This is essentially a copy and paste of my forum post in the Factional Warfare thread. I’m hoping to stir up some additional discussion here.
Context: Being kicked (or not) from a militia due to the character’s militia standings being lowered below the acceptable threshold and how this interacts with the player’s average corporation standings toward the militia.
By my understanding, a character in the NPC militia corporation will be expelled from the militia should the character’s standings drop below an acceptable threshold, while a character in a player corporation has the opportunity to circumvent this consequence if the corporation’s average standings remain above the threshold.
With the introduction of individual enlistment I think this mechanism needs to universally take into account the character’s militia standings rather than having corporation standings supersede the character’s in the cases of individually enlisted characters.
While I think that the issues that exist in relation to this are socially instigated and will generally have a social solution, lately there have proven to be some fringe cases that I think go beyond what is acceptable within the faction warfare zones. What is taking place is that this safety net for characters in player corporations is causing players to be largely unable to interact with battlefields due to a small number of players with a large number of accounts between them playing both sides of the warzone (many characters in both militias) to ensure they always get the offensive payout. Ensuring this is often done by killing friendly militia on the defending side so that the player’s attacking characters can log in and take control of the battlefield.
We should fight over battlefields. But the fight for the battlefield should generally be between the Caldari and Gallente players, or Minmatar and Amarr, and any pirates that show up rather than a ‘neutral’ party playing both sides of the militia and preventing people from engaging with this aspect of the warzone in a meaningful way.
I would hope that having a more consistently severe penalty for all characters doing this would help players (especially those without the sort of resources that these above mentioned players have) begin to take part in battlefields again.