So people may cry about these, however it’s actually a good idea.
For one, it combats botting in FW because the fleets lock quickly and tend to catch alot of the bots, meaning less bot menace. Plus it also makes lowsec pirate groups cry like little girls (see here: Stop the idiotic lowsec instalocking camps) which is always a bonus.
However I think CCP could do more with this, and make it a thing that is implemented deeper into FW.
What I suggest:
Get rid of the current FW missions, I think most FW dudes would agree they’re far to farmable and require no real commitment (anyone and their mother could just drop an alt into FW to farm these). To replace them however, make the current FW NPC fleets payout a fairly decent amount of LP, aswell as making different types of fleets consisting of different numbers, different ship types, maybe make them randomly attack citadels in the area owned by enemy militias (especially low power ones).
Alongside this, maybe make it possible to request aid from an NPC fleet, so for example you can pay 200K LP for one of the NPC fleets to come to a specified system/area with a small frigate fleet with the purpose of shooting stuff or helping with firepower on an Ihub, then ofc a LOT more LP for bigger fleets, with a cooldown. So for example you can only request aid from an NPC fleet once every 72 hours.
The cooldown timer would make them much harder to spam, however another measure to prevent reliance on them or spam in general, is make it so there is only 3-4 or so NPC fleets roaming around the warzone at any one time, and take 24 hours (or downtime) to respawn. So in addition to only being a certain amount, and a cooldown etc. you’d need to try track down where the fleet you want is to try and pay LP to them etc.
Obviously for something like this to be considered the specifics would need to be discussed in great detail, I in no way would want to this to be a thing you could just throw lots of LP at to deal with your problems, but I think it’d be a great tool for FW alliances to be able to utilise (for a high cost bare in mind) to help with operations in the warzone.
How about getting of NPC in null then. Since everyone and their mother goes to null instead of pvp, they go for pve. It’s a pvp sandbox right?? Get rid of null npc then. @Salt_Foambreaker
FW missions are broken. FW has a population crisis.
Your suggestion is rather narrow to boost a certain type of expansive gameplay for entities of a certain strength and is not inclusive of the other gameplay styles of those living in the FW WZ.
There is a need for a significant FW feature development release but, I believe that CCP efforts should be spent on a number of the other heavily supported ideas that have been floated over the past few years (those that had experienced veteran support - before they all left).
CCP would, I think, be pleasantly surprised by the activity increase set directly as a result of a well delivered FW overhaul. There is currently nothing to hold subscriptions for those players that are 10+ years older with RL blocking 2nd job commitment.
FW and the lowest zone needs to support
a bridge for beginners into pvp
Casual play
Solo & high end elitists
Role players
a bridge into escalation pvp
Low end structure play
Piracy
It sounds like a tall order but a lot of those types already populate the area. They’ve just diminished in number due to the frustration from the lack of devolpment of the biggest failings. The penalties to some of these styles of long term play do nothing but drive players away.