The ultimate solution to FW standings, gulling, awoxing

Communications Center General Discussion
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Hi folks. I believe I have the only viable solution to the problems on all sides of FW standings.

If this is the wrong forum area please move the thread, but I did not see an appropriate venue for FW theory.

TL;DR: remove intra-militia pvp standings penalties entirely, and back up these changes with a set of clearly defined rules about FW eligibility to enforce strong social norms and character histories in FW warzones.

The details of this are below, but first I’ll lay out the problem statement, and address the issues from a player’s and from FC’s standpoint.

THE PROBLEM(s)

FW is plagued by seagulls (LP site leeches). There is also some smaller number of aggressive awoxers, who do it as a form of stealing a site, or just to bully / troll.

Furthermore, hostiles will use alts in your militia to bubble you in corrupted insurgency systems and null, penalty free. They can also use logi in your militia to rep themselves, hiding behind overview settings masks for suspect / militia, causing hesitation or weird checks mid fight - (even if you know they are hostile, they might not all be suspect right then - and targeting logi at the start of a fight is often a crucial moment.)

FC wants FW to be one of the pathways for new players to become long term players, and so wants them to have an easy time understanding friend from foe. The idea at the moment is that punishing awoxers who might target these new players, ultimately removing those awoxers from fw (or stopping them) will reduce the chance this friend/foe distinction will be broken, and so new players won’t rage quit, and then the new players can be converted to omega / long term players.

The problems here are many. All of FC’s current approaches to solving these problems are creating an environment that is far more hostile to new players than a very very rare instance of awoxing could ever be. Granular standings impact changes that are practically unknowable. This information is not easily available anywhere. New convoluted rules about battlefields, drops for LP loot. Confusing metrics about when you will be kicked out of what. Standings are… corp? your own? faction? A combination? And the standings are towards (the same list of entities?) In what combination? It’s decending into a kafkaesque nightmare.

The more of these changes are brought in, the steeper the learning curve, the worse the omega conversion rate and general experience. Not only are new individuals put off prima facie, but existing players are disincentivized from recruiting new players as training them in the details of FW is an increasing PITA. Currently the curve is more than high enough.

THE SOLUTION:

  1. Delete FW standings losses between players of the same militia for pvp actions.
  2. Do not allow people to join FW from non-player corps. * footnote 1 and 2
  3. Put a 14 day timer on going from not being in FW, to being in FW, beginning after you join fw. This means you can instantly join, but you cannot instandly join a second corp or enlist in the cooldown period. Put another 14 day timer from being in FW to not being in FW. This means; 3(a) If you join FW in any way, you get a 14 day timer where you can not join FW again. 3(b) If you are in FW and you leave by any means you get a 14 day timer that will additively stack with an FW join timer.
  4. With this timer, you can’t join fw corps or fw yourself. Your current and any future corp you join are blocked from joining fw until you leave or your timer is gone.

In practice, what would all of this look like?

Personal and corp reputation becomes a real and meaningful thing to maintain in your militia.

If you are an awoxer, you will be hit with negative personal and corp standings that reflect your status as a social pariah. People will be aware, and can ready themselves to fight you, leave, or kill you, just as they would a true enemy.

If you are a gull, you will be labeled as such and people can get rid of you, leave, ignore you.

New players that join reputable corps will be easy to distinguish from gulls.

Corps maintain standings records and can share their intel in militia chat.

New players will have an easy time understanding the warzone. They are members of a player corp, and will benefit from that corps existing records and reputation.

If you try to corp wash your bad reputation, you will just end up with a 28 day FW block.

If a gull can’t wash their alts efficiently, they are forced to keep making new characters, and therefore they are forced into being very low SP, and easy to kill.

I don’t care if a bunch of 100k sp characters are trying to gull me. Lovely green day for my KB.

If they don’t cycle fresh characters then they are stuck with bad standings with everyone, and will just be killed on sight until they can fix their behavior and diplo their way out of their bad standings, which is exactly the kind of emergent social gameplay eve is worth playing for.

If you join a corp, have a normal time, and ultimately leave after a normal amount of time, you just have your 14 day timer. In the grand scheme of things, a short amount of time to not be able to do one of many activities in eve.

  • Footnote 1(a) - characters get a ONE TIME exception on going from npc corp individual enlistment, to FW corp enlistment, to facilitate new players moving down the healthy pipeline from trying fw, to joining fw.
  • Footnote 1(b) - Players individually enlisted in NPC corps can get LP from empire faction navy scout plexes ONLY. It seems reasonable for new players to be able to individually enlist, and take the lowest tier of plex. If they are in a plex with a player who is fully in FW (player corp), they should not get an LP payout. This means they can take plexes with other new NPC corp players, or solo.

Open to additional ideas.

I don’t think the current path FC is on will work. As we have clearly seen - the more there is an attempt to get elbow deep and fix, the more will be broken, the more complexity will creep in, and the worse the existing and new player fw experience will get.

We are the militia. We should set the reputation, the rules, the norms.

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Sorry but the solution to seagulling and AWOX seems to be to remove NPC Miliitas and the forced enlistment to access FW content (and rewards).

In this updated FW there are no NPC militias and therefore no enlistment required, you just go into low-sec and look for content. And wow there is a Caldari Outpost-3 and nobody is in local.

You warp to it and shoot the Gallente NPC waves, while ignoring the Caldari NPCs, and after 10-15 minutes the complex is completed for Caldari and you get your payout and a little caldari faction standing. But you could also choose to shoot the Caldari NPC waves while leaving the Gallente NPCs alone and after 10-15 minutes the complex is captured for Gallente.

This makes the content available to a lot more people and there will be no arbitrary blue and red standings so players will ultimately form their own militias and regulate the space themselves. There may even be fighting over plexes between militias that RP as the same side. But i digress.

PEACE

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@bdk_eve I’m looking for support or criticism of my ideas as laid out in this thread.

If you have your own ideas, go make your own thread and we can talk about them there.

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As a new pilot, I would have seen 14 day timer, gone played something else and not returned.

I’d counter that you’d get better results by reducing the number of allowed factions for Direct Enlistment to 1, and these are selected and controlled at the highest level (Corp or Alliance) with a 7 day timer to change the chosen faction militia allowed for DE.

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@Tristan_daCuhna did you actually read the post?

How would you have seen the 14 day timer as a new player?

I think new players from npc corps should be able to direct enlist but be limited to scout navy plexes. I think they should have a one time timer-free corp join from there. A new player wouldn’t come across a timer until they left a player corp. This is all written in the OP.

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Put a 14 day timer on going from not being in FW, to being in FW.

Reads to me like I want to join FW it’s going to take 14 days

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Id like to hear you reason why there should be NPC militias in the first place. Because they are the ones that are creating this problems.

I mean forcing people to be blue to each other and then sending them into low sec. I mean what could go wrong.

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@Tristan_daCuhna again, try reading the whole post

Footnote 1(a) - characters get a ONE TIME exception on going from npc corp individual enlistment, to FW corp enlistment, to facilitate new players moving down the healthy pipeline from trying fw, to joining fw.

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What reputation? Most of the seagulling and awoxing is done by faceless, recyclable throwaway alts. You don’t have any clue about how this game works.

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@Antihrist_Pripravnik did you also not read the post? The whole thing is about forcing people to meaningfully stay in player corps in fw, and punishing people who want to wash through alts and / or corps. You can’t gull people with recyclable alts if it’s literally impossible, as it would be impossible in the system I described above. People in npc corps literally could not gull, and people trying to wash their reputation could at best only wash their corp rep, and only every 28 days, which would not be worth it. And their character rep ofc is not washable without deleting the character - but that puts them back in to the punishment cycle anyway.

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They’ve already scrapped the negative standings in FW

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@Geo_Eclipse_Oksaras no they have not, nor do they plan to

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Um yea, they got rid of anything in Fw that gives negative standings. CSM made sure of that

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Apologies I’ve not made my point as clear as I should.

You assume the new player route of progression will be starter NPC corp to NPC militia. This doesn’t account for those who get recruited into groups like E-Uni, Karma fleet, Brave or even mass recruitment spam like AO and Linknet.

As they will not be going from NPC corp to NPC corp, the 14 day timer applies yes?

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@Tristan_daCuhna they are not coming from an FW corp, so they can immediately join an FW corp.

When you join an fw corp your timer stops you joining again in the next 14 days. You are free to join any fw corp you want immediately when you have no timer.

So, new player, to e-uni, to caldari navy fw player corp - instant.

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I’ve never done FW and I’ve always heard there was negative standings loss when doing the sites. It’s only positive gains now? or when did this happen?

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It didn’t happen, he is talking nonsense.

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Thank you for clarifying this.

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@Tristan_daCuhna yup no prob. Obviously the timings here are just off the cuff and could be adjusted. Longer, shorter - different join and leave timer lengths and so on. I just picked 14 days for now as it would be incredibly annoying to dishonest actors but a very small time for a normal long term player.

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  • Career agent missions no longer give derived standings, so players no longer lose standings to the empire factions when completing the final mission.

  • Promotions no longer give derived standings, so players can no longer lose standings with other factions when getting promoted within their militia.

  • Level 1 & 4 Factional Warfare missions no longer have standings penalties for killing NPCs and structures found in the missions. The plan is to roll this out for all other Factional Warfare missions during the lead up to the expansion.

    depends if ur talking about the plex or the mission sites.

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