EDIT : CCP made some announcements about FW at the CCP Rise “Core Gameplay update”. More below in the update post.
TLDR : if you still haven’t moved yet your FW alts somewhere else, now is the time. Hello Vegas, we are not totally dead yet. FW Discord with all 70 voted proposals here in pdf version.
The system of Halmah has fallen few seconds ago. On the 3 300 plexes we needed to run, only 150 remain for the last mission system of Auner. On the Minmatar side, the blockade is thus complete and on the Amarr side it will soon be.
While the attention is on Eve Vegas, we can already announce the final countdown before our own home brew and players made patch.
Patch Notes For October 2019 Release : low sec FW Amarr and Minmatar agents are no more.
No one can henceforth dock its puller alts in the 24th and TLF stations to chain blitz the lvl 4 missions and earn millions of Loyalty Points crashing the market at the expanse of FW pvpers.
The present :
In terms of man-hours, the 22 mission systems represent a minimum of 550 hours spent on novice plexes or 825 hours spent on small plexes or finally 1 100 hours spent on medium or large plexes. Those numbers don’t take into account the opposing d-plexing or even the form-up, travel or pvp time. The reality is therefore much higher.
Again our hope is not to cash out our accumulated LP : we could cash out by just telling our pilots not to undock and wait for our tier to sink to Tier I. Our aim is to stop mission farming from crashing the LP obtained by plexing and stabilize our markets making it less cyclical so that the Amarr militia don’t bleed members half the year and the Minmatar militia the other half.
An year round reason to undock on both sides, making pvp more interesting as an income by plexing. A stabilized market would also hopefully make plex farmers and bots spread out more equally between both militias, cancelling each other.
You can find a draft analysis of the potential impact here. Feel free to add your own input. TL/DR : no FW item can reach 6K isk/lp without killing its own market.
The recent past :
Those have been two interesting weeks : the dankest civil wars inside militias, RPers taking sides, bored or greedy pirates sponsoring some corps which you already knew from their trolling posting on Reddit, endless debates in local.
We even had a RP war when the CCP Roleplay event crew declared us traitors to our cause trough the voice of a forum NPC. Turns out that the RP crew wanted to help us to highlight Faction Warfare unknowingly starting civil wars anew. Then the 300 posts battle ended with the RP CCPs publishing a RP reason for deleting the missions.
“far more concerned by allegations of corruption among 24th Imperial Crusade officials […] irregular convoy activity and suspicious financial activities.”
If you are interested by RP, you can also take a look there.
The future :
A discussion is ongoing since April in the FW Discord on the future of FW. You can find a pdf of all 70 voted proposals here and its excel version here. Below a quick summary of the main axis of those proposals :
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Disable FW Mission Agents
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Reinstate gate sliding
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Apply penalties to FW Citadels anchored in enemy territory/Disable docking in neutral structures anchored in enemy systems.
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Disable Crime-Watch/Introduce Suspect Timer in Plexes
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Introduce Battlecruiser sized plexes.
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Scale plex impact on system conquest with size of the plex
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Rework tier system by making it less extreme/snowballing or linked to personal activity
And on the long run :
- Introduce mechanisms creating warzone hot-zones and rewarding fighting there : frontline system, weekly events, target systems, adjacency system. More risk, more reward.
This is just a top 10 list : you can find all details in the pdf or launch a discussion in the comments. As always, it’s a work in progress and the whole FW Discord is of course open to any discussion with the devs who could be interested.
And beyond :
Faction Warfare is dying so is Low-Sec as a whole.
Pirate groups also need reward/gameplay reasons to fight beyond just honor fights. Right now most conflicts exist purely thanks to ■■■■-talk in local, not because the game push players against each others and rewards them for that.
Established pirate groups lost strategical objectives when moon mining became active. Before moons represented conflict driving resource points in a pvp lifestyle. Pocos still fulfil this role but on a limited scale.
On the level below, there is no gameplay reason for small pirate groups to set up in the warzone. Or for high sec corps to day trip to low sec. Just to quote a possible example, there is no “air drops” mechanism like in Rust rewarding small pvp scale between small groups.
Right now low-sec only survives because of the willingness of its players to stay for fights. Resource wise, living in low sec has no incentive and its players income is outsourced to alts.
Null sec thrives when its groups compete for owning a territory. Low sec should thrive when different sizes of groups compete for resources in a same lawless territory and fight each others in it.
Thanks for reading and thanks for your support and comments,
Siege Gold
Local is Primary
44th Recon Unit
Yondu Federation
A few articles :
https://newedenreport.com/2019/10/17/sieging-mission-runners-minmatar-and-amarr-united/
