I found that one of the advantages of the previous iteration of Faction Warfare is that it allowed for assymetric warfare. If your enemy had a numbers advantage, you could simply fight them in places where they weren’t concentrated or force them to spread out their defenders so you could pick them off one at a time.
Of course, this ability to wage assymetric warfare was hindered by the bonus in LP rewards given to the winning faction in the previous iteration. The scaling bonuses tended to attract farmers to the winning side. Farmers that didn’t fight, but did tip the scales even further.
The new iteration of FW has solved the issue of farmers flocking to the winning side. However, with the last update, it has given a large advantage to those who have the numbers with winning Battlefields making a such a big impact on the activity of capturing plexes.
Faction Warfare for me has always been the environment where the few, brave and skillfull mattered just as much as the people who were better at the numbers game. Both styles of play could interact and intersect. You needed both fleets but also solo and small gang players.
Currently, having simply overwhelming numbers at one location (Battlefields) is obsoleting a large part of the assymetric warfare aspect. The message the latest game mechanics are sending is: if you can’t bring the blob in the Battlefields, then there’s little point in doing the small complexes, because even though you already lack numbers, you need to do even more work. The mechanic is a force multiplier for the more numerous side.
A part of the attraction of Faction Warfare has always been that it allowed for effective assymetric warfare, a style op place that CCP never managed to achieve in the blobby FC-online environment that is nullsec. I don’t think Faction Warfare is the proper place for game mechanics which reward bringing the blob. The blob already has sufficient inherent advantages that it doesn’t need additional rewards.
Keep the LP rewards for the Battlefields by all means, but reduce their impact on the advantage system so that keeping 30+ pilots in one spot without feasible opposition is not a strategically superior option to spreading your pilots around. In fact, it should affect the warzone just as much as capturing any plex would. That way you balance greed and risk-aversity against trying to achieve the war goals.
I do think that your concerns are valid, but I currently don’t see a problem with mixing fleet gameplay into FW at a good pace. I am a full-on solo player, and although the new 5-person farmbot fleets are irritating, I am getting so many amazing fights, both inside warzone and via people looking for duels at popular FW-central trade hubs, like Hek. Maybe we should let it pan out for at least a year before fixing someting that might not be broken.
This is why I’d like to see the advantage of propaganda posts and listening posts adjusted.
If there’s a blob you cannot fight, then they have 30+ people tied up in one site. Drop some FWCRAB beacons and gain / remove advantage while they’re stuck for an hour in a single site. If they leave the site and warp to beacons then you have all the traditional fleet tactics around divide and conquer, chasing, etc.
Dropping the towers during the BF are optional, of course. You can control the timing. The main problem is today they’re far too rare and too long for the small advantage they bring.
Liked, bumped. This is 100% true and matches my own experiences exactly.
Concentration of players creates regular content but also favors n+1 strategies. Dispersion makes smaller numbers and strategic decisions meaningful. Ideally there’s a balance and we’re too far toward concentration atm.
Any single plex being “the most important” advantages n+1 play. This is because one of the strongest strategies for the smaller force is to use plexes to split up enemies. Previously the Novice was a bit too important, now the battlefield is far too important.
Combined with larger ships and larger fleets being more impactful in the new system, small gangs and small ships are far too irrelevant. Again, ideally we have a balance that accomodates people who want solo or small scale content and people who want 30v30 fights in larges/battlefields.
You and me both, but CCP doesn’t give a about that, they’d rather do what the rest of the gaming industry does and hand make curated slideshow content for instrumentalist toxic gamers to min/max theory craft and judge others to death with.
about that, they’d rather do what the rest of the gaming industry does and hand make curated slideshow content for instrumentalist toxic gamers to min/max theory craft and judge others to death with.