Yet another faction warfare reinvent proposal

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
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This post aims to briefly address the biggest problem in FW and proposes some solutions.
There are many good and some bad ideas about faction warfare in this forum and on the
“Faction Warfare Committee” discord. This post tries to keep suggestions and changes as simple as possible while still providing a perspective on a changed and eventually revitalized FW.

Problem
The warzones are dominated by bots and farmers. There is rarely any incentive to take or hold systems. Major swings are usually done by farmers which switch sides based on faction tier level. Actual committed players can only try to influence when the farmers switch sides.
This is a condensed version of the major issue with FW.

Solution? Adjacency Frontline System!
Easy. Get the players closer together. Faction warfare systems should only be vulnerable if they are adjacent by a gate to a lowsec faction warfare system of the opposing faction. Each faction gets “spawnpoints” which are always vulnerable when controlled by the opposing faction. This would be some systems adjacent to highsec systems controlled by that faction. Either give each side the same amount of spawning systems or make all systems give that adjacency vulnerability. Basically whatever. Non-vulnerable systems keep their plexes. They could be renamed to be “Inactive Caldari Novice Outpost” or whatever. Just disable rewards and contested level changes but keep them up so we can pvp.

What else? Remove the faction tier system!
The entire idea of faction tier system does not work unfortunately. Just remove it. Give everyone like tier 3 rewards and we are done.

What about the noobs?
But if we get the actual committed players to be closer together L0rd N00bsp4nk0r will kill all the noobs which try faction warfare in his snaked garmur ezpz?! What can we do? Let’s introduce super mini novice plex! If possible make same (or even harder) restrictions like in the frigate 1vs1 abyssal pvp event. Just T1 frigs. No pirate implants. Nothing higher meta than T2 mods. If that is too hard to introduce just make it that only T1 frigs can enter with whatever mods and implants. Already a big gain. One can haze two or three noobs in a snaked garmur or whatever. If that is an atron or tristan it is already much easier to fight back for the little guy.

What about missions?
They are not good. They do not help giving incentive to the core game play aspect of FW.
They could be removed. Those rats which spawn super rare tags and stuff could spawn in those inactive plexes mentioned before instead. Somewhat rare but still existing spawnrate so some people would still check those plexes and there would be a source for those items which would otherwise be not obtainable. If faction tier system was removed it would already put missions into a less influential position.

Last wishes?
Think about the corps and alliances in fw plz. Give us corp taxes on LP or another form of income so we can supply the duds with ships so we can get explosions and good fun/h.

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This whole swing thing with faction tier is terrible one side being weak while the other is strong is not good for finding good fights, it would be much better if both could be strong at the same time.

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I like the idea of a funneling players toward eachother. It’s why i also like the idea of the occasional ‘king of the hill’ open site.

Regarding the tier system, I’d also like it stuck at tier 3 or have a system where the more systems one side controls the less pay they get from capturing sites and the more they get from running missions. And vice versa.

Agreed about novice sites or a new nooby site. But restricting equipment is messy. Just disallow pirate ships.

And agreed about LP corp tax. This should be a thing for all LP, not just FW.

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Nice! I like the idea of ‘adjacency vulnerability’!
Currently, when one side gets high tier, it attracts players with a very interesting gameplay style. They sit inside the plex with <1s align time and warp away to a safespot as soon as something appears in grid. They always make a safespot <1au from the given plex and never get in until you will get away from a dscan. Some new versions of these players can also post in local in russian.
I can only admire the speed of their reaction, and their inhumanly strong Spirit and Perseverance. Looks like they play 23.5/7 and always hover a mouse over warpout button.
Now they had disappear from Caldari militia but I can imagine they fighting now on our side. Well, not actually fighting. They never fight. First Law prohibits it. They can only fight NPCs.

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Would be nice if those type of risk adverse players don’t feel being in FW is worth it but the pvp players that want fights feel FW is worth it, will be very hard balance to get.

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Here are my own proposals. I think they’re simpler and more effective than the above while also working within the established paradigm:

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  • Indeed the “accelerated complex capture rate” solves the problem that there is too low incentive to capture systems while your faction tier is low. Altough it does not change that the warzone is dominated by bots and farmers.

  • I don’t think that LP upgrade system is a big issue. Yes i agree it is not perfect but if i had to pick changes to FW it would not be the system tier upgrade system. Whatever it does it does not disturb me. If you can make farmers and bots influence on warzone lower the incentive to upgrade systems will go up anyway.

  • I agree missions are more or less useless.

  • I agree that standings are not perfect. Still it think does issues are minor and not too important to the major cause. Especially since people get flashy now when they slide a gate and some of the issues have been resolved this way.

I’m sorry i don’t agree with you. I don’t think your changes are more efficient.

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There are two main concerns with botting in FW:

  1. LP is too easily farmable via missions; by contrast, complexes themselves are much more difficult to farm (and easy for bots to get ganked at or find themselves constantly warping away from - might as well rat elsewhere like doing L5s in LS or hitting up anoms in NS/WH)
  2. A large pool of players (bots and non-bots), possibly the majority, are piggy-backing off the significant LP investments of a much smaller group of players while making little-to-no investments of their own toward system upgrades and tier multipliers

The first point is addressed by removing FW missions. FW missions cannot be removed, however, without first having a sufficient LP fountain in place or removing other LP sinks. This is probably why CCP has not removed them yet. The second point is addressed by replacing LP with Upgrade Points (UP) for upgrading systems instead of LP (ie. removal of LP sink).

In combination, the net result is that good-faith FWers keep all their LP earnings from plexing (REAL FW) while bad-faith FWers (players and bots) will find it challenging to farm complexes (they have to constantly engage in or evade PVP), and when they do farm they do so guaranteeing that they are actually contributing to territorial control and expansion provided they actually allocate UP, which has zero value other than to upgrade systems (it is 100% in their interest to allocate UP since it helps increase the tier multiplier for increased LP gain). That is to say that botters that do contribute to territorial control and expansion are preferable to those that simply leech off the efforts of others without contributing, particularly when they are gankable at plexes and ill-suited to defend themselves (how many PVP-worthy bots have you heard about? probably none).

(It is plausible that, instead of being lost at expiration, UP is randomly allocated at the end of expiration, but this is a relatively minor implementation consideration consideration.)

Accelerated gate capture also will have an impact on botting with regards to botting being motivated by the value of LP and the ease by which LP is acquired. Higher tiers become easier to lose without a consistent and coordinated effort, so bots will generally no longer enjoy having T4 and T5 rewards for extended periods of time. If you cannot farm T4/T5 for extended periods of time, you’re not going to make bank, and this - in conjunction with the removal of missions and the difficulty of farming plexes - makes FW less lucrative than other bottable activities (that happen to be easier to detect and have less of an economic impact on LP-market goods).

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Both your guys suggested changes are good but when all the bots and farmers are gone we will be able to see clearly who is left who actually enjoys the pvp and our population will still be tiny.

None of your changes take into account wanting to make more people join FW in the first place.

We have huge neutral groups who prefer to shoot both sides because joining fw doesn’t give them more pvp opportunities and makes half the people blue so less targets for them.

If we can find a way to incentivise these groups to join then FW will thrive.

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  • Keeping 100% of your LP (as opposed to requiring LP for upgrading) = increased incentive to enlist (whereas now players know they ‘need’ to contribute LP)
  • Accelerated gate capture = incentive to join and remain in the losing faction knowing that they can quickly regain ground
  • LP gain for killing non-FWers at plexes = increased incentive for enlisting in FW for greater LP gain since you can get LP by killing both enemy militiamen and now additionally neutrals (at complexes).
  • Reduction of standing loss penalties and reduction of standing requirements to enlist (by using effective instead of base) = reduce reservations against and lower barrier to entry for joining FW

@Ember_Fireheart am I missing something?

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Yes you are, most of those incentives are only lp/money making the last one is the only really good one because some people make their money doing other things like worm holes and ded’s and they don’t want to join FW to make money they want to join to shoot more things.

And a neutral group who makes money doing other things are going to loose the ability to shoot a lot of targets because they become blue but in exchange they get more money making opportunities that they don’t need anyways. The no standing loss is the only really good one out of those (for people not in fw I mean, obviously they are good for people who want to make money in fw.)

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The biggest problems with FW at the moment are financial in nature; if you address the financial issues and increase the financial rewards (while also fighting bots and leeches), then more players will want to join (especially if FW PVP becomes more profitable than non-FW PVP).

However, there are non-financial benefits to the points above:

  • I’ve already indicated three “make FW more standings-friendly” points
  • Upgrade Points system: Players are more likely to enlist in FW knowing that other players are actually contributing toward upgrading systems, whereas right now the majority of players are leeching off the contributions of a few. Players don’t want to engage in an activity where others aren’t pulling their weight; the UP system ensures that they actually do. Since every player is generating UP, they can even coordinate militia-wide (or at least within corps/alliances/coalitions) how to best invest that UP; by contrast, that coordination doesn’t presently exist with LP because too few players are willing to invest LP and they’re not publicly/auditably committing a minimum amount (nor should they)
  • Accelerated gate capture incentivizes the winning faction to d-plex, thereby having both factions face off at the same complexes. By contrast, at the moment both factions are primarily o-plexing most of the time, meaning they are plexing at different sites and are not actually engaging each other in combat. This change would make FW more PVP immersive.

I believe that these changes are foundations for improving FW. Additional changes can be made on top of them.

Here are the reservations I have with the prior proposals:

  • Adjacency Frontline System: makes FW too centralized (it’s already centralized around clearly delineated warzone regions - it doesn’t need to be more centralized than that), makes it slow to shift the border, eliminates multi-front tactics as well as the ability to “invade from within”, etc. It becomes even less realistic than Earth wars where battles - namely by insurgent and militia groups - are held deep within enemy territory and can lead to shifts in territory control and expansion.
  • Removal of the tier system: this isn’t a bad idea, but I think keeping the tier system makes FW more engaging as long as you can mitigate the FW pendulum (which is cancer). I do think some things (such as LP-loss on o-plex) should be untiered, however. What I’ve proposed is a way to guarantee that FW participants are actually contributing toward system/tier upgrades.
  • We don’t need plexes newbier than the novice plexes. This has been brought up before. The downsides far outweigh the very minor, near non-existent benefits. If PVP newbs need to practice PVP in highly controlled environments, they should have training and practice sessions on Singularity. It should not be difficult to find a PVP vet who is willing to host such sessions, particularly from a major FW group for the purposes of engaging in FW
  • The proposals above to give systems new “features” based on tiers have numerous downsides, no real benefits, and are somewhat silly, particularly since there’s no player SOV involved. The gate guns proposal in particular is problematic; gate guns exist for very good reasons, and they should not be removed or disabled in a player-controlled fashion. I don’t think CCP/CSM would ever consider these proposals.
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Hmm maybe my idea’s would have made fw low too similar to null and its better to have some options that are very different, so I have removed my first post.

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complexes themselves are much more difficult to farm (and easy for bots to get ganked at or find themselves constantly warping away from

I don’t agree. Those bots are instawarping. The warzones are huge. They can hide. That is the problem we have.
Maybe you are in the amarmin warzone? It has been a while since i was active in there. It is “only” 70 systems compared to 100 sytems in galcal warzone. Still i had the same experience in amarrmin aswell. As players we would just be able to start pendulum chainreaction but not be able to control it.
The problem is not the pendulum altough it makes it makes it far worse. Problem is non-committed people having influence on the warzone generally speaking. FW was designed as a PvP system. So those succesful in pvp, strategy and tactics should have influence on what happens in the warzones.
No matter if the farmers just stay on one side or they switch constantly with tier level: farmers should not have any ground in faction warfare. There are some many farming activities in eve. FW does not need to be one.

The whole point of adjacency system is to make it that instead of ~100 systems in galcal warzone are vulnerable at the same time there are like 6-20 systems vulnerable. If we had like triple population in FW space this would become too condensed. Have a look of like an hour at the killboard of one of the warzones. Then have a look how many systems “light up” during that hour.

It becomes even less realistic than Earth wars where battles

Eve is not realistic. We fly spaceships which behave like submarines. It is super easy to built up lore reasoning why let’s say Gallente Federation will not take a certain system. Something something supply chain and you are done.
One of the ideas i was intentionally skipping in my original post is the addition that pilots could make a system vulnerable ignoring adjacency bonuses by spending a huge amount of LP. Let’s say like 500k LP to make a system vulnerable for 5 days.

We don’t need plexes newbier than the novice plexes. This has been brought up before. The downsides far outweigh the very minor, near non-existent benefits. If PVP newbs need to practice PVP in highly controlled environments, they should have training and practice sessions on Singularity. It should not be difficult to find a PVP vet who is willing to host such sessions, particularly from a major FW group for the purposes of engaging in FW

Where are the downsides? I don’t agree with non-existing benefits. The benefit is very obviously that for relativly new, but intrested players, there is a better place to try solo pvp. I don’t understand how this is no benefit?
As a corp leader, recruiter, alliance director and whatnot of stupid roles i had and have i saw two major reasons (there are other reasons aswell for sure) why people would leave fw:

  1. Lack of content. “This was the promised land of small frigs going boom, but i have to roam hours to just have bots warping away??”
  2. Newer players: “this is no fun. I don’t get any good fights. I only get killed” Yes for sure normal answer is HTFU. This is eve. Still this feels bad. People need room to develop their skills. Plexing undisturbed in an empty backwater system is not what i mean here.

I don’t see where you get your major FW groups from. There are none.
Also FW is intresting cuz i can just join without talking to any recruitment officer. I can just try it out. I think a group is always better, but that is what people do. They join on their own cuz they just want to have a look. Try to make this first look as promising as possible.

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@Archer_en_Tilavine what is the name of your faction warfare character? We have quite varying views on how and what should FW be and i feel like you are playing another game than i do. Maybe there are other forms of playing FW aswell which i am not aware of.

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The problem’s with current FW are:

1. 80% of people warp out when you land with a ship outside a plex looking for a fight.

Possible reasons for this:

*They are used to getting ganged and expect lots more people to warp in behind you.
*They only want to pve and are not interested in pvp.
*They know you are in system they know what ships you fly and have more than likely fought you before and know they will loose.
*Or they are bot’s with a 0.1 au safe spot and d-scan script.

Some moderate idea’s to counter this:

*Popcorns idea up above about smaller plex with more restrictions will make fights at least with smaller ships a bit more fair, which helps the newer guys not feel that they have to warp out in order to survive.

*Maybe make it so that if you warp out of a plex and warp back in the timer gets reset back to start so that bot’s cant just warp out wait for you to leave then warp back in without consequences.

2. The current tier system promotes farming and investing. Basically farm while in t4 and t5 and wait till your in t1 to sell that lp, this promotes much more carebearing and a lot less pvping.

*Popcorns idea about removing it completely is a good one, if both sides where always on t3 then both sides would be trying to make money and finding fights at the same time without null sec dudes making farming alts for when a faction hits t4 and t5 and then dilutes all the lp that the dedicated FW dudes who stay there the whole time make.

3. I agree with Ember Neutral big groups have almost no incentive to join FW and blue half the battle field and loose half the possible targets for nothing but financial gains.

Solutions:

  • No idea, maybe someone can come up with something decent?

4. People don’t want to get -8 faction standings with an empire and be shut out of 2 empire high security space so they would rather make an alt to join FW instead of on their main which is dropping the possible FW population.

Solutions:

*Maybe seperate FW standings from normal standings so that FW players can still go to high sec to buy ships and what not, this will make the barrier to entry for new players much easier as they will be able to put all their skill points into their main pilot and not have to train up a neutral hauler alt right off the bat.

Sorry for wall of text maybe I can make a diagram later to make it shorter.

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I like this a lot, the fact that there is less possible place’s to be in the warzone alone is enough to increase the amounts of fights.

I agree, the people who make a lot of money from missions are the people with lot’s of alt’s running them in instant align jackdaws that provide almost no content and those guys probably are not even in FW with their main.

If you have to ask the people who stay in FW even at t1 will probably say remove missions so that they lp doesn’t get diluted by people who don’t add any content to the warzone.

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The tier system would have to be massively overhauled to be worth it, better to just remove it for now until a good solution is found.

Also I didn’t realize Ivy league was in FW.

Please don’t delete post’s sometimes its good to have bad idea’s “down on paper” so that others know it was already thought about and don’t end up reposting.

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An idea about faction standings.
Instead of lowering your standings to the enemy empire (and thus removing your ability to use its services), and not encouraging enemy’s highsec gatecamping (which galmil does often in Litiura for example), instead militia get suspect combat timer in enem highsec. Thus you cannot realistically camp enemy’s highsec systems

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@Popcorn_Artwik the bots are not depriving players of content in FW. They are not more-or-less problematic than bots hitting up combat anoms with regards to them running away. They also are not investing LP to flip systems, so they aren’t unfairly manipulating territorial control. Outside of them manipulating the market via LP farming missions + pendulum swings of tier multipliers, the bots are the least concern of the state of FW at present. Furthermore, the botting issue and mode of operation is not unique to FW and therefore do not require a unique solution. A general-purpose anti-botting initiative (that CCP already has going underway to great effect) will address botting in FW; apart from the removal of FW missions, there’s probably nothing that can be done to specifically address botting in FW while simultaneously maintaining or improving the player experience; however, there may be changes that both improve FW and mitigate botting as a secondary effect.

FW was designed as a hybrid PVE-PVP experience. As for “non-PVPers in FW” - it’s not our place to judge how players are supposed to play the game. I agree 100% that players should PVP and that changes should be made to encourage PVP (I have not yet gotten to those ideas as they were not my priority), but I don’t think it should be forced in what is advertised to be a hybrid PVE-PVP experience. As long as the PVErs are contributing to system/tier upgrades, they are contributing to FW in a meaningful way for the everyone, including (and especially) the PVPers. This is why I proposed the Upgrade Point system: to guarantee that contributions are made. I want to reiterate that the ideas above are just a starting point on which to build up on with additional ideas. It is better to finish a good-but-incomplete solution than to discard it.

I understand the concept. My concerns are that the number of vulnerable systems is way too low (even if there was a radius and/or a minimum system count), the border would move too slowly, it deprives opportunities of multi-front (esp. rear) and internal incursions, and it makes it less fun for players who have established a base of operations far from the border and now have to wait forever-and-a-half for the border to move closer to them for the supply lines to shorten. It also decreases the relevance of most of the other systems, dropping their activity levels for little benefit whereas now there is a healthy, dynamic player organization to launch incursions toward contesting random systems.

What may be a better idea would be for CCP to dynamically change the spawn rate of complexes based on varying factors instead of making them uniform to encourage players to o-plex/d-plex and even gate camp those systems. The spawn rate can help concentrate activity without having it be too rigid as in the case of an adjacency system. Brainstorm ideas:

  • Increased spawn rate for high-upgrade systems
  • When a system is vulnerable:
    • a vulnerability notice appears when you are present in the war zone
    • all systems other than the vulnerable system suffer heavily decreased spawn times while the vulnerable system increases its respawn time, thereby encouraging players from both sides to rush to the system to o-plex, d-plex, and I-Hub Bash/Defend
  • etc

Regarding Toddler FW plexes: this is the wrong solution to the wrong problem. Content needs to be addressed more directly (changes to shift activity levels dynamically - yes - but not rigidly), and newer players need training (join a corp, guides/videos, etc), practice (classes, solo duels + fleet vs fleet skirmishes on Singularity, etc), to play in fleets, to play in fleets, to play in fleets, to play in fleets, and to play in fleets instead of solo if they’re going to get into PVP for the first time. The militia channel makes it so easy to get a fleet, and the recent update to Fleet Adverts where adverts no longer collapse when the second-to-last person leaves fleet makes it so much easier to create standing fleets than it was before.

I guarantee you players will still warp away. It will also deprive content for other players hitting up higher end sites.

This will punish players who intelligently opt to retreat when they are outmatched and return when the coast is clear. The outcome of a battle is usually determined in advance - it’s not usually hard to determine who will win a battle by examining the participants. If you’re smart, you’ll retreat before engaging in a losing battle. Unfortunately sometimes this means retreating often, especially if you are solo.

How does this make any sense lorewise? You are literally at war with an empire - why should they let you enter their territory without legally being fired upon?

Militiamen are legal participants in warfare. They do not become criminals for being participants in a CONCORD-sanctioned war. Why should they become suspect? In terms of CONCORD legality, the empire wars are no different than player wars, so suspect timers don’t make sense.