Warfare & Tactics

There is no need to fix FW, CCP achieved all goals they had, if your goals were different that is your problem.

FW is woking fine, new players are having fun and shooting each others. If you want meaning for war FW is not for you, go 0.0.

If you want larger scale engagements. Do some research and rf some pocos and towers.

I think you're 'working as intended' guff is wearing rather thin. There's a whole spectrum of pvp between what we have now and null sov grinding. I just want a bit more of it involved in FW occupancy, cruiser brawls, BC fights, the odd capital engagement.

I'm not after l33t end game stuff, just more than frig kills.

The way I see this happening is to make it pay for corps to take and most importantly hold space.

Ask yourself this question. If you were one of the empires, how would you go about encouraging your militias to take territory.

Thanks for the considered post. I think what is really needed is a feeling of consensus amongst those of us who have been involved in this theatre of eve for the long haul. Despite the extensive evidence to the contrary in this forum it is possible to achieve constructive dialogue and a lot of the input to this thread so far shows this.

I appreciate that you feel that CCP has moved on. This may in fact be the case. However, they have no incentive whilst both sides moan or gloat over irrelevant system gains whilst ignoring the salient facts.

I think what a lot of people can agree on is that we want some form of sov-lite that doesn't require eleventy Abbadons every evening. If we can put together some reasonable proposals, get some signatures etc, then what's to stop us demanding a Dev response?

Considered posts are easy, it is stuffing them full of win that is hard

It is not a matter of a feeling of CCP having moved on, but the rather harsh truth of the matter. They flat out stated that the last iteration (the repair they did on their botched job in December) would be the last for the time being, but added the now standard cop-out/caveat that they would be monitoring and tweaking when/if necessary.
That is the reason why I do my damnedest to try to steer all threads in the direction of tweaks rather than overhauls .. it is in desperate need of an overhaul but as it cannot get that in the foreseeable future we must try to keep it simple and try for a tourniquet that will hopefully hold until dev resources can be shuffled back our way again.

It is my hope that they go about the null revitalization with a lot more manpower, insight and deliberation including some aspects from what is working in FW (objective based, size restrictions) where applicable and otherwise add things that can be used in FW when the time comes (ex. meaningful upgrade paths).
Null and FW are and should be different, don't get me wrong, but they should also share some things as they both represent gameplay/areas outside direct empire control and as such the determining factors should be in the players hands ..

Neither do I, it is in direct competition with FW for second place on the BrokenMeter (Cosmos takes 1st, now and always ), but there has to be a reason to hold and defend space beyond the six points towards the tiers.

Two that spring to mind based on coming patch/expansion:
They are going to introduce special belt spawns in LS now, from which you get tag drops that can be used to regain sec.status, add something like the null pirate beacon (spawn multiplier) to upgrade paths - gives us a secondary revenue stream and brings life back to the old things (how many times in the last year have you been to a belt in FW?).
They are going to buff LS mining by increasing yield of the ****-poor ore that exists there, add modifiers to upgrade path or LP bought structures of some kind to make people want to base out of ass-end systems if only to help protect some 3rd party )or their own) mining operation.

In short: The upfront payment (plexing LP + tiers) method has been tried and been found wanting, time to consider the other side of that particular coin.

You know, I was going to start flaming you after reading this but then I thought about it some, and some of these ideas make a lot of sense.

For the stuff under 1), I think a modest boost to LP payout for hubs is in order, maybe up to 50k instead of 40k. The big thing here is to not split the LP among the fleet but simply make it so everyone who shoots it gets the 50k lp payout. In addition, you have to make it like incursions, i.e. no one gets any LP from the hub until the system flips (maybe even make this for all plexes run in the system as well, but something tells me that's another topic for another day).

I think a defense bonus would be a great idea that would encourage lots of fights and draw more people into the battle. It's not easily farmable (system flips are not exactly an everyday occurrence), and the added reward will get people seriously involved instead of just treating it with a very 'meh' attitude.

As for the stuff under 2), I'm not sure it's very RP compatible to give a blanket LP payout just for shooting neutrals of any persuasion in FW space. LOLRP aside, I think only giving an LP payout for killing pirate players or players with suspect flags would be a good compromise. Combined with the proposed idea of giving any neutral entering a plex a suspect timer, I think this would have the desired effect you want without putting a giant bullseye on literally every neutral that comes into FW low sec.

I actually like the idea of putting LP payouts on killing neutral/pirate POS in low sec. Sort of a military exclusion of civilians from an active warzone.

I don't think that killing any sort of benefit for pirates and neutrals in FW is a good thing. We want people to come into low sec, and we want them to get into conflict with each other. Providing FW players with an incentive to go pick fights is a way to accomplish this; disincentivizing neutrals from even coming into FW space is not.

I don't think anything under 3) is helpful. FW is supposed to be for people willing to go out into low sec and shoot each other and participate in the occupancy war. Protecting high sec mission runners does neither of these things. If anything, I think we need to get rid of the navy and simply make it so FWers can't dock in enemy high sec. It makes no sense to be able to dock in enemy controlled high sec where your every move spawns NPCs, but not in enemy controlled low sec. FW has many advantages and disadvantages, you shouldn't be able to pick and choose which ones you want applied to you simply by hiding in high sec.

I like the spirit of 4) but I really don't think messing with plex timers and adding more rats helps things. I think if you want to get more ship types involved, you just need to make large plexes spawn more regularly in the warzone. Maybe making the rats a bit harder would prevent farming, but really anything besides adding tank to them just makes them a hindrance to pvp, and most people don't want that.

I'd only really like to see more plexes for BCs and BS and some sort of mechanic that makes people actually bring them instead of yet another frigate blob.

Some sort of cyno jamming mechanic might be interesting to keep bored nullsec blobs away. On the other hand, they'll just roll through in Machariel blobs then and FW entities lose the opportunity to drop caps too.

About system flipping, LP, ihubs, i'm actually fine with it now. Systems flip, people fight, ships explode, i can still pay my ship replacement bills. All is well.

imo this would be exploited to let it roll bk farm it and rinse repeat till your side decides to flip it if they ever do , kinda like over plexing vulnerable systems in inferno...

The answer is simple: Those non-farming Minmatar pilots are busy defending their home systems from Amarr farmers. Why should I go and push sahtogas when I just can stay at home and kill the bloody farmers comming to me. Even worser, if we leave our home for like 6 hours then it gets heavily contested so that it really gets in danger of being flipped. For those who are not looking at the LP or ISK per hour ratio there is really no incentive to go and take an enemy system (at least as long you have a steady stream of farmers to kill at your own ground).