EVE General Discussion

As everybody knows by now, FW experience has been ruined by allowing low-SP alts in stabbed T1 frigates and empty clones to both farm insane amounts of ISK and affect warzone control.

Instead of fighting each others, the PVP-minded FW pilots are forced to chase farmers out of plexes- endlessly. This is the most frustrating thing I've faced in EVE, and it's now time for CCP to acknowledge the situation.

My corpmate wrote a good blog post that lists the commonly suggested solutions:

- timer rollbacks
- buffing the NPCs
- rebalancing warp core stabs
- cloak prevention mechanism

Currently the farmers risk nearly nothing in space assets, time spent or lost value- cheapest PVE ships possible in game, timers don't reset and there's always a new plex to farm.

If you support fixing FW, post your ideas here, on all relevant forum sections or anywhere, contact your CSM representative or CCP directly. I know I speak for most FW pilots when I say enough is enough, farming has to end. It's up to us to make CCP wake up.

Mate, most FW pilots are farming alts, so you are definitely not speaking for 'most FW pilots'.

What is your point actually, you don't like farmers ? You don't want guys to make LPs/ISK easily ? Is something preventing you to make the same isk yourself ?

My opinion is the only problem with FW is the lack of goals / no reason to push forward after a certain tier has been achieved, no endgame in it whatsoever, only the constant cycle.

Such as…?

Why would they have to do that to do changes to FW?

People should also understand that this comparison is lowballing based on lazy farmers and low tier. When things hit T4 and the farmers really crank up, it's perfectly possible to pull into the billions with a fresh rolled alt within a week.

FW plex farming has, bar-none, the lowest barrier of entry to any ISK transfer in the game. You can spin d-plexes with a day one alt, and within three be running novice and small o-plexes, assuming you're forced to kill the rat and don't find a half-finished plex to scam.

And let's not get started on the joke that comprises L4 FW missions.

So how does this low SP Isk farming work then? You know....for er ... Science.

L4s at T3/4 are surprisingly bad isk/hr, because everyone else is busy crashing the LP price. Right now I'm barely making 400m/hr

Or maybe he just was being sarcastic. Not that it would've stopped him, and others, from using what they can use

I'll abstain from this thread then since I don't have direct knowledge, but given what I've heard it wouldn't surprise me if he were serious.

Agreed, had a farming plexer yesterday call me a "noob loser" for trying to get a fight in Faction Warfare..

I was also working on a post regarding this issue and will contribute my thoughts pertaining to lowsec as much as FW here instead.

As many know, QCATS is one of the best individual PvP corps in the game right now. We passed over 5k kills last month, are #2 on Battleclinic and are going to become #1 in short order (seeing as how we are generating 3-4 times the number of points per week as the Tuskers). Obviously, we find things to shoot. I say this in this context: we are very active PvPers and have numerous pilots who would qualify for the top ten in individual skill.
We are in FW so money is (generally) not an issue for those who can play with any frequency. We have excellent forums, logstics, corp doctrines so our members will always have something to do. We have about a 50-50 EU to US TZ presence now, and as such pilots will almost always have someone to fly with.
Recent;y, a member posted on our forums reflecting an attitude I have come to see as fairly prevalent not only among QCATS, but other groups in lowsec as well. In a vocal particular, Rixx (and his new corp Stay Frosty) has tweeted numerous times in recent weeks about this same thing. I wanted to give the above background to help clarify that it wasn't simply something wrong with the corp that influenced his desire for a break.

Here is what he had to say (with a few things edited out):
"Taking a vacation trip to some distant star far away from all the [crap].
I'm quite thoroughly pissed and tired about blobs, cloaks, stabs and smartbombing [punks] currently prevalent in our neighborhood, and will take the rest of the month off from regular service. I thought about quitting FW for a while, but with my sec status it doesn't actually make any difference whether I'm enrolled or not."

Now obviously there are parts of that text that will never go away, things like smartbomb camps and blobs will always be a part of Eve everywhere you go. But the part I want to make the most light upon was the stabs and cloaks. Not just from a FW standpoint (in dealing with AFK plexers) but from a general lowsec context as well: there are absurd numbers of people in lowsec that are affecting the game by making isk with little to no risk to themselves and, furthermore, are doing so in ships that cost almost nothing to replace.

This is not only forcing PvP corps to change how they fight, but it's also changing how making ISK works. It's hard enough for the pirate corps to fight over DED sights or clone tags without also trying to drive out farmers using say, drakes with a cloak and stabs who is making the same ISK without anywhere near the risk-ISK ratio.
The plain and simple fact is: people who don't want to get shot, who don't contribute anything to Eve except sapping resources from people who want to actually enjoy Eve without abusing the intent of certain mechanics are becoming more and more difficult to counter in any way.

As the QCAT member's post has (I hope) put in a fairly understandable light, simply the mentality of trying to deal with said groups is becoming a poison for the game and I doubt that this is the mentality that CCP wants emulated. I recall from various discussions regarding highsec that there should ALWAYS be risk and that while, the level of risk should be determined, in part, by the pilot (I.E. don't jump blind into lowsec, don't fly around in an officer fit ship in dumb ways, don't put your titan all by itself on a nullsec gate, etc.) there should always be a risk inherent of simply undocking. Sadly however, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction: Pilots are abusing methods of loss prevention in order to completely remove themselves from risk without proper balance or counters. There have been suggestions for specific modules and how to balance them, for instance, making a ship with WCS unable to activate (or fit) any kind of systems that could damage another ship or item (smartbombs, turrets, drones) or make it impossible to target NPC's with a non-Cov Ops cloak etc. While I would support something so drastic as a stopgap measure, I also know that's now what CCP wants. In FW specific situations, I know there are other options to discourage that kind of behavior as well such as rollback timers for plexes, prohibiting cloaked ships from entering plexes etc. But again though, as I understand it, these issues abound elsewhere as well.

I feel that this is something that has long been making itself manifest within Eve itself for some time and, TBH, there will ALWAYS be people who want to play the game in such a way and, as a sandbox game, there is nothing wrong with that. But when it begins to drive out players trying to do what CCP has designed and intended a certain feature to do (again in this case, FW for small gang fighting and plexes to aid in that) then I think that the problem is greater than the intent.
And the intent of FW? Combat. As mentioned here and here, the intent of FW from the beginning was combat. And, as has been mentioned already in this discussion, a vast majority of the raw number of pilots within FW are farming alts.
The intent of DED sites and other forms of lowsec wealth? Risk vs Reward (and maybe funding for those pirates who can't get into highsec anymore) and not just a different way to make more money with as much risk as highsec.

Just my .50 cents.