Assembly Hall

Hello

I have an issue regarding the price for faction weapons in the LP store. In brief the cost in tags for these weapons is too high. Tag generation rates have suffered from a series of patches and game design changes but the lp store tag costs haven't been adjusted to compensate. What we see now is these weapons are disproportionately expensive to other weapons of the same type. This is not an issue of drop rates: players can physically build these modules and that needs to be accounted for.

I request a rebalance of their cost to increase availability as the end goal.

Long version:

The central issue of the current balance for faction weapons are their meta level. With some of these modules having a meta level of 9 in terms of CCPs internal balancing metric this would require them to be very expensive and have a degree of power higher than the lower meta levela. Where faction weapon stats specifically are considered they typically possess a few key bonuses. First of all they generate heat when overheated at around half the rate of t1 and t2 modules. Secondly they have a bit higher ammo capacoty. In terms of caldari/fed navy turrets I observed slightly higher optimal on caldari faction rails while fed navy rails had more fall off. Lastly navy weapons have less fitting requirements.

In theory a dedicated fw player should be able to, through only his own efforts, obtain the tags for and build himself a full faction ship complete with faction weapons/support modules and ammo. It would be time consuming but the overall benefit for this player would be possession of a ship that is considerably tougher than the base t1 variant and have a full compliment of high grade weapons. His ship would have efficient tanking modules and better weapons for general purpose combat. This is a noble goal in itself - the player has built this ship through his own work.

The issues start when you begin to account for how he will build it. There is only one way to get faction stuff - tags. Tags are generated in three ways primarily those being mission running, fw missions or coercing faction police to fight. Before the fw rebalance a couple of years ago it was possible to use the bountiful faction rats found in button complexes as a steady source of tags. With the other dominant alternative being L4 misssion running it was much easier just to use fw for collecting tags - a theory supported by the internal game mechanics of the LP store especially the fw LP store. The rebalance was enacted to reduce the npcs in a complex to bare minimum as a measure of enabling players to fight on more even terms. Unfortunately this stripped one of the most popular methods of tag generation from the game entirely and the fall out from this has been faction weapons are a tiresome grind to build now.

In terms of balance of the faction meta items themselves I do not intend any action here. I am solely concerned with making these modules easier to acquire. In a perfect world faction stuff ahould be more expensive than t2 gear where they are just outright better mainly in terms of like cal navy shield extenders or pds. Things like passive shield hardeners or boost amps are outright better than t2 and cost a respectable amount alrrady. It's when looking at weapons that things start getting crazy. As of this writing cal navy ham launchers are 60 million each - a price not justifiable through any metric. They are so expensive only because to build them costs an upfront few million from the lp store and also something like 500 tags. Five hundred.

CCP should in my opinion reduce the LP store costs of these weapons and weapon bpcs in preference to creating a more accessible tag generator. Why? Because if a new source of tags is created but is created in the wrong way or place nothing will change. People are already not expending the effort to farm hundreds of tags and they won't do it in the future either. By reducing the LP store cost however you let the market drive demand ny virtue of much lower costs and an associated increase in supply as people's pre existing tags get more mileage. Faction gear already out performs t2 stuff by a not inconsiderable margin depending on what you're looking for, lower prices will drive demand up. The increase in demand will see prices fall further over time and hopefully have the tertiary effect of making FW a more attractive and serious occupation in and of itself. With LP stores acting like a giant isk sink for the game getting people to buy more stuff from there will benefit the economy and help to drive inflation down. I won't specifcy any prices for a full faction fit but if conjecture put it at 2 -4 x the price of a t2 ship I think that could be very reasonable

IMO Faction weapons generally are overpriced by about an order of magnitude. Given that they don't in practice outperform T2 (due to the effect of weapon specialisation skills) and can't use T2 ammo, they should have a target price of around double the equivalent T2 gear, triple at most.

That would actually make them a viable alternative to T2 rather than just vanity ornaments.

EDIT: And such a change would also allow them to serve as a useful alternative if we see runaway T2 materiel prices.

This really is a good idea, because faction weapons should be a usable alternative to T2. They're not OP, I can't see how this would break anything, and it has several beneficial consequences.

Before I try and escalate this, is there anything problematic that anyone can see with this? I've tried and I can't.

Not that my opinion counts for much because ~NPC CORP~ but I can't really think of anything bad about this. Right now EVE-Central puts the average price of FN 250mm rail guns at something like 116m each. One rack of those would pay for a small fleet of fully t2 fit Battlecruisers. To me that's broken.

6 days since I posted this thread without anyone raising an issue. Can this now be put forward to CCP?

IMHO, faction weapons should outperform T2, but only until specialization 3 or 4 for the T2 weapon, as fara s weapons go, the ONLY kind of modules that should ever perform better or equal to T2 at lvl 5 spec is DED or officer gear, faction should be allowed T2 ammo but become weaker compared to T2 after spec 3 or 4. hell, kinda on the fence on whether faction should perform so much better as it does than T2 for the other module types as well, makes T2 kinda silly in a lot of cases, where the "benefit" of that faction is a better module for triple or quadruple the cost, but extra fitting room to make an overall vastly superior fit than if you had used T2, making it a huge benefit. but whatever, CCp will do whatever the hell they please.

I would actually like that CCP carry the same attitude they have with faction ships (they want to see more of them in space). I support making faction weapons (and at least all navy faction modules) more accessible (much more volume and cheaper (2-3 times the price of the T2 module, not 100x in some cases). Perhaps remove a large portion (if not all) of the tag costs? It could follow similarly to the difference between FW and highsec NPC corp LP store prices as it is with the ships. I don't even think you would need to rebalance the faction weapons that much. There should a choice between using faction and tech II. You lose the ability to use tech 2 ammo (which is a big deal) but you don't really gain that much from a faction weapon to justify the cost as it is now, slightly higher rates of fire (which are almost the same as T2 because of specialization skills), lower fitting, more ammo capacity, etc.

Agreed. Lets give us more realistic fitting options. More options for using our lp as well as encouraging the lp isk sink. I would love to see faction modules used more. Without ridiculous pricing.

I completely concur that faction modules could use a serious rebalancing pass. At the moment, they generally come across with somewhat jumbled attributes, sometimes being better then t2, sometimes worse, sometimes just different.

I think asking CCP to spend some time rebalancing them, from their attributes to their build costs would be generally a good thing. I don't know where I prioritize it, but it is an area of game play that needs tweaking.

To be honest, this is not a small project, and shouldn't be treated in such a manner.

It is worth mentioning that faction weapon bpcs are another isk sink and require multiple sources of labour to create. If faction weapon build costs should face a rebalance then including data/relic site materials would be a good addition on top of mining and tags.