Assembly Hall

I'm tired of seeing **** posts and ideas about how to improve Faction Warfare so I thought I'd jump on the bandwagon. Yeah, that's right, I said **** and I meant it. No personal offense to those coming up with the ideas -- at least they're bothering to put the time and effort into them rather than bleating about FW being a steaming pile of used acne cream -- but they are **** ideas

A little background, I have been playing this ****** game for 3 years now the vast majority of which I spent in various militias in FW. I have been in them all. I even made a blog once but I stopped giving fucks. I spent the rest of my time as a ****** player in nullsec and have a great interest in the political machinations and meta-gaming of end-game Eve, though I adamantly deny that I even understand a fraction of what's actually going on

So I've come to shine the light of my ideas upon the mouth-breathing denizens of FW in hopes that the merit and testicular fortitude of said ideas will outweigh my hilariously bad reputation and somewhat abrasive and ~edgy~ attitude

Let's begin. There are several overarching themes behind the ideas. These are, essentially

Incentivization - Currently there is very little incentive for being in FW and almost no reason to make a "career" out of it in which to invest your time. FW missions went a long way to this end but were merely a stopgap, temporary measure

Risk vs Reward - To counter incentivization, there should be some risk. I'm not talking about Nullsec-levels of risk, where you can find all of your space, assets and money generation gone over the course of a weekend. But currently FW is 100% risk-free PVP and this should change.

The FW End-Game and Meta-Gaming - Combining the above two factors in appropriate and interesting ways will make FW far more interesting and, I hope, promote much deeper player involvement in the end and meta-game aspects of FW. Currently, FW has the appeal of a schoolyard ****** slap-fight.

So that all said here are specific proposals and ideas that I feel will bring FW closer to this end, and make the FW experience much more fun in general:

• More PVP in Highsec! IMHO being in a Militia should above all else mean one thing -- you are in a never-ending war. Currently it is far too easy for Militia members to simply dock up their shitfit PVP ships in their lowsec staging system and make the one or two jumps to highsec and go bearing for a few weeks. Or worse, an entire subsect of the Militia population who have never actually been to Lowsec. This needs to stop; being in the Militia should mean you are subject to unwanted violence anywhere at anytime. To that end I propose that faction NPC military be nerfed beyond recognition. First, they should take an ungainly amount of time to show up when an enemy militia member arrives in system -- upwards of 10 minutes or more if that militia member doesn't shoot anything. If the enemy militia member does aggress a member of the militia whose faction owns that system, then the faction NPCs can show up -- but be blatantly weaker than they currently are. Much of their effectiveness should be relegated to EWAR: Webbing and TPing from Minmatar, Neuting and Tracking Disrupting from Amarr, etc. Their response should also depend on what they're responding to -- faction NPCs should show up in smaller ships if facing a single enemy militia in an interceptor, and larger if they're in a battleship. Overall the idea is to make enemy Highsec a far more lucrative target, but not to the point that it can be exploited so that some dickholes in instacanes can permacamp enemy militia trading hub stations. They should have to **** off eventually.


• PvE 'plexing to replace ****** orbiting of ****** buttons in space for umpteen minutes, then rinsing and repeating. This is boring unintuitive gameplay. Get rid of it ASAP. Instead, require the player to kill off successive waves of rats followed by a single Big Bad Boss who has a chance of dropping awesome loot, especially in the bigger 'plexes. Also give LP rewards for the killing of these rats, or just straight-up bounties. Make people want to 'plex for reasons other than sov-grinding, like it being a quick way for a noob pilot in a destroyer to make a few million to buy a ship


• This next idea basically rips Sansha Incursions to make that the primary feature of a FW system changing sovereignty. After however many of the above FW 'plexes are completed a Vulnerable system should go into Incursion mode, with a twist. You'd have a similar "Occupancy Progress Bar" appear on the UI, with either militia having 50% progress at the get-go. The system will fill up with NPC faction military "incursions", each with opposing armadas of faction NPCs duking it out in a cool way. In order to move the Progress bar in their favour, Militias will have to go into these Incursions in fleets and kill all the enemy NPCs. Every completed incursion site brings the system towards their occupancy. This should give a pretty hefty LP reward for the militia members doing the fighting, as well as the potential to drop some cool stuff. The problem here is ensuring that Militias benefit the most if not solely from doing these Incursions as otherwise it may promote other non-militia entities becoming actively involved, so LP reward is the best bet


• The current Occupancy Bunkers need to go, but they need something to replace them. FW Garrison Outposts. Similar to Nullsec Outposts these are solely owned by the Militia that owns the system. It provides a 100% safe harbour for that militia, with no neutrals and especially no enemy militia being able to dock. The station should provide greatly reduced if not completely free services to the owning militia -- free clones, free repairs, free offices, etc.

So you made lots of money in FW running missions, but people need more in order to come to FW? Do you think that the datacore move (assuming that the mechanics of datacore harvesting do not change) will bring in lots of people since it is thier passive isk generation device?



The only way I can think of PVP being risk-free is if there were no consequences to the PVP or the income to loss ratio was greatly decreased (lost more than you make). But as you said, under your proposal people can still keep thier stuff 100% safe in normal stations and income generation would be higher. Where does FW lose its "risk-free PVP" status with your proposal?



Would this variety of NPC navy be FW specific? Or would you have all NPC Navy ships follow this paradigm? For example, would a -8.00 sec character not be shot at by the Navy when jumping from low to .7 space?

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Bump for awesome.

By end-game I mean to refer to how EVE's whole Militia population can 'break' the game. With an idea of a totally iterated Faction Warfare in-mind came about how that can be 'broken', and so it'd have to be fixed. The end-game I refer to is an auto-fix of player-influenced extraordinary feats: e.g. defeating the weakened enemy faction that cannot fight back anymore.

Big accomplishments in EVE always happen.


Sorry for confusion.