Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Faction Warfare as a game mechanic has failed. There is no way to win. It is just a pointless, endless war. It serves no purpose anymore except for farming. The RPers are all sick of it. Its stagnating and not providing the right sort of lowsec environment for PVP or PVE. Its time to End FW as it currently exists.

Wat? nu wai.

Yes, I'm serious. The mechanic is not terrible, but not good either. It doesn't encourage the right sort of PvP, and there is little incentive to fight when there is no way to win. It simply becomes a place to farm isk, and attempt to get easy fights. The minmatar control all of lowsec right now, its time for the Empires to return to the negotiating table and work out a peace treaty.

Now, the way this peace treaty comes about leaves all the Empires in a state of turmoil, with massive political and social upheaval. Into this, the pirates begin expanding into lowsec. Each pirate faction gets a constellation of lowsec with stations offering pirate faction warfare missions to invade empire lowsec. All of lowsec becomes FW versus the pirates. I-hub upgrades remain as they are now, but the pirate factions taking control give different bonuses, to things like booster production, illegal implant creation, slave trafficking havens, making the sentry guns less effective, and that sort of thing. This creates a real sort of law vs. chaos battle, one that is designed to actually continue indefinitely, introduces a whole bunch of content for people wanting to be pirates and do stuff with the pirate factions, and also provides a way for people to play the 'good guys.'

Did you think there was an end game peace scenario in the waiting? Really?
You must be new to Eve: there is no end peace unless you choose not to participate.

The FW plexing mechanic is broken, FW as a whole is not. I would support adding pirate factions to it but not deleting the empire FW.

Okay, it basically goes something like this: FW as a mechanic will always fail in the long term because unlike in nullsec, where you can win or lose by defeating your enemy or being destroyed by them, there is no way to 'achieve victory' in FW. The most you can do is take all the systems, which doesn't give you any tangible benefit. CCP is trying to build a game mechanic around this idea of perpetual warfare that simply does not seem realistic, and honestly, no gameplay mechanic should be designed off of the storyline the way FW was. It means there is absolutely no way to move the storyline forward or away from constant endless pointless war. And it becomes very pointless when the minmatar militia control all of lowsec.

What pirate faction warfare would do is allow lowsec to be everything that CCP wants it to be.

First off, all of what is currently Empire lowsec becomes new faction warfare systems. the current FW systems stay in the current hands, the wars as they stand completely end. The upgrade system remains, and can be applied in all of lowsec, however now it slowly begins to trickle up based on ratting, killing pirates, and protecting defensive plexing sites (more on this later) but it becomes automated. As it trickles up, so too does the sec status of the system, with the gate guns getting more effective, the pirates becoming less hazardous, etc, up to a final status of .4, which, with the addition of cynojammers and enhanced gate guns, makes it marginally safer there then it is today.

Piracy, offensive plexing, destroying facilities and NPC structures that appear in space, lowers the sec status. When the sec status drops to .1, the system becomes completely unowned, and the pirates can take it, locking it in. In order to retake it from them, their facilities and such need to be destroyed.

Now, when a system reaches .1 sec, it is unowned by anyone. Any pirate faction can lay claim to it, as can any empire. It reaches a bottoming out point where its basically uncontrolled. From this stage any empire, or pirate faction, (or player organisation maybe) can take it. For an Empire faction to take it, they have to blow up enough piratey stuff to raise the sec to .2, then defend an NPC iHub construction site. For the pirates to take it, they have to LPget from the pirates a 'sovereignty blockade unit' and set it up in the system.

So what is the difference between pirate lowsec and Empire lowsec?

Pirate Lowsec:
*Less Safe
*Less effective sentry guns
*more dangerous roaming NPC gangs (won't aggro if you're with the pirate faction they hail from)
*New pirate stations and destroyable structures, allowing services like booster and illegal implant production, pirate ship creation, slave trade, smuggling, etc. These structures are destroyable, their associated agents are in space.
*NPC structures pop up in various places, destroying these weakens the pirate's foothold.
*Pirate epic arcs and missions become available there
*new pirate faction ships
*bubbles?

Empire Space:
*Safer
*More powerful sentry guns
*cynojamming
*more 'regular' less risky isk through new FW missions, and blowing up pirate faction NPCs
*NPC Defense patrols
*those with low sec status cannot dock

A change in the plexing mechanic:
No one likes orbiting things, and no one really likes structure grind. I think the structure grind of killing the i-Hub is important as a final 'kick the knees out' of the other faction, and it means systems won't flip all the time.

How to Plex now:

*NPC structures and ships like those found in missions appear, along with in space agents, and NPCs for both the pirates and the empires. Blowing up these structures, agents, and NPCs either raises or lowers the system sec by a very small margin for each instance of it.

*Blowing up outlaws and people with negative sec statuses slightly raises sec, blowing up high sec status people slightly lowers sec. Joining a pirate faction nukes your sec down to -5

These destroyable agents, sites, and structures appear randomly in systems, like anomalies do now, entrance to them is restricted like it is in a current style FW plex.

If systems are left untouched, they will very slowly trickle up on their own, except for in the untouchable base constellation of each pirate group. The system is slightly skewed against the pirates, their gameplay is harder, but produces slightly higher rewards. Pirates can only take over a system adjacent to existing pirate systems, and if they manage to take all the way up to a highsec access point, then that highsec gate becomes a battle site, with NPC pirate and police ships both there going at it. In this state, a smuggler can slip through with drugs.

These are all just very rough ideas, but its a starting point.

I agree with the above poster,

lowsec pirate faction warfare should be an addition, not a replacement for empire FW. The two could even intertwine. For example, a caldari + gallente day or week of armistice could be put into effect to battle the gurista or serpentis rats in their respective lowsec systems, while pirate players can try and support their pirate faction and the space they get for it (as pirating in a 0.3 or maybe even 0.1 border system is easier than a 0.4 one).

I do believe that pirate FW should be 75% playercontrolled and only 25% npc-controlled. Meaning that the transition of systems from empire to pirate factions (and vice versa) should be very very very slow when left alone. The systems should all be given a status of "when left alone, converts to 0.x level security faction X or Y space"

Effectively, this would increase lowsec popularity.

The only predictable side-effect that will ruin this form of gameplay is of course the null alliance powerblocks trying to control the lowsec market as well to farm ISK from this all. Supers and caps shouldn't be allowed to farm any kind of mission / plex or whatever else that is tied to FW, pirate or not.