Warfare & Tactics

Missions are the only source of rewards if one side completely wins.

Instead of de-coupling them from tier multipliers, I think that only one fw mission should be able to be picked up at a time. That will

a) Make them a lot less attractive
b) Still make them scale with the LP multiplier
c) Make people travel more
d) Give more incentive to defend a mission, instead of just moving on to the next one and waiting for the opposing member to get bored.

I'd prefer missions affect WZ control AND can be failed by a member of one of the opposing militias for a reward.

Hans does propose that kills receive all LP at the T5 multiplier, no matter what level of warzone control your faction is at. Which would be a good change.

FW should be a pvp centric feature. It is currently not, in order to win FW you need to grind as much as you can. The most fun in FW is had when fleets fight for no reason accomplishing nothing but burning some of the isk you made grinding.

Killing players should net more loyalty points. Ships should have fixed values for how much LP they pay out when destroyed. The act of spending earned LP points should result in the gain of control or contest over a system, somehow. Killing rats and orbiting imaginary buttons should not be how you do faction warfare, if you like pve then go run missions, if you join faction warfare you should be in it to fight.

Having one side have a higher tier over the other is silly because it pressures members of the loosing side to jump ship with no penalty so they can make more iskies.
Have rewards like tiers should be related to how well the individual player performs, or at least his or her corp.
Certain rewards like battleships should only be available after the player has killed a certain ammount of ships or turned in enough LP. Such benefits should be wiped if a player joins an opposing faction.

Claiming more territory offers the advantages of having more places to dock and perhaps should allow the owning faction's corps to setup customs offices (could easily tie into dust).

Just my thoughts. Leave pve out of FW entirely, have rewards come from fighting in it. Let the players rat or run missions for extra isk if they want, if they can't kill anything solo or join a good fleet then they can do level 4's in hisec to compensate.

You know my views on this I have been posting them for years.

1) make winning faction war something that the gaming community would be proud of.

How?
Well null sec has a lock on getting vast herds of sheep to win by blob. And lots of people in null sec are proud of that. So what else is there that the gaming community admires? Answer: skill at small gang pvp.

So make winning faction war about small gang pvp.

To do this we need to bridge that gap between how you win at faction war now (and yes by "win" I mean gain sovereignty for your faction) and the small gang pvp. The plexing needs to be about small scale pvp. Yet in all this time ccp really has yet to do a single thing to promote this. Somehow with all the concern that minmatar were being punished for winning this notion got put on the back burner.


2) Make it so that everyone won't just join the winning side.

You say: "Even the underdog can earn enough isk for pew via the activiities available to him in FW" But this is a bad restatement. How much is enough to pew?

Well it depends on how much your enemy has to pew right? I mean if you have enough to bring t1 frigates and they have enough isk to bring pirate frigates to each fight you won't have enough. If you have enough to bring battleships and they have enough to bring battleships with capital support you wont have enough to pew against them.

Plus this is eve who is going to want to join a side that makes half of what the other side makes. Do you think people who join faction war think they will do that forever and so as long as they have enough to do faction war right now it doesn't matter that one side will fatten their wallets if they later decide to do something else?

Retribution completely destroys this goal. At least inferno had some balances. It did not award defensive plexing. So the underdog would have a shot at making just as much isk as the winning side. That is completely gone now.

3) Make it fun to play

To do this you can:

A) give people short term goals that add to a longer term strategic goals. Inferno had that as well. The tier cashouts were something everyone could strive for. They involved strategy too. Well retribution eliminates that. Now we have just one big long grind.

Think of capping a plex like a eating a hotdog in a hotdog eating contest. In inferno if you ate 50 hotdogs you would get $1000. Now if you eat fifty hotdogs you will get 50 cents for each additional hot dog you eat. But guess what? After you eat fifty hotdogs everyone else, even those who haven't yet had any hotdogs, gets fifty cents for every hot dog they eat.

So not only is this an endless grind but you are violating the second main goal as well. You encourage everyone to just join the winning side.

B)Also again make it about frequent quality pvp. People like pvp. Its fun.

4) Make it unique. Don't just copy null sec mechanics.

EVE has never had anything that was intended to promote frequent quality small scale pvp. Faction war is the obvious choice.

5) Profit

How many new subscribers would Eve have if they actually took these goals to heart and did something beside assign large amounts of isk to whatever they want to have players flock to?

Hans there were people like me and others telling you this all along. You chose to ignore us.

Now after floundering around I predict people will start saying "well its impossible to accomplish these goals." When really you and ccp have just ignored people who are giving you sensible ideas. Instead you went with the cheap win of "lets get people into faction war by throwing massive amounts of isk at it" Well no null sec is upset enough that that was turned off. And now we see that CCP really did not do much to improve the actual core of the game.

Sure, but I appreciate you sharing them again. I think we can all agree these are good goals to strive for - and measurable too. For example, "making it so all the players don't join the winning side" can easily be assessed by observing whether or not new players are willing to join the losing side despite the increased rewards for belonging to the miltia with a greater degree of warzone control.

We could see this happen with inferno right? The numbers gap between amarr and minmatar grew like never before. Yet retribution only made this worse.

Retribution made it so the winners will stay winning by rewarding d-plexing with lp.

Retribution makes it so instead of people who fight to make the losing side the winning side get most of the gains its the people who join after one side is winning get the rewards.

Frankly, I've never understood the point of FW. At best it's a contrived excuse for combat and a way to get high sec combat without crappy wardec mechanics. Other than that, it only appears to offer comically large rewards (still) for making oneself available as a potential target. FW has become an overly complicated pew pew flagging device. I'd argue that it would be better for everyone involved in FW to be given a "I like to fight" button they can press and make themselves a totally legal target in high sec and low sec. I guess I'd be curious to know why CCP should be diverting so many resources to something like this, when they could be making the heart and soul of the game, sov mechanics, better.

Because allot of people don't go for the tween girl aggression dressed up as null sec politics. They like to fly around and fight in their ships. There should be mechanics that promote that.

You seem to think I have something to do with CCP's release schedule.

If I had my way we never would have seen payouts in the first place until the NPC overhaul and the other plex mechanics were addressed, but that ship sailed before I ever took office. The recent patch has everything to do with CCP finally waking up to the mess they created by throwing money at FW first instead of fixing the underlying issues, and releasing the code they had completed by this point. "Massaging the numbers" is exactly what it says - and obviously takes less time than altering core content structure and building custom new NPC AI. The realities of the production process here were what contributed to the order in which the Retribution changes rolled out, I've been quite clear about what I want to see in what order, and been outspoken about the fact that CCP was doing the right things in the wrong order from the beginning.

But by all means, continue to blame Susan for it all, everyone is entitled to their beliefs.

Anyways about this timer rollback - what do you mean exactly? Maybe I've missed something in our previous discussions, I'm hoping you can elaborate on "enemy lands on grid not just anytime you leave". If two players are both on the timer, why would it not just stop moving completely until one has defeated the other? There's still a month left, if there's a better way to tweak this I'm all ears.