Warfare & Tactics

This would be a good start with one small change, make it non-covert ops cloaks cannot activate. Don't punish the specialist ships that have taken some effort & isk to field.

Having dabbled in FW with my alts, I have to say I am a bit shocked at how labyrinthine and long-winded the mechanics and mathematics of plexing are - as evidenced by the paucity of responses from other players and CCP to my threads in this section asking for clarification on how it works.

The 'problems', as I see it, are that ultimately there shouldn't be anyone in FW who isn't 100% committed to getting involved in fights. These are some of the issues that need tackling:

- long winded and really boring plex farming, the inability of people to actually plex systems and get a fair fight when stabbed farmers just run off, and people switching sides to cash in.
- the ability of non-FW participants to enter plexes and gank. Only Militia should be allowed in.
- how long it takes to have any 'impact' on the battle zone. Things 'drift' for weeks, unless a FW corp decides to do a mini-goon.
- the relationship between LPs, plexing, and rewards - and the associated 'LP push' to cash in that goes with the tiers.
- the slightly sinister relationship between Tier levels and profiting from LPs, where people build up a stack of LPs, buy loads of things like data cores and faction ships, then let their side 'drift' down a tier or two so they can cash in.
- The whole laborious business of d-scanning continuously, then needing to get a 'grapple on your opponent within the first 2 seconds of them arriving doesn't work either. It also disadvantages a number of potential plexing PvP options (like the mid-range kite, for example) as most of the setups tend to be either brawlers or kiters - catching the opponent as they arrive from the gate, or hoping to get away from them straight away.
- Loki links and the whole linked-to-an-alt-in-the-system fiasco.

But the main difficulty, really, is in dropping in and being able to see what you're supposed to be doing for your militia at any given time, then doing it, given the total absence of any functioning or useful command / control ability, for both vet and noobs alike.

Ultimately it needs to be made a lot, lot simpler. If you're in FW, you can expect to get into a bunch of fights quite quickly. If there's plexes, make them all about 1 vs 1 fights against matched opponents. Not militia vs gankers, or farmers, or an NPC first, or 1 vs several - that happens everywhere else.

Here's my suggestions to simplify things:

- Do away with the Tier system altogether.
- Do away with NPCs in plexes completely. They are only there to stop the farmers, but this puts the attacker at a disadvantage as they start any non-NPC combat with a ship that's already been in a knock. It's a failfit solution.
- Scrap FW missions altogether.
- Make the plexes permanent. Make it so that every system in a warzone has a fixed number of permanent plexes - say 3 novice, three small, 2 mediums and 1 large.
- the plexes, and the i-Hub have three possible statuses - owned by you, owned by the enemy, or neutral.
- To 'flip' a system, you need to capture every single plex in a system, then 'destroy' / flip the i-Hub, switching it to your side.
- You get LP rewards for capturing an enemy plex, or destroying / flipping the I-hub.
- if anyone recaptures a plex while you're doing this, it resets the i-Hub to neutral perhaps.
- dramatically improved information screens that show, in real time, the status of every system's i-Hub and all the plexes.
- You still get LPs for flipping a plex to your control, and a lot of LPs for flipping a system hub.
- you get 10x the LP for destroying an enemy combatant in the plex itself.
- No cloaking allowed in the plex.
- 1 vs 1 in the plex only. You and an opponent. Not 1 vs many.
- The plex fight starts much like a duel. Your opponent 'arrives'. A 15 second countdown begins until the fight starts, during which you can't activate webs or fire or anything, but can get into position and get drones out ready inside the plex arena only, then it kicks off. This gives everyone a fair chance to fight and not have it be decided largely by a 2 second 'slippery slope' right at the start.
- as many vs as many as you want against the i-Hub, which is in open space.
- fighting outside the plexes as normal, as it is now.
- Take a leaf out of the FPS book and create a bit more 'e-peen' around success in FW combat. Elite ships that can only be flown if you're in FW. Uniforms that don't cost 100m and another 100m worth of LPs. Medals for kill streaks - that sort of thing Some kind of bragging rights. At the moment, there's 10 lame, meaningless ranks.


Factional Warfare needs to be a whole lot more 'FPS' in outlook, if you catch my drift - you log in, can immediately see where the action is, it's easy to figure out what you're supposed to be doing to help your side, you can get involved either solo or as a fleet, and what you do makes a noticeable difference.

If FW was supposed to be about encouraging people to PvP in a 'controlled' way, it's not working as intended.

Why do you want to deny fighting against multiple opponents?

By far most of the plex engagements I've been in are in fact 1vs1, and the times there's been more have just been crazy fun. You're suggesting a very artificial restriction that would just result in a situation where a vet in a linked pimpfrig can lock down a plex from everything but an equally linked and pimped fit, and new players can't team up to take him down.

Locking the number of plexes and limiting engagement would result in fights moving outside the plexes, or in even worse case agreeing with your enemy to go to certain system and plex.

Less fights for him and everyone.

Also nothing wrong with non-FW pilots entering plexes either, more fights fights for everyone!

And really, the only thing new players really have to learn in this game is that PVP isn't fair. There is absolutely no mercy, no rules and many pilots show no signs of honour whatsoever- the sooner they learn to deal with this brutality, the better for them.

EDIT: the 15 second start timer, really? Please rethink how this would affect farming. It's already almost risk-free, but your suggestion would ensure total safety to farmers.

I only comment on your plex mechanic suggestions as tiers and LP are outside my scope of interest.



You suggested that there is a 15 second cooldown timer before fighting can commence in a plex. What this would mean is that the farmer can warp out at his leisure and there is nothing the attacker can do about it. It would even allow for them to leech the timer for 10 more seconds, smack a bit in local and then warp out, no stabs or cloaks needed.



Instant intel like that would give a massive advantage to the stronger side, and decrease the need to have active roaming presence in your systems.

Anyone who is defending the plex can run if they want to. This wouldn't change without some kind of mechanic that 'traps' you in a room once an attacker arrives, which I can't see happening. The attacker stays in the plex, runs down the timer, collects their LP. If the attacker catches and kills the farmer, well it's a decent LP bonus for the kill. It's the attacker that gets the smack-talk rights in local if the opponent runs, surely?

It's about reducing the reward for alt-farming, and ultimately about increasing the chance that two players, in roughly equal ships, get in a room and have a fight that starts fairly, combined with rewards that allow those players to cover the costs of losing ships all the time. Removing the regularly spawning plexes disincentives the farmer. Removing the Tier levels disincentives the farmer. Increasing the LP for kills in a plex incentives PvP.

It's not perfect, but surely what I'm suggesting is a lot less worse than it is now?

In fairness, it would decrease some roaming and increase the focus of fighting. On the plus side, the pace of the action would improve a lot

I'm more of a plexer / defender than a broader fighter, so it's difficult to judge how much of an advantage the stronger side would have from instant intel. Probably quite a lot.

But, if you take the current Gal vs Cal warzone as an example, where Gal have about 80 or so systems conquered to Caldari's 20, the Caldari side has a much bigger choice of offensive plexing targets. Assuming equal numbers of pilots, there's less chance of being caught if you've got a bigger choice of systems to offensively plex. Much more organisation needed by the winning side to properly catch all the plexers.

It also gives every player exactly the same quality intel and reduces some of the need for spying, having elite 'intel' channels that most militia members are not party to etc.

How would you improve the interface? I think we can all agree that the whole % contested thing is a bit lame.

Here's another thought: what if you just keep everything exactly as it is now, but just replace the LP rewards from plexing with 'hub points' that can only be spent on upgrading hubs? Maybe dial up the LP for FW kills to compensate?

Removes, at a stroke, all the incentives for plex farming.

On this, we violently agree. Ideally, occupancy and sovereignty would be based almost entirely on fighting, with the battle zone and the plexes merely the arena for the fighting.

This would be OK if the mechanic that accounts for the rump of occupancy 'value' wasn't plexing, and that LPs have a value to the player outside of the FW mechanic itself. Plex farming has a far greater impact on warzone control and ultimately Tier level than it should have, given that a 40,000 LP Tier upgrade is worth 1 point, the same as controlling a system outright. If system control was worth roughly the same as all the upgrade Tiers in a system (so, perhaps, 5 and 5 points respectively), it night balance things out.

If you earned a lot more LP for killing squid, particularly in plexes, things might also be different and get more people into PvP, which would make life harder for the farmers. I accept that people would then attempt to pull off dual-account shenanigans by killing alts and characters on other accounts, but this is better that the current alt-farming fiasco.

This last page of posts has burned my eyes out with its terrible ideas and caused me to crash my ship into the sun. Thanks.