Player Features and Ideas Discussion

faction warfare needs something new and exciting to bring players to FW. at the same time, it has to be rewarding enough that people stay, but not so broken that nullsec powerblocs come and own it all. this is a difficult thing to do CCP already said they are brainstorming, so let us the players brain storm as well

for some reason, i think about random stuff all the time, one day i thought about FW and what it could be like.

my thoughts on faction warfare are simply said, a never ending battle over control points in space which gives benefits to the winners but doesn't put forth a hopeless battle for the losers.

changes
- players in FW are part of the alliance of the empire of their choice, solo players are of course in npc corp alliance chat becomes FW wide and can be used as an intel tool or spying
- taking territory needs to be substantial; opposing faction cannot dock anymore, neutrals can dock, but there is a docking fee+taxes to refineries, and extra market taxes on neutrals. a portion goes to everyone on the winning side who has gotten on a kill mail in the last day.
-to take a station multiple combat sites will be in the system, each guarded by some NPCs and possibly players the attacking faction has to capture majority. the NPC's shouldn't be super strong, but enough that 1 person cannot take an undefended station that easily.
-above all, faction warfare should be about killed the other sides navy, no more FW plexes and carebears in FW its all about pvp lots of kills, lots of deaths, this will be a good training ground for new pilots.

rewards for FW players
other then the bonus of capturing a station a new LP store with all new stuff is added to FW store, and ONLY the FW store.
-new ships Tech 2 tier 3 battleship BPCs, navy tier 2 battlecruisers, cheaper navy ammo can also be thrown in. other ideas but can't think of any off the top of my head.
these items will cost just LP from the store, making FW a serious isk maker.

LP and how to acquire it.
since PVE isn't an option. PVP is all that is left.
the only way to make this work without being alt farmed is based on ship class/hull.
the LP reward would be based on who is on the killmail, or who is on grid and not cloaked whichever would work best.
example of LP gain
300LP for t1 frig
3000 for cruiser
5000 for battle cruiser
tech 2 and faction variants grant 50% more LP, so killing a t2 cruiser would give 4500LP
keep in mind the above is a basic idea, of course it would need balancing and testing.

--fundamental problem--
with this LP system people could farm their own alts.
to prevent this the only way to do it would be one kill per week on a particular player.
LP would have to be granted weekly. the highest point value ship you kill per different person per day a the end of the week would be your LP for the week

lets say i kill player A's frig, then the next day i kill his battle cruiser, then the next day I kill player B's frig, then i do nothing the rest of the week.
i would get the LP for player A's battle cruiser (not frig because BC>frig) and player B's frig
my total would be 5300 LP for the week. this would help prevent alt farming.
--integration into WIS/CQ--
I hate CQ, but this is something that could use this update.
players in CQ should be able to view live reports of ships destroyed in FW systems, who is winning, recent station changes all from their TV. even those not in FW can view the changes and where the action is.


-Pro's of the new system-
-mineral sink, many ships will die
-no isk faucet, any isk entering FW is from another player, not from killing NPCs or selling stuff to NPCs. other then insurance which has nothing to do with FW anyone joining FW would not make a penny unless they sell a LP store item or do another activity for isk.
-FW becomes valuable
-FW will be a decent entry point for new players wanting to try PVP out
-CQ gets a minor purpose

--Cons--
-people hate change, this would be hard to accept for current FW players most likely
-powerblocs can come in and dominate FW
-it might be too late to save FW
-lots of new stuff would have to be implemented into the game, live reports for CQ, and an entire new PVP setup with the capturing stations and LP reward system would be a lot of work and probably take a while and need extensive testing
-people will inevitably find a way to farm LP if its worth the time.



any comments/suggestions post, flame/trolls will be flaming trolls.

Interesting ideas. I'm not sure I like the idea of rewards based off killmails or type of ship killed, but some system for rewarding active participation would be needed.

How about simply rewarding pilots based on the mass of player ships killed? Some ISK/Ton bonus, amounts to a bounty on enemy FW ships.

It's kind of hard for me to propose any ideas for faction warfare without also talking about missioning in general. I'm an outsider to both as I only mission for refine standing. Some players farm the opposing factions tags but aren't involved in faction warfare at all, meaning they aren't even in the militia. That, to me, just seems strange and I've never understood the reasoning behind it.

I mean, isn't that what faction warfare is for? Shouldn't faction rewards be in the faction warfare LP store only? It seems none of this was taken into account when faction warfare was being fleshed out.

this could work, and then tags be used in FW npc store to get the stuffs. but at the same time, there would be great ninja looting
BETWEEN friendly forces, which should be avoided, killing same faction/friendly faction forces should be discouraged.

so you want 1 person to be able to capture a system? i don't.

why not allow taxing neutrals? it gives a great reason to capture the stations and means there could be many battles.

1 kill per day won't be much if more people join, and its be on a killmail, so if u have a group and all shoot a battleship you all got your kill

so you can't pvp every day? so what? you don't get tax revenue. your not kicked out of FW or anything. chances are the taxes from a station won't be anything special is just a cool little bonus for capturing stations.

FW only loot makes FW very valuable= more people try it.

For fucks sake. Goddamn piece of **** forums .. *sigh*. Not doing that again.

Summary:
- You are not bringing anything new to the table.
- You are swapping one mechanic abuse for another (farm alts for LP instead of missions).
- You advocate numbers > all (blob system until flip, move on).
- You want people to suffer the ego's of others to make ends meet or chase down the ever elusive small-gang/solo engagement.

Only one good bit that I can see, you want the militia interface to show information that is of actual value and up to date and integrate it into CQ .. can only endorse a revamp of the useless crap that is the current 'redundant/outdated statistics' window.

Well now that's the 64k question and probably the most critical when it comes to revising the occupancy system.

The only way I can think of is to let a majority of the plexes be spawned by direct pilot action (anchor/hack something) and appear in the pilots journal (like escalations) until warped to .. ie. make the scanned down and thus possibly pre-camped gates less of an issue.
Add to that significant advantage time wise for defenders so that they can close say 3-4 plexes in the time it takes an attacker to close just 1 and you force an offensive blob into smaller groups .. for maximum impact it could be constellation wide (a la Incursions) to avoid the "camp one system at a time and rotate to win".
The only time I can really justify encouraging big fleets is for the actual system flips .. replace the stupid Goddamn bunkers with NPC carrier + battle group protecting a relatively soft target and have the NPC's "stand down" when X friendly pilots arrive on scene (perma-ban exploiters, no warning) .. it is the system HQ for Goddess sake, how can it have zero protection other than a big fat buffer?

Missions are only a "problem" now because CCP wanted to make them easy because they grossly overestimated willingness of people to hunt mission runners who invariably run .. up the difficulty by including some of the elite frigs/cruisers in the target pool for the missions and you force runners into combat capable ships and even gangs, or in other words the bomber is made an exercise in futility for the purpose of missions.

You want to introduce a bunch of extremely dev intensive items to make FW LP worth more to counteract the lower intake, but we already have the template .. make the Empires shift some/most of their military grade items out of the vanilla corporation and into the militia's, if FW LP was suddenly the primary source for navy tank/damage/tackle/etc. mods then ISK/time skyrockets (done carefully to not affect markets too harshly).

Your ideas will either kill FW altogether as no one will have any isk, as you just won't get enough kills or rather people to kill to get enough LP or will make everyone roll an alt or 10 into the opposing militia and just farm them.

If you want to get people to fight you'll have to make the mission running a bit harder.
And I don't mean more NPC, but rather a mechanic in which if you don't fight not only do you have to wait a while, but you lose your mission and make some isk for your opponent.

What I'm talking about is introducing a mechanic, where you can complete someone else's mission for yourself.
For example in the mission where you need to destroy the gate there could be a "construction device" which you could operate to finish the gate and bring it online (or something like that).
So if you find someone doing a mission you actually have an incentive to go after him, and he has an incentive to fight you.
Whereas right now most of the time you'll find most people just cloaking their bombers or docking when they see a wt enter local.

Other options of forcing a fight would be to introduce some occupancy effects and maybe incursion style rewards for flipping or defending a system where you only get a reward after the final battle for the bunker or something like that.

It could be also combined with some incursion style effects like a cyno jammer for the system once the bunker becomes vulnerable or something like that.