Warfare & Tactics

If there was something that needs to be changed, it would be to make any form of warp core stabs, un-usable in plexes, unless its built in to the ship (you'll see a WHOLE lot of ventures now)

I agree.

Also, use PLH. Instascan and analysis of pilots in local --> easily spot 1-month old farmers --> move along (or chat, if you speak russian).

I hate saying this because I want more new players to come do faction war but I am sick to death of all trial toons stab farming in faction war like pro's, it's so obvious these are not new players but farming alts and I don't see any way to stop it except keeping trial toons out of faction war altogether. When they have plexed their accounts, that's fine let them use stabs/nano's what ever i dont care it's their game, but corps are abusing free trial accounts to deplex systems and keep sov and it's making a mockery of the warzone mechanics. I've tried hunting them by fitting 2 scrams and had some joy but these are not new players, they scan gates before warping to them, they mwd over 30km off the warp in when they enter a plex and they are always ready to warp out as soon as you go in.

I did all those things when I had been in the game less than a month. It doesn't take a genius to learn those tricks.

This. There is nothing wrong mechanically wrong with Faction Warfare. The only thing that would be nice, but not a necessity is to make neutrals unable to go within 30k of a plex. It just makes thematic sense to me to only allow faction fights in faction warfare. But I don't consider the system as is now broken.

Can trial accounts join faction war? I dont believe they can.

You definately don't need 1y of training to kill that comet pilot. I would say in a couple months you have all the skills you need to blap it easily if you bring the right tool for the job (i know i did), in 4-5 you can be pretty much on par with a all lvl V in a frig, I know i was.

But you keep saying that you need more than a year over and over, here and in the thread you opened, despite multiple people telling you otherwise.

Stop making excuses for your losses, toughen up and learn, or stop going solo.

I think we should be talking more about large scale changes to faction warfare, and not waste too much time worrying about stabbed caldari freaks.

As others have noted, CCP is on a mission to save Null Sov just now, so they don't have a lot of time or attention for FW. But, when they do, I think those guys are capable of making big changes, if there is a good reason to make a change.

As I see it, the biggest threat to FW is a lack of fights, or more exactly a high time to fight ratio of investment payoff. I was in hospital earlier this year, and it is easy to play Eve when you have nothing else to do. Now our corp has new members from real life, and they add up the hours spent on the game and compare it to the fights they get.

Rather than ***** and moan (I like to ***** and moan) about issues, maybe we should consider the metric of "time/fights" when we consider the changes we would like to see made. If the ratio goes down, new players are going to enjoy the game and stick with it, and bitter vets might take a bit longer to grow bitter.

In my view, we need a new set of mechanics that allow squads to find roughly matched squads to fight in a quick and easy manner. The plea system is good, and I don't think it needs replacing, but at the same time it rewards players with LP and isk. It doesn't reward players with pew, per se.

You show me the incentive, I will show you the outcome. We who want pew, and not isk, need CCP to make the incentive winning battles, not earning isk. Then people who want that incentive will participate, and stabbed freaks will go back to winning asteroids with bears in high sec. Or whatever it is that they do for isk.

In my opinion, CCP need to build a group mission mechanic for FW. They have sort of done this with incursions, but this is PVE based mission running. It is not designed around PVP faction warfare.

If we stick to the lore, Faction Navy ships (NPC) can fit black ops jump drives.

We could have special FW navy missions where the mission is to be hot dropped into a random FW DED spot by an NPC battleship. These special NPC BS could be configured to warp tech 1 and navy ships only, and they would be limited in the number (total mass) of ships they could drop.

The other faction, using the same mechanic, could also drop the same total mass of fleet to the same location. If the drops were synchronised, you would get neat FW squads fights of roughly equal sizes very quickly. Squads would just need to form up at the nominated point, at the appointed time.

It is exactly the same as with current missions, except that two sets of missions, on either side, are being synchronised.

Eve is a fantastic game, but roaming for long periods without fights is not attractive to new players.

I do agree with the concept that FW lends itself to a split mentality of plex or fight. I know on the days I need to make LP, I tend to runaway alot more than when I don't need it. I think that can be easily fixed though by just significantly increasing the LP payout for killing enemy militia.

The issue I see is that there can never be a perfect system in regards to FW. If you create a system in which one is forced to fight, you will be forcing people into alot of unfair fights. Which is counter intuitive in teaching new players PVP in EVE. Alot of success in PVP comes from knowing engagement profiles; what fights you should take and when you should run. Even veterans with a bajillion SP and massive amounts of skill still have that mentality. I think it is unavoidable that if you have a bunch of newbies in a PVP system you are going to have alot of them running away from most fights because they simply can't win most fights. And forcing them to continuously sacrifice their ships to the ship gods isn't fun for them.

When CCP started fw there was no monetary gain from capturing plexes. I think they assumed people would fight for plexes and territory because it was fun. And it wasn't a bad assumption. At times people did this and had fun. The idea was you would get isk to fight for your faction. It wasn't that you would fight for a faction to get isk.

But by and large plexing and fighting for territory became of little importance.

So players said we need rewards/consequences for plexing and then that will fix everything. So now we have consequences. Yet again after the dust settles we see that winning the actual occupancy war (outside of your home system or occasionally to get a medal) is of little importance to the average fw player. Conclusion: adding consequences to a dull game will not make it better.

And along the way ccp has adjusted the npcs in all sorts of ways. They made them weaker and stronger and required them to be killed etc. But fiddling with the npcs will never make fw occupancy a fun pvp game. There was a time when npcs were stupid powerful and discouraged pvp but at least that is over with. I don't think tweaking npcs will change much.

The only thing ccp has never done is give the players more tools so that they can fight for plexes throughout the war zone. Intel tools so players can know where plexes are being taken real time and therefore effectively cover a larger territory was something CCP said it would do, but never actually did. This combined with a timer rollback system is what faction war always needed. Get the blobs out of the same hot spots and get more quick small gang action spread throughout the war zone.

But somehow these changes that would better place the fighting into the hands of pvpers never made it through.

Why doesn't anyone care about systems? Because the game of gaining occupancy is not fun. Alts in plexes is boring but it's how you gain the most vp. (I said vp not lp) Make it fun by giving pvpers better tools to fight for their territory and you make the occupancy war game fun. Once the game is fun people will care.

In the meantime we will have the occasional blob a home system campaign spread out by lolplexing.