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Not really. Open door now. Let the role play alliances (the ones with high faction standings for every corp as stated in the thread) in. More targets, more fights, more fun.

If you want small fights, then FW theater will always be big enough to find small scale fights away from central hubs.

CCP has done a great job on the plexing front with a stop-gap solution nobody else envisioned. Let's hope they continue making improvements.

The new UI is basically the same as the first attempt, except now it's on the left...

The "E" menu serves no real function at all, except for the folders contained within. What lies within the folders is dandy, except that you can create groups on the Neocom anyway, so it's redundant to have an "E" menu at all.

Movable icons are good.

The icons themselves aren't highlighted very well on hover and activated states.

If an icon expands into a series of folders, it should show an arrow icon (or something) indicating it expands rather than opens a window.

The skill progress bar is a decent idea but I feel the Neocom needs to be wider for it to be clearer. The hover state for the character icon and the progress bar should be one and the same.

Station Services might start to get redundant as a window with the new Neocom, particularly with folders like Business and Social. Might want to consider this as well.

You cut off the rest of my post :




Now I was thinking that CCP had to make these changes. But you think I can do this? Which change can we make without ccp?

No I can't. The plexing mechanic is a lame pve mechanic. I tried, trust me I did. But the plexing mechanics are too stupid.

And it's not just me.

FW is a only a small fraction of those who play eve. And those who play eve is only a tiny fraction of the potential eve playerbase. And *even in FW* there is only a tiny fraction of people who plex.

If people could just "choose" to respect people who are good at engaging this bad mechanic none of the statements in the above paragraph would be true. Alas it's not so easy.

Conclusion: *CCP* needs to fix plexing. They know this.

I think Cearain's point is simply that plexing has never been a primary motivating factor in the majority of PvP fights in Faction Warfare over the last few years. For every good fight that happens inside a plex, there's about 10 more that took place at a belt, on a POS, on a gate, or on a station. (OK, the last one was a joke. Station games are lame and should be discouraged - TURN THOSE STATION GUNS ON THE ENEMY!!)

There's a whole lot of us who have PvP'd in FW for years now barely ever entering a plex - its completely optional, of little consequence, and has zero draw as a feature to outside players who may want to come to FW.

Sure, just about anything in the game can be meaningful if players decide it to be arbitrarily - but there are far more effective ways to encourage fighting that use the mechanics themselves to drive conflict.

The POCO's are perhaps the best thing to happen to Faction Warfare in my opinion, far more so than the "stop gap solution no one envisioned" (which actually, everyone envisioned because we've all been asking for that change specifically for years now.)

With POCO's, there is a real incentive for participation - control over POCO's means control over planetary income. Players compete over ownership of a planet, and planet owners compete with other planet owners to draw more PI producers to their system.

If CCP could use POCO's as a standard for further Faction Warfare iterations, in terms of shaping the feature so that victories and losses have actual consequence, we'll be in great shape.

The arbitrary wardec, arbitrary reasons for "occupying" systems in Faction Warfare, and the pointlessness of victory points other than pure role play simply haven't been enough to maintain a healthy player base in all four factions in all four regions.

Yes, people still plex. Yes, there are even really talented PvP'ers in the plexes. But plexing activity still is heavily centered around one timezone and the rest of the zones only dabble when they're bored of just about any other way to bait a fight.

Plexes should be exciting, carry value when won, and be something that attracts new players and outsiders to join Faction Warfare - not simply remain a filler activity people engage in for lulz when they have nothing else better to do.

CCP, you really hate Gallente do you?

Half of the people playing EVE start Caldari and the number of flying for Caldari is actually higher then other faction. Finding alliances with corps where the majority of players has positive standing to the Gallente side will be much more difficult.

Your allance to FW idea will only make bad things worse.

FYI, Gallente FW is stronger than Caldari FW right now.

Is it just me or does 0.5 sounds like a low number? Maybe make it a little harder to start with and see how it goes?

Agree with the tyranny of the "or". I am one of many who think that this idea has merit, but the timing is misplaced. We could double the amount of people enlisted in Faction Warfare overnight, it won't solve any of the list of problems that has prevented Faction Warfare from being a lasting gameplay draw, other than the hardcore crowd who will stick around no matter what. Those people get good fights, and have fun, but if someone is looking to come in, get in fights, and have an impact on anything they'll be just as disappointed as those who have already came, spent a little time, got bored, and left.

We need to stop the revolving door from revolving - not simply funnel more people in and out of a broken system at a faster pace.

In the long run, increasing the number of reasons to fight will be a much bigger numbers draw than simply adding more people to the militia roster for a short stint. If Alliances are going to join us - I want them to stick around. Not just join, pew for a bit, say "whats the point?" than go back to ganking ice miners in highsec or fighting over nullsec moons, or whatever else there is to do that has a greater impact on the sandbox.

I'm just saying letting alliances in now, and iterating on the core mechanics in the summer, is putting the cart before the horse, and loading the cart with extra dead weight. Its not going to actually mean progress, until the summer stuff hits.

Whats the point of any game?

Ultimately the only thing you can do in a game that will make someone want to stick around is make it fun, and even more fun than that person's other options.

But you can't make fw plexing more fun by just throwing isk/game advantages at the winning side. Because (unlike in null sec and player organized controlled alliances) people can always just switch to the winning team.

CCP needs to make fw such that many people find it more fun than other things in eve, without just throwing in game consequences at it. FW plexing needs to offer a method of play that is *different* than what other parts of the game offers.

For me I hope they make fw plexing offer frequent quality small scale pvp. That is something that is not offered by any other game mechanics.