Warfare & Tactics

Suitonia is running for CSM this year and I beleive he is a strong candidate. Recently I asked him what his thoughts are on how to improve FW. Here is his response: https://www.reddit.com/r/eve/comments/5tgojp/_/ddmlgky

First, I agree with him that the current tier system for rewards needs improvement.



This is a suggestion I am on board with! I go out plexing for Minmatar milia on the regular, and it feels like those who join when the going is good/easy get rewarded better than I do. This would also help with win-trading, because people who keep fighting while one side is the underdog can still get good LP payouts.

Second, I don't like the idea of splitting FW militias up from a 2v2 into a 1v1v1v1. Yes it will get more fights, and it could help balance power in the event that one side starts dominating...but I rather enjoy setting up relations, trade deals, and other friendly interactions with our allied militia. I think it keeps things interesting, especially considering that the Minmatar LP store has powerful faction points/scrams, which is something that gallente EWAR ships are bonused towards. And gallente LP store have powerful webs, which is something Minmatar EWAR ships are bonuses for. It's a good opportunity for trade deals and to help each other out.

That's a great idea.

That's a good idea, but what if you made multiple accounts? What if you had two different characters and you used the ISK you generated from LP on either side of the warzone to fund PvP with a third character?

Spies
Blue kills
People who steal sites

These are the things that ruin FW.
Fix these issues and it's a great environment.

switching sides should cause all loss of standings from the previous side, at the minimum.

Create 'campaigns'
Only people who participated in the campaign can enjoy the rewards.

I think we're having a miscommunication here.

The problem is related to how the tier system works in Faction Warfare. Say for example, that your faction is at Tier 1 - you get little payouts for flipping plexes. This is supposed to incentivize taking over territory and pushing your faction up into higher tiers.

The problem is that when a faction is in Tier 1, a lot of players give up on trying to push it up into higher tiers. This makes it very hard for the few remaining loyal players who continue to fight to bring it back up. Those who continue grinding plexes in a T1 faction make less than 30 million isk per hour. I'd say they make maybe 10-15 million ISK per hour by flipping novice/small plexes, dealing with PVP situations, and losing ships. Personally, I don't think 10-15 million ISK per hour is enough to warrant flipping plexes - and I can understand why so many players leave when a faction is struggling in T1.

One might argue that plexing isn't meant to be a source of income, it's meant to be a place to fight. If that's the case, why not just take away all LP payout for flipping plexes, and let them sit there? Who is going to sit in a plex and wait inside of it for 10-39 minutes when there's only two reasons for being inside of it: A) Getting fights in ships that are of similar power level to your own. And B) Grinding your faction up into higher tiers of LP payouts for running FW missions? I'm just going to go on a limb here and say this: very few players. If you wanted to get fights, it would be much faster just to roam around asking people to duel you on a stargate.

What bothers me, is what happens when these loyal, diligent players grind the plexes in the faction warfare zone, and get their faction back up to Tier 2/3/4; because when a Faction hits higher tiers of rewards, all of a sudden other players join the party and start farming LP, reaping the rewards of the hard work of the players who were loyal and stuck around to get thier Faction out of a rut. And also making it that much harder for the opposite side to regain territory. So the pendulum swings back and forth. When should you join Minmatar Faction Warfare? Well when Minmatar is winning! When should you join Amarr Faction Warfare? Again, the answer is when Amarr is winning!

I hope what I'm saying make sense to you. I like the idea of individual players or corporations having their own tier of rewards, because then those few loyal players who grind away while a faction is losing a warzone still get rewarded well for doing so. And those who jump in when the going is good, have to actually work their way up the tiers to get good rewards.

Perhaps it could be a two tiered system. Your LP payout could be based on two factors: A) What tier your entire faction is currently at. And B) What tier you are personally at. Then if your faction is at T1, but you personally (or your corporation) is at T5, then you get medium level rewards (current T3 rewards). And if both your Faction and you personally are at T5, then you get what is currently T5 rewards.

Now you said that it could be easier to code a system where a player gains negative LP for the opposing faction when they gain LP for their current one. I agree that it could potentially be easier for CCP to program that into the game. What I don't understand is how that would help in the problem that I just elaborated upon above. If you can explain to me how it would help, I'm open to it.

The point of the negative number is to prevent a toon from jumping back and forth between factions based on who's at the higher tier. That seemed to be the point of having "personal tiers"... to have something incentivizing you from flipping to the higher tier side.

If that's the case... having a negative LP balance with the opposing side does the same thing. If you have been grinding Amarr plexes and all of a sudden the minnies flip the board... under the current setup the plex farmers will flip to the minnie side, right? But would they if they had ground 50 million amarr LP and thus had a -50 million LP balance with minmatar? That would mean they'd have to grind 50 million minnie LP just to get to 0... and to start being able to cash in LP for anything.

The huge negative LP balance from grinding amarr prevents an individual toon from switching and grinding Minmatar. Now... could they have another toon for the other side? Yeah... but they could also have another toon with high tiers for the other side in your personal tier system... and they'd still get higher rewards if the other side was winning.

If the flipping of sides isn't your main issue and the fact that those grinding on a lower tier get lower rewards is... the negative LP suggestion doesn't address that. It addresses only the flipping of sides. But preventing toons from flipping sides may have an impact on how many people are plexing for the losing side... it's hard to tell player reactions on a change like that ahead of time.

Here's a little things list that has been cleaned up and passed around for a couple years that you might want to send his way. The original is linked in the newfw tweetfleet channel.

Remove FW standings hits in null sec.
Remove purple icon for allied militia - or allied militia should take standings hit if they attack you (or just get rid of allied militia) (4 way war confirmed as desired by CCP Affinity).
FW standings eligibility should be applied on individual basis, not on corp basis.
Remove faction standings hits for AoE effects (or other weapons) when in same fleet. (or remove standings hits for all AoE weapons everywhere in lowsec)
FW overview for newbro’s in militia MOTD and FW panel.
MILITIA FILTER. Militia-only contracts. “Militia” filter for POS access, Citadels, etc… Ability for militia members to post future events such as future fleets to entire militia on Calendar
Strengthen Faction Navy to make it harder to camp opposing highsec to farm newbs.
Have plexes persist through DT and redo spawn mechanics of non-outposts (keep them semi-random though)
Randomize plex respawn rate by using a respawn window.
Useful system upgrades
Decouple System Upgrades from Tier Level
Smooth out Tier system and fix payouts for PVP at existing level 5 payouts.
Remove aggression from plex rats (affects afk oplexers without hurting pvp’ers).
Citadel problem.

dual timers seems like a more elegant solution than timer rollbacks.

Yep. Thanatos is one of the most learned protagonists of FW. That list is a collection of a lot of hard thinking by a number of long term Militia Troops.

Alongside the above:

1. The FW LP Store needs an overhaul too.

• Tags should be consolidated into a single tag (Minmatar Militia Tag), etc. Large plex's spawns drop more of the same tag than spawns in the smaller plex's
• Change the costs of some of the items to just include a number of the single tag.
• Make some of the more expensive (possibly more lucrative or desirable) items in the LP store only available to higher FW Militia ranks - or add new items that are High Rank only.
• Put Militia Rank Tags into Faction Warfare Capsuleer wrecks
• Put Faction Warfare Militia Rank Tags into costs of some items in the LP store. [oh I need PvP tag(s) to get that item]
• Rebalance the items across the 4 Militia LP Stores (yeah I think Amarr should have a scram and Minmatar currently has a far better spread of modules in it's LP Store). - I'm probably too biased on this one.

2. The dual timer suggestion I'm not sure about. I still favour rollback, which I believe would need careful implementing to not be broken.

As there is still a problem that a single capsuleer cannot defend a system from another single farming capsuleer without resorting to warp ping pong (which is poor quality gameplay = bad thing) I don't think the dual timers thing would work... maybe.

However, I will concede, a balance of other mechanics would likely promote interactive gameplay and reduce farming a little bit more (some of the previous attempts have been good like the defensive plexing LP rewards being index linked to the contested level).

3. Ranks

Give the FW playerbase something as a reward for grinding and pew'ing themselves up to a high rank other than a badge on the character sheet that no one looks at.

Reward each rank up somehow, with more than just an increment to the standings.

Then Millita switching becomes an issue as you lose rank once you switch.


FW has suffered a population crisis because so many long term Militia pilots have quit due to the system not working. This low population leads CCP to ignore requests for change as "why bother coz it's only a stepping stone".

Failure to realise that this is a part of Eve (under the right conditions) which could be heavily populated by long term subscribers is an error. There are many who want to play a faction and be part of a factions story. Make it possible and they will come.

Part of the issue we seem to run into on a semi-regular basis is how FW is currently just not dealt with or considered very much on the CCP side for whatever the reason. I'm not sure Suitonia or any other CSM rep by themselves will be able to change that, but it would be interesting to hear how they might go about it.

The CSM notes give us a glimps, though admittedly not a full picture, at how FW is viewed in comparison to other things going on at CCP:

"CCP Guard asked if the CSM felt that they had managed to talk to everyone and
about everything they felt they needed to at this Summit. Nashh pointed out that
it would have been nicer to have a longer community session. Gorski commented
that it would have been nice to have a Lowsec and Faction Warfare session, with
CCP Logibro replying that that session in particular was not put on the schedule as
the development team is unable to commit to anything in the shorter term and
Team Five-0 were already having a large number of meetings. "

Source

As players if we really are interested in getting more attention from CCP we might need to find a way to get FW to rise to the surface more frequently.


On the plus side the little things list used to include things like getting T3Ds out of smalls, and mass fitting of ships, both of which have been implemented in the game.