Warfare & Tactics

If you are simply running plexes for isk then you will generally go with the higher tier - if you are rational. The fact that the market fluctuates to help all the sides at certain times does not prevent this - at all. Get the most lp for what ever side has the higher tier regardless of what the market is currently for that side. That way you will have more lp (over 2xs as much) for your time when the market swings to that factions favor.

I agree with Master Seargent McRoberts that there can be tweaks to make switching sides more difficult. But because of alts its not going to be a purely economic one or based on standings.

In the end it has to come down to making people feel certain sense of pride in gaining sov for their faction. When you best gain sov for your faction by always running away then that is going to be tough to make people proud of gaining sov for their faction. Sure there are some in faction war that think it's fine. But the overwhelming majority of eve players understand fw sov to be a joke. And they have good reason for their view. CCP needs to fix this and until they do, very few players are going to feel pride in accomplishing things for their faction in the sov war.

Null sec sov is often criticized and I am not saying it is perfect. But at least you don't win sov by constantly running away! You receive intel about what is attacked so you have an opportunity to defend in pvp. This is a big reason why thousands of people find null sec sov rewarding and only tiny fraction of that number find anything worthwhile in fighting for faction war sov.

As long as people keep saying rabbit plexing is not a big deal (and therefore ccp puts off the fixes for rabbit plexing) this will continue to be the case. People won't take pride in making gains in fw sov and they will therefore not really have any sense of commitment to one side. Of course there are exceptions in every faction. There are those who are committed to their faction despite the current horrible mechanics. But honestly they are so few compared to the overall playerbase, that I would hope even they could recognize that what is motivating them, is not working very well for the vast majority of players. Sadly a few of them are so attached to their tiny niche play style that they don't see what is obvious to the rest of eve. Some of them are very vocal on these forums as well.

Station Lockouts: To the extent anyone from null sec is reading this and isn't sure of the mechanics in fw. When you are "locked out" of a station in faction war there is no real risk to your assets. Your station will not be bubble-camped because there are no bubbles. You can have an alt on the same account as your faction war character dock in that station and move your stuff. (you can even have that alt join the other faction war militia, but you don't need to.) You do not need to try to get an alt in a player run alliance that will likely ask for your api and then see you are contracting all your stuff to that alt etc.

To say your stuff is more at risk in a faction war - low sec station than it is in a sov null sec station is extremely uninformed. So yeah if you are scratching your head at some of the comments here you should be. The person claiming there is more risk in fw stations is clueless. Station lockouts in fw are an annoyance they are not in any way a real risk. And citadels have a much larger impact on Null Sec sov than they do on fw space.

The 15% value tax for losing your stuff in a citadel is IMO a bigger risk than losing one of your characters access to a station in faction war space. In both cases you are going to have to relocate your stuff but the citadel also has a 15% tax on top of that.

This is really the bottom line on where we disagree. I gave my reasons for believing rabbit plexing is a huge problem for faction war. I won't go through it again now.

But yes you are definitely one of the people I was refering to as being an obstacle for getting people organized to help push ccp for the changes that will actually benefit faction war sov.



Yeah well the overwhelming majority of players think fw farmville is not good on any level, and is actually pretty broken. Hopefully CCP will recognize the potential in faction war and finally make the changes it needs.

Someone posted a really good idea. Instead of having timer rollbacks, you get accelerated o-plexing until it hit's the default time.

So for example if you warp into a large and the stabbed punisher warps out. And you see the beacon is at 35 minutes. instead you would o-plex it down to the 20 minute mark (default starting spot for large plex) at an accelerated rate.

Helps both not only with giving us a way to deal with farmers, but also with trolls who leave a large/medium plex at 39 minutes.

Nice to see we can agree on this.

You know what else needs more work? The LP store. Holy **** that needs work. When you can buy deadspace items for cheaper than the FW items in the LP store, there's a real problem going on.

I dont really recognise the problems you see, nor do i have a vision of perfect intel and tier pushes for mass cashouts like you have argued before.

People get frustrated at farmers because they run away. I think thats better than the farmers not existing and that plex being empty. Farmers have never had any influence over a single system that i have ever had any interest in.

The tide of the tier levels IS NOT content. Its a content driver. An objective of a purely PVP driven FW would be boring since there would be only way to progress and that would be dominated to whoever recruited the most neckbeards. The tier system is a nice way for us all to make isk. For every farmer that you think has no right to make isk in this computer game, there is another player who also neds isk.

All the isk generated usually finds its way into some form of PVP or other.

The CONTENT in FW is the combat, and regardless of what farmers are doing, combat is not hard to find or engineer on any scale in FW space.

Im not trying to be an obstacle to improving FW. All ive ever said is FW is in a very good place mechanically speaking. And for your ideas in particular, for the most part, i see as damaging or regressive.

I like the accelerated o-plexing idea better. Reason being, I've had situations where I've chased a stabbed d-plexer back and forth for a long time between two plexes, and the automatic timer rollback would not work well in that situation.

They dont care, farmers are to blame for everything, they must be stopped whatever the cost /narrative.

The pendulum swings when the farmers switch sides, by that time the hill has been climbed. The oplexers have done their jobs they broke the opposition, conquered enough sistems to support t3 and they have also donated to push for t3, thats when farmers make the swich. Not before because its not worth it for them, so if anything its the farmers that sail the tide.

Its far more complicated than that. I cant say its wrong since some farmers swap when the 'losing' side hits tier 3.

More accurately, the losing side finally decides to push tier 2. In caldaris case, they had enough systems to do this for months but for some reason decided not to. Once at tier 2, the high ISK/LP value of caldari LP attracts farmers when then pushes occupancy to the point that cal mil can upgrade to tier 3.

During this time, gal mil pokes at caldari homesystems like hasm, okka and aivonen in order to shake cal mils confidence.
Cal mil push vlil to show gal mil that they arnt untouchable.
Overall, cal mil take enaluri, probably the best statement of confidence cal mil has made in a very long time.

While there were probably other important events im not aware of since im not active atm, these are what i see as the main events in the last year in our WZ. Non of them were driven solely by farmers. Farmers were just one aspect of the tide that made these events possible.

Asking Pvpers to plex up 60 back end systems uncontested is unrealistic with current numbers. Farmers making isk and providing fodder, and some surprises to would be hunters, is in no way a detriment to whatever narrative the more serious players want to adopt.

The way to fix farmers, if to recruit more proactive pvpers and populate space which would deny farmers LP while not effecting others ability to support themselves. Short of that, there is no problem with a horde of easily influenced and predicted farmers adding another layer of strategy onto the current meta.

'Fixing farmers' is not really any different to 'Make more space empty'.

Having 2 bullet points is not the same as having 2 good points.

I count no good points.

People dont avoid FW because they lack perfect game delivered intel. This is not delivered in null sec but they dont have population issues. Well, they do have density issues. I suppose that would be fixed if they ALSO had perfect game delivered intel telling them where their enemies are?

People dont avoid FW because their ability to harass evasion farmers is not quite as effective as they would like it to be.