Warfare & Tactics

from http://poeticstanziel.blogspot.ca/2012/10/faction-warfare-same-as-it-ever-was.html

First of all, I welcome the changes to faction warfare that decrease the value of loyalty points. I also welcome the changes to faction warfare that make it more difficult to farm loyalty points. I welcome the changes that make it easier to attack and blow up loyalty point farmers.

But I'm not going to talk about that. We know about those changes. And there are no people that I know of that don't feel those are good changes to the system.

tl;dr See last paragraph.

What I want to discuss is the number massaging that's happening. And will likely continue to happen, because CCP keeps telling us, these numbers can be adjusted. The numbers that define loyalty point payouts for the winners and losers, for offensives and defensives, the winners and losers. These are the numbers that have come to define faction warfare.

Adjusted to what end though? Basically, to dictate how faction warfare is played. Which boils down to being a **** you to emergent gameplay. CCP doesn't want us to decide our own play, CCP wants their numbers to define how we play, and they'll keep shifting the numbers about until we do start playing according to the CCP/CSM vision. Except those numbers never seem to have the outcome they desire.

I've played on both sides of the fence. I've been on the winners side with the Minmatar. I am currently on the losers side with the Amarr. With the Minmatar, I had a mindset that warzone control was important. I engaged in offensively plexing systems, defending systems, making sure that our advantage was held. It was easy to motivate that mindset, because the reward for doing so was exceptionally high. When Inferno was released, it was easy for the Minmatar to fight for what they held because there was no hill to climb. They started with total dominance, they've maintained total dominance since (minus a short period, when Nulli Secunda took a vacation from nullsec, but the army of farming alts that the Minmatar had at their disposal was able to quickly reverse that.)

The new system of numbers, being released with Retribution, I've come to believe that these numbers will not encourage the losing side to do anything but deny their enemies loyalty points. It will not eliminate their disinterest in warzone mechanics. The system is once again skewed toward the winners, the hill to climb for a loser still too steep. The malaise towards warzone control is the likely to remain the norm among the losing side, rather than an eagerness to increase warzone control.

Same as it ever was. The numbers encourage the winning side to care. The losing side sinks into a give no fucks attitude towards the system.

If the Minmatar bring an Amarr system to vulnerable, their ability to acquire loyalty points [LP] ceases in that system. Why would the Amarr defensive plex for some meager amount of LP, giving the Minmatar the opportunity to offensive plex for an obscene amount of LP? If the Minmatar decide to flip the system, there is no loyalty point gain in defensive plexing, since they own the system outright. So the Amarr would be better off not offensive plexing for some meager amount of LP, then allowing the Minmatar to defensive plex for some half-decent amount of LP.

So the status quo that is likely to develop over time is that the losing side will deny loyalty points to the winning side. The winning side will likely move into missioning for their mad income if this denial strategy by the losing side occurs (missioning is far more lucrative than plexing systems, anyhow.) The PvP that the new numbers were meant to encourage, actually decreases.

I think I'm moving towards a system that penalizes and rewards the losing and winning sides as little as possible. A system that lets the players define how they play. An exceptionally simple system with no numbers to massage. Static loyalty point rewards for plexing, a number that is not affected by offensive or defensive plexing, a number that is not affected by warzone control. A flat rate for running a plex to completion. This will allow the players to motivate themselves on why they fight, why they take over systems, why they give them up. Emergent gameplay. This reverts back to faction warfare pre-Inferno, but allows its players to earn a reasonable income while taking part in this area of the game.

Warzone control can still come into play, but only in terms of offering small rewards to the winning side. Perhaps additional industry slots, or slightly decreased taxes and brokerage fees on systems controlled. Some of this is already part of the system, but some further small advantages can be given. Though no rewards that are back-breaking to the losing side.

Let the players supply their own motivations for fighting, for plexing, for trying to win the warzone. Using numbers to artificially create these motivations are never going to work as expected. Revert to a static system of loyalty point rewards.

Pretty much, I still don't care about system occupancy

Time will tell.

But I've decided that I don't particularly enjoy having a bunch of numbers and equations telling me I should start caring about X in faction warfare, or that I should now be doing Y, because the numbers are advantageous at the moment.

So you are saying currently with an incentive to hold territory you have no interest in warzone control. So we should get rid of the incentive of holding space, and that will make you interested in warzone control? That doesn't make sense.

Players do supply their own motivations for fighting. If they don't feel the structure of FW adequately aligns with their goals, they won't do FW.

Fweddit is currently investigating new ways to get the sorts of gameplay we want. And the sorts of gameplay we want are interesting fights.

A few days ago, we had one of the best fights we've ever had in the last few months (for some, the last year), and it had nothing at all to do with faction warfare.

Whereas, we'll definitely stay with faction warfare, because the opportunity for the type of fighting we like is greater than in any other region of space, we do get tired of fighting the same 30 people flying the same 30 SFIs, over and over and over again.

The majority of us don't give a poop about warzone control. And I think it has mainly to do with the amount of PvE effort in affecting the warzone. It is a very long hill to climb. And that is by design. And the PvE is, frankly, really boring. And I don't log in to do a bunch of boring stuff in over and over again.

So Fweddit is looking at creating other opportunities for fights, that are likely going to be more piratey in nature. But that's okay. The new pirates among us (myself, for instance) are learning that a -5 security status isn't all that bad. And it gives more avenues to good fights than just being a positive secstatus faction warfarer.

if we could take the enemies systems, then we could hurt their ability to fund their war effort, and apply some real strategy. we didnt ask for some ridiculous tier system, we didnt ask for this secondary income stream that invited 10,000 farmers to descend on FW. we wanted to do as you said, define our own content.

There are resources in low sec. Moons, mins, rats, wormholes, ore, what have you.

We could have played our own game.We wanted to.

CCP would NOT let us. We begged for years to add this mechanic to FW. when the finally did, it was lost in a host of garbage that was foisted upon us in a manner that fundamentally changed the nature of FW, which we didnt really want, and removed the consequences of losing systems, even as they finally gave us the means to take them.

They should have left it alone, and simply given us the ability to hold systems by preventing our enemy from docking. Thats all we were asking for.

We then would have had MORE pvp as the militias were FORCED to defend their mission hubs, as losing them would have had REAL consequences. They gave us an ISK sink faucet , and just as they finally unscrew it, morons from the CSM start blathering about taking away the ability to lock out opposing militia.

I really wish CCP had found some other guinea pigs to experiment with their sov light ideas on instead of the long suffering core of FW militia pilots.

I agree with you completely, they try and force us to play how they want us to play and more and more old timers move on, they dont care about keeping them, as long as they can dumb things down so they can keep drawing noobs in so they can keep turning a profit.

I miss what this game was when I started playing in 2007, when it at least FELT like you could determine your own fate in this game....

the point is CCP didnt have to boost the winning side, they didnt have to punish the losing side. They could have left it in the hands of the players, which is what they didnt want to do.

Instead of letting us have the ability to take systems and shut down our opponents ISK faucet, they made sure they instituted another one just in case we actually did take control of our own game play.

They have instituted mechanics so they can perpetually tweak it and keep us fighting while maintaining what balance they think we should have . They have taken the meaning out of FW, I understand the OPs point.

Dont get me wrong, I'm glad the last patch came out and they shut down the isk faucet, and hopefully the farmers will leave, but they should definitely leave in the mechanics for locking enemy militias out of stations and systems controlled by the opposing militia.As systems now become harder to flip, and more than lkely the front stabaslizes to an extent in a coupel of months, people will turn to alternatives to make isk, like back to running FW missions, back to penetrating enemy lowsec, and generating actionable intel, and maybe the abilty to take those systems where they draw there missiosn from will have some impact, like we wanted it to have in the first place, and we can define how FW moves forward, as opposed to the csm and CCCP

FW has gameplay structures intended to generate fights. If it's not working as intended, then there's vanilla lowsec, npc null, sov null, wh, and hell even decshield space herpes in highsec to fight over. If you want more unstructured fights then there are already plenty of places to look. CCP doing exactly what you suggest may very well lead to everyone but the diehards leaving for greener pastures so that you still only end up fighting the same 20 guys over and over. That too would be "emergent gameplay" (simple gameplay changes leading to player exodus leading to complex ripple effects in whatever field they end up) but it still wouldn't be any more fun for FW goodfight seekers that things are currently.

And you may ask yourself, how did I get here?

Easy. Combination of inept & biased CSM , CCP's general lack of clue of about history of FW and motivations of your average Joe Gamer.