EVE General Discussion

*UPDATE* We did it!! The Faction Warfare expansion is HERE. Inferno is out May 22 - and with it a whole host of feature changes, upgrades, rewards, and consequences. Welcome to the new war - it won't be easy, but I have faith in the community. There's a bloodthirsty lot of you out there who find every possible way to make the most of the new system!

Dev Blog: Inferno Changes for Faction Warfare

What's next for Faction Warfare?

CCP has made a public commitment to iterating on Faction Warfare all the way through into Winter Expansion. If there's something you hate, and it ends up *actually* breaking the feature in an un-fun way, chances are we can get it fixed, along with adding a lot more cool features as well.

Top Trending Faction Warfare Quick Fixes - "the little stuff"

1.) Plexes only spawn after downtime. This means plexing is an activity only for one timezone, the rest of the militia rarely participates due to lack of spawns. *UPDATE* Fix completed as per Crucible patch notes. GREAT JOB, CCP!! FW community - be sure to share your appreciation....

2.) Pirate frigates widely considered too powerful to be included in a plex designed for tech 1 frigates and destroyers. Faction Frigates make sense for Faction Warfare, but if interceptors are banned than Dramiels and Daredevils should be as well.

3.) Repping a militia member with low security status currently kills faction standing. This unduly penalizes logistics pilots while working in a fleet regardless of whether a crime is being committed. *FIXED!! As of Crucible patch 1.1*

4.) Repping a friendly militia member who is a victim of aggression results in GCC if friendly pilot is low security status. This causes confusion in fleets, as pilots attempting to save their friends end up dying to gate fire even when no crime is committed. *CCP has stated they are working on a fix for this, due out Soon TM*

5.) Lack of highly visible alert or intel system for when territory is threatened. If Faction Warfare is meant to deliver pickup and play PvP, an alert system (Captain's Quarters TV screen?) would get fights much faster than relying on aimless wandering patrols. Even just adding alerts in real time in the militia office tab (like POS fuel notifications in your mail, or broadcast history in fleets) would be great and increase frequency of PvP fights. *FIXED!! Brand new Faction Warfare UI coming in Inferno

Top Trending Major Underlying Issues "The Big Stuff"

1.) Plexing is not rewarding. Victory points are arbitrary and meaningless, and do not serve as proper motivation to encourage regular activity. *FIXED!! Plexing payouts coming in Inferno

2.) NPC presence in plexes needs adjustment. EWAR and general difficulty is imbalanced between the races. AI is poor, easily fooled by speedtankers. Also, NPC presence isn't required to complete plex, making fighting them rather pointless. NPC's should have a purpose - either they must be killed to cap the plex, or simply eliminate the PvE aspect of plexing entirely. *PENDING - NPC balancing likely coming in post - Inferno release


3.) Faction Warfare missions easily farmable in a Stealth Bomber. Result is missions that encourage PvP as intended (by nature of being on overview), but do not encourage diversity of ship types or cooperative gangs to complete. “PvP” that surrounds current mission system is primarily limited to interceptors chasing bombers. NERFED!! Station Lockouts coming with Inferno will drastically reduce mission farming for the losing faction, forcing them to PvP in order to access agents again

4.) Imbalanced EWAR fielded by mission NPC's means some missions are easier to run than others, resulting in imbalanced market value for faction items and causes certain militias to be flooded with mission farming alts. *CHANGES COMING!! Inferno brings a scalable LP store depending on Victory Conditions


5.) Sovereignty is more or less meaningless. The lack of consequences for owning a system means little motivation to go out and cap plexes. *FIXED!! Rewards and consequences galore coming in Inferno

On the topic of Alliances, why not also allow Militia and non-Militia corps to enter into Alliances with one another? Creating a Military-Industrial Complex of a sort.

Another thought that comes to mind is allowing individual capsuleers to join the Militia without the participation of their corporation. They would in effect be similar to National Guardsmen for their Militia. I would be willing to bet that FW would get an influx of players if this were to be allowed.

Both great suggestions. However you slice it, there are many ways to allow more player participation that won't interfere with the spirit of FW. I agree - the militia is indeed about citizen-soldiers. Those that are willing to take up arms for their race REGARDLESS of what their day job is. Allowing individuals, Alliances, to participate, or to expand the ability of the Republic itself to be run AS a player Alliance (cutting the strings so to speak) all address one of the issues that limits Faction Warfare participation.

If FW is all about pickup and play PvP, that relies on numbers. There are a number of artificial boundaries like this that arbitrarily shut out interested players, and the scene is established enough now to handle broader participation levels safely. FW pilots can fly anything anyone else can, and the veterans know how to defend themselves and lead others in doing the same.

I agree with everything you said, except for this:



FW doesn't need to be made into a blobfest like null sec. Getting into a fleet and pressing F1 is the last thing I want via massive blobs. That's exaclty how you learn to NOT PvP effectively. Getting frigates blown up is. How do you learn about manually piloting, spatial awareness, and various other fundamental PvP tricks if you're just part of some massive blob. How boring and useless.

Leave alliances out in null where they belong.

Bah, the board ate my reply. I'll try this again:


Yikes. That would draw sov alliances away from endgame while negating the corps that just want to be in FW.

They need to have a non-sov alliance classification so FW can join forces and be more effective. Maybe limit the number of corps in one and give it a new name like "conglomerates".


I like what you put below that, especially the blinking alarm. However, to improve the PvP in plexing, you need to make the PvE more involved. It should require a gang or higher to take one, and they should resemble the new incursion system. The system should also be set up so a corp can plan on bringing a fleet of 10-20 and taking a system in a reasonable amount of time. Right now, taking a system is so out of our control, few bother.

With a system like that, you would increase the amount of gangs and fleets active throughout the day. As anyone in FW will tell you, nothing gets a fleet up faster than a war target fleet roaming around. If you knew exactly where one was and have a time limit to respond, it would increase the urgency to fight them.

And make the bunker a functional space fort, not a space box.

There's other tweaks I would like. An occupancy meter and LP store consequences for controlling systems come to mind. But I'll stop there for brevity's sake.

For many of us, faction warfare IS the endgame. The old mentality of high, low, and nullsec as being beginner, intermediate, advanced PvP needs to be thrown out the window. While that may have been the original intention, it doesn't reflect the norm nowadays.

For many players, if you're wanting to get a start in PvP, an alliance is actually a better choice. Alliances have dedicated educational teams, classes, and very large fleets with easily defined, easily instructed roles. They also have the benefit of mandatory call-to-arms, and concrete objectives to point hungry noobs at.

In Faction Warfare, every man needs to be able to fight for himself, and know how to find their own fights as well. As it stands right now, jumping in a ship and roaming about, throwing an "x" into militia chat, is a quick way to get yourself really bored, or really killed. The faction warfare corps are self-contained, competitive entities, who fight for killboard glory but aren't truly networked like an Alliance, as there is zero economic incentive to work together and get over the trust issue. Faction sovereignty changes and their consequences could fix that.

A good faction warfare pilot needs to be skilled in small gang warfare, which gets pretty cutthroat and relies on a certain experience and skillpoint level for everyone in the gang. The actions of one pilot make or break the team.

Lack of plexing motivation means gangs are on their own for finding each other - this also bores the hell out of new players. Newbies want to be told want to do, not taught how to go find fights for themselves (which is what the militias do now, just like pirate corps do)

All these things are why I continue to reject the notion that FW is "gateway PvP" for players to dabble with on their way to "endgame" nullsec PvP. While that was the original intention, the reality couldn't be further from the truth. CCP should heavily consider this point when further developing FW, in my opinion.

A small fix which would greatly affect small gang pvp in FW would be to even out plex spawns over the course of the day. As it stands, 90% of plexing is done and finished within an hour or so of the server coming online. If these were instead to spawn constantly during the course of the day, they would create a large supply of arenas for small gang warfare to take place in.

Hans nice post.

I think Hirana's idea that if alliances want to join they can't also hold sov is a good one.

As far as station guns firing I think this should only be for the militia specific stations. That is 24th imperial crusade stations will fire on minmatar but not carthum conglomorate. That way faction war militias can base out of a station without so many station games but the winning side doesn't get too strong. There was a time when caldari had all the systems. Gallente had few pilots in fw. If they also had the all the station guns hitting them that would have been pretty bad.

I'm not sure what can be done with supercaps but I don't really do allot of the larger fleet stuff so I can't really speak to that. They can't enter plexes so I really don't care how many there are.

Here is a list of 22 ideas that were discussed regarding faction war plexing and a short pro and con of each:

http://eve-search.com/thread/1564233

I think some of those ideas would be pretty nice. Including the one about sensor strength in the plexes getting a large boost for that faction when inside their plex. So if I am in a minmatar plex with a minmatar ship I would be almost impossible to jam.

Distribute plex spawns throughout the day.
Have the same NPC spawn for every factions plexes - easy fix and balances them out remove ECM from NPC, this is just silly.
Increase the number of different levels of plexes. Faction ships are overpowered against T1 ships, and the newer players no longer plex as they are insta popped by older players in Drams, Daredevils, Cynabals, Vigilants that also have a neutral booster in system.

eg:
T1 Frigate Minor plex
Minor plex as existing
T1 Cruiser Plex
Medium as existing
T1 Major plex
Major as existing

Make it a requirement that no NPC are on grid for the plex counter to continue, this will stop speed tankers.

I like the station gun idea, hopefully this will not include gate guns, although I suspect it might be hard to reprogram them as different guns. I wouldn't go for any further advantages, as this will only lead to people blobbing up. It still needs to be viable for solo pilots to go out and roam happily.

Cut the LP for missions, they pay out way too much and most militia members are now there for the missions only.
Increase LP for kills.

Fix faction standing loss, so Logi alts can also be in the militia without having to worry about standings

Do I need to say supercaps?

Add some militia bling to the LOL shop for the RP guys - maybe they can plex for Aurum?

Look at the distribution of space, the choke points between systems and access to high sec. Change as necessary to encourage free flowing movement.

The poor Amarr are bottled up in just a few systems bordering high sec and can't leave without a huge blob. Add some gates so they can experience low sec.

The Minmatar have to deal with whoever the campers of the week are in Amamake. Sadly, the use of neutral alts in all surrounding systems, means the gate campers run as soon as a fleet moves towards them - leaving them uncounterable.
Add more high sec gates so our noobs don't get popped. Couple in Auga, couple in Dal, couple in Arzad will almost match the Amarr access to high sec.

Whatever you decide to do, ask for feedback afterwards, and then continue to make improvements - not after another 18 months please.
You can expect a flood of people coming back to see if FW is fun again, don't fail to keep it moving forward again.

Also, fix FW and I will redo my portrait so you don't have to keep looking at my shaven testicle.

Great post but I can't possibly agree with everything.



Do this in the missions! Make all missions like the amarr missions where the rats have painters and missiles so you can't solo them in a sb.


Screw npcs in plexes do away with them, or at least make it so we don't have to fit a pve tank. With a notification system we can have players fighting for plexes instead of npcs. But if you can't stand scrapping the npcs all togehter here is an idea that I think would work:

1) every 3-6 minutes an alarm will spawn. How often depends on the size of the plex. I think a minor plex would have this thing spawn at 3 minutes and 6 minutes. That alarm will be able to tank different amounts of damage but not do any damage. An alarm in a minor plex would tank say 50 dps. An alarm in a medium plex would tank 120 dps, major closed plex 300 dps and major open 500 dps.

2) If you kill that alarm in under 90 seconds, or there is a player ship friendly to the faction in the plex, no npcs will come. If you don't kill it and you are against that faction then npcs will spawn. The rats in the larger plexes will be fit with lots of target painters and missiles so smaller ships can't speed tank them.






Does this explain why hirana wants them to postpone fixing fw?