Assembly Hall

First of all, let me bow down to your obvious collective forum warrior superiority. But alas, I do not care about the forums much, so please, let a rambling buffoon speak for a moment.

Also, I have to state right now that I do not partake in Faction Warfare which my suggestion is regarding. (I am a naughty pirate) I am somewhat interested in getting involved in it, but in its current state, it has put me off somewhat.

My idea is somewhat multifaceted, and would be something of a major overhaul from CCP's perspective, but I think there might be some potential. What I am proposing is that the current broken system be changed into a mixture of Exploration (and its subsequent mini-professions) and Incursions, in a manner of speaking.

Before you obvious trolls start bashing, let me continue. I will admit that this is a rough draft, and not a complete proposal, so there may be areas that I've missed, or aren't complete. If you find any, please at least try expand on my post. In other words, if you don't have anything constructive to say, please be quiet ;)

The first, and most obvious part, is that all sites are similar in style to incursions to run. Ranging from the Scouts to the Headquarter class sites in principle. (as in, the number of people required to run them, though not to the same degree) Perhaps these require different systems, or maybe there can have a mixture of classes in the same system. That's open to discussion. The real change is that these sites require scanning down, and these sites also do not have acceleration gates. Completion of these sites yields LP's, and influences the system control, much like in incursions. Once this influence is completely down, a final site is ran, (like the mother ship site) to transfer sovereignty over to the attacking faction. During this time though, the defending faction's influence (aka sov) regenerates a certain amount over time, thus requiring a maintained presence.


So, you what? That didn't make sense?

* Attackers have to continuously probe down sites, and run them to attack the sovereignty. LP gains for completion of sites
* Defenders simply have to do what it says in the tin. Defend their space. (Ie, kill the attackers) LP gains for successfully defending a site (As in, once a site has been started, prevent the attacking forces from completing it within a particular time frame, where it de-spawns. Rewards in the form of LP gains? this would need fine tuning for balance / exploiting purposes)
* Acceleration gates are removed to increase the risk,and to promote pvp
* The longer a certain faction holds sov, the faster sites spawn, (incentive for the attackers), where as the defenders receive different benefits. (I don't want to go down the same penalties as incursions though. Perhaps the current Sov mechanic regarding docking/clones etc is sufficient?)

I had considered that the lack of gates means things like cyno's and capitals appearing in the sites. Initially, I thought this would be a problem, but the more I thought about it, I don't believe it would be too much of a problem, because those capitals would attract attention, and fights would escalate as a result.

I have tried to predict with a mechanic like this, how these risk averse FW LP farmers would behave. To be honest, I can't imagine the behaviour changing much in the grand scheme of things, but at least there is a greater element of risk since you can't stab up, cloak up and AFK the site to farm those LP's.

Another area of concern with this proposal I can see is how these sites scale. For obvious reasons, you want to keep the entry level low, so that there is content for everyone yet scaling the difficulty in the higher tiers to promote co-operation and fleet composition. For the sake of examples, how about the following:

Scouts: Achievable in 2-3 man groups, designed for frigates.
Vanguards: Achievable in groups of 5-6, designed for cruisers,
Assault: Achievable in groups of 10-15. Designed for mixture of cruisers / battlecruisers.
Headquarter: Achievable in groups of 16-20: Designed for a mixture of cruisers, battlecruisers and battleships.

I have given samples here, but the thing thats important here, is that all of these should be achievable with tech 1 ships, and there also needs to be a way to encourage people to fill various roles, though I assume that could be achieved with the use of allowing NPC's EWar capability?

Its still bad, so GL going to FIX it somewhere else....


To the OP, nice Idea +1, one small change, any none FW player will not be able to warp to the site. Sorry pirate...

I have it on good authority that this is not exactly true. While the DEVs are happier with Faction Warfare in its current form they are not happy in general with it (because it's systemically isolated relative to other parts of of the game <-- that's more or less what they have said).

They are done with big changes for right now... but they are making tweaks here or there in the background.