Warfare & Tactics

It has nothing to do with skillpoints and everything to due with available playtime and peoples definition of fun. I have 2 moros/ archon pilots and I'm working on the third. Two of my combat toons could easily fly supers if I choose to spend the isk on the fighter bomber/titan skillbooks and the ship. My problem is that I play Eve at exactly the same time everyday which is after the kids go to bed and after a little quality time with my wife. Given that, I still play between 2-4 hours a day. That leaves me in the situation where there isn't always something going on at the only time I can play Eve. If there is something going on, its fun to jump into a faction BS, T3, or a capital. If there isn't anything going on, I also have fun flying a destroyer or frigate. I have no patience to sit on a titan or wait in station docked up for something to happen, as I see that as wasting my limited playtime and it is just as fun to fight outnumbered in a FW plex in a frig/destroyer.

I'd love to do more of the big epic fights, but the more I understand that playstyle, the more I realize that you have to sacrifice the small gang in order to get it which is why I'm still in FW. If you want to play the game with the big boys, you need to be tethered to jabber 24x7 and ready to log in and deploy in a few minutes.

I think Xolve is making the issue a bit too black and white and pitting Nullsec shiney fleets vs FW cheap fleets.

Andre makes a good point about how FW is conducive to people like him and I who have limited playtimes and don't have the patience to sit on a Titan. I used to play alot, but nowadays I can barely play twice a week due to RL priorities.

But Xolve also makes a good point about how FW has denigrated into mostly destroyers and below. And it has...for the most part. I just commented yesterday on comms how I have yet to do a proteus fleet in lord knows how long despite the fact that many of the skilled players in our corp can fly a proteus or T2 HAC easily. Sadly, the FW mechanics don't encourage us to bring out BCs and higher

I'm still baffled by the defense of FW.

It doesn't encourage pvp, people simply pvp in spite of it.

It doesn't encourage teamwork, people simply gravitate toward social activities.

It doesn't reward risk, people can avoid risk as much as they want.


Does it work as it? Sure, but being satisfied with it is like enjoying a stale sandwich without meat or condiments. Yeah, its edible, but why would you want to eat it or at least complain about what you got that is somehow called a sandwich.

Chatgris suggested this.
Couple of points:

The cost of a clone is not so daunting in low sec with no bubbles.

But in low sec we do tend to lose allot of ships compared to null sec. So its really the cost of the ship/mods that is the bigger issue. The reason I don't fly bigger ships is due to insta lock gate camps. They catch everything but I don't mind losing a frigate or dessie. But when I am throwing away 100ish mill for a non fight its no fun.




I am not sure what you mean here. But the cashout system was sort of like that. I liked the cashout system, but I think I am the only one who liked it.

There are 19,000 characters in faction war. There are only 170 systems. Pvpers don't need more players they need better tools. 7-10 active pvpers online could prevent all the rabbits in a warzone if they had the right intel tools and rollbacks.

You're right. Risk vs Reward is way out of whack. I wonder if this had something to do with CCP Oveur leaving, as he used to be the killdeathwtfpwned Dev and had been silent for years before his eventual quitting.

Honestly though, I still think it comes down to the fact that CCP is unwilling to risk subscriptions. They would rather make a game in the soft center than commit to one side or the other. The game had greatness in it before with lots of bugs and amateur programming, Now its polished, pretty, and soft & cuddly.

I wouldn't recomend anything that would cost subscriptions. If they made fw sov war a pvp mechanic the farmers would just run fw missions. I actually don't mind that people like to do pve in eve. I occassionally did pve in eve. Its occassionally fun to see just how fast your new tech 2 guns can cut through rats. I am not against all pve.

Its just that all the mechanics don't need to be pve. There are already allot of pve mechanics. Sleepers, incursions, belt ratting, missions in high low and null sec, Faction war missions, cosmos missions, epic arc missions etc etc. Having one pvp mechanic that is different than the sov null sec blob mechanic can only expand the subscription base. If they get it right it will expand the player base by a whole lot.

You are conflating the benefits of rollbacks and a notification system. I would love rollbacks and indeed think they would cut down on the number of people flying farmer fits.

However, back to the notification system, if you love to know who's within 3 jumps of you, why don't you use any of the player driven tools that everyone else in eve uses to find their targets, intel channels immediately come to mind, plus the fact that you know, you could just fly those 3 jumps your self.

Again it is not the case that some group of farmers are doing incredible amounts of damage from a place we can't find. It is the case that farmers are plexing systems that the MILITIA DOES NOT CARE ABOUT because they are highly irrelevant to the warzone in its current form. Furthermore those pilots actually interested in real pvp are not going to fly 6 jumps to fight someone that clearly does not want to pvp, aka sitting 30km off the warp in with a cloak, stabs and already aligned.

The sole reason that it makes sense for them to fly these fits/behave in this manner is that there is no disincentive to them warping out. They know that a real pvper is not going to unwind a 28 minute button in some backroad system while the farmer sits in a safe/moves on to another plex. Timer rollbacks will fix this. To argue notifications will help , stipulates that people are struggling to "find" the farmers. This is not the case for me and I hope anyone with a functioning sense of how to find targets/ the bare basics of organization within their militia.

As someone else said, the warzones, particularly Gall/Call are far too large for the playerbase, there is no ability, incentive or desire to cover the entirety of the systems.








I love plex fighting too, as does everyone who isn't here for the farming. Having a system that tells you where the stabbed condor is, flown buy a guy with 0 inclination to fight, is not going to help those that "love to fight over plexes," how can you not step back and see this?

Since you brought it up, I'm the alt of a Gallmill player who I assure you is deeply interested in how far we can put our boot down the Caldari throat in terms of sov war. Since December I have fought everywhere; defending Nenn, attacking Enaluri the first time, attacking Eha, attacking Rakapas and OMS, defending in Ikoskio and Kehjari as caldari tried to interrupt the push for complete control of the WZ, defending Eha, defending Nenn the second time and again pushing on Enaluri and later Innia.

I am enjoying as much small gang pvp as I can afford quite frankly, and plenty of solo too, I on a personal level, and my militia more generally, dont give two ***** about the farmers and have learnt how to fashion the warzone to our liking. Perhaps your assumptions are more grounded in the fact you have only participated in militias that fail pretty hard on the organizational side. Again, your proposed system would have been ignored since december, "come join our fleet of 20 so we can fight this callmill gang of 20 in Ena" versus "dipshit farmer that never hangs around for a fight is plexing in Deven"... like... wow.

Perhap Caldari/Ammar failcascade at stages in the farming cycle, but Gallente didn't, none of our people "moved out of the warzone" despite caldaris resurgence this year.

(Real men fly Gallente hulls. That's why.)

Essentially, it would be a campaign system, where you would get a random 'scenario' and you would push to gain control of X hostile systems without losing y friendly systems. Once one side completed a 'phase', warzone control would reset, and another would start. Payouts would be done by activity in the warzone both through Plexing and PvP vs FW War Targets (both awarding Victory points on some scale I don't feel like putting together because it's not really the point).

In addition, new plex types would ideally be featured with minimum ship requirements (Large Strongholds, Smallest allowable ship, Battlecruiser) as well as requiring all plexes without minimum ship requirements to require the largest shiptype possible in the plex for the time to start ticking down.

The current system gives too much freedom to the individual with no loyalty to a specific faction, this idea would reward those people that have stayed true to a specific faction, would be a little less solo friendly (outside of novice/smalls), and would reduce the impact farmers have on the warzone; if the war in FW is meant to wage on forever, why not have it simulated in this manner as to not have it mimic nullsec favoring the side with the most farmers.