Warfare & Tactics

How come I never thought of this?

out with the farmers, in with the loyalists. anything that convinces the wstab farmers to go away is good in my book. and the idea for LP tiers by one's rank is a good one also. it would definitely give a whole lot more depth to FW, requiring loyalty for long times to get good pay.

the downside to this is when you want to bring people in from outside FW because newcomers will get very low LP. if corps get tiers that can make it easier to recruit people, but they still won't get as much as the high-ranking players do.

still, definitely go for that. we should post about this in F&I and try to get CCP's attention to this topic.

#1 fine, I don't think it is quite as important as you do because if you care about defending said system you should already have at least one person keeping an eye on it. However, I don't think this will cause any problems.

#2 I still think any sort of accelerated rollbacks will cause a massive imbalance towards whichever side can form a flash blob. The winner of whomever wins the plex shouldn't get a time bonus. They should just get a bonus that says "If the other side doesn't bother to come back, I don't have to waste my time here undoing their progress.". This will result in pushing people to cram more people into plexes instead of spreading out. This is bad.

How about every complex have a warp disruption bubble that covers the entire range where the timer moves plus 10-20km?

Would that be a simple method of reducing plex farming if that's the issue? Would seem to force more fights... you could still run but it would be harder.

Most of suitonia's comments read like someone who doesn't really play in FW but has read the rules, and either has an alt in for casual pvp, or knows someone who has an alt in for casual pvp. He talks about pirates hotdropping people if they form BS in large plexes (lul) and recon traps being the reason that we don't see T3D/cruiser brawls in mediums. Anyone who has a reasonable amount of familiarity with the system knows that these are wrong (one of them hilariously so). Recon traps matter for solo/micro gang pvp. No organized FW gang cares about recon traps. The reason you don't see T3ds vs. cruisers is cost pure and simple. High level plex pvp usually involves attrition doctrines because of the frequency of pvp and losses, so constant t3d losses hurt pretty hard.

The biggest problem with FW right now, imo, is citadels. Station lockouts used to be the primary motivator of FW occupancy warfare. Lose the sov, lose your stations. Fatigue set in at some point and occupancy warfare slacked off, but that had more to do with boredom and the sheer effort required to take an FW system. When both sides are motivated, there's nothing else in this game that quite compares to it. The ship losses for Burn Huola back in the day were staggering. Unfortunately, citadels have really put a hit on this type of gameplay for two reasons.

On the one hand, they make defense much harder. The advantages to defending an owned system are that it's much easier to ship in new equipment via JF, and reship times are much quicker, so you can get inside a new plex and set up in your optimal and control the warp in. Citadels erase this advantage for the defenders, sometimes making reship times quicker for the attacker, because of NPC station locations in the target system. They're also so easily defended due to TZ advantages and combat multipliers, that they're virtually impossible to get rid of once they're anchored and fit. And even if they do get blown up, asset safety means the attacking force loses almost nothing and can replace the citadel for less than the price of a fit capital ship.

On the other hand, they make FW sov almost meaningless, since they're so easy to defend and don't require occupancy to set up. Corps have been living in their home systems regardless of occupancy, with station lockouts barely affecting their day to day activities, due to the ease of living out of a citadel. So now you have a situation where occupancy warfare is both much more difficult, and also more irrelevant than before. Obviously, this isn't very conducive to healthy FW content.

There are two ways to fix this situation. Either, you have to change citadels themselves, by making them less functional or less defensible, or you need to change how citadels behave in FW space. Either way you're going to have to put restrictions on them, or give us a different reason to push FW occupancy.

I don't think CCP are going to want to change the base citadel design, so they need to function differently in FW space. Some possible restrictions are no docking rights at any structure for FW chars (or neuts for that matter) if you don't own the system occupancy. Barring that, you could great increase the required vuln times for citadels belonging to both neutrals and hostile FW entities. Maybe a hybrid of the two ideas, perhaps preventing hostile FW citadels completely, and greatly inceasing vuln times on neutral citadels in FW space.

There are other issues with FW, but this one is undoubtedly the most pressing.

Julius I think you may be a bit too hard on Suitonia. And perhaps some views other than the very few who are die hard faction war guys are warranted. I mean many more people have become disenchanted with the faction war sov system and left it rather than stayed to continue fighting for sov in a broken system. So maybe the issues he sees might not be issues for you but would you agree that not many people care about faction war sov beyond just a few systems they base out of?



Do you mean the burn huola from July of 2014? If so a couple of years with out citadels has passed since then. It seems a bit harsh to blame citadels for so much stagnation that happened well before they were even mentioned by ccp.

Also I am not sure lockouts or any real strategic goal was the main reason for burn huola. It may have been for those who announced it but they don't speak for everyone who participated and it wasn't done as though it was a strategic goal. I mean it is one jump from high sec and both sides can base out of high sec despite the navies. It was also an event announced before it took place in order that everyone could purposely base there and fight. It is not strategic to announce your attack before you do it but it does tend to draw people in because they can prepare and bring ships. For me, and likely other pilots, burn huola had allot more to do with content than it did to drive someone out of a station. Even with citadels such an event could happen again. It might happen over the destruction of a citadel.

I think you should give citadels a bit more time before you decide they are nothing but negative. As someone who likes to roam around enemy space I think the number of citadels in caldari gallente space are great. Lots of people left faction war partly due to lockouts. Sure now years later those that didn't mind them or thought they were good is all that is left. But that doesn't mean lockouts are only a big positive. They reduce the number of roams into enemy space and thus cause stagnation in large areas of space.

Bottom line is that faction war needs help and has for years. The whole blobbing one system to try to take an objective is fine but rarely happened and really is null sec lite. Its just blobbing with fewer numbers and cheaper ships.

Faction war needs something to make it not just null sec lite but a different experience.

Also I am not sure I understand your proposal on changing lp payouts would end farming or rabbit plexing.

The key for a better fw in my opinion is fun and iskis.

In null sec sov, everybody understand what is a CTA , they are motivated because their systems are how they farm. And you don't have to plex a system 1 week to be able to switch the owner.

This doens't happens in fw, maybe this motivation could be inserted in factional, adding some kind of rating, combat complex, exploration, industry bonuses, POS production. in one word your rewards gets multiplied if land belongs to you as an alternate way to farm plexing.

So you'd have plexing, exploration, pve, etc.... but multiplied in some way and keeping that meeting point that the actual plex have for pvp.

I remember a few years ago, low sec had a lot of people farming and fighting, CCP balanced the rats and change the cloacking in the complexs ( I understand the reasons ) and low sec suddenly changed, people leave it, farmers and PVPers. The relation between pvpers and his farming is local, no farming no pvp, no pvp I'll move and farm in other place.

Honestly I don't think plex rabbits should be removed if the conquest system is not changed too, basically because is a lot boring for me to plex a system till is "conquerable" or deplexing it with almost no reward. When a system is near to be switched then people get motivated and the fun arise with a lot of organized and not organized combats.

I usually farm oplexing because I have combats there, if not I get a reward. When I get bored of plexing I switch to other activities, pve, exploration, those could be "multiplied too" to support my PVP.

Missions should be balanced is not funny to travel 19 jumps for a bit of repetitive PVE.

Citadels should be left outside of fw mechanics in my opinion, before they show up, it was quite common to setup a POS as base to conquer a "hot system". I think citadels create nice content as you can have an easy base for offensive/defensive PVP, and also add content when the other faction comes to destroy it.


Pirates add content, mercs add content, citadels add content.
More content is good.
Less content is oviously bad.

There is something to be said for changing something that has become stale.

There are many small QOL changes that can be made to make FW space even better, but still within the scope of what it currently is.

However, if they want FW to really thrive they need to deal with the citadel problem or rework FW from the ground up.


Semi-random off the cuff thought. Only let FW corps/alliances anchor citadels in FW space, and use NPCs to enforce it. Said NPCs could even come through and sweep enemy citadels out of systems that get flipped.

It might be a bit extreme, but it is fun to think about :)

Ok let me give you my view on this. Station lockouts lead to people clustering in a few systems or front. Why? Because if you have a small corp that might have 5 guys online at a time you would go to sleep and find your system highly contested when you woke up. So you would have to put alts in to deplex all that damage. And this became an unbearable pain. So eventually all the corps just congregated to a few systems so that they could have round the clock defense and spread out the task of d-plexing.

The problem is when you put everyone in one or just a few hot spots then the game becomes more binary. Do I have the forces to fight here or not? Its usually a simple yes or no when everyone is grouped into a small space. If you do great but then the other side will likely dock up. Even burn huola (which had a many more variables and groups than most fw sov pushes) lasted only about a week before that binary calculation became clear that the Amarr would not win. Sure people tried to keep morale by saying we will win etc and we would occasionally piddle around. But it became pretty clear fairly quickly that we didn’t have the numbers and soon the fleets stopped. That is because it was one system. And when you are talking about one system the math can’t really be manipulated very well.

Now before station lockouts there were patches of minmatar corps spread all over the map. Before inferno I had ships thoughout the zone and the corp I was in had about 4 or 5 mini bases of operation through out fw space. So if one constellation was too hot you could roam up the pipe and see what a different group had to offer. We might get 8 guys in bcs and go roam around up to hror (deep in minmatar space) and we actually got quite a few fights in a variety of areas and with a variety of players. Now with lockouts you fly into enemy space you can easily get those bcs trapped because you can’t dock. It forces players to stay local. That is why so many sections of caldari gallente space are dead right now. That is also why there is stagnation.
Citadels may help this issue. If corps can roam and have multiple bases throughout the warzone then there will be more opportunities to find good fights. Continuing to clump everyone into a small areas will continue this trend to stagnation.

So people who leave faction war can already do that. I have bases of ships thoughout low sec fw space. Its great. If I go roaming I am always just a few jumps from a reship. That was a considerable advantage to being a neutral pvper. That reason to become a neutral may be diminishing due to citadels. And generally things that bring pvpers back to faction war is good for fw.

Another draw to bring the pvpers back to faction war would be if they could see real time intel where plexes were being captured. Especially if they knew that the person capturing the plex knew he had to stay to fight or his time would rollback. It’s not a mystery that allot of neutrals are in faction war space for the pvp. And its not really the faction war missions that bring that pvp. The fw plexes are a big draw. Having this intel would make finding fights much more efficient. Not only could you warp to plexes but when you enter a plex you would know you are notifying the enemy where you are! That would mean pvpers would not feel they are wasting time capturing a plex when they want pvp. They would likely get the pvp they want while winning sov for their faction. And that would be a large draw for allot of pvpers. It would also be allot of fun. That would probably the best thing for eve since the introduction of cruisers.

The cashout system was awful. I'm glad it died, and long may it rest. I personally lead fleets where we had to bash around 20 systems in a single go, just to be able to cash out our LP at the time. And of course, the whole time you were doing such mindnumbingly awful gameplay, there were 100s of faceless alts sitting in Villore, asking if we were done yet, who I of course had never seen in fleets or out plexing any system of consequence. Seriously, it was an awful iteration and only someone who didn't have to do the heavy lifting of organizing cash outs could have any sort of fondness for it.

I get that you want FW to return to some casual PVP paradise where you can roam around and fight 8 guys in one area and move around if you get blobbed, but ask yourself this: if the old mechanics were so good before lock outs and LP for plexes, why the hell was FW almost completely dead?

EVE is really a crap game mechanically. It takes too long to get into the action, losing is too costly, there's a tremendous amount of anti-social behavior in the community, so where's the draw? The draw is in the challenge of the game, where combat has meaning and people will put up with that to accomplish something meaningful, that they couldn't do just by themselves. Thousands of EVE players flock to null sec to be a part of the game out there, despite the fact that the mechanics are nearly universally condemned as terrible. If your gameplay isn't meaningful and challenging, then you're just left with a game with **** mechanics, played by a bunch of sociopaths who take out their inability to talk to the opposite sex on poor newbies dipping their toes into low sec.

something you guys should know about CCP: they are only listening to player feedback if they are actually working on something related to that feedback or if that thing is a game breaking issue.

you can't break the game with FW because LP shops are actually a isk sink, so trying to convince CCP that plexing is broken is one thing, the much harder step is to convince them that it is important enough that they actually schedule time to work on FW again.

and believe me we tried for 5+ years to push for timer rollbacks (or similar mechanics, although rollbacks are basically the least complex and most direct fix).


So far, all plexing related changes were really just quick and dirty fixes and did not address the underlying issue, only mitigated it.
farmers speed tanked the rats -> ccp added the requirement to kill them
farmers killed the rat then sat there with an empty ship with an alt -> ccp let the rats respawn
farmers used stabs -> ccp increased the tank on the npcs so that damage mods were required to kill them (less slots for stabs - at least that was the goal lol)
farmers cloaked in plexes as soon something was on dscan -> ccp gave the beacon a 30k volume to disable cloaks.


And none of the changes addressed the underlying issue that running away or hiding is LP efficient (some were even counter productive, e.g the cloak was the most expensive part of a farming ship and trapping a farmer with you on grid while you deplexed was kinda funny). Stabs, cloaks, unfit ships are not required to run away, they are just convenience. Timer rollbacks however address the issue directly and make running away LP inefficient. Suddenly stabs, cloaks and unfit ships wouldn't make sense anymore unless all you really want is to protect your ship (which is completely fine since you don't contest a system by doing that).


so good luck with that - my war is over ;) but i am willing rejoin FW if ccp changes their mind and finally decides to update it.


fake edit: btw there are like a million different variations of the "timer rollback" idea, it can be anything from donating lp at the beacon to reset the timer to slowly backwards ticking timers as soon you leave the influence of the beacon.