It is a time of revolution in New Eden. CCP have made more significant changes in the past couple of months than they have in the past few years. They are debating about new Citadel structures, further changes to sovereignty mechanics, improving probing and the list goes on. Players have mixed feelings about this, some claim its “the death of the game”, others that it’s “a golden age”, only few stay neutral.
On this revolutionary wave a player posted an open letter about Faction Warfare on the reddit EVE subsection.
F(arm)W(elfare)
The popular opinion on FW is that it is nothing more than elaborate mining, complexes are full of quadra-stabbed Frigates, everyone is fight averse and the only pvp going on are between dedicated role-players, loyalist corporations and local pirates.
Frequent advice that a newbie interested in solo and/or small gang PVP receives is to move to the FW regions. Then instead of joining one of the militia, become a pirate, since its provides much better fights.
Is there any truth in that? Well, a militia member thought these opinions to be at least partially true since he had an urge to share with others, mainly CCP and the CSM, his opinion and ideas about the future of Faction Warfare.
Nikolai Agnon
Nikolai Agnon is a member of Dirt’n’Glitter, which is an Amarr Millitia corporation. Despite animosity between militiant organizations, his thoughts on FW received positive feedback from players of every faction.
His main concerns are that being a part of Millitia puts people at a disadvantage if their goal is to do low-sec pvp in a Militia zone. Another good point he raises is an effect he called “pendulum”. It’s a phenomenon that happens when one side of a war-zone dominates the other, solely because of farmers and opportunists switching sides for better income (since LP value of former winning faction starts inflating). He also suggests better CREST and API tools, so people may better monitor their FW efforts.
Here is the full open letter:
Hey-o,
“FW and PVE” discussion happens today at the CSM panel, and I’m worried, to say the least, about what that title implies for the upcoming “changes to FW” that have been rumored about lately. CCP will be in congress with CSM today about my favorite part of EVE, one that does not necessarily attract the most outspoken of communities, but nevertheless contains one of the largest content drivers in the game – one that is several years old and in dire need of attention.
A brief intro about me, because I don’t post on reddit too terribly much and I want you to understand where I come from, since despite my corp ticker, I’m usually one of the less vocal members in my corp:
I’ve played EVE for almost two years now, and I’ve risen to become a director or CEO of every player corp I’ve been a part of (all 3 of them on my main, heh). I have experience in hisec (mostly industry and missions; have yet to try incursions), wormholes (both in lifestyle and as mere daytrips), sov-nullsec (CFC during Dominion; TEST briefly at the start of Aegis), and, mostly, lowsec (piracy and FW). More than half of my time in this game has been in FW as part of Dirt ‘n’ Glitter, and before that, I was an active director of Scope Works. I joined DNG during the start of Burn Huola last year, when Amarr had a mere handful of systems, and since then, the Amarr-Minmatar warzone is coming to the completion of an entire ‘pendulum cycle’. At a particularly low point in content availability, I led DNG to check out Aegissov with TEST alliance, and upon returning to FW, started up our current alliance Local is Primary. I love FW, I want it to thrive, and I love the many successes it’s achieved thus far. Unfortunately, the FW system also has a great number of flaws, and for the sake of wanting to see my corp/alliance/militia’s members continue to have fun for months and years to come (and the same for all militias, not just Amarr), it’s important to me that CCP hears from those of us who are not and have not been accurately represented in CSM but who make up much of the small-gang content present in EVE. There is plenty of change happening in nullsec, but FW is receiving almost no mention at all in these discussions. I don’t want FW to be left by the wayside and merely patched with band-aids, like I’m worried could happen today.
A balance pass of the tier system
Personally, I’d call for its removal entirely, but at least until ihub upgrades start becoming individually worthwhile, basing the entire balance of the warzone on such an arbitrary mechanic is comically misrepresentative of militia efforts. The current system heavily penalizes the losing militia until the winning side has oversaturated its own LP value. This ‘pendulum’ makes the PVE component entirely seasonal: in the Amarr/Minmatar warzone, each side has approximately 3-4 months of the year to farm their hearts out, while the other 8-9 months it’s entirely infeasible because either LP is oversaturated or payouts are revoltingly penalized. I imagine the Cal/Gal warzone is even worse.
Corp Incentives
LP payouts are great for newer players, but outside of the few months each year for prime farming time, most veterans pay for their PVP habits through other means. This has several implications, but when players “graduate” from the low-SP, low-ISK, new-to-pvp culture, they usually just become pirates, in which case they get to shoot twice as many people. There are effectively zero (0!) corp benefits for FW, mechanically. Instead, we get limited access to hisec, can’t dock in enemy controlled systems, and when FW corps/alliances are active participants in a war, they have fewer resources (time, isk, warm bodies) to spare towards fighting against pirate corps. There should be rewards, more than just monetary, for corps to be active in FW. The empires should be rewarding their most successful corps and alliances by providing strategic benefits. A few examples:
Militia-exclusive bonuses for upgraded ihubs (bonuses don’t apply for neutrals)
Additional defense timers and/or smaller vulnerability windows for upcoming structures
FW-oriented corp income. LP taxing, for instance: add an LP wallet to corps, retrievable by members with wallet roles
Reduced-cost and/or free ship repairs, based on ihub upgrades
Reduction in structure fuel costs for ihub upgrades
FW-specific structures, such as an intel structure that sends in-game notifications to players/corps/alliances when the enemy militia captures a plex in the system (‘home’ systems, etc)
Strategic benefits for geographic control
One of the big goals with Aegis-sov is geographic significance. Constellation layout and tactics play a big part in defending your sov, with chokepoints being valuable, and buffer systems being important safeguards for ratters, miners, etc. Nullsec alliances also have system indexes based on activity. Oddly enough, nullsec entities are the only real force that have such geographic value assigned to which systems they control. FW, on the other hand, is comparable to a “real-world” war. I envision militia leaders in smoky rooms looking at war maps and discussing which systems are better to attack, and how come. Right now, locational value is nothing other than docking access. Given how stretched out the conflict is in FW compared to null, though, it’s the perfect environment for assigning value to owning many systems in constellations and even regions, in the way of deplex timers:
Systems would have control indexes similar to in nullsec, but instead of having shorter vuln windows based on ownership length and pve content, plexes would have shorter deplex timers based on system ihub level, and how many systems the respective empire has in the constellation and region.
For owning an entire region and having a fully upgraded ihub, deplexing in that system might have up to a 50% reduction in deplex timer length, making homedef easier
Organizing an attack against a cluster of systems would involve strategic thinking, because as ihubs are destabilized and systems are claimed, it becomes harder for the defenders
Better API / CREST tools
Just like kills are public via CREST, so should plex captures. When a player of any militia captures a plex, the following information should be publicly available:
System = Asghed
LP awarded = 5,000
Size = Novice
VP awarded: 20 (or -20 for deplexing)
Time = 2015.09.17 05:40:00
Characters = Nikolai Agnon, Edeity, Odysseus Olacar
Corporations = Dirt ‘n’ Glitter, Holy Amarrian Battlemonk, Calibrated Chaos
Alliances = Local Is Primary, Habitual Chaos
Militia = Amarr Empire
I personally have written a program that tallies my corp’s FW activity – our members love it, because they can track how many plexes they capture and in what systems. Unfortunately, it’s awfully round-about in how it has to be implemented. I won’t discuss my program’s specifics here*, but I want timerboards and live-feed maps available for the FW warzones just like what exists for sov. Naturally, it’ll be up to players to build such programs, but we need better API and/or CREST tools to work with.
I will probably post the code and an explanation thereof in the near future. In an ideal world, everything my program does now should be public for everyone involved in militia efforts.
I want lowsec booming, I want FW to reach a golden age, I want all the militias to thrive. Even the Minmatar and Gallente, in-game grievances aside. Lowsec is where non-blobfest PVP happens, and FW makes it happen every single day. It’d be nice to get some love, though. FW is not just pve. It’s a content magnet, and it needs help. Please give us some attention, CCP.
If you want to show support for his ideas and case, here is the original post!
