The Dantelion Plan - The Epic of Factional Warfare
So, after my foray into High-Sec, I now switch my focus back to my first love: Factional Warfare.
As I have explained in previous articles, Factional Warfare (Faction Warfare or FW, from there on) is what saved me from boredom, or even worse, when I started the game.
With the perspective I have now, I realize that what it did is give me a taste of EVE even though I was low on skills, was far from space-rich, and was low on connections.
I realize now that I could have found that in any of the spaces of EVE (with the notable exception of High-Sec). Null-Sec could have given me a taste of large-scale organization, logistics, and war. W-space would have given me a taste of invasions from War targets and Contest of Sites/Complexes.
But what Faction Warfare did so well is make all of those accessible to me nearly on Day 1.
So I spent several years in the zone, capping plexes, participating in sieges, and killing (and mostly being killed) war targets.
And it was a blast, FW gave me a taste of the potential of EVE and what can be accomplished in it. The battles that can be done, the reasons they can be done for, the myriads of ways they can be done (yes, that includes Propaganda), all things that EVE gets done in a manner that is truly unique in the Gaming market right now.
However, despite all those great things, and the years of amazement and entertainment Faction Warfare provided me, Faction Warfare is now a decrepit zone that is finally seeing the results of years of both neglect and abuse in the form of an activity that is a shell of its former self.
Faction Warfare is now an Empire that fell.
Following those changes, Null-Sec was in turmoil for several months, the new menace of the Trollceptor, https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/3hdlqw/is_there_legitimately_any_downside_to_banning/, https://forums-archive.eveonline.com/topic/411402/, wrecked the zone and disheartened several elements in it. This led to a migration of Null-Sec players either out of the zone, or out of the game!
One of the direct results of that migration was an increase in players in Faction Warfare.
At this time in the history of the game, Null-Sec was considered the proper End-Game of the game, it was the end-and-be-all, where the money was and where the competition was, the King's Game.
It failing in such a fashion led to several people looking for a zone as lucrative and engaging as it. Several chose Wormholes, but a significant amount of them chose Faction Warfare.
Faction Warfare at that time was known for the idea that you could plex your account by just farming plexes, that and FW Missions were slowly being recognized as the cash-cow they are.
The monetary argument convinced many people to give the zone a try.
And this is how the Empire began its ascent.
So as the numbers soared, so did the activity.
EVE in general was in the middle of an intense Dev involvement likely pushed by the most-beloved CCP Seagull. Shorter release patches were encouraged, important changes were done and discussed, and grandiose presentations presented a picture, alongside the Alliance Tournament introducing E-SPOORTTSSSS in EVE to a unknowing audience on Twitch, of an EVE that was getting more vibrant.
Faction Warfare was in the perfect place to benefit from those two forces, the migration from Null-Sec, and the renewed vigor of the game.
Thus once again, as in many times in its history, plexes were capped, farmers farmed, missions were blitzed,
But more importantly, systems were being sieged:
https://www.factionwarfare.com/oped-the-fall-of-tama-and-the-future-of-operation-meatshield/
Hotspots appeared all along this period. Whether it was Tama, Okkamon, Asakai, Nisuwa, or Heydelies, zones with entrenched occupants would be attacked by drivens enemies.
Those were the flaring moments in that period. Thousands upon Thousands of ships destroyed in the matters of days, hundreds of pilots involved, entities from all spaces meddling in, both in kills and influence, from the massive Null blocs to even Wormholers sometimes.
Those were the moments FW could proclaim proudly that it mattered, that its affairs were as important, even more important, than the ones of even Null-Sec. That we created more battles and strife than even Null-Sec could achieve.
Faction Warfare could boast that it had the most explosions in the entire game.
The activity swelled, the pilots increased, the kills mounted up, and thus more and more people had the time to interact with the system and understand it.
The more people moved the systems, the more its cracks widened, and the more its flaws were revealed.
Things that were contained through sheer habit started to rattle the newcomers who unlike those who were in the system before the soar were used to their effects and took them as granted, as part of what it was to live in the Warzone.
The first and most influential part of those cracks were the Farmers.
Farmers are the shadow aspect of Faction Warfare, the one very few talk about when introducing and discussing the system with others but the one that influences the most the events people get to see happening in FW space.
A Farmer is a pilot that run plexes and whose goal is to generate the maximum amount of ISKs with the least amount of effort. As such, the farmer will avoid any confrontation, as a ship lost is a net loss. They will stick to defensive plexing, as in capping plexes in friendly systems, as those can be run without NPC interference, but if they go after enemy plexes (which give better LPs), they run drone ships to be able to kill the plex NPC while AFK. They will have scram/point-preventing modules such as Warp Core Stabilizers, better known as WCS (or at least, they used to), or ECM to break targeting for example.
Farmers are so influential because what they do is push the contested index of a system while they accumulate LPs. They are the actors that generate the most amount of contest index and thus they dictate, slowly but surely, the systems that will eventually get captured.
This gets further exacerbated by the core incentive of the FW war, The Tiers system.
To put it simply, for those who don't know, the tiers reflect how much systems are controlled by a side. The more systems you control, the greater your tier will eventually get. And with Tiers the reward from plexes increases.
Some of you will have realized what's going on here.
As the dominant faction has more and more tiers, they will have more and more Farmers, and thus more and more systems, and thus more and more tiers...
This obviously undermines the influence of proper warfare in the zone.
It matters more to have the farmers on your side than to win battles. As in without the Farmers you are significantly less likely to get systems to battle in in the first place.
At the micro-level, the Farmers participated in the growth of another crack:
Risk-adversity.
The classic interaction with a farmer is the following:
- You track him down.
- You warp to the plex.
- From this point the farmer has either noticed you and already left.
- If he hasn't, you slide into the plex and when you scram/point him, he leaves (WCS).
In general, Farmers do their very best to avoid conflicts while farming. And the problem is the system worked with them instead of against them.
If a farmer leaves a plex after running it for 1 minute and an enemy militia comes, the Farmer will likely leave.
The enemy militia can then try to nullify the Farmer's Work, running the plex for a 1 minute. Thing is, the time the Farmer spent running it is added to the time!
Meanwhile, at the same time, the Farmer gets to the next system, and run a plex for 1 minute.
Overall, the Farmer wins time-wise. While the enemy militia works to nullify his minute, he himself gets one.
This core problem makes it the logical choice ISK-wise to just flee whenever an attacker comes.
The core incentive system of Faction Warfare, plexes, does not encourage fighting.
Another significant crack that appeared was Veteran Fatigue.
For many of the people who had been in FW way before the surge, this was yet another ebb that ended with a significant problem.
Their Growth was being capped.
One of the core designs of Faction Warfare is the size-capped nature of plexes. A Novice plex only allows Frigate-sized hulls for example.
This size-limitation is great news if you are a newbie, because you can size the kind of opposition you are willing to take on, something cheap and fast, or something more durable but slower.
However between Mediums and Larges, there was a significant gap in sizes, Mediums allowed Cruisers, and Larges allowed ANYTHING. But Larges being significantly too low in reward, putting anything there other than a frigate if you were in for the profit was foolish.
So overall, the Corporations and Alliances involved FW would optimize themselves for Novices to Mediums plexes engagement. That means nothing more than Cruiser level (of course this changed over time).
This with the realization of the dominance Farmers exerted on the zone, plus the lack of more appropriate rewards for what is called Full Warzone Control (one side owning all systems), to the point of it being actually detrimental since you would kill your content, this led to entities in the Warzone looking for greener pastures as some of their veteran started to tire of Faction Warfare.
This is evidenced by the push some of the Gallente leadership started, to make the use of bubbles less punishing for militia members. A feature that would be useful to them only in their forays in Null-sec.
People were starting to see the lack of rewards, the lack of hierarchical content, and the lack of Participation in basic plex warfare.
Sure sieges were still done, ships were still exploding, and militia factions still propagandized their way out a system. But from there, people were slowly but surely agreeing that the system we were playing under was borked, and that something had to be done.
In effort to solve the problems of the zones and show some consideration for it, a significant initiative had been started in the Tweetfleet Slack channel of #newfw between 2015 to 2016.
This initiative saw most of the moving players in the zone find themselves all in one channel and discuss the various problems that they deem were holding the zone back.
Out of this initiative, one document: The Faction Warfare proposal.
The proposal had several ideas that all had the goal of fixing the different lackings of FW life. For example, one proposal was about banning T3Ds from Small plexes, this one would get implemented, another one was to limit contest of systems to ones that were next to enemy systems, some even proposed to add the Entosis to FW!! Some of the changes also got indications that some of the devs were for it and were planning to add something of the sort, the 4-way war for example.
Among the most controversial proposition of that Proposal was a clear nerf to Farmers: The Plex Timer Rollback.
The Plex Timer Rollback would make it so that leaving a plex would make the plex slowly rollback all progress done in it.
Suddenly, it becomes less ISKs/hour-effective to leave a plex when an aggressor comes.
This was opposed by many because, contrary to what one would think, several FW players benefit from the role of Farmers or just employ them to fund themselves. But eventually it was added to the list of Proposals.
Several years later, in the year of our Lord 2018, the only one of those proposal that got implemented since the T3Ds ban is the banning of WCSs from plexes.
Since then, the Tier system, the Farmer forces, the Veteran Fatigue, and the overall general neglect of the zone all contributed to a slow but persistent decline in the two metrics that matter most: Activity and Explosions.
A final coup de grace came with the release of Citadel in June 2016, the expansion that introduced the aforementioned Citadels.
Citadels came like the Summer of Sov and drastically changed the landscape of the game.
But more importantly, they changed Faction Warfare in ways that were never anticipated.
The same way the interaction between Faction Warfare IHub and Structures was obviously never considered, the effect Citadels would have on the Warzone were never considered too.
Structures essentially invalidated one of the major incentives of the Faction Warfare game, docking rights.
Docking rights gave a reason for militia to care about systems control, as losing a system would mean losing docking in said system and thus everything you own in the stations in it. I learned that the hard way in Sujarento!
But now, instead of caring you could just drop a Citadel in the system...
Even worse, it fundamentally changed the nature of System Sieges.
Before Citadels, the enemy had to base out of neighboring systems *with docking rights*. This gave a layer of strategy to the whole thing as you had to make sure such systems were available, and you could attack the attacker through the route between the targeted system and their base systems.
Of course, all of it evaporated with people just putting a Citadel in the system...
Now what was usually a battle of plexes had to transform into a classic Structure bash. With a structure in the same system, even if the siege failed, the enemy still had a presence in the system and thus it would never really be safe as long as the enemy Citadel was in.
This changed the way FW players saw conflicts. Structure bashes being very different from the ***size-constrained*** battle of plexes.
It gave the opportunity for players who had caps to make use of them in FW. But this also killed the very accessibility FW was based upon.
An immediate result of that is that non-FW entities started playing a major role in the zone as the capacity to field Caps suddenly mattered in system control...
As of Monday 20th, August 2018, Templis CALSF, a pro-eminent player in the Caldari warzone, one of the strongest alliances in the game (at least a participant in several Alliance Tournaments) announced that they would leave the Caldari-Gallente warzone.
This came after the withdrawal of another pro-eminent actor of the Caldari-Gallente warzone, the Bloc.
A lot of enthusiasm followed the completion of the #newfw Proposal.
But years of neglect and those never being mentioned clearly sent a message that FW was a way lower priority in CCP's eyes than people expected.
One of the reasons cited in the withdrawal of both entities was clearly the abandonment of FW by CCP despite the feedback from the Proposal.
As I have explained in previous articles, Factional Warfare (Faction Warfare or FW, from there on) is what saved me from boredom, or even worse, when I started the game.
With the perspective I have now, I realize that what it did is give me a taste of EVE even though I was low on skills, was far from space-rich, and was low on connections.
I realize now that I could have found that in any of the spaces of EVE (with the notable exception of High-Sec). Null-Sec could have given me a taste of large-scale organization, logistics, and war. W-space would have given me a taste of invasions from War targets and Contest of Sites/Complexes.
But what Faction Warfare did so well is make all of those accessible to me nearly on Day 1.
So I spent several years in the zone, capping plexes, participating in sieges, and killing (and mostly being killed) war targets.
And it was a blast, FW gave me a taste of the potential of EVE and what can be accomplished in it. The battles that can be done, the reasons they can be done for, the myriads of ways they can be done (yes, that includes Propaganda), all things that EVE gets done in a manner that is truly unique in the Gaming market right now.
However, despite all those great things, and the years of amazement and entertainment Faction Warfare provided me, Faction Warfare is now a decrepit zone that is finally seeing the results of years of both neglect and abuse in the form of an activity that is a shell of its former self.
Faction Warfare is now an Empire that fell.
The Rise of an Empire
During the Summer of Sov, https://www.eveonline.com/article/politics-by-other-means/, Null-Sec was seeing significant changes that would considerably transform it in the years to come. A new capture mechanic was introduced, and several changes affected the capabilities of giant deathballs of caps to be the sole and final answer to everything (this obviously worked.)Following those changes, Null-Sec was in turmoil for several months, the new menace of the Trollceptor, https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/3hdlqw/is_there_legitimately_any_downside_to_banning/, https://forums-archive.eveonline.com/topic/411402/, wrecked the zone and disheartened several elements in it. This led to a migration of Null-Sec players either out of the zone, or out of the game!
One of the direct results of that migration was an increase in players in Faction Warfare.
At this time in the history of the game, Null-Sec was considered the proper End-Game of the game, it was the end-and-be-all, where the money was and where the competition was, the King's Game.
It failing in such a fashion led to several people looking for a zone as lucrative and engaging as it. Several chose Wormholes, but a significant amount of them chose Faction Warfare.
Faction Warfare at that time was known for the idea that you could plex your account by just farming plexes, that and FW Missions were slowly being recognized as the cash-cow they are.
The monetary argument convinced many people to give the zone a try.
And this is how the Empire began its ascent.
The Zenith of an Empire
So as the numbers soared, so did the activity.
EVE in general was in the middle of an intense Dev involvement likely pushed by the most-beloved CCP Seagull. Shorter release patches were encouraged, important changes were done and discussed, and grandiose presentations presented a picture, alongside the Alliance Tournament introducing E-SPOORTTSSSS in EVE to a unknowing audience on Twitch, of an EVE that was getting more vibrant.
Faction Warfare was in the perfect place to benefit from those two forces, the migration from Null-Sec, and the renewed vigor of the game.
Thus once again, as in many times in its history, plexes were capped, farmers farmed, missions were blitzed,
But more importantly, systems were being sieged:
https://www.factionwarfare.com/oped-the-fall-of-tama-and-the-future-of-operation-meatshield/
Hotspots appeared all along this period. Whether it was Tama, Okkamon, Asakai, Nisuwa, or Heydelies, zones with entrenched occupants would be attacked by drivens enemies.
Those were the flaring moments in that period. Thousands upon Thousands of ships destroyed in the matters of days, hundreds of pilots involved, entities from all spaces meddling in, both in kills and influence, from the massive Null blocs to even Wormholers sometimes.
Those were the moments FW could proclaim proudly that it mattered, that its affairs were as important, even more important, than the ones of even Null-Sec. That we created more battles and strife than even Null-Sec could achieve.
Faction Warfare could boast that it had the most explosions in the entire game.
The Descent of an Empire
The activity swelled, the pilots increased, the kills mounted up, and thus more and more people had the time to interact with the system and understand it.
The more people moved the systems, the more its cracks widened, and the more its flaws were revealed.
Things that were contained through sheer habit started to rattle the newcomers who unlike those who were in the system before the soar were used to their effects and took them as granted, as part of what it was to live in the Warzone.
The first and most influential part of those cracks were the Farmers.
Farmers are the shadow aspect of Faction Warfare, the one very few talk about when introducing and discussing the system with others but the one that influences the most the events people get to see happening in FW space.
A Farmer is a pilot that run plexes and whose goal is to generate the maximum amount of ISKs with the least amount of effort. As such, the farmer will avoid any confrontation, as a ship lost is a net loss. They will stick to defensive plexing, as in capping plexes in friendly systems, as those can be run without NPC interference, but if they go after enemy plexes (which give better LPs), they run drone ships to be able to kill the plex NPC while AFK. They will have scram/point-preventing modules such as Warp Core Stabilizers, better known as WCS (or at least, they used to), or ECM to break targeting for example.
Farmers are so influential because what they do is push the contested index of a system while they accumulate LPs. They are the actors that generate the most amount of contest index and thus they dictate, slowly but surely, the systems that will eventually get captured.
This gets further exacerbated by the core incentive of the FW war, The Tiers system.
To put it simply, for those who don't know, the tiers reflect how much systems are controlled by a side. The more systems you control, the greater your tier will eventually get. And with Tiers the reward from plexes increases.
Some of you will have realized what's going on here.
As the dominant faction has more and more tiers, they will have more and more Farmers, and thus more and more systems, and thus more and more tiers...
This obviously undermines the influence of proper warfare in the zone.
It matters more to have the farmers on your side than to win battles. As in without the Farmers you are significantly less likely to get systems to battle in in the first place.
At the micro-level, the Farmers participated in the growth of another crack:
Risk-adversity.
The classic interaction with a farmer is the following:
- You track him down.
- You warp to the plex.
- From this point the farmer has either noticed you and already left.
- If he hasn't, you slide into the plex and when you scram/point him, he leaves (WCS).
In general, Farmers do their very best to avoid conflicts while farming. And the problem is the system worked with them instead of against them.
If a farmer leaves a plex after running it for 1 minute and an enemy militia comes, the Farmer will likely leave.
The enemy militia can then try to nullify the Farmer's Work, running the plex for a 1 minute. Thing is, the time the Farmer spent running it is added to the time!
Meanwhile, at the same time, the Farmer gets to the next system, and run a plex for 1 minute.
Overall, the Farmer wins time-wise. While the enemy militia works to nullify his minute, he himself gets one.
This core problem makes it the logical choice ISK-wise to just flee whenever an attacker comes.
The core incentive system of Faction Warfare, plexes, does not encourage fighting.
Veteran Fatigue
Another significant crack that appeared was Veteran Fatigue.
For many of the people who had been in FW way before the surge, this was yet another ebb that ended with a significant problem.
Their Growth was being capped.
One of the core designs of Faction Warfare is the size-capped nature of plexes. A Novice plex only allows Frigate-sized hulls for example.
This size-limitation is great news if you are a newbie, because you can size the kind of opposition you are willing to take on, something cheap and fast, or something more durable but slower.
However between Mediums and Larges, there was a significant gap in sizes, Mediums allowed Cruisers, and Larges allowed ANYTHING. But Larges being significantly too low in reward, putting anything there other than a frigate if you were in for the profit was foolish.
So overall, the Corporations and Alliances involved FW would optimize themselves for Novices to Mediums plexes engagement. That means nothing more than Cruiser level (of course this changed over time).
This with the realization of the dominance Farmers exerted on the zone, plus the lack of more appropriate rewards for what is called Full Warzone Control (one side owning all systems), to the point of it being actually detrimental since you would kill your content, this led to entities in the Warzone looking for greener pastures as some of their veteran started to tire of Faction Warfare.
This is evidenced by the push some of the Gallente leadership started, to make the use of bubbles less punishing for militia members. A feature that would be useful to them only in their forays in Null-sec.
People were starting to see the lack of rewards, the lack of hierarchical content, and the lack of Participation in basic plex warfare.
Sure sieges were still done, ships were still exploding, and militia factions still propagandized their way out a system. But from there, people were slowly but surely agreeing that the system we were playing under was borked, and that something had to be done.
The Fall of an Empire
In effort to solve the problems of the zones and show some consideration for it, a significant initiative had been started in the Tweetfleet Slack channel of #newfw between 2015 to 2016.
This initiative saw most of the moving players in the zone find themselves all in one channel and discuss the various problems that they deem were holding the zone back.
Out of this initiative, one document: The Faction Warfare proposal.
The proposal had several ideas that all had the goal of fixing the different lackings of FW life. For example, one proposal was about banning T3Ds from Small plexes, this one would get implemented, another one was to limit contest of systems to ones that were next to enemy systems, some even proposed to add the Entosis to FW!! Some of the changes also got indications that some of the devs were for it and were planning to add something of the sort, the 4-way war for example.
Among the most controversial proposition of that Proposal was a clear nerf to Farmers: The Plex Timer Rollback.
The Plex Timer Rollback would make it so that leaving a plex would make the plex slowly rollback all progress done in it.
Suddenly, it becomes less ISKs/hour-effective to leave a plex when an aggressor comes.
This was opposed by many because, contrary to what one would think, several FW players benefit from the role of Farmers or just employ them to fund themselves. But eventually it was added to the list of Proposals.
Several years later, in the year of our Lord 2018, the only one of those proposal that got implemented since the T3Ds ban is the banning of WCSs from plexes.
Since then, the Tier system, the Farmer forces, the Veteran Fatigue, and the overall general neglect of the zone all contributed to a slow but persistent decline in the two metrics that matter most: Activity and Explosions.
A final coup de grace came with the release of Citadel in June 2016, the expansion that introduced the aforementioned Citadels.
Citadels came like the Summer of Sov and drastically changed the landscape of the game.
But more importantly, they changed Faction Warfare in ways that were never anticipated.
The same way the interaction between Faction Warfare IHub and Structures was obviously never considered, the effect Citadels would have on the Warzone were never considered too.
Structures essentially invalidated one of the major incentives of the Faction Warfare game, docking rights.
Docking rights gave a reason for militia to care about systems control, as losing a system would mean losing docking in said system and thus everything you own in the stations in it. I learned that the hard way in Sujarento!
But now, instead of caring you could just drop a Citadel in the system...
Even worse, it fundamentally changed the nature of System Sieges.
Before Citadels, the enemy had to base out of neighboring systems *with docking rights*. This gave a layer of strategy to the whole thing as you had to make sure such systems were available, and you could attack the attacker through the route between the targeted system and their base systems.
Of course, all of it evaporated with people just putting a Citadel in the system...
Now what was usually a battle of plexes had to transform into a classic Structure bash. With a structure in the same system, even if the siege failed, the enemy still had a presence in the system and thus it would never really be safe as long as the enemy Citadel was in.
This changed the way FW players saw conflicts. Structure bashes being very different from the ***size-constrained*** battle of plexes.
It gave the opportunity for players who had caps to make use of them in FW. But this also killed the very accessibility FW was based upon.
An immediate result of that is that non-FW entities started playing a major role in the zone as the capacity to field Caps suddenly mattered in system control...
Death
As of Monday 20th, August 2018, Templis CALSF, a pro-eminent player in the Caldari warzone, one of the strongest alliances in the game (at least a participant in several Alliance Tournaments) announced that they would leave the Caldari-Gallente warzone.
This came after the withdrawal of another pro-eminent actor of the Caldari-Gallente warzone, the Bloc.
A lot of enthusiasm followed the completion of the #newfw Proposal.
But years of neglect and those never being mentioned clearly sent a message that FW was a way lower priority in CCP's eyes than people expected.
One of the reasons cited in the withdrawal of both entities was clearly the abandonment of FW by CCP despite the feedback from the Proposal.
In activity, the zone can no longer boast the numbers of previous years, when the warzone was booming with explosions and fleet-on-fleet actions.
Instead, the zone is more than ever under the thrall of the Farming entities who benefit from the ebb and flow of Tiers to accumulate then cash out LP.
Farmings drives the warzone, no longer Explosions.
Instead, the zone is more than ever under the thrall of the Farming entities who benefit from the ebb and flow of Tiers to accumulate then cash out LP.
Farmings drives the warzone, no longer Explosions.
The Ashes for a New Empire
Despite the fade of its fortune, FW still has the core of its advantages within it. It remains the most accessible zone in the game in which a new pilot can learn the rope of PvP and how to be independent in EVE. It still has the size limitations that allows solo and roamers to find more willing targets than anywhere else in New Eden. Finally, it still has its war going on, despite at a slower, less engaging pace.
Overall, CCP still has a zone that can fuel some activity in their game, the engine is still there, it's rusted, parts are broken or outright missing but still as we speak a new player is likely getting his first kill in a Novice plex, hooking him for life.
The system is there, the good parts are still there, it's just drowning under the masses of problems that are stifling it.
Overall, CCP still has a zone that can fuel some activity in their game, the engine is still there, it's rusted, parts are broken or outright missing but still as we speak a new player is likely getting his first kill in a Novice plex, hooking him for life.
The system is there, the good parts are still there, it's just drowning under the masses of problems that are stifling it.
Essentially, to fix the system, 6 things are needed:
- Fixing the Commitment problem of Farmers.
- Curbing the Influence of Farmers on the Warzone.
- Encouragements for Full Warzone Control.
- Introduce a bouncing-back Mechanic to help the losing side and start the War anew.
- Incentives to encourage the roaming of Militias.
- Introduce a bouncing-back Mechanic to help the losing side and start the War anew.
- Incentives to encourage the roaming of Militias.
- Give a Faction identity to Structures in FW-space to re-establish docking rights.
Each one of those grease the gears that make the engine of the Warzone.
By forcing Farmers to commit to a plex, you encourage the pirate lifestyle that is central to Low-sec.
By curbing the influence of Farmers, you put power back into the hands of fighting Militia corporations, increasing the engagement of those to the Warzone.
By encouraging a side to go for full control of the warzone, you ensure a competitive spirit in the Warzone, that will lead to more Conflicts and more Stories.
Each one of those grease the gears that make the engine of the Warzone.
By forcing Farmers to commit to a plex, you encourage the pirate lifestyle that is central to Low-sec.
By curbing the influence of Farmers, you put power back into the hands of fighting Militia corporations, increasing the engagement of those to the Warzone.
By encouraging a side to go for full control of the warzone, you ensure a competitive spirit in the Warzone, that will lead to more Conflicts and more Stories.
By introducing a mechanic to pickup the losing Militia and encourage them to keep fighting or to get back into the fight, you ensure Faction Loyalty and prevent the utter dominance of a single faction.
By incentivizing militias to roam, you introduce a dynamic component to what is a very static lifestyle (plexes being static), something that will bring more life to the warzone.
By giving a Faction identity to Structures in FW-space, you stop the problem Citadels have introduced in the Warzone and you make system control matters more than it ever did.
Finally,
FW needs one more differentiating factor to make it a zone that is distinct in goal and purposes to the rest of the game.
A sixth object is needed to fix Faction Warfare:
FW needs one more differentiating factor to make it a zone that is distinct in goal and purposes to the rest of the game.
A sixth object is needed to fix Faction Warfare:
- Introducing Ship Amount Control to the Warzone.
By introducing Ship Amount Control, you make FW low-sec the premier zone for small-gang PvP and for small-scale PvP alliances.
This would make of Faction Warfare a space where we could direct those of us who are interested strictly in PvP and prefer a more tight-knit kind of community. The likes of Stay Frosty. at their very beginning and my own former corporations [IBLOB] SQUIDS.
This would put forward the real potential of the zone. A zone brimming with small conflicts, TRULY elite PvPers, each ducking out with each other with the menace of Caps and of blobs.
A space for people out for action.
This is it for today. I'm not done with Faction Warfare though. In the next article, I will talk about my own proposals on how to accomplish those different fixes, some of which (if you have checked the Proposals) you have seen already. Some of them are crazy, but most are just calibrated enough to give Faction Warfare what it needs.
Until then, Stay Golden!
This would put forward the real potential of the zone. A zone brimming with small conflicts, TRULY elite PvPers, each ducking out with each other with the menace of Caps and of blobs.
A space for people out for action.
This is it for today. I'm not done with Faction Warfare though. In the next article, I will talk about my own proposals on how to accomplish those different fixes, some of which (if you have checked the Proposals) you have seen already. Some of them are crazy, but most are just calibrated enough to give Faction Warfare what it needs.
Until then, Stay Golden!
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