Plex do what they're meant to do - provide an avenue to push the system that leads to pvp fights. Of course the manner in which CCP implemented them was ********. You go AFK orbiting a thingy. It's dreadfully boring for those of us that like to pewpew, and a godsend for bots / jews. Really, anything past a minor shouldn't be soloable in a t1 frigate. Perhaps if the timers were shorter, but only ticked down when ALL the mobs were dead? Or if only the mobs rewarded LP, which when added all together, was similar to the LP you'd earn from capping? Something like that would go a long way to stop these afk wankers.

CCP obviously didn't think too much about this. Amarr will likely never get past L1 because of a snowball effect. People see Minmatar are winning, and join them. People playing Minmatar get 1. More LP, 2. Cheaper LP rewards which all translate into more ships to lose. They tell their friends how they're making 300mil a day by plexing, and more come for easy isk. I personally don't care as it means more ex slaves to baptize by fire, but god damn it was poorly thought out, and the FW mechanics themselves are stagnant as ****.

I'm actually baffled winmatars get LP's for capping caldari plex's. In my opinion they should only get the standing bonus but no LP. If they want to cap Cal space they can join the frogs and if they want winmatar LP they can try to cap amarr plexes.

First off, I want to say two things:

1) I have no idea if these changes were in before Inferno, as I didn't play much after I last quit in 2010. I also knew nothing about FW when I quit in 2010.

2) I apologize if there is already a thread up on this topic.

As it stands, it is too easy to make ISK via Minmatar FW. I made 600 mil with little to no effort in the last two days (Friday/Saturday) and if I care enough I'll make another 100 or 200 mil today. I am a 8-day old character, I should not be able to make that kind of ISK in so little time with the exception of intelligently playing the market. I know nothing about playing the market so I have to "work" for my ISK, but with FW I barely have to work at all for a lot of ISK.

Major complexes give 25000 LP.
Medium complexes give 15000 LP.
Minor complexes give 10000 LP.

For my horrible navigation skills, I can't speedtank a minor complex in a Vigil, nor can I really "do them" because my speedtanking Vigil fit with 200mm ACs can't even track them fast enough as I orbit them. This is still nice because I prefer to do Medium/Major complexes. Ultimately, I prefer doing major complexes as I can pretty much AFK in them as the orbital is so wide that they never get a lucky hit on me. In mediums I can't AFK too much because I'll get a hit here and there, so I have to pulse my SSB once in a while.

I made 188k LP in the last 2 days doing mostly majors, but some medium and minors (with partners) here and there. I didn't bother doing any plexes for the majority of yesterday as I made like 100k LP and I got bored of making more LP. On Friday night I made 80-90k LP. With what I'm trading in (which is slowly crashing in the market compared to the other Minmatar faction stuff that's crashing really fast) I get 3000 ISK per LP.

188k LP took me from 85 mil to 691 mil ISK.

There are a number of reasons how I am able to get this much LP and how I have a high ISK per LP ratio:

1) I can speedtank their complexes.

2) Amarr cannot speedtank Minmatar complexes.

Combine these reasons together and you will understand why Amarr is losing the Amarr vs Minmatar war heavily as Minmatar complexes cannot be speedtanked due to TPing and webbing NPCS. This means Amarr has very little progress in T1 while Minmatar is always T3 but fluctuates up to T4 daily.

The Gallente vs Caldari war do not have this problem because both sides can speedtank both factions. This means both Caldari and Gallente fluctate between T1 and T2.

The T3/T4 fluctuation is a huge advantage to my success. At T3, we pay normal price as other corporations for anything in the LP store. At T4, we pay 50% of the price! (just a note: T1 means you pay 4x the price, T2 you pay 2x, so as the tiers go you divide by two, this means T5 will be absolute insanity as it'd be 25% of normal price). This is for both ISK and LP, so something that costs 10000 LP and 10 million ISK to buy is 5000 LP and 5 million ISK to buy at T4.

So let's take a step back and see what this means. With T4, we get more from the LP store for cheaper. Factor in the fact that speedtanking Amarr plexes is effortless, resulting in a massive pseudo-free LP income, we have brand-new characters with crappy navigation skills making 200-300 mil per day with no effort and a couple of Vigil losses to retardation.

However, this can be fixed.

There are two solutions. One is easy, but detrimental to the whole point of FW. The other is good and solves the basic problem behind FW at the moment.

1) Let Amarr speedtank Minmatar complexes so everyone is "equal" in our ability to speedtank. But this is a bad suggestion because the ability to speedtank each others' complexes is a bad design implementation. Let's move on to the better suggestion.

2) Have all NPCs that spawn in all 4 faction complexes be able to web you. This will solve the problem behind speedtanking and force intelligent fleet composition and gameplay to actually conquer complexes.

Each side has always been able to run plexes on both fronts.

The key issue is rewards on all fronts are out of whack with effort. Your concerns are only concerns because Minmatar LP rewards may (or may not) provide more incentive for farmers to plex for Gallente than the ease of 1 day old alt farmers plexing for Caldari.

It also counter balances the penalty of everyone farming for winmatar.

What I was trying to say was that the entire system is out of whack. Plexing in Caldari/Gallente space for Minmatar LP is only a symptom.

What I was trying to say was that the entire system is out of whack. Plexing in Caldari/Gallente space for Minmatar LP is only a symptom.

FW warfare should be about PvP, IMHO they should remove the PvE componenets including plex and missions.

When I was in Caldari you couldn't get a fleet for PvP, but mention you needed more for some missions and you would get many people.

That is lame.

And don't tell me FW would be dead, yes, the PvEers would leave, but they don't count anyway.

I see some people fail to grasp what ISK/hour is.

It's not three unrestricteds +15% minmatar bonus for 103500 LPs that magically turn into ISK on the spot.

It's all the hours from undocking. to finding plex, to running them, to going to the LP shop, to selling whatever you exchanged your LPs for.

Factional Warfare needs to be nerfed

You still fail at Business 101.

You can't exclude the time (or the outsourcing costs) for traveling, exchanging LPs, hauling, and trading. The three hours you spent yesterday grinding for 95k LPs are only a part of the time you spend before you have ISK in your wallet. The correct way to calculate FW ISK/hour (not LP/hour) is adding up all of the activities undertaken.

Unlike incursions, FW is actually newbie-friendly, and you dont have to have a 5b fit on your machariel to get into a fleet.

Unlike incursions, FW got an easy to reach ceiling of simultanous player jewing them out. 2-3 guys per system, against 200-300 people for each incursion.

Unlike incursions, FW promote PvP, being located in lowsec and far from gates.

And unlike incursions, FW isnt an isk-faucet. It's an LP-faucet, LP being traded for various items, you also end up with a semi-self-regulating system, where farming too much LP ends up devaluating these LP and the items they offers, which in turns devaluate your LP and your ally LP, but in turns makes your "product" cheaper for the rest of Eve.

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UPDATE:

I am at 14 days played and I have acquired 1.5b ISK off LP transactions alone. I honestly do not feel like I did anything to get that 1.5b. All I can remember is orbiting a button on a couple days and acquiring massive amounts of LP. I've only plexed for 4 days or so, all of the others were just me logging in a little bit and not doing anything. Based on how much ISK a player can make with no effort in his first two weeks (basically my point is a trial player can do this), I do not think FW is balanced in terms of risk/reward - zero risk, great reward.

And that's not even the worst of it. If someone played like me for 16 hours a day he could make 5 billion in 5 days easily. Probably more closer to 10-15 billion in 2 weeks. How is this balanced? You can put in so much effort into FW and get massive rewards for essentially zero risk. This is beyond ridiculous and it's boggles me that I know when I link this update into Militia channel, people are going to go "stfu pineapple FW is balanced go get a new haircut".