Rikki Sals
Caldari
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Posted - 2010.07.18 19:21:00 -
[2]
 Originally by: Farelle
Originally by: Rikki Sals
The problem isn't that they haven't fixed Faction Warfare yet, it's that they haven't removed it yet.
why would you want a part of the game used by (if milita numbers are anything to go by) thousands of players, removed?
I apologize, I did not realize participation in Faction Warfare was so widespread.  If amends to it could be proven to not only retain players currently involved in it, but grow participation from the rest of the playerbase, as well as attract new players to EVE, to a greater extent than Incarna and Dust 514, then yes, it certainly deserves more developer attention. However, I do not believe that this is the case.
I played Warhammer Online for the first year that it was out, and it was built from the ground up to be based on Realm vs Realm (Faction vs Faction?) pvp. It had many great mechanics for people to form ad hoc groups to accomplish both pve and pvp tasks; the progression of the greater pvp war was based on smaller pve objectives, any of which could quickly turn into pvp engagements (sound familiar?). The combat had a nice skirmish feel, and the game got a lot of things right. Warhammer Online is now also widely considered a massive failure. Its subscribership numbers dropped off a cliff. 
Why? In small part due to the normal implementation hiccups that almost all MMOs face; bugs, server problems, imbalance issues, etc. But what REALLY killed it was that from the very beginning the concept was flawed.
By dictating the players' opponents by an arbitrary choice at the beginning of playing (one more based on roleplay aesthetics, or so and so's side is or isn't the current underdog, etc.), rather than allowing all conflicts to be born out of individual player choices and interactions, the burden of giving pvp conflict any personal meaning went to the developers. So the developers would try to come up with more and better ways to dynamically reward/punish the victors and defeated with various game items/ranks/limitations/perks. These things soon get old, and people soon realize that such a system devolves into gaming the system itself, instead of each other.
Realms (factions) would occasionally achieve widespread cohesion and accomplish all of the goals dictated by the realm (faction) conflict mechanics, after which rehashing such accomplishment would become trivial faster than the devs could pile more new content or incentives on top of the heap. Each side would soon devolve into chaotic sparring against people they might rather be riding(flying) with (but hey, they're part of such and such faction, so we're SUPPOSED to kill them!) while wishing they could kill some of their very own realm(faction)-mates, or into cliquey semi-organized groups that effectively gamed the system for maximum profit, and then eventually got bored of it and quit.
TL;DR - Faction warfare as a larger concept is a dead end; many proposed improvements to it would make it LESS player driven and more dev driven, and there are way more compelling things for the CSM and devs to be spending their time on. (Revamping low sec, new features that will for a certainty result in playerbase growth, things that add on to the sandboxyness of EVE rather than spoon feeding more of it, etc.)
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