The ship restrictions for novice complexes are hilarious. Faction frigates are of the same level as T2 frigates, yet they are allowed in while the latter arent.

I updated Buckingham and tried all the plexes out on Sunday. I was able to complete all 4 sizes of site with a t1 frigate: a tristan with hobgoblin IIs, 1 web, 1mn AB, 2x neutron blasters. 156 dps seems a little low ball tbh (since that was all that I had and all that was required).

The ship restrictions for novice complexes are hilarious. Faction frigates are of the same level as T2 frigates, yet they are allowed in while the latter arent.

Now, for the GÇ£whatGÇÖs nextGÇ¥ stuff GÇô Timers, timers, timers. The lack of visibility on the timers and lack of rollback for unoccupied plexes is hugely frustrating. I sincerely hope there are concrete plans to address this in a .1 patch. They are critical fixes to the PvP nature of plexing and needed to create a strong danger of being attacked in a plex and encouraging pilots to fight instead of to flee. Especially with the NPCGÇÖs nerfed down this hard and so easy to kill, weGÇÖre relying on players now to defend and take space GÇô so lets make it dangerous. This should be an immediate priority with what time is left for FW work.

A large source of income for me at least came from tags collected while plexing.

Will the new NPC contain a similar amount of tags as before?

Besides the challenge faced by unprepared new players in rookie ships, the ability to defensive plex in a rookie ship was deemed too powerful to allow them in.

As for the faction ships, we will be monitoring the situation and if needed we can take actions such as banning pirate faction frigs from the Novice plexes.

Each NPC will have 1-2 tags. We will also be monitoring the tag situation and can adjust drops as necessary

This is my view:

• Novice complexes now only accept tech1 frigates (rookie ships will be excluded)
• Small complexes now accept all frigates (including tech 1, tech 2, all pirate/navy variants) plus tech 1 destroyers
• Medium complexes will accept all frigate and destroyer variations, plus tech 1 cruisers
• Large complexes will have no ship restrictions to enter and will spawn a Battlecruiser NPC

The largest ship type in a plex must be limited to tech 1 only for it to work.
Every ship type has a reasonably balanced area to fight in.

What are the arguments against this?

Nice work team, as usual! The LP store improvements were a great surprise and a huge quality of life improvement for Faction Warriors (Especially the LP *****s. I know, I know, carpal tunnel from shopping is one of those GÇ£1st world problemsGÇ¥ but its just as helpful for us weekend warriors.)

Now, for the GÇ£whatGÇÖs nextGÇ¥ stuff GÇô Timers, timers, timers. The lack of visibility on the timers and lack of rollback for unoccupied plexes is hugely frustrating. I sincerely hope there are concrete plans to address this in a .1 patch. They are critical fixes to the PvP nature of plexing and needed to create a strong danger of being attacked in a plex and encouraging pilots to fight instead of to flee. Especially with the NPCGÇÖs nerfed down this hard and so easy to kill, weGÇÖre relying on players now to defend and take space GÇô so lets make it dangerous. This should be an immediate priority with what time is left for FW work.

Secondly, I hope the option remains to tweak the site balance. I think most of us expected the current Major plexes to become Larges, and IGÇÖve said before there needs to be more opportunities for bigger fights in FW, not just frigate / cruiser combat constantly, though the new plex distribution is a lovely haven for small-scale combat. The ship balancing will contribute to a really fun variety of engagements now that the NPCGÇÖs wonGÇÖt be dictate what we can bring. That being said, with the only place for BC and up combat being what were the old unrestricted plexes and bunker busts, IGÇÖm afraid weGÇÖre about to see a lot less battlecruiser fights in general. ItGÇÖs two steps forward, one step back in terms of making Faction Warfare a place for true diversity in engagement size. WeGÇÖll see how it plays out, but I hope these can be tweaked if it becomes a monotonous frigate-fest too quickly.

And once again, thanks for jumping on the opportunity to squeeze in the geography changes, they look fantastic and I know itGÇÖll go a long ways towards making our warzone in particular much more competitive.

A lot of players told us how much they disliked having to travel more than 80KM to the capture point and we also felt this discouraged PvP within sites. To counter this we have also made the followed adjustments to the complexes:

All capture beacons have been moved much closer to the warp-in point GÇô they are now 10KM off warp-in