lol. It's less about SC's in plexes and more about them hotdropping whenever we have a sizable fleet out and about. So yes, they kinda do disturb 'occupancy war' quite a bit.

Yeah what Johnny said. You lose FACTION standings with the RR bug.

It certainly appears Bengal Bob is correct, but just in case the Devs really are still reading this:

The Lowest of the "Low Hanging Fruit" tasks that could ever be accomplished by the Dev Team for this winter.

Plot FW Occupancy Heat Map as an absolute value rather than a relative value.

i.e. Heat(j) = amount_contested(j)/amount_need_to_make_vulnerable, where "j" it the jth system under consideration. This way FW pilots would know how critical it is for them to fight over a system. If the "heat" is low, then they can do other stuff, but if the "heat" is high then they ought to turn their attention to that system.

Currently the in game map plots a heat map to show which systems are contested and by how much they are contested relative to the most contested system. Something like Heat(j) = amount_contested(X(j))/max(amount_contested(X)), where X is the systems being interrogated. This makes it very difficult for somebody looking at the map to figure out whether or not they should spend their time helping out.

tl;dr Replace max(amount_contested) with amount_needed_to_make_system_vulnerable.

REPLACE ONE WORD IN YOUR CODE! Do it!

Plexing is not a full time job for 95% of militia. They can do it in spurts, but only two to four guys can do it as a full time job. Plexing effort increases a bit the closer a system is to being vulnerable. System will likely still flip, but more people will be willing to fight at or near even odds. Happens all the time.

Except that we will still have to spam HICs to keep them on field long enough .. gets worse as their numbers increase as the ridiculous ECM burst can essentially perma-jam an entire fleet once SC count goes double digit.

Remove immunity when outside own sovereignty!

Either that or hit them with draconian limits like the Titan's and their inability to DD in low-sec .. kill off remote burst in LS and we won't have to field 2-3 HICs per SC to insure they stay put.

You missed the main reason. Plexing with no notification to the enemy milita is mainly a pve activity.

People figured out that through hide and seek plexing faction warriors like ank could do over a hundred plexes in a week without a single pvp kill. This is what makes plexing silly to most people in fw. This is why faction war is ridiculed by the wider eve community.

If CCP continures to make plexing a pve activity they won't really create that much needed small gang pvp mechanic. The only way people will do thme is if they give huge isk/lp payouts. But then its just making "the war" into carebearing. People will stop doing missions and grind plexes for isk.

Bad Messenger makes a great point. Running plexes with alts leads to no fights (it's still a lame strategy/tactic), and always overwhelming your opponent in plexes leads to no fights (after the opponent figures out what's up). Props to you all. You achieved your goal of no fights for plexes.

I'll add: No fights = boring time orbiting button for non-alts.

And yeah, it was real easy to spot where PERVS were since they took over systems one constellation at a time. And BM would have his alt Don Goldspoon sit in the target system 23/7. It didn't lead to more fights.

First you say you enjoy small gang pvp and that you want CCP to protect it


And then you complain that you cant continue flying large gangs


Seems to me the problem isnt the rules of the game, but instead the way the players are choosing to play it.

If your enemy is forming up fleets to gank your 100+ man battleships, then start forming up fleets to counter theirs? Start getting tricky, bombing them, picking off their stragglers. Waiting for their fleetwarp off a gate and then bubble the 2 or 3 idiots who didnt align? There are hundreds of ways to **** with larger fleets. Pick one.

And yes, giving all your space up and waiting until your enemy gets bored and leaves = really dumb, and a great way to lose your pvp players.

2 ships speed tank is ok? So completely turn it into fw missions with a speed tank alt???

So long as we have npcs in plexes plexxing will be a pve activity. Notifiy the militia players when where and how their militiary complexes are being taken and let them fight for them if they wish.

The mission are only fine if you not in FW with your main, and using them to make easy isk with an alt or two.

PVE being in FW at all, is not fine.

Not nurf FW missions - get rid of them entirely. Or if not that then make them something you can't do in any stealth ship. Currently you can run FW missions (Amarr and Gallente especially due to no missiles) in a single Stealth Bomber. Come over to Bleak Lands and count the number of Purifiers and Hounds you see (or not see but see jumping) and you will see the problem.

If there is a PvE element to FW - it has to be a lot more integrated. As it is now, its not about sharing wealth, its about FW becoming another Motsu style cash cow.

The militia will be notified where you and any alts are trying to capture plexes. Its not like this will be hard to follow. The messages will just say when/where and ship type when someone enters or exits a plex.

If these military complexes are so important its hard to understand why the militia is not informed when they are attacked.





Nobody wants to go scouting for your hide and seek alts. They should just inform us when and where military complexes are being attacked so we can get on with the fighting.

I think you know very well that a simple notification channel would cause problems for your alt brigade. That may be why you don't like the idea.

The map crashes my cient about 50% of the time. Also I do not think it tells me where people are entering complexes.

BTW: I do agree with your other points on fw.

Sync I agree with you completely. CCP needs to have this as the goal.

The problem is that the current plexing is mostly pve. the question is how can ccp make it so that it is pvp centered? I have supported an idea that was raised long ago in my signature. Namely remove the npcs and give the players a notification system when plex is entered.

Once they change the plexing system to no longer be another pve system then I'm with you. Until then they are just playing a shell game, switcihg out red xes in missions with red xs in plexes.

Here is an example of why it would be nice not to have supercaps mucking about in low sec:

http://www.minmatar-militia.org/kb/?a=kill_related&kll_id=220392

Amarr FC calls in PL...

Susan Black's excellent write up of the whole evening:

http://www.gamerchick.net/2011/10/revenge-of-nerf-herders.html

This, combined with consequences for gaining or losing a system, would make for fantastic gameplay. Imagine hearing on the militia chat "we're about to lose vard. everyone x up!"

But, how to make people care about occupancy? I've seen it proposed before that when a system flips, so do the mission agents in that system. So if the Amarr manage to take Dal, the Tribal Liberation Force Station become Occupied Reclamation Facility and instead of it's previous 4 TLF agents, has 4 agents from the 24th. So Amarr get mission agents closer to the frontline, and Minmatar lose a source of income. That is something that would inspire people to fight. Real, game world impact as a station flips, and real player impact as losers lose isk making opportunities and winners win it.

People would care, occupancy would matter, and people would fight over it.

Bad Messanger - you use the ord 'kick out of FW' a lot.

No one is being kicked out - those who are in it for the easy isk will leave and go back to Motsu. The people who are left are the ones who want to actually do FW. Running missions is not part of FW, it is the incentive to get players to do FW.

Now I am not against a way to make some isk in FW - but it has to be directly integrated into the mechanic - like FW standing. AND it cannot be exploited by a group of people who play the two sides for a profit.

But I am sure you and everyone here agrees that the current system is broken, that FW numbers do not represent anything. The reason Mini and Caldari have the highest numbers of FW members is not because more people are fighting for them, its because Amarr and Gallente npcs don't use missiles.

But ultimately we are back to the same spot - because even a compromise to the total elimination of FW missions would involve making them 1) gang, 2) multi room, 3) difficult and time consuming 4) broadcasted. And this would have nearly the same effect to those who want easy money.

So do you see FW as some high reward, low risk farming mechanic with RP flavor? Cuz that's how you are coming through here.

Well I don't play rigt after downtime so it may be somewhat different in that 1 hour of time.

But other than that I do go in plexes allot. That way I don't get blobbed by supercaps. I just don't actually run them because of the npcs. And yes its only the npcs that prevents this. Most times i think my ship is safer there than if I docked.

Very few people bother to hunt anyone down because the system occupancy war is a silly pve mechanic. Out of the current 300k accounts how many do you think are *really* working at fw occupancy? 20? 40?

Or make it so its not a silly pve mechanic. That way new eden would finally have a small scale pvp mecanic that works. I think allot of eve players would like that. More importantly for ccp I think allot of people who left eve would come back, have a blast, and new players would start subbing.

It's about time the developers checked back in with us and shared their thoughts, there's lots of great ideas bouncing around in here!!

Soundwave?? Thoughts? Is FW still being worked on?

I guess I just don't understand why you're posting in here at all. Are you simply trying to troll the militia? If you don't think any ideas are good, and you don't know how to fix FW, and you just think everyone in here is complaining, that I please ask that you keep your comments to only contructive suggestions. You can't give a few reasons why your corp tried FW and gave it up, but than say no in here is actually playing FW.

Well, at least I can respect honesty.

As for you calling out my lack of plexing points, I'd hardly say that makes me uninvolved with Faction Warfare. You may see FW as a plexing system mechanic, I think most of us in this thread see FW as a community of players. You're right, its a static wardec. And that static wardec is far more interesting than the plexing mechanic. That's why we're offering suggestions for improvement. It shouldn't be just players treating it as a wardec, there should be some interesting reasons to fight over the plexes. As it stands right now, reclaiming a system is completely irrelevant, and does not drive players to participate.

Warping frigs around to orbit a button is extremely boring gameplay, and just because many of us don't do that doesn't mean we're "not really doing FW" Those of us treating FW as a static wardec for fun and PvP purposes are a lot more involved than those who simply plant alts in the militia so they can farm missions, take the money elsewhere, and than sit back and say the militias don't know what they're talking about when it comes to FW.

Bad messenger is a simple troll guys, don't bother responding back and forth. Clearly he's here to make sure that his mission income is protected, or to see that FW is done away with completely, either way he's not here to help make useful suggestions so I wouldn't keep wasting your time back and forth.

I regret taking the bait up till this point.

1.)Allow Alliance participation in Faction Warfare

2.)Get Supercaps out of lowsec. This may not seem like a FW fix, but supercap drops by non-participating Alliances are a huge faction warfare killer. Having Pandemic Legion in the thick of things pretty much ground regular fleetwork to a halt recently,

3.) Give sovereignty consequences.... One simple fix would be to enable station guns to fire on the opposing faction, as if they were GCC....

4.)Make plexing a PvP exercise, not a PvE exercise.

His agenda couldn't be any more obvious :) How do you guys think he afforded that monocle? With the alts he has in every militia, to farm the missions he doesnt want nerfed, of course.

So really, you're just here to troll. You're not offering any suggestions yourself, just saying "these ideas suck". Seriously, stop posting in this thread unless you have something useful to say.

/blocked bad messenger for irrelevancy.

Please stop posting and leave this thread... You are adding NOTHING of value. All you are doing is filling up the thread with noise which means you can go for 1-2 pages with noise from you and people responding to you without anything meaningful being discussed.

I have posted a number of things that are worth discussing, but the thread moves on 4-5 pages before people see them because of the dribble coming from people such as yourself. And of course, more will come since you will HAVE to respond to this post... Other people have also said similar things.

The majority of the calls about missions is the BALANCE them (as opposed to nerfing them). This could be done by making them all easier, or all harder or some easier and some harder to strike the balance... You also seem to believe that FW missions should be an entitlement for people in FW. I am arguing that they should be the reward for participating in FW activities (PvP and plexing etc...), rather then the ONLY form of FW activity that the farmers perform...

Read some of the old blogs that were release pre-/post Empyrean Age and you'll see that missions were intended to be the fuel for the mayhem in FW .. and not a bottomless wallet for anyone with an alt.

Example Blog: War is a full time job

The only way that will change is if we (read: everyone that is not me) give up the ridiculous notion that PvP and PvE must be kept completely separate at all costs. An example of how they can be tied together can be seen on page 20 (post #386).

Fair enough, how about this change then.

Give missions victory points (*Edit: and by VP i mean missions can flip sov). If this was done, make sure that if a system was occupied that no missions could be given by militia agents in the occupied systems. Give all missions the poison pill idea proposed by gallantus (name?) So that it was easy to shut missions down. How does that sound?

... Only ccp can decide if they will puke npcs everywhere forcing people to use pve fits so they can't pvp if someone else shows up. Only ccp can decide if they will let militias know when complexes are taken so they can actually fight for them instead of having people orbitting buttons all alone in low sec back waters.

Since the bomber flood started, saturation of the market has cut 50-70% of the price for a majority of the items available to us .. that means we "legitimate" FW players have to run twice the amount of boring missions to keep doing what we do.

FW missions are my only income as I don't have alts (eve the hardcore way), so farmers make me a sad panda. But that's how market in eve goes...

We have several ways how to make the farming much harder. We could make a mafia-style system where you have to earn your "missioning rights" with pvp, otherwise u get ganked/chased by major fw corps (might hurt standings in long run). We could use alts in opposing militia to chase farmers. We could make a deal with opposing militia to make big ops to chase farmers and leave pvp missioners alone etc etc... Might take alot of effort but its possible...

Not really no, the protectionism is nice and snug with you it seems .. you would stand to loose a substantial amount of income should such a thing be done .. having alts in all militia's is one thing but if the earning of ISK/LP from missions is tied directly to the action of the individual character there is no way of "gaming" the system.

CCP already acknowledges that FW should be about the pew, not the missions and the one should feed the other, both in the actual FW promo material but also in the fact that a mission takes 5 minutes to complete solo in a PvP ship and it pops an overview beacon.
The mere fact that it is being farmed as heavily as it is proves beyond doubt that it is not what was intended .. it is the single highest source of income for an individual anywhere in Eve .. that should belong in blob-land not Empire according to risk/reward system.
So we can either reduce FW mission income to a pittance or make certain that the people it was meant for are the ones who benefit .. since the former effectively kills FW in its cradle the only real option is the latter.

PS: Starting to see why Hans chose to stick you on his 'ignore posts' list .. you are really not contributing much of anything

I wish the PERVS bloc would stop pretending it has any desire to see FW balanced. It's not convincing.

Let me ask you why you told them where you were plexing? Did you tell them because you wanted some pvp and letting them know where you where was the obvious way to get PvP? That is sort of my point. Letting the enemy know where their military complexes are being taken is a pretty obvious way to increase pvp.

How many alts do you think people are going to multibox? Please give a bit more detail as to how you think this would be gamed.

-lot of text-

I imagine people got tired of trying to keep track of where your alts were plexing. A notification system would take care of that.

Were these free accounts?

I just had a random idea, thought I'd throw it out there for everyone to discuss....We've been trying to think about ways to reward players without turning FW into farmville.

And than it hit me - what about rewarding players for losses, instead of paying them for plexing / mission? Clearly some of the appeal in joining a big alliance is having your pew pew ships reimbursed, I was wondering if an insurance-type system could be implemented to reward players who sacrifice ships in FW PvP.

Think of it like AFLAC for FW pilots - additional insurance payouts, upon death to a wartarget. Should be easy to program for the developers, if you're a FW pilot, and the final blow is laid by an enemy militia, you get some sweet bonus insurance money, financed by the Tribal Liberation force, or 24th crusade. (might be lore issues with this, feel free to bring those up)

This would solely reward those that are out PvPing, as this is not money you can farm and take elsewhere. You would have to go out and lose ships to benefit, and the amount could still be low enough that it doesnt completely cover mods and thus couldn't be proftitable to farm with an alt. But it would make ongoing pew pew much cheaper, attract players who want PvP without major grinding expense, and keep people out of the missions and in fleets.

Also, as an added benefit, it adds an incentive for militias to engage each other, and not to engage in piracy out of boredom. That will still happen, but this properly encourages people to stick to wartargets, as they'd lose the bonus insurance if they died fighting neutrals.

Go ahead, rip it to shreds, just trying to think outside the box a little. Its just one idea, could dovetail with other changes, but I think it aids in making FW what its suppose to be - PvP centric, rewarding players for fighting, and not for farming PvE content whether its plexing OR missions.

Nothing is wrong with making them stronger - but if frigs are not usable in minors, that IS an issue...

They merely increased the amount of plexes available so systems will be flipped in droves by the people who have alts/manpower to burn. With one simple change they have managed to make the plexing scene even more of a travesty in a way that favours the use of alts to an even greater degree .. although not if you happen to be Gallente or Amarr because the missile spam they face still requires gangs to clear/survive in most cases.

Plexing activity increase is temporary. The system itself is still very much broken so the massive dis-/-advantages that were present before are still there .. just more cases now. In a few months they will be used to farm standings for the various freebies and alts will likely be recycled after payout of said freebies.

One character .. ONE BLOODY CHARACTER can now make TWO systems vulnerable PER DAY (if unopposed and an insomniac). Compare that to the silly null monkeys who have up to two full days or more of buffer for just about everything .. governments/empires are not known for their efficiency but holy crap, taking it a bit to the extreme don't you think?

Want to take bets on how/why they settled on this particular change? My money is on their beloved metrics, they probably had a spider count all the instances that the various things have been mentioned over the past three years and then went with it without actually giving it any thought.