Comments from a FW guy who participates in occupancy war, fights, and missions.

Remember this: The BEST thing about FW is the free war dec. Opening up the free war dec to willing participants (joining FW) leads to great low sec fights without worrying about gate guns and your ability to re-enter high sec. The BEST thing about plexes is ship limited combat. Occupancy war is a side show and always will be. The average guy in FW has always been in it for the casual PvP.

Low hanging fruit for this winter:

*****Pirate Faction ships = T2 ships in plexes/missions. Doing this one thing will help out the newer player more than any other thing you implement this winter. And it will make plex fighting much more fun. Pirate faction ships are OP and reward old players with large bank accounts.

Transparency in Stats: There is a measure of how contested a system is. It should be available to everybody not just those who know how to read their cache files. For those of you not "in the know", it takes 3000 vp to make a system vulnerable. The current numerical value should be available on Dotlan evemaps, and on the in-game map when occupancy is viewed. Also, we should see how much a given system has changed in vp totals over the last day and week.

Occupancy War Modifications: Three easy mods for the short term.
1. Get rid of bunkers completely. They are boring.
2. Reduce occupancy requirement down to 1000 vp. If opposing side can get vp above 1000, then they occupy it. 3000 vp is too much and does not offer enough instant gratification most FW pilots are looking for.
3. Automatically subtract (or add) 100 vp to a system every day so that the baseline vp returns to zero if nothing happens in it. If you want to occupy a system, then you need to maintain it. Otherwise it will eventually return to the owning side.
4. VP = LP. Give those little plexing minions a table scrap for their efforts.

Losing faction standings for RR: This issue has been around for forever. Fix it please!

How about make missions work instead (see poison pill suggestion)? Nobody likes the plexing mechanic, so why force them into it to make isk? Your suggestion won't stop the alt farmers from making their isk. They'll simply run plexes 23/7 instead. Kicking inactives from militia would at least give us an accurate count on how many people are active in FW.

What did you mean about low numbers? Did I miss something?

As alternative to denying docking rights completely you should consider just limiting the things hostile entities can do while docked. At the minimum denying hostile entities access to station services should be considered and it could go as far as denying access to items and ships completely in the occupied systems or just prevent them from restocking their assets there. Point being it doesn't have to be all or nothing with docking rights and it might even be preferable and more interesting, if you use a less blunt instruments to bring more meaning to occupancy.

Docking rights to hostile stations should be removed right away tbfh, there is no logical reason why you would accept that ppl you are war with to dock in your stations

What would make FW work? Sort out the problems. How about making FW mechanics work properly and fairly across all time zones and factions?

PROBLEM: Plexes that spawn in systems with the wrong occupation status are reshuffled using a down-time script to systems with the correct occupation status
SOLUTION: New programming of plex spawn so that reshuffle occurs as soon as it spawns in illegal system
PRIORITY: High
EFFORT: ?, Probably high due to reuse of old code.

PROBLEM: Faction standing loss on remote repping faction ally
SOLUTION: Change the standing programming
PRIORITY: High
EFFORT: ?, Probably high due to reuse of old code.

PROBLEM: Amarr/Gallente complexes can captured by speed tanking
SOLUTION: Change plex _capture_ programming to make it so that the timer doesn't run down whilst navy spawn is alive. Defence programming stays the same.
PRIORITY: Medium
EFFORT: I don't know of any other game feature that uses a similar mechanic. So, it should be easier.

Nope, not really. You see it IS based on exploration code but they had to tack on the horribly broken/annoying code (DT Shuffle code) to be able to restrict the spawning to not only specific systems but specific system states (read: occupancy).
If there was an easy fix as some people assume there must be, then you can be damn sure it had been implemented already as this point has been brought up ten times more than any other issue these past three years.

FW missions have been there from the beginning. but people started to do those after that buff, main reason why people did not do those before was that if you did not complete mission you will lose faction standing, so penalty was too high to take risk for most especially when you have only 12 hours to complete those missions.

Because Ankh cried that people should get good rewards being in FW , CCP removed standing penalty and boosted LP shop.
Still people are not willing to do boring plexing, even thou CCP made all changes they asked for to make good income on militia career. You got your paycheck but you do not still want to do your job.

You proposal could work but if it contains any possible exploitable elements some one will abuse those.

How i see you change will go is that some dedicated group will get all boost for lp and rest are just crying CCP to nerf them.

This is not a bump.

Am I the only one who thinks catalysts and thrashers will be too powerful for minor plexes after they remove the rate of fire penalty and make the other changes to them (lower sig, increase armor and shields hp more capacitor etc.)?

I'm thinking they will be able to put out somewhere around 350-400 dps with faction ammo (the catalyst may even be able to get away with void ammo given the change to blasters and its tracking bonus) and have a tank of around 8k ehp. Why would anyone use any other ships for minors?

Also:

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=12772&find=unread

Very important for FW. Just saying.

I will be more inspired to undock if I get a pretty shiny new station to undock from.

Keep an eye out, Faction Warfare peeps!! CCP Guard said we should see our very own Dev Blog coming out ... Soon(TM)

Hope everyone's had a wonderful holiday season full of gaming goodness, we'll get back into the swing of things here once the next set of FW details come out and have plenty to discuss, I'm sure. I've got my eye on the webosphere again, scanning for all things FW-related - and will keep you posted if I hear anything new.

The next couple of weeks should be exciting - we have the Dev Blog as well as the detailed CSM summit notes to look forward too!

Thanks for all of you who have contributed to the cause - we wouldn't have gotten this far without you. FW's best days are ahead...