Faction Warfare Musings

I'll start off with the good stuff. Comments on Faction Warfare mechanics, and then write a little about my experiences this week.

CCP is wise to let faction warfare stew a little before heading into any iterations. There's some stuff I'd maybe like to see, but it's hard to say right now if it is really necessary. Especially with Minmatar vs. Amarr, where the two factions are so lopsided, more time is needed for Fweddit (in particular) to skill up. As they start flexing some muscle in the near future, where the equilibrium falls will become more apparent.

I am concerned that defensive plexing awards zero loyalty points. The Minmatar side is currently giving up systems, simply so that we can take them back again for the loyalty point (LP) rewards. Roushzar, this weekend, is a good example. Let the Amarr have it and we'll take it back sometime this week. If there was some benefit to defending, we probably wouldn't be doing that. We can, at the moment, easily maintain our tier four warzone control while giving up systems here and there.

I guess the argument against awarding defensive plexing is that it will lead to farming. The solution to that is to scale defensive rewards based on the contested state of a system. If a system is stable, obviously no LP should be awarded. If a system is 99.9% contested (almost in Amarr hands), then defending plexes in that system should award half of what they would were we offensive plexing. The LP rewards then scale from that based on the contested percentage. A system that is 0.4% contested would award almost zero LP (0.4% of the maximum), and a system that is 75.6% contested would award 75.6% of the defensive plexing LP maximum. So, defensive plexing never awards as much as offensive plexing, but enough that defending your systems has some benefit, versus just constantly giving them up and taking them back.

Is that the solution? It sounds good on paper, but how will the players abuse it? Would they simply continue giving up systems, to get maximum reward? Hard to say. Is shooting for and maintaining tier five warzone control worth the effort? Maybe not under the current system, but maybe so under a system that rewards defenders to some degree.

CCP is doing the right thing, though. Watching what happens, and then using the collected data to determine what iterations are necessary. Faction warfare came out of the gate solidly built, unlike new Inferno items such as the unified inventory and the war declaration system.

***

Faction warfare missions are quite a bit different than regular missioning. The first thing that struck me is the travel. It's common to travel six to nine jumps from the agent to complete a given mission. In regular missioning, you rarely travel more than three jumps from the agent.

The second thing is that you need only kill one thing. There are no waves upon waves, no multiple pockets of rats. You kill a ship, or a structure, and then you get the hell out^[1]. The missions are designed for quick blitzing. You still need to survive a bunch of rats while killing the one thing. It's still important to know what you're doing, to be able to do it quickly, but faction warfare missions are quick in and outs.

The third thing is that as soon as you arrive at the acceleration gate, a beacon goes up, notifying everyone in system that a mission is being done. Missions are often PvP targets. So you have to be doubly aware while completing them. You're not looking for probes (because nobody needs probes to find you), but rather any ship withing 20000 kilometres of your position. If you're watching for trouble, you can get away easily enough. Like plexes, the acceleration gates have to be used to get into the mission pockets.

^[1] There are a few missions where you have to retrieve an object, but these are declined. They are poison pills. Someone else can as easily scoop the object out from under your nose, forcing you to fail the mission and take a standings hit.

***

After losing a Helios and a Dramiel during the week, I'm back to my cache of Thrashers. Still have 35 of them in station.

I was looking to change things up. After the initial successes, I was Fweddit's new primary in every encounter. That grew annoying, fast. Hard to get on killmails when you're in your pod inside of 90 seconds every fight. Harder to get any LP from plexing and system takeovers, when you're flying the six jumps back to station to reship.

I figured, to avoid being killed immediately, I needed something fast, something longer range. I had some Dramiels sitting in station in Hek, so decided to put them to use. My first fit, which I don't have, because I never really used it, was an Arty Dramiel with two Sensor Dampeners in the midslots. It was kind of a ridiculous fit, but the thinking was that if I was not going to be doing much damage from range, I could at least add some ECM for benefit. Eventually, I went with something, at least a little more traditional looking, if still ridiculous. Still not even sure how I died. I was plexing in the thing, speed tanking a major (though it might have been a medium, I cannot recall now) when a bunch of Fweddit landed on grid. I immediately began burning away. They were 30 km distant. At least, I'm pretty sure I was burning away from them. There were no red brackets in front of me. And at 5000m/s, I was pretty sure my escape was guaranteed. Yet, I was popped, by an autocannon Cynabal. I don't know what the range of an autocannon Cynabal is, but it can't be all that much. Thirty kilometres sounds pretty extreme. And yet that's what killed me. I wish I knew exactly what went down, because hard to learn from a loss, if you don't really know why the loss happened.

(Was just informed by the esteemed Pinky Feldman, that autocannon Cynabals have an optimal of 2-4km and a falloff of between 35-45km, depending on ammo. So that would explain my death. The MWD bloom didn't help matters any. And running directly away from them was the poor decision. I should have run perpendicular to their position, though the transversal might not have been enough even then.)

So I've given up the Dramiel experiment for the time being.

When the weekend came, I was once again looking for fleets. It seemed sort of a slow Saturday, so after talking with Hans Jagerblitzen, decided to give Faction Warfare missioning a try. I wasn't going to go all gung-ho at it to begin with. The usual thing people do is to fly a route between all the faction warfare agents, picking up all the missions before doing any of them. I was just going to try a few, get the hang of it. He recommended speed tanking in a stealth bomber. He uses a Hound, a faster ship than the Nemesis that I'm skilled to fly. But I built out a fit nonetheless and began tackling level three missions (standings for level fours are just out of my reach for the time being.) I couldn't get quite to the recommended afterburner speed of 1000m/s, but 988m/s seemed good enough.

[Nemesis, Faction Warfare Missioner]
Nanofiber Internal Structure II
Overdrive Injector System II

Gistii B-Type 1MN Afterburner
Small Shield Booster II
Small Shield Extender II
EM Ward Amplifier II

Covert Ops Cloaking Device II
Prototype 'Arbalest' Torpedo Launcher, Caldari Navy Mjolnir Torpedo
Prototype 'Arbalest' Torpedo Launcher, Caldari Navy Mjolnir Torpedo
Prototype 'Arbalest' Torpedo Launcher, Caldari Navy Mjolnir Torpedo

Small Bay Loading Accelerator I
Small Warhead Calefaction Catalyst I

Today went roaming with Iron Oxide. The FCs are Iron Oxide, but the fleet itself is a smattering of every Minmatar alliance. They run good, solid fleets. Mid-day to early evening (mountain timezone), guaranteed that the Iron Oxide folks are out plexing and looking for Amarr prey. I did get a solo kill on a Fweddit at a minor outpost gate. He was decked out in tech 1 to my tech 2, so nothing to really brag about, but I was happy with the solo nonetheless. I don't get them often. I'm usually the guy that gets killed.