I've no hard numbers. Those are still locked in the CCP statistical vault. But as an example, just the other day, a 20 jump roam through Minmatar/Amarr lowsec garnered a single kill. Disappointing. That same roam on December 6th would have brought several big fights and thirty or forty kills.
I'm not suggesting faction warfare is dead. Far from it. Just that players seem to be quickly succumbing to the same malaise that was affecting them pre-Retribution. Fighting the same people over and over again, facing the same comps over and over again, putting up with the same bullshit tactics over and over again. It gets tiring.
Faction warfare definitely needs some new blood. I'm not sure how to get that new blood into faction warfare, but we need it.
Maybe RvB (Red vs. Blue) need to join. Red on the Minmatar side. Blue on the Amarr side.
Maybe faction warfare simply needs to affect some aspect of an entire faction, such as tax and broker rates? Maybe faction navy ships should only be available through faction warfare loyalty point stores? If that even gets 50 more people interested in the warzone, looking our way, wondering what's going on, then great.
It would be fantastic if it were all up to the players to now get other players excited about PvP and lowsec war, but if the mechanics are such that faction warfare is ignorable, then it will be ignored for the most part. We probably need mechanics that at least draw eyes and some interest to what's going on down here. As it is, we're a bottle episode, self-contained, nothing we do affects anything outside our own little sphere of influence.
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The march to -10.0 continues. I'm sitting at -9.1, thanks to an Iteron Mark III and subsequent pod kill last night. The transport itself was empty, and the pod was worth next to nothing, but the sec status penalty was worth it.
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We had a flurry of systems flipping back and forth after Retribution. It would look like we're settling into a status quo. But still hard to say. Come the middle of January, more solid analysis can be made.
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If you're an EUTZ corporation looking for some solid PvP opportunities, then Fweddit wants your corp to join the alliance. There are a bunch of EUTZ Minmatar who don't have enough Amarr to fight. If you're interested, get in touch with Rina Kondur or Fenrir Vice.
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I have a record number of killmails this month. Previous record was 150. I'm now up to 167 and December is not over yet. Maybe 200 if I'm lucky. The month started off gangbusters. This far into December, it feels once again like November.
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We submitted our alliance logo on December 5th. The Space Chicken above. Hopefully we'll see it inserted into the Retribution 1.1 update. Crossing fingers. It's a damned fine logo, though.
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Sorry. I wanted to do an exciting Fweddit/Faction War update, but there simply hasn't been a lot going on in the warzone. This is the best I could come up with. It could be argued I should not have posted anything at all.
FW is dead again? Chicken little much?
ReplyDeleteThe past week has seen some incredibly intense fighting in the Eugidi constellation - most notably Aset, but also the adjoining systems. The wrecks are barely cold in what has been one of the most violent systems in EVE for the past week.
Maybe you're roaming the wrong areas. Maybe your gangs are too large. Maybe you just haven't been paying attention, because shit has been going down constantly.
Did I say it was dead?
DeleteAnd I was in Aset. There was fighting. But it was mostly a lot of blueballing, but both sides.
There's nothing to fight over in Aset any longer.
No, you just said it wasn't while strongly implying that it was, and then cited a single anecdote as evidence.
Delete--
The reason you saw a lot of blueballing Aset was because it was an important target that people actually cared about, and making a mistake could set you back significantly. Combine this with even numbers in USTZ and the enormous advantage of being first into a plex, and you’re going to see FCs being a lot more hesitant about engaging (this was a lot less true in EU and AU timezones, where TLF enjoyed clear numerical superiority). Plus, you’ve got to factor in the reality of system sieges in FW: you’ve got to do everything possible to jump on a plex ASAP when it spawns, which means you can’t wander off and do something else when nothing is happening, which means you spend a lot of time sitting in an expired plex doing nothing but spam come-at-me-bro smack in local.
In any event, the fighting for Aset may be over, but that’s hardly the end of fighting everywhere. The last two weeks have seen a number of systems change hands, and it almost trivial to find small/solo fights almost anywhere near the front.
You can do a crude analysis by looking at the ships destroyed on the FW killboards, per day. You can be slightly cleverer by weighting this against eve-offline's player count for the day, to give an idea of how engaged people are.
ReplyDeleteThe numbers would be independently quite meaningless, but if you just look at the delta from day to day to week to month (or whatever) then you can show something meaningful if it's around.
FWIW I got bored of the concept of FW by just reading about it - without any grander meaning or reason to fight the other people the conflict is completely arbitrary.
New-FW has been called "sov lite" - but a much more apt way of describing it is "manufactured sov conflict". Somehow as a core concept I don't like how it slots into a sandbox game, I guess.
Faction warfare is basically RvB with a tad more meaning and e-peen attached. But not much more.
DeleteAs for the graphs ... if I'd started charting the numbers since December 4th, I could have done that. But I didn't. So no comparison to draw on.
Pull up the most violent systems for Fweddit in the month of December. 362 kills in Egg. The next system has 59. That is a 6-1 ratio. I'll let you connect the dots.
ReplyDelete-Zarnak
I thought sitting in a single system and blobbing anything that moved was LNA's deal? Maybe Poe will sue for copyright infringement.
Delete"Maybe faction warfare simply needs to affect some aspect of an entire faction, such as tax and broker rates? Maybe faction navy ships should only be available through faction warfare loyalty point stores? If that even gets 50 more people interested in the warzone, looking our way, wondering what's going on, then great."
ReplyDelete^^ No, that'd just generate a LOT of carebear tears. Coupled with the mission nerf, it might just be enough to push a lot of them over the edge into unsubbing for good. The problem is that once CCP made hisec an island unto itself, with CONCORD, set-in-stone boundaries (between hi and lowsec AND between the empire factions), and "appearance" of safety -- well, you just can't go click the "undo" button on that.
"No man is an island," although a pure hisec-bear in an NPC corp is pretty damn close.
I tried to use seemingly minor faction-wide effects, so as to not upset the apple cart. Navy ships being sold only through FW LP stores. Minor. They'll still make it on to the market and bears can still buy them. Or just a slight rise (0.5 - 1.0%) in taxation.
DeleteBut maybe a shift in the apple cart is all that's needed to flip it right over. Which would be a bad thing, as you suggest.
I know that a lot of people are busy, especially with the holidays, travelling, and etc. It would be nice if everything was constant action all the time, but I think we would all get burned out of that pretty quickly...
ReplyDeleteMaybe we should plan a Late Night vs. Fweddit snowball fight one of these days, just for kicks...
I've been down in the amarr-minny FW zone lately (because nothing that ineresting is happening in null) and its fairly active.
ReplyDeletehttp://eve-kill.net/?a=corp_detail&view=kills&crp_id=132780&m=12&y=2012
If you look at this killboard though, you'll notice a pattern. Most of the FW corps are willing to roam in small gangs and give goodfights, Fweddit just.. aren't. I was messing around in some ships I had left over spare from my time in FW, the station was camped with 10 members of your corp in Instacanes (by the way Fweddit need to learn how to stationcamp properly) yet there was no Fweddit fleets flying out in space.
I'm not going to accuse you of blobbing. But you need to understand that if you aren't willing to go out with smaller fleets, you aren't going to get fights. If your members are only going to sit in Egg all day with Lokis camping stations/gates, you aren't going to find fights. If you seriously want action, go and make it.
FW got ehgouth attencion recently now time for other aspects of the game
ReplyDelete