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[Aldrith Shutaq]

Yeah of course, FW is more disposable than sov related stuff if something goes wrong.

Actually Lyn, it is. Then again, people who've been active in Factional Warfare since it's start and/or in the old live events that had some pewpew in them have also learned to roll with the punches. 

And recently, get hilariously rich.

Or poor. Let's not forget the space poor who refuse to run alts for the enemy.

[Seriphyn]

They are upcoming FW changes for Winter that are gonna cut the farming, right? Make it harder to capture a system, no more 90 systems at a time that are vuln that flip between Gallente/Caldari endlessly.

[Gesakaarin]

With the planetary districts and DUST it seems all things being equal it's going to favour a degree of status quo or at the very least make seizing and holding enemy territory far more difficult unless one has a high degree of co-ordination with DUST units or have DUST players integrated into a current corp or alliance.

This is of course discounting the possibility of having a large amount of DUST players choosing one side over another and effectively just steamrolling the opposition. It would be even worse if rewards are tied into how many planets a faction owns which would cause defections to the winning side since you get higher rewards (They're mercenaries, duh).

If that's the case then it seems whichever side manages to score the quickest victory through numbers or whatever else in DUST will in all likelihood maintain that position.

[Lyn Farel]

Yeah of course, FW is more disposable than sov related stuff if something goes wrong.

Actually Lyn, it is. Then again, people who've been active in Factional Warfare since it's start and/or in the old live events that had some pewpew in them have also learned to roll with the punches. 

That was /sarcasm. Ive been there since the beginning too, so, bittervet oblige.

[Laerise [PIE]]

Yeah of course, FW is more disposable than sov related stuff if something goes wrong.

Actually Lyn, it is. Then again, people who've been active in Factional Warfare since it's start and/or in the old live events that had some pewpew in them have also learned to roll with the punches. 

That was /sarcasm. Ive been there since the beginning too, so, bittervet oblige.

In factional warfare, perhaps :p It's been like this forever, I'm sure people like Graelyn can say the same.

[kalaratiri]

New Dev Blog based on the linking of the Dust chat to Eve's: http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=73468

[BloodBird]

Or poor. Let's not forget the space poor who refuse to run alts for the enemy.

THIS. My FW toon is piss-poor, and will likely remain so, partially because I've no time/interest to farm the system like some parasite, and partially because if I did have time/interest to play I'd generate my money in a different manner that don't artificially inflate the Free Welfare system's capture mechanics.

[Z.Sinraali]

So you're fine with gameplay that results in harm to random neutrals as long as effort is involved?  That's a wholly different argument than a griefing condemnation.

A bounty is just an automated market transaction.  It's hiring mercenaries made easy, the transformation of an under-used aspect of EVE to a streamlined interface.

What the change means as that it's easier for a capsuleer to expend isk to hurt or make a target of another capsuleer. Potentially any kind of behavior in the game can be punished, as long as the price is right.  This is an expansion of the sandbox, and permits a new ecology of careers and consequences.

The necessary conditions are effort and risk. There's no risk in dropping a bounty on someone, because it's anonymous, and all the effort it takes is scraping up some ISK and pressing a button. It's as if they put in a module that let you teleport to optimal range and shoot from cloak. So my argument is that it's making it too easy. You're not adding any new consequences, because you could always kill someone or hire someone to do it on your behalf for anything. And hired gun is hardly a new part of the ecology of careers in EVE.

Bounties are not placed on capsuleers based on their outlaw actions.  Other capsuleers put bounties on each other and themselves for lols, attention-seeking and advertisements.  No matter how many outlaw acts you commit, the only reflection on your record is your security status.  CONCORD never sets bounties on capsuleers for criminal acts.  No capsuleer places bounties on other capsuleers in order to punish them for criminal acts because that would be dumb, given the way things presently work.

You're arguing that the bounty system should continue to perform a role that it never performed.

And you're arguing that the bounty system should perform a new role that it never performed. There's no logical high ground there. Yes, CONCORD doesn't set bounties based on criminal acts. What it does is permit them based on them. What chain of in-universe logic should lead them to change that, given that it makes criminal acts more likely and therefore hinders their mission?

[Jev North]

It's not CONCORD's mission to make the world safe for capsuleers. It's CONCORD's mission to keep the world safe from capsuleers.

[kalaratiri]

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=164501

Team Gridlock has been working in the last months mostly on improving server-side parts of the inventory system (and related systems). Many of the changes won't be visible to the player (except that a few old bugs should be gone), but there are a few important changes, which are now on Duality for testing:

Fleet hangars:
Corporation hangars on capital ships and Orcas have been converted into fleet hangars. These fleet hangars have no divisions and corp roles are irrelevant. The size of the fleet hangar is the same as the old corp hangar and all items are moved from the corp hangar to the fleet hangar at deployment of the patch.
The access rules to the ship maintenance bay (SMB) and fleet hangar have also changed:
It is always possible to use the fitting service of the SMB of a corp member and a fleet member
Corp members can access both the SMB and the fleet hangar with the setting "Allow corp member usage"
Fleet members can access both the SMB and the fleet hangar with the setting "Allow fleet member usage"
We discussed these changes with the CSM and we hope that they improve the usability of the fleet hangar and the new access rules should make it much clearer on what is possible when.
Known issue in the build on Duality: The right-click option to open containers in fleet hangars is not doing anything.

Storing the settings for SMB and fleet hangars on the server:
The above mentioned settings for SMB and fleet hangars are now stored on the server and they stay always on the ship (as long as it is not repackaged). It is no longer necessary to re-configure the ship after a jump or after a relog. Be careful when boarding a ship from your corp mate or similar - it will be using the settings, which he set.

Storing the forcefield password of ships on the server
Forcefield passwords are now stored on the server. But: We are currently working on another iteration of this to improve the consistency. Please do not send bugreports about this yet.

Storing the "lock items" setting for audit log containers on the server
The "lock items" setting on audit log containers is no longer a personal setting, but it is stored on the server and applying to all users. The new default setting is "unlocked". In corporation hangars the role "Config Equipment" is needed to change the setting (assuming no password is set).

Please reply here, if you find any bugs or other problems, which we might have missed. The changes should also be covered in a DevBlog later, but I have no idea yet on when it will be ready.

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2069493#post2069493

Sorry for the late reply - I was not in the office this afternoon.

Trying to cover the most asked questions / complaints:


Divisions: I am afraid that it would be very difficult to bring them back. I will discuss on Monday with the team, if we could find any good alternatives.
"too many people" issue/feature - I will investigate this in the following days, but I don't think there has been any changes made to this.
Scanning: Items in the fleet hangar can not be scanned by cargo scanners - this has not changed. Customs officials on the other hand will find items in the fleet hangar - this has also not changed compared with the corp hangar on TQ.
Forcefield password: They are not being transferred to other pilots. We are currently changing the way of how this is being enforced (Probably by storing the password on the character and not on the ship).
Separate access options for SMB and Fleet hangar: I will discuss this on Monday with the team.
"Will we be able to drop items *into* a fleet hangar if the box isn't checked?" - No, you will be unable to open the fleet hangar.

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2066837#post2066837

Quick update on these guys, got a few tweaks to polish them a bit and help differentiate them from the Combat Cruisers:

Omen
-100 Structure
+10 Velocity
-10 Sig Radius

Caracal
-100 Structure
+5 Velocity
-1,000,000 mass
+0.035 Agility
-10 Sig Radius

Thorax
-100 Structure
+5 Velocity
-10 Sig Radius

Stabber
-100 Structure
+5 Velocity
Removed the dronebay and bandwidth
-5 Sig Radius

(Later post)
There are changes to the Combat cruisers coming through the pipeline atm that will be the more significant part of ensuring each ship has its own flavour.

[BloodBird]

I take it that the mass on the Omen, Thorax and Rupture are sufficiently low as to warrent the - 1 million mass on the Caracal, and that it's not there to make is so much simpler to make a nano super-kite Caracal with cap-less weapons?

Because where I'm looking from it seems to be a blatant act of favoritism, though I've not checked the ship stats in a while. I'm wrong, I hope?

[kalaratiri]

I take it that the mass on the Omen, Thorax and Rupture are sufficiently low as to warrent the - 1 million mass on the Caracal, and that it's not there to make is so much simpler to make a nano super-kite Caracal with cap-less weapons?

Because where I'm looking from it seems to be a blatant act of favoritism, though I've not checked the ship stats in a while. I'm wrong, I hope?

Previous mass values:

Omen
11650000

Caracal
12910000

Thorax
11280000

Stabber
11400000

The Caracal will in fact remain the heaviest, followed by the Thorax, then the Omen, then the Stabber. The difference will just be considerably less between the Caracal and the others.

[Seriphyn]

It's not CONCORD's mission to make the world safe for capsuleers. It's CONCORD's mission to keep the world safe from capsuleers.

Nice.

[Shaalira]

Even if you don't 'farm' the Inferno FW system, you can make lots of isk by playing "legitimately."

I don't use alts - a personal preference.  By and large, I've plexed contested systems instead of farming vulnerable systems.  Often, I fight in plexes.  Even with this non-optimal, inefficient playstyle, my returns have easily been 9-10 digits each tier 5 push.

I admit, though, that it did help that I was fighting for the Minnies for a while there.  Being part of a side that can hit tier 5 at will really benefited my wallet.  What FW design lacks (and will lack) is an explicit counter to the "rich get richer" issue of multiplayer games.  That is, to keep matches interesting over  their length, games will often offer advantages to the losing side.

Aside from built-in market mechanics that reduce the price of a faction's wares if there's a glut of them, there's no such mechanic in EVE FW.  Factions that gain an early advantage have it good.  Factions that are losing are hard-pressed to make up the difference.

[kalaratiri]

http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=73491

Fast Forward

Hello everyone. CCP Fozzie here writing on behalf of my teammates in Game of Drones. We’ve got some updates for you all regarding our plans for Factional Warfare.

TL:DR Is that we’re accelerating some of our Factional Warfare feature changes that had been planned for Retribution and releasing those features that are ready for prime time starting with a patch on October 23.

The Story so Far

Team Game of Drones has been working on Factional Warfare (FW) iterations for quite a few months now, releasing the changes for the Inferno expansion that revitalized FW and brought in masses of players including those new to PVP and experienced players looking for a change from the status quo. As part of CCP’s continued focus on iteration and polishing our features we have also been working on a second set of iterations to Factional Warfare for the Retribution expansion.

The Factional Warfare iteration process has been a very successful example of close interaction between CCP and our amazing community. Starting from a series of FW proposals collected from the community and brought to CCP through CSM 6 and continuing through the current CSM 7 term we have been working hard to learn from the FW community and channel those lessons into a better FW system. The announcement of the overall plan for the Retribution FW iterations made in two threads on the Features and Ideas forum was the culmination of our dialogue with the FW community up to that point.

Warzone Control and System Upgrades

Rebalancing FW NPCs and Plexes

These roadmaps have received generally positive feedback and we’ve been working since then to tweak the proposal internally and with the CSM, adding new changes that the community has brought forward and removing aspects that the community has pointed out to us are flawed.

The goals of the Retribution FW revamp have been:

Encouraging fun PVP gameplay and removing areas where the incentives discourage conflict
Balancing the Factional Warfare benefit system that has become universally acknowledged as too lucrative considering the risk and effort involved with certain activities
Providing new ways for players to become invested in and excited about taking territory for the glory of their chosen empire
You can see the threads linked above for details of the original Retribution plan and I’ll have some updates to it at the end of the dev blog but for now I want to fast forward to the recent weeks.

 

Fast Forward

Like I said above, the plan was to introduce these much needed community-sourced changes in the Retribution expansion alongside our upcoming changes to Bounty Hunting, Crimewatch and our unprecedented wave of ship balance changes. However more recently we have seen signs that waiting until December 4th for all of these changes would not be in the best interest of the warzones and the game.

Since we announced the Retribution changes many players involved with Factional Warfare have let us know that the excitement and action in their warzones is trailing off quickly. The annoyance with non-combat evasion plexing alts that do not contribute anything to the fun of FW has been building, and with the inevitable decrease in income on the horizon many players have understandably focused their efforts on farming and cashing out LP instead of combat and interacting with the rest of the community. These are the problems that our Retribution changes were designed to alleviate, but players have been telling us that the situation is degrading faster than we had expected.

At the same time we have begun to see the more significant effects of the newly wealthy FW players flexing their economic muscles. Although FW is not an isk faucet and does not generate any additional isk in the economy, the influx of cheap LP store items has caused a crash in the income of some mission runners and the concentration of wealth has contributed to the rising price of PLEX on the open market. Players stockpiling PLEX have simply been responding to the economic incentives at the time in good faith, but the price rise has affected the gameplay experience for those who rely on PLEX every month for their subscription. CCP is working via a variety of methods to bring the price of PLEX down, and FW has been identified as an area that can help the process along.

Faced with the dual problems of FW stagnation and PLEX inflation we saw an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. Team Game of Drones is still in the process of completing the FW changes for Retribution, but the specific features we already have completed internally are ones we believe will have a significant positive impact on Factional Warfare right here and now.

 

The New Hotness

Here are the feature changes we have ready to go that will be releasing with Inferno 1.3.2 tomorrow:

Replace the LP store price reduction from War Zone Control Tiers with a LP gain bonus. This is intended to encourage the various factions to keep their systems upgraded instead of “spiking” tiers to cash out their LP on one day. You will gain the best benefits for taking, holding and upgrading territory over the long term instead of spiking up for one weekend at a time.
The actual multiplier numbers for the LP gain bonuses have been adjusted since we posted the original plan to increase the benefit at Tier 5 somewhat. All FW LP store prices will become static at the values formerly received at Tier 3 (pre-Inferno values).

Old system was:

Tier1: LP store offers 4 times more expensive, LP gains unchanged

Tier2: LP store offers 2 times more expensive, LP gains increased by 5%

Tier3: LP store offers unchanged next to pre-Inferno levels, LP gains increased by 10%

Tier4: LP store offers 2 times less expensive, LP gains increased by 15%

Tier5: LP store offers 4 times less expensive, LP gains increased by 20%

New system is:

Tier1: LP gains reduced by 50%

Tier2: LP gains staying the same

Tier3: LP gains increased by 75%

Tier4: LP gains increased by 150%

Tier5: LP gains increased by 225%

Remove all LP rewards for completing offensive complexes in a hostile system that is fully vulnerable. Currently the optimal path for each militia is to keep most systems under hostile control so they can farm complexes. Militias even use alts in the opposite side to flip systems since holding system when you are not spiking is not optimal. This change should return some sanity to the incentive structure and help get people fighting over space instead of fighting to get rid of space.
Add new LP rewards for defensive plexing at a reduced and variable rate. The formula here has also changed since the F&I post, and now is:
LP Gain = Base value of plex * (Contested percentage of the system/100) * 0.75

So if a system is 100% contested and you run a defensive plex you would gain 75% of the base payout for that plex type. If the system is 50% contested you would gain (0.5*0.75=0.375) 37.5% of the base payout.

Add new LP donation tax based on each faction’s warzone control. The higher your warzone control level the more of your donations are consumed by the tax. This is in place to provide diminishing returns and to compensate for the increased LP gain from the new tier system. When reaching Tier 5 the tax would be as high as 70%.
Increase the cost of upgrading systems and decrease the bleed-out when those systems are attacked. Currently 50% of the LP gained by offensive plexers is removed from the upgrade level of the system they plex in. We are reducing that to 10% and increasing the total LP pool for upgrading systems. This will result in systems taking twice as much LP to upgrade but also make degrading those upgrade levels take 10 times as long.
Old upgrade costs were:

Level1: 10,000 LPs

Level2: 25,000 LPs

Level3: 45,000 LPs

Level4: 70,000 LPs

Level5: 100,000 LPs

Buffer: 150,000 LPs

New upgrade costs are:

Level1: 40,000 LPs

Level2: 60,000 LPs

Level3: 90,000 LPs

Level4: 140,000 LPs

Level5: 200,000 LPs

Buffer: 300,000 LPs

To combat the proliferation of non-combat evasion alts in plexing we will be requiring the defending NPCs to be destroyed during the course of offensive plexing. This will be implemented at this time with the current NPCs, as the new ones are not ready yet. We acknowledge that it would have been better to release the new NPCs in this patch as well but we have decided that AFK plexing was doing so much damage to the fun of the warzone and the economic impact of FW that we are best off to make the incremental change to the current system while we work hard to finish the new improved NPCs.
 

The Rest of the Plan

There are some other changes to the rest of our original roadmap that we are making after consultation with the community:

We will be implementing a cap on the number of missions one character can have open at once. This cap will affect all Security, Distribution and Mining missions, not just FW missions. The exceptions to the limit will be Storyline, Cosmos and Epic Arc missions. The current plan is for the cap to be 5 simultaneous missions.
We will be attempting to release two new features to the FW complexes that have been suggested many times by the FW community to increase PVP opportunities in complexes:
Have plex capture timers count backwards to the default state when no players are contesting them

Have plex capture timers visible to everyone in system so you can easily tell which plexes are close to being captured.

We cannot commit 100% to getting these changes in quite yet since they were added a bit later to the plan, but we have added them to our backlog and want to get all your feedback on them.

There is a change in the original Winter FW plan that many players have pointed out to us is flawed. This is the proposed change to make any defending player anywhere in the complex grid contest capture. We have decided that you all are correct and this change would cause more problems than it solves, so it has been removed from the plan. Thanks to everyone who took the time to help us come to that conclusion.
The rest of the plan as described in the F&I threads linked above and below is still in our backlog, and we will be working with the goal of getting as many of those changes as possible delivered to you by Dec 4th. Expect another devblog discussing them as we get closer to release, and as always you can keep up with the latest in our changes through the official Features and Ideas forum.

 

That Was a Lot of Words

On behalf of team Game of Drones, thanks for sticking with us through this blog. We welcome your feedback on these changes in the comments thread for this blog and the two F&I threads on Tiers/Upgrades, and NPCs/Plexes. We’re committed to dialogue with the FW community as we continue the iterative process of improving Factional Warfare so don’t hesitate to get involved in the process.

We believe getting these changes out early will go a long way towards shaking up and reviving the FW warzones while also reducing pressure on the economy (most notably the price of PLEX). We will keep observing the impact from all of these changes and will keep tweaking as needed to get the best results possible.

All my ♥s