Entries tagged with “Factional Warfare” from Things You Don't Care About

It's been over a year since CCP introduced factional warfare to Eve Online, and over a year since my corporation began its participation, and we've seen some sweeping changes to the way the game is played as a result, not all of which seem to have been good for the game, especially the roleplaying community.  While I am still wrankled about the storyline problems over the last year, that's not what this article is going to be about really -- I may address that in another post later.

The Good

• Factional warfare managed to bring back small-scale skirmish warfare, at least for a time.  In our fighting on the Caldari-Gallente front, we actually saw a lot of small (10 or fewer people on a side) gang fighting.  There were some aberrations -- pushes by FOOM or other big corporations distorted things, when they could make 20+ person fleets alone -- but for the most part on that front, there was a lot of fun fighting with relatively little blobbing (more on this later though).
• By a similar token, small, cheap ships -- tech 1 frigates, destroyers, and cruisers -- actually got a lot more use on the front lines, since they could get into the more restrictive complexes.  That's good to see, since it makes the game more accessible to the newer players in the game.  Tech 1 cruisers are still some of my favorite ships to fly, so it's good to see them getting a bit more use in the game, instead of being dismissed as "useless" compared to tech 2 ships and battleships.
• The above two points managed to bring in a lot of new players to PvP, which was one of CCP's goals -- and a fair number of factional warfare participants did leave for 0.0 after spending time in the militia, notably the 22nd Black Rise Defensive Unit, which had been one of the most successful members of the Caldari militia.
  
• Plexing introduced a new mechanic that did not necessarily favor giant blobs of the heaviest ships you can find, and allowed single, inexperienced pilots to make a difference, and new tactics to be developed (such as the "budget smartbomb doomsday").  That's good...but they have their own issues (see below).
  

The Bad

• At least in the Caldari faction, there seems to have been a homogenization of the roleplaying groups, which, in combination with the storyline's progression since last May, seems to have drained a lot of enthusiasm out of the roleplaying community.  CAIN really did not want to join factional warfare at first because we have no desire to support anything related to Heth, but in order to defend the State we really had no choice but to join.  Wardeccing individual corporations just didn't work out very well (as the Star Fraction and others are coming to the same conclusion).  This has been a loss for the game, in my opinion -- factional warfare isn't nearly as interesting as our war against the Acheron Federation or other roleplaying enemies was in the past.
• In an effort to make factional warfare appealing to as many people as possible, it was also made as consequence free as possible.  Players and corporations can come and go from various militias (even opposing ones in turn), Caldari militia forces can base out of Federation militia stations, and changes in occupancy have no real game effect whatsoever -- it's just a scoreboard.  This has caused a disengagement of players from the actual progression of the war and few members of the militias seem to feel any sort of strong attachment to their faction, many of them changing sides overnight when things got boring.
  
• Factional warfare isn't really a sustainable activity for most people.  The "rewards" of doing so are limited to titles that mean nothing, and higher factional standing that most of the roleplaying community already had.  Even the titles are not really attainable any way other than plexing, which is a rather boring and unskilled activity at least three-quarters of the time -- note that the Gallente militia has been relatively even with the Caldari in terms of kills, even while they were having systems taken from them left and right.  This is largely because the most active corporations in the Gallente militia were not interested in bothering with plexing, whereas those in the Caldari militia -- the 22nd and PERVS, and to a lesser extent CAIN -- put effort into it.
• Factional warfare was designed as an introductory/transitional activity, which probably contributes to the above point.  For some people, that's not necessarily a bad thing -- the 22nd, FOOM, and a number of other corporations have left the militia with their new experience to try their hand in 0.0.  But for roleplaying corporations that want to align with the empires in the way that they've been doing informally for the last several years, it leads to more dissatisfaction and frustration.  After "winning" on the Caldari front, there just doesn't seem to be anywhere else to go for us.  This unfortunately feeds back into more dissatisfaction with roleplaying and the storyline in general (there's a lot of that going on, yes).
• Factional warfare seems half-finished (largely because of the above points).  Despite being promised for years, it seems like the design was extremely simple and something that CCP thought they would come back to and improve later (and, in fact, they are doing that very thing now), but they waited too long.
  

The Ugly

• Tama (and, on the Amarr-Minmatar front, Kamela).  A meatgrinder on an epic scale, where people feel compelled to fight and yet accomplish absolutely nothing.  This obviously wasn't something CCP intended, but it arose just the same.  It turned a lot of people off factional warfare as well, because they thought that was all there was to it.  I'm not sure of an easy way to fix that either.
• Factional warfare seems to have only made the increasing disconnect between the player universe and the NPC universe in Eve more and more obvious.  The party line seems to be that "occupation" is only space superiority, and even that has relatively little effect on the people on the ground.  In my experience, that seems to have only increased dissatisfaction with the game's storyline and factional warfare in general -- many of the roleplayers I know see it as "dumbing down" the game or making roleplaying (and the storyline itself) increasingly pointless.  I can't help but feel some sympathy for this point of view.
• Tied to the previous point, the whole plexing/bunker mechanic doesn't seem to make a lot of sense in terms of the game world, and it's such a transparent "game" that it hurts immersion, much like the mess that is sovereignty.
  
• Pirates in the militias are extraordinarily frustrating, but if they are in yours you can't be proactive about them because of the standing hits.  This doesn't come up that often -- most of the pirates don't stay in the militias for the same reason -- but it's another almost unavoidable ramification of how factional warfare works.
• Organizing a fleet of militia pilots seems even worse than herding cats.  I think every single militia has one or more "trusted" channels for specific corporations or pilots, and even then it's difficult to organize.  This isn't something easily fixed, but it's a bit disheartening to see 300 people in militia chat and no one actually interested in fighting, or anything more interesting than a giant blob (usually in a major center of fighting, like Tama).  All four militias are essentially the same as a horribly failing alliance, only one where no one trusts anyone else but their own corporation and people can decide for themselves whether to join or not.  Even worse, the militias are riddled with spies, and there's really no easy way for a new player to know which FCs can be trusted to know their stuff, or simply not to be griefers that are going to lead them into some nullsec gatecamp (though the latter certainly happens considerably less these days).
  

Overall, I have to say that factional warfare has been disappointing for me and the other players I play with.  This was essentially the same sentiment I had when I participated in the factional warfare roundtable at FanFest last year, and there were no substantial changes since then, so perhaps that's unsurprising.  While I am hopeful that it will be improve, the only change announced so far (giving factional warfare participants loyalty points for their activities) seems like a bandaid that really won't solve many of the fundamental problems with the mechanics.  Rather than call it a failure, though, I think I'd call it a false start, and one which has been allowed to linger too long -- only time will tell if it is allowed to fester like the sovereignty problem or if the devs will manage to make it a truly compelling feature of the game.