Factional warfare - focus and goals (CSM)

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Raised by: Ankhesentapemkah
Submission Date: 28-09-2008
Issue ID: 0103-03-0088

Problems

There are several major problems with factional warfare.

  • Lack of reward and consequence to contesting and capturing systems (1)
  • Lack of reward for capturing/defending complexes (2)
  • Lack of reward for kills (3)
  • Missions not contributing to system contestation (4)
  • No meaningful items in the FW loyalty point shop (5)
  • No loyalty point gain outside of missions (6)
  • Inability to sustain a factional warfare career without another income source (7)
  • Possible permanent damage to standings for no gain (8)
  • Lack of goals (9)

Clarification

(1) Currently, when a system changes ownership, there is no reward nor consequence to this. It will be listed on the factional warfare statistics page but no credit is given. In addition, there are no changes in the system itself. People can still dock at stations, and agents will still hand out missions. There is nothing that shows that a faction occupies a system besides a little bit of text at the top of the screen.

(2) Fighting over complexes is not encouraged either, as there is no reward for the participants besides a little bit of (useless) standing with the militia corp, and a minor standing gain with the faction upon promotion. This does not encourage people to join into the fight, and makes most complex captures a boring “wait for the timer to elapse” chore.

(3) Killing other pilots may be exciting for some, but once again, there is no gain for doing so. The players lose ships in combat but do not gain anything that makes up for it.

(4) Players can run mission for the militia, but this does not have an effect on the state of the system, giving the players an unrewarding feeling and making the whole endeavor quite a pointless exercise from the militia point of view.

(5) The factional warfare militias do have a loyalty point shop, but no special items can be obtained there, thus not rewarding the players that participate in factional warfare.

(6) An additional problem with the loyalty points is that they can only be gained in missions – not through kills or the capturing of complexes.

(7) Due to the lack of rewards but combined with the fact that players will lose ships during the course of factional warfare, people will drop out of factional warfare as their money runs dry, and are forced to pursue other careers instead. Factional warfare is not sustainable, which certainly leaves a bad impression on new players that fail to make any kind of progression through factional warfare gameplay.

(8) Destruction of NPC ships in missions and complexes will seriously damage player standings. This will make them unable to run missions or even gain access to opposing faction space, even after they ended their careers. Players are forced to suffer serious, possibly permanent consequences for no gain.

(9) There are no diverse objectives in factional warfare. Mission running follows the same mechanics as we are already used to, and complexes do not offer any variation. There should be more goals and objectives in factional warfare.

Solutions

There should be meaningful consequence as well as rewards to conquering systems. While revoking docking rights may prove technically difficult, station services could be disabled. In addition, there should be dynamic occurrences in the system, based on what side owns it. One way to accomplish this is by adding cosmos type agents in space, which can demand dogtags, slaves, and other goods, for example, as well as offer missions related to factional warfare, such as capturing a complex in system X. These agents are only present if a certain faction occupies the system. It would also be possible to offer medals through these agents, giving extra incentives for the players. These medals hold significant value, as they require a whole system to be captured, and a mission to be completed. Each system can have its own unique medal in this way.

Missions should generate victory points towards system contestation.

As for rewards, there should be direct rewards for kills, complex captures/defends and destruction/defense of the system control bunkers. The rewards of kills can be based on the class of ship that is destroyed, to prevent people killing their alts.

One of the options is to remove the standing gain from missions and complex captures, and allow players to buy standing through the loyalty point shop instead. This will allow players to choose between financial gain, or invest towards promotion. As their rank goes up, additional standing becomes more and more expensive, but additional items may be unlocked in the loyalty point store itself.

While completing missions and capturing complexes, the players will seriously damage their standing due to the destruction of NPC ships. There either should be more reward for doing so, or the standing penalty for ship destruction should be capped, so it will never lower the standing below a critical threshold (-5 is the threshold for mission availability, which is what I would suggest).

Besides missions and complexes, there is not much for the players to do. There should be some more objectives, especially for the mining and industrial aspect of the game. This has already been illustrated in the ‘Factional Warfare by Eva Jobse’ document sent in a few months ago. Another suggestion often heard is making certain trade goods such as slaves and refugees significant, by making them obtainable at certain sites and allowing them to be handed in at

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