For Faction Warfare, It Was Too Little Too Late

In the last 24 hours, two of the largest and most active alliances in the Caldari Militia have announced their withdrawal from faction warfare:

Link

And:

In response, prominent Gallente Militia leader Julianus Soter wrote a piece bemoaning Cal Mil's failure to step up to the latest Federation offensive launched this summer:

The Caldari Militia’s response was again largely passive. And I will levy the vast majority of the blame at the Templis CALSF and The Bloc leadership team.
Whether they were misguided, unmotivated, or ill informed, the choice to passively lay down while we conducted the offensive has caused catastrophic harm to their organizations. Each week, fewer of their active PVP’ers participate. Major defense fleet operations they form have withered, to the point where they are overwhelmingly outnumbered by Galmil, and are often forced to stand down while structures are killed.
The facts are quite clear at this stage that the inaction of Calmil leadership has led to a steep decline in activity by their players, at all timezones. And a counterattack has still not come.
When the offensives at Eha began, I was utterly astonished to see how little resistance was offered by the Caldari Militia. Over four days, the system went from 0% to full conquest for the Gallente. There were fights every hour of the day for the last few days, however, the Caldari were consistently overmatched and simply didn’t have manpower to support any serious defense.
This comes down to a failure to properly recruit and motivate younger and moderately skilled characters to participate in these kinds of fleets. And even if they had a higher skill player base, they could have conducted guerilla warfare with higher skilled ships such as Omen Navy Issues, or other fast faction ships, to whittle down the Gallente blob. But the same tired tactics of the past were rehashed over and over. Navy Hookbills. Catalysts. Cormorants. Punishers. Over and over again. The result is now clear for all to see.

Going into the way back machine, back to April of 2018, I wrote something:

Without intervention, Faction Warfare is going to wither and die. Right now its quickly becoming only a farming mechanic with some jostling over tier levels and no strong desire for open direct conflict outside of meaningless good fights. Far more engaging is the emergent play over structures like POCOs, citadels, and engineering complexes as well as the refineries and moon politics next year, none of which has any hook into faction warfare. You might as well not be in a militia unless you roleplay or your members need the mechanic to make money. And that's sad.
It is often said that Faction Warfare suffers from "good enough" syndrome in CCP, but at some point we need to tell CCP loudly that FW is no longer good enough but is indeed dying. Do they want to save it? 

I believe that CCP is letting Faction Warfare die. A year and almost a half later, there has been no large effort to reinvigorate the feature and we see the end result of the dominoes falling since before that time. As the players in the militias aged and gained wealth and experience and security, without new blood to freshen the content , it was only a matter of time before one side would come to dominate and force the other side out. Gal Mil got lucky with the expedition to Cloud Ring being so successful and setting up the content to drive their alliances and coaltion forward while Cal Mil Alliances languished. As Gal Mil forged new deals with null sec power blocs, the allies of Cal Mil withered away. When a strong and unified (mostly) Gal Mil decided to move on the warzone, Cal Mil could only watch their homes burn.

And CCP allowed it to happen by standing by and letting the process play out. Many things could have been tried to spice up the warzone, there were no shortage of ideas. CCP lacked the will to try.

I wish my old Caldari foes good fortune in whatever new arenas they go towards. Hopefully Faction Warfare will get some real love in the future to bring you back.

Warzone Dynamics

In response to my last post where I said "[w]ithout intervention, Faction Warfare is going to wither and die" commenter Easy Esky asked:

How specifically is it dying? Has there been a noticeable decrease in the number of players in FW systems? Is there a way to overview LP volumes to see it reduced? Just looking at the number of ships killed in FW zones, is it smaller? I ask these questions, because if you can demonstrate actual decline then it will get traction with CCP.
Wasn't there a massive resurgence by the Caldari which saw them win against odds to take Gallante down? Events like this do not speak of a declining play style. 

I readily admit that I have no interest in wading through the records from ZKillboard or some other database and finding the statistics. I blog for fun of writing and have no time in my busy life to dedicate to that kind of project.

But I can tell you my impressions from being active in the warzone over the past multiple years, as well as talking to other players.

Yes, there was a massive resurgence by the Caldari militia that was fueled by new Alpha pilots from the Ascension release, and it saw them push Gallente down to tier 1 and took some long held systems like Vlillier and Nennamailia.

And yes, Federation Uprising had a tough campaign more recently against Black Shark Cult in the south of the warzone.

But the overall activity in the warzone outside of those conflicts has been quieter in my impression, and since the conclusion of those campaigns the opposing militia has seemed more subdued than ever.

Let's take a 5 second look at Black Rise kills for the past two years and a bit:

As you can see, Black Rise's heyday was late 2015, started to lose steam in 2016 until the Ascension release which powered the big spike on the right, but as 2017 wears on and the Alpha wave peters out we see declining numbers (and yes, the drop off on the end of the graph is the incomplete for April).

Now, one can look at that graph and say "March is usually slow as spring gets people out" but I counter with this: concurrent players is averaging higher due to Alphas but Feb and Mar for Black Rise were amoung the low points for the past two years. The rising tide of alphas is leaving the main battleground of Faction Warfare behind.

If I were a real journalist, or even am amateur one which I am not, I would sit down and spend a few days running over Zkillboard stats and player logins and what not, trying to prove that Faction Warfare is stagnating. I don't have the time. But I hope someone at CCP is taking the time to check on the health of this gameplay and see if it needs a shot in the arm.

Election Ruminations

EVE Fan Fest has come and gone and and a new set of faces have been announced as winning the election for CSM. Alas, Faction Warfare representative Scylus Black who I supported was not one the the ten players elected.

It was always going to be an uphill battle for a Faction Warfare rep to get elected with only 10 seats available, even if all the militias united behind him. But I'm still disappointed in the makeup of the CSM which sports 7 null sec members, 1 hard core wormholer, Fuzzy Steve who is unclassifiable, and a youtube video maker, only the last of which has an interest in a vibrant and dynamic low sec environment, and none that require faction warfare to be thriving. If FW were the gateway for new players (both Alpha and Omega) to be introduced to PvP before having the option to going to null sec or wormholes, then I'd feel like those candidates have some common interest with me and my alliance, but EVE is not a zone progression game and those other areas of space wisely setup their own new player organizations like Pandemic Horde and Brave Newbies to gather up the recruits. On the other hand, FW can be a destination and not just a stage for pilots... as long as its healthy.

I've discussed previously how structures have changed the warzone:

What this means is that NPC stations are quickly losing their cachet as homes for militia corporations and alliances, and they are being replaced by home Citadels that they cannot be locked out of by plexing enemy fleets. Furthermore, as faction warfare moves to concentrate on attacking and destroying enemy citadels, this provides upward pressure on fleet size and more frequent bat-phoning of capital heavy nearby entities top provide more firepower for destroying these large structures or counter-dropping firepower as deterrent for enemy fleets. No longer can a militia remain agnostic to the politics of the low sec entities that they share space with.

And threw out an idea to start to address it:

So I propose we extend the station lockout mechanic that currently applies to NPC Stations in faction warfare systems to anchored structures in said systems.

But the problem is not a problem for anyone outside of low sec (or even outside of the militias to a large degree) and any solution probably will have little to no impact on anyone outside of the militia pilots so the likelihood that any of the CSM 12 members will push to address it or be able to advocate well should CCP bring up the topic is low, and that is disheartening.

Without intervention, Faction Warfare is going to wither and die. Right now its quickly becoming only a farming mechanic with some jostling over tier levels and no strong desire for open direct conflict outside of meaningless good fights. Far more engaging is the emergent play over structures like POCOs, citadels, and engineering complexes as well as the refineries and moon politics next year, none of which has any hook into faction warfare. You might as well not be in a militia unless you roleplay or your members need the mechanic to make money. And that's sad.

It is often said that Faction Warfare suffers from "good enough" syndrome in CCP, but at some point we need to tell CCP loudly that FW is no longer good enough but is indeed dying. Do they want to save it?

Backswing

I've been fortunate that the last two weeks has been very exciting for my Sunday Night Fleet, with two Sunday's ago being the Boss Fight with the Chimera and friends on Abenall and last night seeing multiple small skirmishes with various small gangs and occasional ganks.

Overall, however, the theme that continues this spring is Caldari Militia's complete unwillingness to contest for space allowing Gallente Militia to gain and maintain valuable Tier III warzone control. TEMPLIS seems content to exist in Akidagi with the occasional foray and Black Shark Cult patrols Placid but is not making a lot of progress in any plexing effort, seemingly content to get the occasional fight and kill. The Bloc? Virtually missing in my experience.

To be fair, there have been efforts to anchor Citadels in Gal Mil systems but outside of those failed strategic gambits its been depressingly quiet in terms of Orange target fleets.

After a brilliant campaign in the fall and winter pushing Gal Mil harder and back farther then in recent memory, not only do they seem spent the State's militia seems broken, as if the failure to hold on to their gains in light of the rekindled fighting spirit of the Federation's forces was the straw that broke their back.

Another part of the problem could be a general malaise that despite making an effort no Faction Warfare candidate made it on the null sec dominated Council of Stellar Management, coupled with the signals from current CSM, CCP, and Fanfest that there are no refinements or refactors of Faction Warfare mechanics coming any time soon. With no promise of new or improved mechanics, veteran pilots frustrated with the current situation could choose to turn to other activities or simply not log in at all.

Its annoying that CCP recognizes that balance changes and new mechanics are necessary to ship balance to shake the meta and refresh the environment, and then leave Faction Warfare alone for multiple years in a row. Yes, structures have arrived and changed Faction Warfare, but its been tangentially and almost unintended effects, and not wholly for the positive as I've discussed before.

I'm hopeful a new force arrives to electrify the State and provide some excitement in the warzone.

Pacifying Placid

Over the past week and a bit our newly formed alliance Federation Uprising [FEDUP] has been conducting operations in Placid region, part of the South of the warzone along with Essence region (the North being Black Rise and Lonetrek).

The main Caldari opposition in the area comes from fairly new Black Shark Cult corporation, a decent sized group based around giving new players an introduction into faction warfare from the Caldari side. Unfortunately for them, they are smaller than Aideron Robotics alone, much less the combined efforts of AIDER, XMETA, JREX, and CRYRS.

The result of our attention has been a string of system flips all throughout Placid:

 This is not too big a blow to the Sharks, however, as they base out of high sec right now and the fights they have been getting have been great for their morale. Plus, now they have a slew of offensive plexing systems nearby giving more Loyalty points than defensive plexing.

For now we have the upper hand and the campaign has been good at cementing the alliance and starting off on the right foot.

Putting the Faction Back Into Faction Warfare

Last month I wrote a piece detailing how citadels are negatively impacting the warzone in a post called Game of (Citadel) Thrones:

All of this means that if an attacking force gets a Citadel to stage from, all the home field advantages of the defending force are lost: the attackers have the same ease in restocking and reshipping for participating in the attrition warfare. Worse: the attackers have the luxury of making multiple pushes over any period of time that they can muster pilots and fleets for, while the defenders only need to slip up once to find themselves on the cusp of losing their home station.

At that time I declined to offer suggestion as to how to address the emerging issue but last week I made time for an interview on my podcast with Scylus Black of Templis CALSF alliance, part of the Caldari Militia, who is running for CSM and I wanted to help out. During that interview I asked him ideas for addressing the impact Citadels are having on Faction Warfare and he wisely deferred promising to consult with the Faction Warfare community if elected for ideas.

But I'm not running for CSM so I can be an armchair developer. So let's get to work.

The Problem 

To reiterate, the issue is that citadels circumvent the main faction warfare mechanic that provides a benefit to owning a system, namely the station lockout of the opposing militia. This removes the defender's advantage in a system assault where the attackers anchor a citadel and de-incentivizes assaulting a system where the defender is living out of a citadel stronghold.

My Proposed Solution

I went over in my head many different options but ultimately there seemed to be shortcuts to circumvent all of them by using neutral dummy corporations to own the structures instead of militia. There seemed to be no subtle way to address this issue, and I'm a big fan of subtle solutions. But I'm not opposed to bringing out the sledgehammer when required and I feel this is one of those times.

So I propose we extend the station lockout mechanic that currently applies to NPC Stations in faction warfare systems to anchored structures in said systems.

What this means is that if your militia does not own the system, you cannot dock at a station or citadel or engineering complex (or in the future, drilling platforms). Yes, not even structures that your corporation/alliance owns. Yes, this is a huge deal, but it returns to the forefront the concept that owning a system in faction warfare *means* something tangible AND important. It means that losing a system is a significant blow to your militia if you have assets there. Yes, you could drop militia to become neutrals and get access to assets but that is not a trivial step to take and you cannot do other militia related activities while in that state. Its a non-fatal pain in the ass and its what made faction warfare system assaults/defenses feel so important to the pilots involved.

HOWEVER, there is a downside to this approach! Militias still need a way to operate even in a limited capability in a system owned by the enemy and by locking out all structure we once against will see attackers forced to use Player Owned Stations as forward operating bases to stage out of, but we know CCP's long term plan is to get rid of these archaic bug laden boondoggles.

So the second part of my proposal is a new special citadel class structure which I dub Astrakamp that has the offensive and defensive capabilities of a Raitaru engineering complex (maybe less) and can be bought from the militia loyalty point stores and, most importantly, is exempt from the station lockout mechanic like current structures are now.

Militias could use it as a forward operation base in lieu of a POS without having the durability of a full blown Astrahus citadel. This special structure can be fine tuned for balance between attacker and defender without seriously impacting other parts of EVE because while other non-militia entities could choose to use it as well but really why bother when you can get a full-blown Astrahus instead?

With these two changes you make ownership of a system in faction warfare important again without pushing the use of POS mechanics as forward operating bases, and introduce a balance lever specific for faction warfare, i.e. adjusting the properties of the Astrakamp to find the right balance between system offense and system defense.

Second Time's The Charm

A few days past Aideron made a second attempt to anchor and online an Azbel Engineering Complex (once again produced by your humble author) and this time we were successful.

Aideron's Azbel

This structure is part of a larger plan to turn the system of Fliet into a bulwark for the warzone in the south against the waves of Caldari Militia pilots. Combined with the Fortizar citadel laid down by our militia allies Mecha Enterprises Fleet (XMETA) we have made great strides to turn our home system into Fortress Fliet. We are hoping that this solid base can be a rally point for the militia to regroup from the fall of Vlillier and push back against the Caldari offensive.

If all goes according to plan, I hope to move some of my production for Ninveah Enterprises to Fliet to make use of low sec production bonuses for more $$$.

Game of (Citadel) Thrones

In September we saw the Battle of Aivonen where Gallente Militia spent a week of hard fighting to take the capital system from Caldari Militia. Recovering from that setback CalMil quickly retook Aivonen and proceeded to launch a counter-offensive on the warzone, taking a large number systems and highlighted by a 3 week long assault on the Gallente capital system of Vlillrier in Placid region that ended on Dec 23rd with the system's 7 year streak of being held by Gallente coming to an end.

Throughout these sieges one thing has become readily apparent: the home field advantage for defenders has been greatly diminished by the rise of Citadels.

* * * * *

Picture this: its before the release of citadels and you are in faction warfare trying to launch an assault to take an enemy home capital system. One of the big points of faction warfare is that the controlling defending faction can dock at the NPC stations there while the opposing attacking faction is locked out. Sure, one can use neutral alts to gain access to the station to retrieve assets and such but the members of an attacking militia cannot make use of the hangers, repair facilities, and safety of the station.

This means in a war of attrition while fighting over complexes in the system to drive contested level up (attackers) or down (defenders), the defenders can reship in system in the station very quickly while the attackers would have to find another source for their new combat ships. To get around this, the attacking force would make use of Player Owned Stations, aka POSes to stage out of. However a POS lacks a lot of the convenience of station hangers, permissions for allies not in the owning corporation are tricky and problematic, and restocking the hanger arrays is not as easy as jumping into a station with a jump freighter. 

The upshot of this dynamic was that mounting a successful assault on a home system of an enemy was very difficult if the enemy was well organized and had good pilot numbers.

* * * * * 

Fast forward to now. The first step in attacking an enemy home system now is to deploy an Astrahus, maybe even more than one. 

A citadel has many advantages over a POS for staging:

- permissions for access to allies is trivial using the access lists

- allies can rent an office and have their own organizational hangers

- jump freighters are virtually invulnerable jumping to and from a citadel

- handing out ships via trades or contracts is possible

- ship repair

- clone bays

- unlimited storage

But all of this convenience is dwarfed by the fact that while POS can be attacked any time, Citadels have owner determined vulnerability windows thus allowing them to dictate the timing of the initial battle. 

All of this means that if an attacking force gets a Citadel to stage from, all the home field advantages of the defending force are lost: the attackers have the same ease in restocking and reshipping for participating in the attrition warfare. Worse: the attackers have the luxury of making multiple pushes over any period of time that they can muster pilots and fleets for, while the defenders only need to slip up once to find themselves on the cusp of losing their home station.

* * * * * 

What this means is that NPC stations are quickly losing their cachet as homes for militia corporations and alliances, and they are being replaced by home Citadels that they cannot be locked out of by plexing enemy fleets. Furthermore, as faction warfare moves to concentrate on attacking and destroying enemy citadels, this provides upward pressure on fleet size and more frequent bat-phoning of capital heavy nearby entities top provide more firepower for destroying these large structures or counter-dropping firepower as deterrent for enemy fleets. No longer can a militia remain agnostic to the politics of the low sec entities that they share space with.

I am not sure this emerging gameplay is the in the best interests of faction warfare as a whole, but I see no immediate move or change to address the current issues. I only hope that CCP is observing the developing situation and making plans for faction warfare in the future to help it remain an independent and engaging game system in low sec that is not subservient to unaligned low sec entities. 

Rising Tide

Since the Battle of Aivonen at the end of October the State Militia have been resurgent and attacking the warzone with a fervor not seen since the last time Gal Mil tried to take the warzone in past years. Fueled by new pilots due to Ascension expansion and Alpha pilots swelling their ranks, CalMil has been reinforcing the contested states of mulitple home systems of Gallente corporations and alliances while running roughshod over quiet non-capital systems. The result has seen the scales shift in favour of Caldari with them currently holding 50 systems to Gallente's 51, the closest it has been in quiet some time, and no sign of the State war machine letting up the pressure.

The war rages in systems like Vlillirier where the fighting between militias has been at a constant boil for weeks:

This has been great content for both sides and new players to EVE get to see some small scale knife fighting in the plexes as well as larger fights for control of the systems.

It promises to be an interesting winter...

The Battle of Aivonen

The Gallente Militia launched an all out offensive on the Caldari Militia stronghold of Aivonen in Black Rise region last week and over the weekend the fighting was fierce as both sides jockeyed for control of complexes to drive the Contested Value up or down.

The result has been one of the fiercest battles in recent memory.

Aivonen over just the last 24 hours has been a hotspot of massive proportions in the cluster:

That red circle is Aivonen.

Despite intense resistance and determined leadership from CalMil in general and Templis CALSF in particular, the contested level continues day over day to inch up.

The next few days will be the most important. Can the Gallente forces continue to keep up the pressure? Can CalMil turn the momentum around?

Immense shoutouts to all pilots in both militias who are making this a memorable battle we'll talk about for years to come. The Siege of Aivonen... how will it end?

Aideron Robotics Evolution

About 2 years ago Aideron Robotics moved from the then capital system of Gallente Militia, Nennamailia in Black Rise region, to Heydieles in Essence region (and later to next door to Fliet), to work on developing the corporation in terms of identity and membership.

Over the intervening time we've had some membership fluctuations, some wins, some losses, but overall we were successful in establishing a unique corp culture and relationship with the rest of Gallente Militia and other low sec entities.

When the Gallente Militia Civil War started this past year we were able to leverage that unique position to remain friendly with both sides and keep neutral, hopefully providing some use as a friendly go between for the two camps to remind them that Caldari Militia is always the ultimate threat.

This summer we looked at our current state and we felt we needed to expand beyond our comfort zone of frigates, destroyers, and cruisers and look into integrating with the larger Gallente Militia culture. Part of this is because our members have matured and want to explore larger fights against more dangerous enemies than we alone can face, and part is because the miltia has thinned down due to the stagnant state of faction warfare and our presence in bolstering fleets can be more acutely felt.

The result this summer has been a few instances where Aideron pilots have joined a forming Gallente Militia fleet and doubled its size, allowing some amazing fights against Cal Mil and pirates that otherwise would not have happened with battlecruisers and battleships. These victories and experience work into a positive feedback loop where our pilots want to join more fleets and increase enthusiasm for other pilots.

The next step for Aideron is to develop our own Fleet Commanders in these larger doctrines and work with the leadership of the larger Gal Mil to support and lead more fleets. That involves me getting out of my small fleet comfort zone and getting more bold but I feel up to the challenge.

In other news, Aideron Robotics is recruiting so if you are interested in PvP in low sec as part of Gallente Militia, check us out on the web and in game in the "Aideron Robotics" public channel.

Slugfest in Akidagi

Last night we joined up with other Gallente Militia corporations/alliances in a Navy Mega/Mega fleet and went to shoot at a Templis CALSF Astrahus in Akidagi system of Black Rise.

Our fleet was about 45 pilots and we anxiously scouted the Templis HQ system of Aivonen and other system of known pirates and other Cal Mil forces for incoming fleets. Soon reports of a Rattlesnake fleet in Aivonen were heard, as well as an incoming Megathron fleet from The Bastard Cartel. As Templis jumped in we warped to the Aivonen gate and engaged the enemy, but it quickly became apparent we lacked the reps from our erstwhile Guardian logistics wing so we called in FAX triage reps and the enemy called in a Dreadnought.

Over the next 30 minutes we exchanged blows, targets, kills, and deaths. We lost one of our two Apostles but destroyed an enemy Naglfar, and as our fleet moved from one battleship target to the next we finally forced the surviving enemy to retreat. Despite being significantly outnumbered we held the field and won the ISK war.

Click for full size, link to BR here.

Major props to Cal Mil foes for bringing the fight and our Gal Mil bros for a great battle! Video incoming...

Bloc Fighting

Last night we were cruising around in a small fleet of Algos Destroyer when we spotted a Caldari Militia kitchen sink fleet of mixed frigs, destroyers, and assault ships. We chased them for a bit and they setup in a plex and I decided to charge in.

I proceeded to make two fatal flaws: I missed the Burst logistics frigate on the scan and overview, and then I proceeded to call primary as the well tanked Harpy assault frigate. Things did not go well.

Later on with a better composition and still smarting from the previous loss, we ran into the same Cal Mil fleet again and we re-engaged, this time setting up in the plex and having them come to us. The results were better; they won the ISK war but we held the field, and everyone left happy.

One of the pilots (possibly FC) on the Cal Mil side, Myra Stark, had this email comment to my post last week about the state of the warzone:

You missed one piece of this problem. The current Warzone Tier system punishes the losing militia. Using the Cal-Gal WZ as our model, the Caldari hold 22 systems and with 22 systems can garner 132 VPs enough for T2. The Caldari need 41 systems to attain T3. The Gallente have the ability to seize T3 whenever it suites.

 In recent history, this has occurred 3 times. Each time the number of Caldari held systems takes an immediate nose dive. Why? Quite simply FW system control is in the hands of players who have no interest in FW PVP or WZ control. They see FW as a means to earn LP/ISK for other pursuits in Eve. As such, they join the militia that pays the best for their plexing efforts. This forces the weaker militia to spend its time pursuing farming alts with ZERO interest in PVP and is like chasing ghosts even with the new Maulus NI. Then after you've chased them from system you must spend hours in plexes undoing the damage they've done. Gatecamps and aggressive patrolling helps remove them from system but doesn't undo the damage they've wrought. That requires FW pilots to spend hours dplexing with alts or mains of their own. 

Remember this damage is being done by farming toons. Attacking defended systems has zero impact on the farmer. You'll get PVP from the defenders. The opposing militia may even concentrate to defend the system all the while the farmer sits in his plex undisturbed because FW PVP pilots are PVPing elsewhere.  

Finally system vuln is a 24/7 business. This creates large windows of opportunity for farmers when your organization has few people online and they can farm unchallenged.
The WZ Tier system is broken. It empowers players with no interest in FW and prevents the weaker militia from rebuilding. Who wants to spend their precious game time dplexing systems for hours with little chance for PVP to offset the work of profit motivated farmers. In addition, efforts to claim the 41 systems required in Cal-Gal space for T3 requires PVPers to spend hours o-plexing while their home systems become increasingly vulnerable and usually at a faster rate because the opposing militia will rally to defend since they are starved for PVP as you mentioned. 

As long as the WZ Tier system exists the weaker militia is at a significant disadvantage as it tries to rebuild its numbers, hold its space and challenge the stronger militia for control in the WZ. Instead of the tier system, lock in plex value at T2. Provides fair profits for plexing and stops the movement of farmers from militia to militia in pursuit of the higher tier. It won't end farming but over time offers the opportunity to even out the influence of farmers on war zone control.

Faction War Stagnation

While things in low sec are still pretty active, the war with Caldari Militia has been mostly, well, un-war-like.

We've seem to have entered a "nightmare scenario" where one side has dominance in warzone control and the other side has no incentive or ability to break that control. Currently Gallente militia controls 79 systems while Caldari controls 22 and that situation has been mostly static for the recent past.

What was always expected to occur was that if one side dominated that two pressure valves would activate to start the pendulum swinging back to the other side. The first was that the winning side would be burnt out or get bored beating up the losing side and would go off and do other things allowing the other side to regroup and push back. The second valve was that the winning side would flood the market with their loyalty point store purchases and devalue their loyalty points while at the same time the other side's LPs would gain in value as the supply of their store items became limited, thus encourage LP farmers to switch from one side to the other.

However, those valves are not working. First off, because the warzone is so inhabited by PvPers, not only those in faction warfare but low sec "pirate" groups, that groups in a winning militia do not need to go on vacation for activity. Rather, they can simply change their objectives to spar with a different group or groups over non-faction warfare resources or just for "gud fites".

Secondly, most veteran faction warfare pilots don't earn the majority of their ISK through loyalty points. Instead pilots have secondary income sources such as exploration, planetary interaction, trade/manufacturing alts, etc that are all more lucrative per hour than plexing for loyalty points. This leads to the effect that people don't plex very much even when winning so the supply does not spike and prices remain relatively static, thus very little incentive to LP farmers to switch en masse from one side to the other. Couple in all the changes to make LP farming more difficult to do in an mostly-AFK manner and the farming of LP dynamic is pretty much negated.

Hence the current stagnation.

As we discussed this in the fleet last night while the only CalMil fleet was a handful of assault ships that ran away very quickly, we threw around some ideas to try and break the deadlock.

One thing suggested was increasing the rewards or uniqueness of items in the loyalty point store for the militias, which might encourage more offensive plexing and draw in more pilots to fight for control of systems. But really that only increases the number of for-profit farmers and not the actual bread-and-butter PvPers. Busier is not necessarily better.

Another idea was to work on a Viceroyalty program where groups in faction warfare could gain more control of a system or constellation, encouraging groups to fight for the militia to secure a more personalized home. For example, claiming viceroyalty of a system could allow a group to charge docking fees or repair fees in stations in their system. By giving groups something to build up and claim, you give something for other groups to try and destroy. Right now kicking an opposing militia corp out of a system is an inconvenience at best. However, this is a radical change and would require a lot of design and thought before implementation.

I know at one time CCP was thinking about making faction warfare a free for all instead of the current 2v2. This might invigorate the war by giving everyone more opponents, for example, current dominant militias Gallente and Minmatar could fight for overall dominance giving Caldari and Amarr a chance to rebuild. Or, it might not make a difference as the distances involved between the warzones might keep them isolated anyways.

There does not seem to be any simple answers.

The Gallente Militia Civil War

You can read the basics of why this war started in the excellent EveNews24 article but to summarize: militia corp Rapid Withdrawal (RDRAW) made an arrange with low sec big dog alliance Snuffed Out (Snuff) to blue each other and work together. RDRAW gets a friendly batphone for escalations against hostile forces they can't deal with on their own while Snuff gets a feeder corp for new pilots and another source of content as RDRAW acts as bird dogs for them. Since a lot of GalMil corps don't like Snuff they see the arrangement as problematic at best and traitorous at worse and have accused RDRAW of working with Snuff to kill GalMil ships while RDRAW claims they are free to make their own working alliances and the old guard of GalMil is being unreasonable since RDRAW has never actively tried to "awox" GalMil ships using Snuff or any other method.

The tension escalated for months until a recent incident in which RDRAW any or may not have been trying to kill a known GalMil associated vessel caused the escalation unto war footing for three of the main GalMil corps.

Aideron Robotics has been watching with dismay as the once coordinated Gal Mil warmachine has broken down and begun to tear at itself. As partners in the "South" of the Gal-Cal warzone Aideron has worked a lot with RDRAW for a long time and many times over the past years has seen a lot of assistance from RDRAW fleets and pilots in defending our home and assets (to be clear, other corps and alliances have also helped). At the same time, our pilots and fleets have worked with the "Northern" GalMil corps frequently, so we don't like seeing either of our allies coming to blows.

As such we've taken a neutral stance in the war in the hopes that it will be short and cooler heads will soon prevail. Nevertheless, a line has been crossed and I fear the unified Gallente Militia war machine will not be seen again for a long time.

Interesting Time in the Warzone

Its been an interesting few weeks since coming back from August vacation in the warzone.

The Caldari have been running around in a tight Cerberus fleet lately that just scares the crap out of me. You've got to have confidence you can handle anything you run into when you are roaming around null sec in Tech II cruisers and these guys got swagger.

On top of that, it seems like remnants of Black Legion's implosion have landed in the warzone as the alliance Carpe Noctum (ticker: N.O.X) and are roaming around, last night in a Gila Scimitar fleet which we joined up with allies RDRAW and sent them packing.

And some famous names in the neighbourhood now, as this character was spotting in local:

Elo Knight, now part of Snuff Box. Never thought I'd see the day.

Kirith's Annotated Cal-Gal FW Map

Click for full size.

From DOTLAN maps, numbers are ship kills / pod kills in the last 24 hours.

(TAMA. IS. SAFE!)

Fun Per Hour

Brave Newbies is leaving null sec for a vacation in low sec to reorganize and gather themselves after a rough season. The topic is not about Brave per se, but more about fun in the various types of space.

First off, I'm defining fun purely from a combat PvP perspective as that is the most common type of fun people are looking for in EVE.

I've written about Brave and how null sec is fun until its not. If you are looking for raw fun per hour for your organization, null sec is not it. Null sec is about Empire Building and clash of cultures wars, and as such can have vast amounts of quiet time and build up followed by frantic explosive battles. Overall, fun per hour is low but the highs are higher and bigger and the satisfaction derived from control of systems / structures / empires is larger and deeper.

Wormhole space also runs low on the fun per hour ratio. Its more about stealthy-stealthy-ninja-surprise! fun which has many fans and definitely makes wormholes interesting for many people. But the hardships of logistics, living out of POSes, scanning down connections, looking for fights cuts into the sheer amount of fun that can be derived per hour of game time.

High sec is a virtual desert for any PvP outside of arranged wars like Red versus Blue, or groups that like constant suicide ganking. For a large group looking for fun dynamic PvP, high sec will not work out.

And then we come to low sec. I've written before that low sec is the best place for consistent and destructive PvP and I suspect the whole "Fun per Hour" concept that is susposed to be part of Brave's DNA comes from having gestated in low sec in the first place. Quite simply, low sec is the best area of the game to maximize fun per hour, and to highlight that I want to present this excellent article from Crossing Zebras portal called The Battle of Kehjari:

A handful of times each year, Factional Warfare erupts from restless simmer into a protracted bloodbath. Days on end of relentless slaughter leave space littered with wrecks in the thousands. These kinds of multi-day battles are unique to FW and are always an amazing thing to be a part of.
Such was the recent battle for Kehjari, a well known north-western system in the infamous Black Rise region. Unfortunately for me I was on a much needed vacation at the time. Fortunately for all of us, Epikurus (Mjolnir Bloc CEO) and Veratrix (Spaceship Bebop FC) saw fit to join forces and write the amazing report you see below. Get a hot cup of tea and sit comfortably, this tale spans four days of bloodshed. – Niden

I'm not going to quote the whole thing, but let me quote parts of it (emphasis mine):

Critically, experienced HECON and Templis FCs were able to start effective defensive operations and to begin trying to slow the assault down. For four hours, from 1600 to 2000, the CalMil Coalition forces under allied command prevented any further gains. However, as Gallente numbers increased again in EU prime, the contested level started rising again. EU prime saw 3-4 hours of heavy fighting with GalMil being overwhelmingly victorious, and their numerical advantage only increased during the transition to US prime.
[...]
By 0500 eve time on Saturday morning, the situation looked very bleak indeed for the Caldari defenders. The initial Gallente assault had pushed Kehjari up to 75% in its first 24 hours, sweeping aside most resistance. However, GalMil was now moving into a timezone during which the Caldari Militia has recently dominated. Whilst GalMil had complete AU dominance during their sweep of the warzone last year, the return of The Church of Awesome, a highly experienced and dedicated AU corp, in the early months of 2015 had changed the equation dramatically. This allowed the Caldari Militia Coalition to maintain 20-man fleets on the field throughout the period up to and immediately following downtime. Gallente planners took this imbalance into account and hoped additional pilots would stay up late and get on early to try to keep things even in this timezone. The tactic paid off on Saturday morning. Gallente fleets held the contested level steady for most of the AUTZ though CalMil forces were able to pull back 10% in one sustained burst.
[...]
In the face of ferocious fighting, the Gallente managed to make slow but steady gains over the next 10 hours, hanging another 12% on the system by midnight, averaging an advantage of one-and-a-half plexes per hour. Exploiting their generally higher skill point levels, GalMil deployed its Zealot/Guardian fleet to dominate the medium and the large plexes, constraining Caldari efforts to the smaller plex sizes. In response to this, Caldari State Naval Operations [CSNO], the primary EU corp in HECON, redeployed their stocks of Guardians and faction cruisers across the warzone to Kehjari, generously handing them out for free to defending pilots. After some skirmishing, though, the Caldari fleet was defeated in one of the more notable pitched battles of the weekend.
[...]
This fight was symptomatic of a new ‘environmental factor’ in Kehjari. The large numbers of kills started to draw in third parties from across the map. Most notable among these were the enthusiastic local posters of Pandemic Horde [THXFC]. The Horde brought fleets of 30-40 pilots on a regular basis during EU and US timezones throughout the rest of the battle, causing problems for both sides. They generally avoided pitched fights with the Caldari and Gallente fleets, opting to camp the station and plex gates as well as gunning for solo and small gang plexers who were detached from the main militia fleets. On those occasions that they did engage directly, the Horde tended to be comprehensively defeated by the hardened militia pilots, but their ongoing harassment remained a significant irritant throughout the rest of the weekend.
[...]
Affecting the concerns about the supply situation was the fact that the fighting in Kehjari only got more intense as the day wore on, reaching a peak of violence with a gruelling non-stop fight that began at 1834 between two 30-man fleets with large logistics wings rolled on until 1848. After 14 minutes of intense and constant destroyer and frigate PvP, the remaining fleets had become kitchen sinks of whatever the pilots could find nearby and 98 wrecks sat gathered around the button in the plex. The ship losses were 60/40 in favour of the Gallente, but the tide had turned at the end with GalMil out of instantly available reshipsl. When it was clear that the fight was unwinnable, they warped out, conceding the plex to the Caldari.

Read the whole article, sure parts of it can be dry but its an excellent read about an intense battle for a single system in low sec. Sure, these battles don't happen very often but smaller versions of these battles for control of a system here and there are common enough and the entire area is constantly inundated of small to largish groups roaming and looking for fights, militas, pirates, and visitors.

If you are looking to maximize fun per hour, if its part of your corporate DNA, then you should strongly think about whether or not you want to live in null sec.

By the way, if you want a preview of what CCP wants from Fozzie Sov, read that article and imagine it writ large across null sec in multiple battles at any one time. Let's hope it works.

Away From Keyboard Gameplay

One of the thoughts to come out of the discussions about Faction Warfare plex farmers and  warp core stabilizers discussions that I want to explore further is Away from Keyboard (aka AFK) gameplay.

EVE Online is chock full of passive activities or partially passive activities that require limited player involvement, from mining to manufacturing to plex running. Some of it can be considered true AFK gameplay, others simply passive gameplay.

For the purposes of this post, AFK gameplay is defined as an activity where the pilot is required to be in game and engaged in the activity but the player is only partially engaged and could be doing other activities either on the computer but in different applications, or away from the computer entirely and only checking in occasionally.

This definition embraces activity as varied as autopilot movement through high sec (set destination, hit autopilot, come back hours later), asteroid / ice mining (checking in every few minutes to move ore / ice to hauler), mission running / ratting where a pilot warps in and launches drones, sitting cloaked in a system, etc. And of course, it includes faction warfare defensive plexers who only half pay attention to their ship orbiting the button.

In all these examples, the in game pilot is required to do something (even if its sit there and keep the ship running in the case of an afk cloaker) but the player is free to do anything else out of game. In some cases the player could stay at the keyboard and make the task run more efficiently (e.g. warping gate to gate and not relying on autopilot, or actively running a mission instead of letting drones do the work) but there is common property that runs through AFK gameplay: often the task is repetitive and boring and the player would happily do something else out of game rather than be stuck in game. In some cases, like afk cloaking, there is virtually nothing to be done.

So we need to ask a few questions: is this gameplay beneficial or at least non-harmful to EVE? And secondly, what can be done about it?

Is AFK Gameplay Harmful?

To be blunt, yes. In every single instance, you want players when they are logged in and doing an activity to be engaged in what they are doing and invested in paying attention. Having gameplay boring enough that players would rather do something else, in some cases sacrificing reward, is bad design.

Is There Anything CCP Can Do About It?

This is where things get more convoluted. In some cases it makes sense to change mechanics to make the gameplay engaging and requiring the player to WANT to be involved in it, but at the same time you don't want to make the gameplay frustrating or needlessly repetitive which may drive players away. If you go too far the other way, make it less boring by taking less time, you possibly skew the entire balance of the mechanic. For example, market differences drive a portion of the economy and if mass transportation of goods is allowed to discourage people from afk autopilot hauling, you could destroy a market trader career.

Other things could be easily addressed with a mechanics addition or change and not disrupt any vital economic or balance issues, like AFK cloaking, but beg the question if addressing the gameplay is worth the backlash of the players who utilize it.

A more current events example is faction warfare plexing (ignoring the whole warp core stab thing) where a defensive plexer is potentially faced with 10-20 minutes of button orbiting that may or may not get interupted by a hostile that the player then runs from. If we make the effort more intensive than simply orbit, e.g. require shooting at a rat or using an entosis link or some hacking minigame, than the fallout of that could be players stop defensive plexing and move on to other non-addressed AFK gameplay, perhaps depleting faction warfare of some pilots, and thus possibly fewer pilots in space. Depending on your point of view, this might be a GOOD thing (fewer pilots in low sec that avoid fights means less time hunting runners and more time finding fighters) or it might be a bad thing (less deplexing means home systems more vulnerable to attack means possibly less stability and investment in militia low sec HQ systems which possibly means less fighting pilots living in low sec). ALTERNATIVELY, you could make deplexing less time consuming thus being less attractive to going AFK while doing it, but then you run the chance of the risk-vs-reward dynamic becoming to tilted to reward and flooding the market and destroying the LP conversion rates... and so on and so forth.

In other words, since many things are interconnected, sometimes quite strongly, CCP can't simply go from one AFK gameplay mechanic to another and change them to make them less attractive to AFK gameplay, even in some cases where we strongly would like to remove boring gameplay (and let me tell you, orbiting a button is boring).

This is all not to say that CCP should never try and fix things. Don't be ludicrous! All I'm saying is that addressing them needs to be done carefully and with an eye to the knock on effects.

For now, we're faced with a number of AFK gameplay mechanics.

Welcome to my Citadel

On my podcast I already raved about the dev blog introducing Citadels but I'm going to go into again here because I cannot stress enough how much I like it.

I've lived and worked out of Player Owned Stations, aka POSes, before in null sec, low sec, and wormhole space over the 8.5 years I've been playing this game.

I still remember that feeling of awe the first time I saw one back in Pelille in my misspent youth. Someone was showing me how to scout out moons and we warped in to check it out. The large glowing sphere, the mysterious icons with names I saw nowhere else like Moon Harvesting Array, Silo, Corporate Hanger Array, etc. Some time later my group of friends decided to set up our own POS and I began to learn the Byzantium art to anchoring and setting up a "stick" of our own. And began to learn the horror of fueling calculations (be thankful new players for that evil has been vanquished at least).

Later on I would join a null sec alliance and our corporation would live in a stationless constellation and we, all 20 or so of us, would live out of one or two POSes. In order to have some private space for modules and loot, we each had anchored a secured cargo container at least 150 km from the POS itself so you could do short warps back and forth instead of having to slowboat around the POS itself. God, I hated that.

And then having to unanchor that thing? And all the structures? Evil.

I once had a high sec research POS in my solo indy corp but got war decced and it was destroyed in a long weekend I was away with family. That's when I decided that solo POS was not for me.

All this is to say, POSes are evil. They are overly complex, use mechanics that are not really shared anywhere else, and are generally a pain to setup, manage, and take down. Pretty, but pain in the ass.

And up until recently, the only thing outside of null sec Outposts that players could erect for themselves to live in, and Outposts require a magnitude larger amount of resources to make and then you could lose it in the next sov war.

Citadels hold great promise to fix this frustration. By using well understood and common mechanics (i.e. fitting modules like one fits a ship) and introducing station like docking and asset management, we enter a new age where players can come toegether to erect, live out of, and defend their own home without having to be part of a huge alliance or deal with the terribleness of the current POS mechanics.

I'm very excited.

Of course, there is a fine line to be traversed here in order to make feasible. In low sec, a common conflict driver is control of the Player Owned Custom Offices in the areas in which entities live. They are in a perfect balance of risk versus reward versus effort triangle where it takes enough effort to reinforce and destroy them that people are not doing it willy nilly but not so much effort that only the big entities can even consider doing so. Citadels, being potentially a lot more valuable than a POCO, will attract a lot of attention of people willing to expend more effort to reap the possible rewards of good kills and tears, so need to be sufficiently hard enough to justify the effort while not being so hard as to be impossible to reinforce and destroy.

So I eagerly await to see the final product for Citadels and how they change the landscape of low sec and beyond because I think they have tremendous potential for interaction and excitement.