Faction warfare: Difference between revisions

= Now I'm in what can and should I do? =  

Factional warfare is apart from restricting your access to two of the major NPC empires and dumping you into a high sec war expanding your gameplay with two features, factional warfare mission and plexing. Both accumulate victory points which at a certain (only internally tracked) point make the control bunker of a system vulnerable. At this point the offensive faction can attack this bunker and turn the occupancy from the opposing ones into their owns.

''To change these states each side has to gain victory points by either doing factional warfare complexes aka. Plexes or by doing factional warfare missions.''

Plexes are the major feature CCP introduced with factional warfare. These plexes spawn in the low-sec regions between the four major empires and divide the two wars into two war zones, one between the Amarr and Minmatar and one between the Gallente and the Caldari. These factional warfare low sec parts are displayed on the Dotlan EveMaps (under Special Maps).

These plexes are anomalies that can be scanned down by militia members of both sides with the normal onboard scanner around each planet within a system. If you warp to the plex the acceleration gate beacon will become visible for everybody in the system (you can cancel the warp but it will still become visible to everybody) and everybody can pass the acceleration gate if they fly a ship within the gates restrictions.  

 

Originally there was a bug that would always drop you at 0 on the acceleration gate, no matter which distanced you selected, but this was later fixed by CCP.

All plexes are defended by NPCs of the faction that is currently holding the occupancy of the system. The difficulty ranges depending on the size and they respawn after a while.

First, do not open the plex immediately, as plex beacons only visible in space for everybody after somebody warps to it. Some FCs want to control which and how many plexes are open to hide them and do them one by one, while others open them all at once to do them all at once.

 

In the past, people would “speed tank” plexes and not destroy the NPC guarding the plex. As of late 2013, the NPC must be destroyed to offensively capture a plex.

You can use the size restrictions of the gate to your advantage. You can either wait inside (drop a can at your warp-in point from the acceleration gate) or gank people who warp to the beacon. Further sitting at the acceleration gate you can see what ship types and how many are in the plex by using the d-scan.

The internal plex spawning mechanism keeps track of the total plexes within a constellation (see also the FW maps) and due to a down time (DT) mechanism the likelihood of plexes spawn after DT is a bit higher. Enforcing focus to a certain constellation will thus result in a slightly higher efficiency in accumulation enough victory points to make a control bunker vulnerable.

All missions are encounter missions and you kill either NPCs ship(s) or a certain structure. There are no storyline missions after 16 missions have been completed. Just as in factional warfare deadspace plexes, MWDs can be used in the mission pockets.  

The major difference between normal and factional warfare missions is that the beacon you fly to will be visible to everyone in the overview, just like plex beacons. Anyone in the system, including neutrals, can see where somebody is doing a factional warfare mission and warp to you to fight you. Due to the decreased difficulty of the factional warfare missions (as the main purpose is to fight other players and not NPCs) the pay out of factional warfare missions in terms of ISK is slightly lower than normal missions. There are no bounties for the NPCs since they are faction Navy ships. The loot they drop is mainly Navy tags, although the occasional module might be there as well.  

The original point of these missions is more or less putting a big sign on your location telling everyone, please gank me I'm doing a mission, thus encouraging PvP. This provides an incentive to roam around in low sec and surprise missioners in mid-mission.

CCP overhauled the Factional warfare missions as well as the loyalty points shop. The overhaul included a higher reward in Loyalty points per factional warfare mission as well as some unique items only obtainable from the militia corp loyalty point shop. These items include new faction navy items as well a few unique new faction ships. In addition to adding these new rewards all stuff bought from a militia comes with a LP discount. This discount goes up to 60% resulting in paying only 250k LP for a faction navy battleship rather than 650LP points.

Just as with plexes the factional warfare missions are gated with acceleration gates, limiting the ship size passing through it. The ship restrictions are just the same as for plexes.

With all missions being kill mission a lot of these are partially blitzable, depending on the incoming damage and your tank. The structures and NPC mission targets though are setup in a way to provide a challenge but not being overly dangerous as their incentive is to keep you for a certain time in low-sec to provide a chance for a PvP encounter.

In general all missions can be completed solo, but it will take a lot more time and effort than a normal empire faction with the increased risk of a PvP encounter. All missions up to lvl3 can be done solo and are generally worth doing for the LP reward and the opportunity to buy unique faction navy items, compared to empire missions. From a risk vs reward perspective, Lvl4 missions take much more time, increasing the risk of PvP and making it a close draw to an empire lvl4 mission.

The mission NPCs though still use the "old" AI thus only aggroing the first ship close to them, allowing a fleet to speed tank the NPCs while the rest of the gang kills the objective. Another important difference to empire missions is that you can decline factional warfare missions from your agent as often as you want (since [http://www.eveonline.com/updates/patchnotes.asp?patchlogID=191 Apocrypha 1.5, released 20 August 2009]). This allows you to skip missions till you get a few missions in one area.

The average LP payout for FW mission was:

As mentioned before, in a group of players one can speed tank the NPCs while the others go for the main objective. Also skipping through missions allows the whole group to collect several missions into one or two systems in the close proximity. Depending on the fleet composition, it's also worth doing all missions from all agents as L1 missions can be done by the smaller ships, while the bigger ships can go for the higher level missions.  

Communications is set to improve and allow better comms between EVE and Dust players. When an EVE pilot connects to a district, they are added to the DUST team text chat for their militia and can join in voice comms as well.