Faction warfare: Difference between revisions

Factional warfare was introduced by CCP with the Empyrean Age Summer Expansion 2008 Eve to ease on the step from the PvE game play to the PvP gameplay. In-game wise it moves the storyline into a war which has been on the horizon in several storyline missions as well as global in-game news.

Missions and capturing plexes give out mainly standing within the four militias and empires as well as handing out ranks depending on the gained standing.  

Credits go to the official factional warfare guide [http://www.eveonline.com], the Minmatar militia academy forum [http://www.Minmatar-militia.org] and several other forums from where I gathered my knowledge.

Factional warfare introduced with the Empyrean Age Expansion 2008 was introduced by CCP to Eve to ease on the step from the PvE game play to the PvP gameplay. Ingame wise it moves the storyline into the war which has been hinted at in several storyline missions as well as global ingame news.

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 very well on the Dotlan EveMaps (under Special Maps).

These plexes are anomalies that can be scanned down by the 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.  

Plexes come in three sizes, the bigger the more victory points naturally:

===Scanning for a Plex===

Fly to a planet at random distance, open up your scanner window, select cosmic anomaly, click on scan and wait for the result. If you are lucky a cosmic anomaly will show up, with a signal strength, distance and accuracy. Signal strength can indicate already to the size of the plex, with smaller signatures being a bigger plex.

 

Around 0.5 and below is usually an unrestricted major, 2.0 and above usually a minor but distance from the hit also contributes to the signal strength. Signal strength 1.0 - 1.5 might be a minor if its several AU's away and 0.5 - 1.0 could be a medium plex and not a major.

 

If you are in a gang people usually put the planet number they are flying toward in fleet chat so you get better coverage of planets.

 

A core probe launcher with the core probes will reveal all plexes with a 100% hit within the system with just one probe out, allowing for quick scanning of a complete system.

LP rewards for defensive plexing are given at a reduced and variable rate:

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.

Usually people “speed tank” plexes, means one pilot in a fast ship grabs all aggro and drags them around within the deadspace, while another gang mate sits close to the countdown beacon commonly called the button. Watch out for the re-spawn. Shooting NPCs gives no bounties but you can loot tags and salvage the wrecks.

Factional warfare mission are missions that take you deep into enemy low-sec territory (6-12 jumps), where you have to do a regular missions, though the difficulty is easier than a regular as these mission are more an incentive to PvP. The difficulty is about one lvl easier than normal empire missions, so a factional warfare lvl3 missions is like a difficult lvl2 normal empire agent mission.

There are only kill missions directing you to kill either NPCs ship(s) or a certain structure and there are no storyline missions after 16 missions have been completed. Just as in factional warfare deadspace plexes MWDs can be used during these mission.  

The major difference between normal and factional warfare missions is that the beacon you fly to will be visible just like plex beacons in the overview, so that everybody (again 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 and the NPCs, as they are faction Navy ships don't give bounties. They loot they drop is mainly consistent of Navy tags though the occasional module is there as well.  

The original point of these missions is more or less putting a big sign on your pod telling everybody, please gank me and being an incentive to roam around in low sec.

With (reference) 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.

In general all missions are soloable but will take a lot more time and effort as normal empire faction with an increased risk of a player encounter. Al mission up to lvl3 can be done to a fair extend that they are worth doing it solo for the LP reward to get the new and unique faction navy items. Lvl4 missions will be taking a lot more time and thus increase the risk making it a close draw to a 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 |Patch notes for Apocrypha 1.5, released 20 August 2009]). This allows you to skip missions till you get a few mission in one agent.

The current more or less Minmatar militia standing is against pirating, as it is counter-productive as it drains resources from plexing and most FW corporations have a semi-ingame goal focussing on holding and gaining occupancy.  

Ranks are the only visible reward you gain from participating in FW, which do sound and look nice are tied to your standing with the FW militia. They sadly do nothing apart from looking and sounding nice and giving your opponent more LPs.