Faction warfare

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. It introduces 4 militias, dividing the empires into two wars with objectives called complexes (plexes for short) in low-sec that can be captured by the different militias and also agents offering factional warfare missions. Doing these accumulates victory points, which contribute to switching a system’s occupancy. 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 [1], the Minmatar militia academy forum [2] and several other forums from where I gathered my knowledge.

Introduction

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.

FW puts the player into an "alliance" that is constantly war-dec'ed with two other "alliances" called militias. Each militia is holding occupancy over certain low sec regions between the two empires which the players fight for control vs the opposing militia. The central mechanism around FW is gaining occupancy by conquering factional warfare dungeons commonly called plexes. These plexes focus factional warfare participants into mostly frigate and cruiser size ships due to their restrictions on their entry acceleration gate.

Since these militias are tied to the four high sec NPC empires, the opposing NPC empires will take measures if you enter their empire space, sending/spawning Navy NPCs to shoot opposing militia members in 1.0 to 0.5 to protect their high-sec space, dividing high-sec into safer and unsafer high-sec while still being part of an empire war dec.

Getting in

There are two ways to join factional warfare. You can either join the NPC militia corporations as a solo player:

• The 24th Imperial Crusade (Amarr)
• The State Protectorate (Caldari)
• The Federal Defense Union (Gallente)
• The Tribal Liberation Force (Minmatar)

or you can join a militia with your whole corporation. Corporations are moved into a FW faction after the next downtime, either instantaneously or, if they're leaving a player alliance, after 24 hours.

To join the militia of your choice you need in both cases standing of 0.5 with the empire of that faction (social skills are not taken into account). You can get this by doing regular missions for corporations of that empire. For corporations the corporation standing needs to be above the 0.5 with that appropriate empire, the individuals standing is not taken into account (at least not directly).

Two main standings are used in Factional Warfare:

• Faction standings for joining requirements and NPC aggression.
• FW Militia standings for ranks (detailed later)

A detailed process is described at the eve online guide [3] .

Factional Warfare requirements

Apart from the 0.5 standing with the appropriate faction, there are no further ingame requirements, apart from not being on a trial account.

Skill-wise you should be able to fly a frigate with a MWD, scram/disruptor and web. This correlates with having the Basic Propulsion Jammer Operator certificate and the Basic High Velocity Helmsman certificate.

Having done:

• the overview class to understand the different overview settings
• the fleet movement class will be very useful
• knowing how to operate the onboard scanner (Apocrypa changes not taken into account yet)
• knowing how to use the star map is also not a must but can be an advantage

Apart from that I suggest being partially self sufficient ISK wise and being able to lose several frigates and cruisers including their fittings.

Consequences of being in a militia

The consequences of being in a militia:

• You are now in an empire war with all it consequences.
• You now will be attacked by other NPC faction navy spawns if you enter the opposing factions space. These will have different strengths depending on the security rating of the system and they will use neuts/nos, EW and web. They will however not scram/disrupt you, so if no player intervenes, you will be able to run away.
• If you entered the NPC militia you will have that NPC militia as corp channel and have access to a militia channel, resembling an alliance channel. The NPC corp channel is not used that much; the militia channel is usually full with people looking for fleets, advice, fleetmembers and/or intel which is semi reliable.

Just as in Eve Uni fleets, don't give out fleet locations in militia chat but feel free to rely intel. Also some FW corps have spies in the opposing militia channels and sometimes even in fleets.

You can now scan for plexes in low sec and conquer these to gain victory points for your faction. You will also be able to fight for control of the control bunker who defines the occupancy of a system. Gaining victory points will also result in increase of personal faction standing and with increasing standing youll new ranks.

What should I do before I joined a militia?

Before you join a militia make sure you don't have assets you need and are to dangerous or to expensive to be moved in the opposing empire faction space.

Further check your overview settings and adapt them. Personally I have a separate tab with opposing militia members just as normal war dec's with a flashy background on overview. I also have neutrals on overview to identify “out of corp” spies in rookie ships.

You also want to prepare a few ships before hand to quickly jump into a new one, for Minmatar FW Amamake is a common rally ground so a base near or in this low-sec system can be handy. For other militias I suggest looking at the FW Map pack from Ombey's Eve 2D Maps [4].

Having Teamspeak, Ventrilo and Eve Voice ready for usage will help as well. In the Minmatar militia Eve Voice is commonly used by all corporations, though the corporations have usually an internal TS or Ventrilo server. From hearsay, I heared that the Amarr militia has been using a more or less Amarr militia public Ventrilo server to handle militia fleets.

I personally prefer Eve Voice as it is available for everybody and you don't need to setup an additional program. Identifing who is talking is also a little easier.

Can I still do normal missions in empire or go mining?

Yes, you can do still missions in empire, but keep in mind that if you do missions in the opposing factions empire the faction NPC navy will also spawn and attack you.

Your access to other corporations even from the opposing faction is thus limited due to the movement restrictions due to these NPC Navy spawns. If you can keep up your standing with the other factions corporations you could join the Minmatar militia and still do missions for the Caldari empire, provided these agents are in Minmatar or Gallente space.

Suicide ganks into the opposing faction have been popular and happen from time to time, also the lone wanderer or fast interceptor is looking for unaware militia members afk-ing in their own space, but I haven't heared from somebody bothering to bring a neutral scanner just to find militia members in high sec.

Mining in common asteroid belts can be dangerous with the imminent danger that a suicide fleet shows up and there have been the occasional kills during the first few weeks of afk miners in high sec so you might want to refrain from doing that. On the other hand – and don't tell the Amarr – I do mine from time to time in Heimatar in a Hulk and so far have been only tagged once by a crow, who couldn't get passed by my shields and ran away when I unleashed my drones.

Risk assessment: with all those people, who do I trust?

Being thrown into an NPC militia , you end up with a whole bunch of people, and this still being Eve the questions arises can I trust these people?

The question as in all of EvE is no, trust nobody. Although the spying, backstabbing in the Minmatar-Amarr war is fairly low and the numbers of really bad or even traitorous FC is very low, each war is different. You could even say depending on what time you play the war within on conflict is fought differently as RL player TZ come and go.

A personal experience from the Gallente-Caldari war from our well known intelligence, Patric Reign:

As a member of the the Caldari militia it became apparent that many of the pirate groups were allied/supporting the Gallente militia in Black Rise. The risks of initiating combat against pirate targets who in many cases kept their sec status neutral, with the subsequent sec status hit and engagement of gate guns, kept the militia on the back foot. Corporations operating from high-sec would also declare war on individual corps in a militia. This would allow them to isolate and engage individual members of your fleet who belonged to those corporations without being flagged to the rest of the fleet. Intervening would also incur a sec-status penalty; Almost complete absence of command & control structures in militias.

Within the Amarr-Minmatar war the CVA have been a long time supporter of the Amarr NPC militia as well of some of the player corporations. Since alliances can't join militias their support was mostly more logistically and I personally encountered them almost never in the factional warfare zones fighting. Though they recently retracted their official support (ingame news), this doesn't mean that there are no out-of-militia supporters in the Amarr-Minmatar war. Personally I already encountered an NPC noob scout in an noob ship as FC following my gang everywhere dragging an Amarr militia gang with him.

There also have been some known spies in the Minmatar militia, who have been identified, which you will notice and learn from just watching the militia chat and being active. Keeping good and bad militia mmbers and FC in your personal adressbook can help keeping track of these people.

As Patric also stated there is no functional command structure within these militias - although some corporation have gathered around some regulations - there is no ingame way to enforce any of these regulations, e.g. killboard loss posting is requested but can not be enforced, there is no shared standing or derived standing and individual player corporations within a militia can be war dec'ed by player corporations within their own militia as well as from corporations outside the militia, resulting in no way to support allied player corporations in the militia from within the alliance apart from re'deccing the aggressing player corporation with your own corporation.

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.

Taken from the official guide:

There are different system states appearing in the "Occupancy" line on the top-left corner of the screen depending on the attacker/defender general strength status:

• Un-contested: natural state of a system occupancy and thus not directly shown. The system is currently not actively fought over by different factions.
• Contested: FW Dungeons have been claimed by the offenders. Defenders may take it down to "un-contested" by winning FW Dungeons back.
• Vulnerable: the attacking force won enough FW Dungeons to put the Control Bunker to vulnerable for attack.
• Lost: the system has been successfully captured by the attacking faction. As such, the Occupancy will switch to the new faction after the next Downtime. Existing FW Dungeons no longer affect the power scale and new ones won’t spawn until then.

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.

Plexing

Plexes are the major feature CCP introduced with factional warfare. These plexes spawn in the low-sec regions between the four major empire and divided the two wars into to war zones, one between the Amarr and Minmatar and one between the Gallente and the Caldari. These factional warfare low sec parts are very good displayed by Ombeves Factional warfare map pack obtainable at http://www.ombeve.co.uk/ .

These plexes an be scanned down by the militia members of both sides with the normal onboard scanner around each planet within a system. Scanning is chance based so standard recommendation ( on Minmatar side) is to scan at least twice before moving on to the next planet. 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. You always end up at 0km to the acceleration gate no matter what distance you choose, take this into account when you expect enemies following you or when you expect enemies at the gate.

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

• minor, 10min countdown, 10km radius, ships allowed: industriel, frigates and destroyers
• normal, 15min countdown, 20km radius, previous + assault ships/T2 frigates and cruisers
• major, with major's having two ship restrictions, both with 20min countdown and 30km radius, called
  • major, all previous + T2 cruisers and battlecruisers
  • unrestricted, with no acceleration gate and thus no ship restriction (hot-dropping titans please here ;) ).

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

Tactics for plexing

As every FC runs his fleet differently I just go over a few common tactics and approaches to finish plexes offensively or defensively.

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.

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 onboard directional scanner (Apocrypha changes not taken into account). Defensive plexing can be done against higher number of opponents if you stay close to the beacon and hide between your faction navy NPCs.

The internal plex spawning mechanism keeps track of the total plexes within a constellation (see also the FW maps) and due to a DT mechanism the likelyhood 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.

Factional warfare missions

Factional warfare mission are missions that take you deep into enemy low-sec territory, 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.

There are only kill missions and there are no storyline missions after 16 missions have been completed. Just as in factional warfare deadspace 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 and LP is slightly lower than normal missions.

The whole point of these missions is more or less putting a big sign on your pod telling everybody, please gank me.

More stuff?

Battlefield intelligence page

The battlefield intelligence page lists a few statistics about your militia, your corporation and your character. The items it list are number of pilots on each militia, including people in corporations, kills during the last day, week and total – no idea what total this is though. It also lists for the same timeframe victory points and last but not least currently occupied systems.

It also lists, which systems are close, where fights have occurred (dangerous systems) and which have been recently contested and/or changed hand, though again I'm not sure about this.

In overall, apart from the news to the sidebar, which are usually RP-ish nature with some hints toward certain objectives I hardly use it. More interesting and informational is the star map.

The Star Map

For factional warfare the star map has a few additional statistics, showing

• defensive systems: where a militia holds occupancy, but the opposing faction has contested the system
• offensive systems: where a militia has contested the current occupancy of the opposing faction
• occupancy: which systems belong to which militia
• kill statistics FW ships of the last 24hours and the last hour

For the first three options you can either choose “My Militia” or directly one of the four militias. “My militia” naturally is the same as choosing your militia directly from the four.

Pirating while in Factional Warfare

Pirating in factional warfare is a very controversy topic, ranging from “I don't care”, till “I'll shoot pirates even when they are in my fleet”.

The Drama-Lama is strong in this topic and militia corporations even had internal war-dec's against each other with the related forum wars e.g. on the Minmatar militia forum.

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.

They are not “anti pirate” on the other hand either, so commonly nobody will shoot a flash/low security standing militia member, though some flashy's in fleet had their occasional accident due to overeager fleet members not knowing the difference.

Rewards

With War is a full time job CCP introduced the factional warfare LP shop, where members of the militia have a fixed discount on the faction ships in the LP store. In addition CCP offered additional faction navy items, which are only attainable from the factional warfare LP shop.

Together with this CCP introduced gaining LP for shooting other ppl militia members based on the rank and shiptype the enemy was sailing. The formula used is:

[Total given LP value]: [Ship hull LP]x[Ship tech level LP]x[Pilot FW rank]

The LP value will be evenly divided for each gang member in grid range of the kill, no matter which ship they may be flying. Also, LPs will only be given for killing your militia direct opponents, not allies to them (as a Federation pilot, you will not receive LPs for destroying an Amarr pilot ship for example).

For more details please see the dev-blog [5].

With the upcoming Dominion expansion CCP is overhauling the existing faction navy ships and adding the tier one navy ships, again only attainable from the factional warfare LP shops.

Still Plexing was never intend to be lucrative, so there are no bounties for NPCs and apart from militia tags and salvage, which are sometimes hard to gain there isn't much profit to be made.

FW Missions do payout LP and ISK but compared to normal mission, the payout is way smaller with a far higher risk having to operate in low-sec with the “please gank me” sign on your pod, which should now be compensated with the items only obtainable through the FW LP shop.

Ranks

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.

Leaving factional warfare

Willingly leaving factional warfare from the NPC militia corps, is done just like leaving a normal corporation. If you leave a factional warfare your gained ranks will not be visible any more from the character page. You will not loose your ranks, so when you return you will start with your old rank, if you haven't damaged your FW militia standing, which can be done by e.g. joining the opposing militia.

You can also be forced to leave factional warfare, when you joined the NPC militia, when due your actions your standing drops with the appropriate faction below the required minimum.

From the official guide:

• Player:
  • Willingly:
    • If part of a FW militia, a player has to click the “retire” button in the sign-up FW page to leave it. The process happens instantly.
    • If part of an enlisted player FW corporation, the individual will have to leave the corporation though normal means to retire. If you have roles, the process will take 24 hours, otherwise it will be instant.
  • Automatically:
    • If an individual’s raw faction standings drops below 0.5, the player receives a notification mail to raise them back at the next downtime. If they are not recovered during the downtime after that (thus, two downtimes after the standing drop), the player will be instantly kicked out of the FW militia.
    • If part of an enlisted player corporation, individual faction standings do not apply for the check. Corporation faction standings are used instead, see below.
• Corporation:
  • Willingly:
    • The CEO/Director has to press the “retire corporation” button from the FW page. The change is done during the next downtime. Before then, any Director or CEO can cancel this action by pressing the “cancel retirement” option.
  • Automatically:
    • If a corporation’s raw faction standings drops below 0.5, mail notification is sent to the corporation mailbox at the next downtime. If the standings are not recovered after the second downtime (two downtimes after the standing drop), the corporation is instantly expelled.

Player Experiences

Here just a few collections of other player(s) about Factional Warfare. From Juan Rayo, Gallente Militia Member via a player corporation(2009):

I log in at any time and take a look at militia chat. People are X'ing up for something. Intel channel says the Caldari are moving a fleet down the pipe, 30 strong, lots of Battleships and some EW boats, so I could go join the fight. In another channel, plexers are trying to decontest a system that the Caldari have been fighting bitterly for, slowly driving us out. .

They are more organized plexers than most of us, and have been slowly, but surely, conquering Gallente territory. Plexing would raise my standings, and help us defend the systems, so I could head that way. Corp chat is already heating up with people calling for support or looking to go kill, explore a WH or do a mission. A quick look at my wallet tells me I could also use some missioning to pad it a bit, faction warfare is an ISK sink after all.

The great thing about it is, ALL this options are open to me the very moment I log in. Faction warfare offers a lot of things to do, and unless your corp is fairly strict, a great ammount of liberty to do those things.