CSM X � Summit One
2015 / 09 / 17
Session : Factional Warfare & PvE

CSM ATTENDEES:
* Sion Kumitomo
* Sugar Kyle
* Sort Dragon
* Endie
* Corbexx
* Steve Ronuken
* Mike Azariah
* Jayne Fillion
* Cagali Cagali
* Gorski Car
REMOTE ATTENDEES:
* Manfred Sideous
* Thoric Frosthammer
* Chance Ravinne
CCP ATTENDEES:
* CCP Leeloo
* CCP Falcon
* CCP Affinity
* CCP Paradox
* CCP TomB
* CCP Scarpia
* CCP RedDawn
* CCP Frellicus
Affinity - Introductions all around.

Affinity - Okay so firstly, we're aware that FW and PVE are two different things, but in the same respect we're working on adding content to FW, so we decided to have one session that we can talk about everything in.
Affinity - Firstly, we're looking to add daily incentives to EVE called a Tribute System. We've thought about a few things and initially we were looking at adding it as a mission reward. However, this would leave out the wormhole players and other groups, so we wanted a solution that captured all areas of space and one where people could be rewarded for doing the content they already do, in the place they already live. The solution we've come to at the minute is to reward on dungeon completion; which is triggered in all PvE except COSMOS and landmarks. This is of course all up in the air right now. we're still working on it.
Mike - Does hacking a site come into this too?
Affinity - Yep, it does!
Jayne - So like what you guys are doing with DUST?
Affinity - Yep! We want to get people out into space, but make these incentives so that people don't have to leave where they're living to do them, just get involved with their local content to qualify for them. We're also looking to tier it from one through five, and group all content depending on the difficulty and rewards you get into one of those tiers for the daily payout. These rewards will be cumulative so if you do a level one piece of content, you'll get the reward, then later in the day a level 4, you'll get the rest of the reward up to level 4 for completing that one too.
Jayne - What kind of rewards are we talking about?
Affinity - ISK rewards.
Jayne - Do you know how much ISK this will be injecting into the economy?
Affinity - This is still early in design phases so we'll talk to our data team when we want to work this out.
Mike - What about LP instead so that you don't affect the market?
Affinity - We don't want to crash the LP market though. I don't think some of the FW players would be happy with this. We've thought about a lot of different things such as aurum, LP, ISK, and we're investigating them all.
Sugar - The LP market is pretty volatile and will be even more so with upcoming changes. Mission running and FW LP conflict with each other, and we have a lot of people who just want the LP store revamped in general.
Affinity - I think it's bad for new players too because if we give them all this LP, then they need ISK, which they don't have, to spend it. It complicates things for them.
Scarpia - ISK has the most benefits because it's the thing that people want the most and the thing that's used most widely, especially new players.
Mike - What about varying things a little, people like randomization, maybe now and again you could get a little more as a random.
Affinity - We're also looking at integrating this with the opportunities system, so that we can give out rewards that way too.
Jayne - New players might not know how to cash out LP, the entire time I was a mission runner, I had no idea that LP was a thing, I only found out later. Maybe if you give a little ISK and LP, that allows new players to be introduced to the LP market and allows them to get used to using it.
Affinity - The reason I'd like to start with ISK is so that we can see how popular it is, if people use it, then we can branch out and try other things. We need to make sure that it's something people will use first.
Sion - ISK is a great way to start, it keeps things simple.
Affinity - The other thing we have on our backlog is the Drifter Incursions, we're still working on them since we took them offline, and we hope to have them up and running again soon.
Affinity - As well as that we have some factional warfare stuff that we want to work on too. CCP RedDawn is working on balancing the factional warfare missions as I know Sugar brought this up last year, and they're pretty broken. Right now CCP RedDawn calls them "Winmatar" missions, so we need to look at them.
Sugar - Pretty much!
Steve - We saw some stats in the Data session, and yes, then FW LP numbers have huge gaps.
Affinity - We'd also like to split factional warfare into a 4 way war in order to increase the scope of PvP and PvE content for FW players. We think that a four way war will give more PvP opportunities and reduce the grey areas for new players who might be attacked by "allied" milita in terms of allied awoxing.
Mike - Will there be a storyline lead up to this?
Affinity - Yep, we're working on that. We're also looking to introduce NPC patrols into factional warfare. So right now there's PVP opportunities, then there's the missions and plexes, but we want to have NPCs patrolling not just in FW space but in all space. So if you interact with them, you'll be able to get an ISK reward, but you'll also be told "you could have also earned this if you were in the militia, come fight for us."
Affinity - We also want the convoys to fight against eachother, so if they come across eachother they'll engage.
Jayne - Can NPCs currently jump gates, or not?
Affinity - No, not at present, but we're working on it.
Paradox - We're actually working on making them remember things too, so that they'll re-engage or follow, that kind of thing.
Sugar - Using FW for this as a test best is a good idea, then you can expand it further so that NPCs interact more and chase people and stuff.
CCP RedDawn - The drifters do that to a certain degree, we're working on it.
Affinity - We've also been exploring allowing individuals to enlist in FW without their corp being in it. Basically by allowing corporations to "affiliate" themselves with a faction/militia, then all members of that corp would be free to join factional if they wanted to do so, or stay neutral.
Gorski - What if they were in an alliance?
Affinity - The alliance would then pick the affiliation and all the corps would be part of it.
Steve - What about standings?
Affinity - We're looking at maybe letting people move militias without a standing penalty, but there would be some restriction so as not to allow people to militia hop.
Sugar - That's good because right now there's an issue where if a single player gets out of line and shoots the wrong person either accidentally or on purpose, the whole corporation gets kicked from the militia, this is good for a lot of people.
Affinity - Yeah, we talked about this at fanfest, and I'd really just like to decouple standings from being in FW completely.
Sort - That's good because there's a lot of people in nullsec who'd like to do FW with their alts, but can't because they don't have the standings, and they're missing out.
Affinity - I was just thinking about during alliance downtime, people being able to go have fun shooting each other and the npc patrols.
Sugar - That solves one half of the standings problem, but there's also the standings gain.
Affinity - A lot of the feedback we got from players is that they'd like an overhaul of the full system, but we don't feel that is beneficial at present when a lot of feedback we're hearing is "we don't have enough to do in FW", "there's not enough PvP targets", "there's no reliable PvE" so we want to fix that side of things first, then perhaps the system issues go away, we'll see.
Gorski - Is there any incentives in the works for the losing side of FW to keep fighting because right now there's nothing.
Affinity - It's not on our roadmap right now, but I do agree with you.
Gorski - What about 4 way war, there'll be a lot of dead areas between factional warfare areas, is this something that will be looked at?
Affinity - We may need to look at the zones, yes. There's a lot of technical stuff to look at first though, before we get to that. This is still in the early stages.
Sugar - With the 4 way war coming in, are you still looking at suspects going into plexes.
Affinity - With the suspect flagging, to me it's more important to lower the entry bar for new players to FW, so it'd be nice to keep them a little protected until they find their feet.
Gorski - How long is the suspect timer going to be?
Affinity - We don't know yet, we'll see. Probably shorter than the crimewatch one. It's just to put people on equal footing when they enter the plex, we're not worried about when they come back out.
Gorski - Are you going to restrict T3 destroyers from small plexes?
CCP RedDawn - Yes, we've just started working on that change today. We're also going to introduce some fast webbing frigates into the missions to reduce the stealth bomber issues, and tweak a few things.
Sugar - The other problem is Novice complexes, which are supposed to be the easiest ones. They're now the "Garmur" complexes and people don't stand a chance against them.
Sugar - Faction police are also kinda laughable, and you can basically farm players and ignore them. With the four way war this will be even more prevalent, Can they be buffed so they're an actual threat?
Affinity - We're going to see how the patrols go first, before we consider making any changes.
Cagali - Have you guys considered tackling the problem of AFK frigates in plexes and warpcore stabbed ships orbiting beacons, etc?
Affinity - The changes with patrols will hopefully help with this.
Cagali - One idea that's gathering traction is that combat ships shouldn't be allowed to fit warpcore stabs, certainly one theory that could work and people are pretty bitter about it.
Falcon - You guys should have been around when there were no drawbacks at all for fitting warpcore stabs.