Before we get started with ideas to further show the impact that FW has, how about we look at other FW stats? Look at how lopsided most of these battles are. Look at how little experience many of the players who join FW have. Look at how many squads actually get formed in FW. Look at how many people have left all four boxes checked for their FW preferences.

FoxFour, there is a big problem here with FW now compared to before. While it is nice how easy it is to get into FW now, it has created an unintentional side effect. You have many, many new and unexperienced players or players without a squad searching for FW battles now because it is just as easy to get into as Public Contracts, but Factional Contracts sounds cooler. The negative side effect here is that in FW you also have a ton of experienced players in squads playing, meaning the battles can get extremely lopsided.

Look, I'm not saying these new guys should not be able to play FW, but honestly when they have so little skill invested into anything they aren't doing anything but hurting the team and FW itself doesn't offer them any more than they could get out of Public Contracts. Also it doesn't make sense that the 24th Imperial Crusade or Tribal Liberation Force would hire all these rookies. Sure it's fine in EVE, but EVE doesn't have a player cap like Dust does. When only 16 people are allowed per team, it creates some big problems.

So here's what I personally want to see done:

1. Add requirements to FW. Say each player must meet a time since creation requirement, a warpoint requirement, and a skill point requirement. It doesn't have to be ridiculously large, just say something that says, "At least they played for a week or two and should know what's going on."

2. Put everyone into a squad automatically. If you queue up with a squad then everything happens as normal. If you don't queue up for a squad, then it will autogroup you into squads. Also add an option for players without a squad to apply for squad leader, working sort of like MAG (I know, I know) in that sense.

3. Add standings as soon as possible so we can get out of this flip-flopping business. I noticed at first Amarr would win a ton a matches, but now it seems like all the blueberries getting creamed by Amarr wised up and switched sides so they too could win, but all it did was flip flop the lopsided-ness.

Chewing over a longer post but one aspect which jumps out right away is OB support.

Listing the pilots name, damage done/kills, etc. from both sides would be a great way to give more tangible indication of who is supporting FW and who is not.

Also including some sort of notification EVE side would be great, killmails for OBs?

Basically allow the interface to tell us what's going on and what impact is being made by coordinated efforts.

Cheers,
Cross