Absolutely disagree. This isn't a change to skirmish, this is a change to FW. My opinion has always been and always will be that CCP needs to do more to encourage FW to be a place for organized squads and not a place for your random blueberry. Plus I'm pretty sure the issue with FW right now is not so much that Amarr and Caldari are outnumbering their enemies, but something a little deeper which I explained already in many topics.

Also John, consider this. A lot of times when you enter a FW match and there's no one on the enemy team, that usually gets resolved within the opening minutes. Also I see it happening the other way around, where there is no one on my team besides my squad, and then getting resolved in the opening minutes. So really, CCP just needs to increase the warbarge time a little. Plus there is always the very probably notion that the enemy see a squad of say "TeamPlayers" and quit before it starts.

I already find a bunch of blueberries in the current FW. Nothing is stopping blueberries from playing fw already anyways and I still find them everygame. How do you propose CCP to encourage organized squads in FW? All organization atm I see is being created and upheld by the players. However I still find a bunch of games where my squad is the only one and I have 10 squadless team mates.

I am not entirely disagreeing with you, I just want to explore some ideas on how the gameplay of FW could be improved.

During the last event many people chose to fight for Amarr. This caused an imbalance in the teams. I already fought for Amarr before the event but what I noticed different was.... I kept getting put into games against no people. Amarrians were vastly outnumbering their opponents.

I propose that people who pick skirmish game mode gets put into a random faction to help fill up slots in FW. FW is just a glorified skirmish mode that as of now only helps a certain faction gain territory. I know new rewards will be out soon for fw as well... So why not just get rid of the old skirmish and make FW the official skirmish. If people do not want to side to one specific faction, just give them a random faction that needs players.

What does the community think about this idea?

What needs to happen is what happens in EVE. You don't just go fight for whichever faction because you want to. You have to join a faction and you are locked into it. You have to leave a faction to join another and even then you need to have at least a .05 standings with that faction.

Problem solved.

Another thing that would make people fight for a certain faction would be faction rewards. Something like the LP (loyalty points) stores in EVE would be cool.

Also, a reason why you'd want to belong to a faction is because of the area of space that you want to have standings with otherwise. They should add that in some way also to DUST.

Example: You may think Amarr are evil. But they have cool weapons and modules and you can get named weapons and modules only on the LP market.

While true that my idea does make it more of a pub match.... I also see absolutely no point in doing a normal skirmish anyways. The player count of this game is also dropping. FW is a glorified skirmish but its still a skirmish. Why have two types of the exact same game mode with no real differences between the two? Especially if player count keeps dropping.

The event is over now, but when I saw that event play out and scotty constantly breaking... it made me think about the future of this game, Skirmish, and FW. If people cant get into games and the games they do get into are empty or you end up joining a game that just started a few minutes ago but the enemy team already has you guys red lined... Well that is just neither fun nor fair. Yes increasing warbarge time could solve some of those problems and they are good solutions for the short term but I was thinking of something more long term.

obviously the best long term fix would be to get more players, but a solution to that is an entirely different type of discussion.

The point of pub matches are for people new to the game who are still trying to figure things out and/or haven't made social connections yet. Think of it as the glorified tutorials. Everything else needs to have a little higher entry level, no excuses - not even the player count.

I believe in CEOpyrex live stream 2 it was mentioned, possibly by CCP Nulabor, that they are looking at friendly fire being activated in FW.

If true, this would make it distinct from normal skirmish and will probably discourage blueberries from jumping in.