It won't be too far behind, and experience tells me you guys will complain but manage just fine until the player market is rolled out. We could delay FW until *everything* is ready by that seems like a worse idea.

No taxation on LP, corps do not have an LP wallet.

No ISK
Faction warfare right now will not be a sustainable career on its own. There will be objections to this of course but we are doing it on purpose for some good reasons. There is quite a lot of ISK in dust and not a lot of things to spend the riches on, so items exclusive to FW as well as the progression in FW itself will be the motivation to spend some of that money. When the secondary market comes online (itshappening.gif) faction warfare specialist should be able to maintain it as an exclusive career.

Woo lots of feedback so far, thanks guys. We'll need a bit of time to discuss all the comments with the team. A couple of early tidbits though, basically stuff we have already discussed internally.

Friendly Fire
I can see us also doing a max TK per battle as well as the standings penalties. That was actually in the original design but we didn't include it in the notes here. I think of all the numbers and mechanics, the friendly fire penalties will be the area that undergoes the most change based on player feedback and just how well it plays out once we go live. We are acutely aware of how important it is to get the FF penalties in pubs correct.

EVE Orbitals
On my todo list is to add kill mails for OB, LP rewards and improve the locating of battles. We have some rough ideas for a battle finder in EVE to help the FW guys out. Making the district name visible in the war barge should be possible as well. We may do changing local for dust mercs in battle now that local is delayed and not leaking intel. We will very likely allow connected EVE pilots to talk and chat in the team channel.

No ISK
Faction warfare right now will not be a sustainable career on its own. There will be objections to this of course but we are doing it on purpose for some good reasons. There is quite a lot of ISK in dust and not a lot of things to spend the riches on, so items exclusive to FW as well as the progression in FW itself will be the motivation to spend some of that money. When the secondary market comes online (itshappening.gif) faction warfare specialist should be able to maintain it as an exclusive career. The other concern we have though is that faction warfare becomes more profitable in every way, leaving public contracts under populated. We still want to continue working on matchmaking, levels, game modes and rewards for public contracts and with the current dust population having this starved for players would be a negative overall. A healthy dust lifestyle in our mind includes playing a bit of public, FW and PC. This may change as the game grows however and specialising becomes more sustainable.

With that all said, we are talking about this stuff early in the development and we're very happy to have out minds changed so let's keep the discussion going.

o7

wouldn't it be great to prevent intentional team kills by adding a system that stops your gun for a while whenever you hit a friend?

What about players that don't try to team kill , but activity damage their teammates shields and their health close to zero? Or deliberately get in the way so your teammates kill you?

How about once at the end of every one or two weeks you get isk based on your performance? Like I won 30 battles and received 5-10k wps at the end of the week (or more) I maybe receive about 1 million isk .

The sentence about there being a lot of ISK in Dust and FW items being a motivation to spend it is irrelevant as far as the actual issue goes. There being too much ISK in the game is a symptom of the game economy being a farce and arbitrarily punishing dedicated FW players for playing in the sandbox as they want to is not going to help.

I'm sorry I couldn't read the whole thread, so please accept my apologies if this has been answered already, but I'm very concerned with there being no reward for fighting for a losing faction. I know you're supposed to ideologically attach yourself to one faction and then stick with it for glory and honor, but I have the feeling it's not going to work very well. Are there any concepts in the pipeline that would help stabilize FW when the fight becomes extremely lopsided?

On one hand I see why people want ISK payouts for FW until there's a market. I evensuggested it myself in Zatara's thread: Everyone gets some ISK, as a sort of advance on fighting, we are mercs, we want some guaranteed money up front. Winners get a lot of LP, losers get less, but the small amount of ISK stays the same just to keep it semi-sustainable.

However, as I went through this thread, specifically Odinsons post, it just occurred to me that there is actually an upside to ISK loss in FW. If more advanced players turn to pubs to get ISK like he says, then suddenly we might actually see a drop in protostomping. Wishful thinking, perhaps, but if people start saving their good gear for FW, perhaps the noobs don't get pummeled quite so relentlessly when they leave the academy anymore and player retention rises. Might for once be a positive unintended consequence. Or maybe there will just be more farming, in fact I'm sure there will be, and there's always the PC vets with more ISK than they know what do to with (for now, lol) Regardless, I still see some potential for something good to come from this aspect.

The issue of having too much ISK is relevant. I know a corp that has a wallet size of at least 1 billion ISK for that corp alone (it's an estimate based on number of shareholders) and that's just outside of EoN. Can you imagine the mountain of ISK that EoN has? A lot. Think of Scrooge McDuck's money bin from Duck Tales. That can have a negative impact on the economy if too much ISK is in circulation at one time.

Many of us have constantly asked CCP to implement some kind of ISK sink to alleviate this economic problem and so far the idea of no ISK payouts for FW seems like a novel idea. But as others have mentioned here, we won't know of what the ramifications will be until we see the effects for ourselves. All this speculation about people joining FW in free suits and all is just that... speculation.

Flux grenading your whole team just before a big skirmish is pretty lame though, so we'll keep chewing on that problem.

A simple solution to this problem is to implement an IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) system to the Flux Grenades.
Say Shields are modulating on a certain frequency range or phase for friendly troops and the flux grenades are programmed to identify these frequencies and not affect them, but affect all the enemy frequencies.

Love it! Hope LP items will have different skins for show off value.

This is a good point and something we have discussed already. Whether we should be tracking kills, damage done or maybe ISK destroyed. Kills are simple for now in that they can also be forgiven and are easy to track and explain to players.

Flux grenading your whole team just before a big skirmish is pretty lame though, so we'll keep chewing on that problem.

We will have a forgive option to cover accidental where the victim agrees it was an accident. I kinda like the suggestion about no TK penalty for squad mates as well. Will discuss that with the team.

I see your view but like I and many others we arent in PC nor did we get 500mill isk from the reset, in total me and my directors hardly have more isk than whats in the corp wallet. And If your like me you easly blow 200k-400k in one battle for your fraction Im only asking for 100k and less payout nothing more.

Like I said, I'm good with a small amount of ISK for FW. I'm not in PC either.; I still have a small nest egg from the reset I sit on for a rainy day, but it's nowhere near 500 mil, it's not even 100. But, since I use STD suits or BPOs 95% of the time in pubs it's consistently profitable for me, so I'm less concerned about going broke than I am about Nyain San or whoever running full proto squads and HAVs in pub ambush matches and making new players ragequit, never to return.

See the match info thread. There's a 24h cooldown before they can start participating in faction contracts again.

That would make sense, and essentially make flux grenades voided in terms of FF. It is sort of the same principle for why you don't stand in enemy nanohives and get ammo.

Except are you aware that these changes will only encourage Nyain San and other to protostomp in public matches, since they won't be making any ISK in FW so won't want to play it?

Except not all of us are EON or play PC. Why should they punish the FW players in order to give PC corps an ISK sink? There's nothing novel about that.

As I said we expect specialists will exist in the game, but that won't be sustainable until the player market comes online. Until then we're not compromising on our big picture plan, so you'll need to supplement it with pubs / PC / corp income etc

I don't know about you or how you think, but I don't see this as punishment to FW people at all. We are being rewarded with something far greater than just mere ISK here. We will be given Loyalty Points which will go towards purchasing faction-specific gear. The faction-specific gear is something that can only be acquired (for now) from faction warfare for the side that you choose and they are exactly like the proto-level weapons but with lower CPU/PG requirements which is something a lot of proto folks love to have for their suits (especially us scouts). And unlike the pub matches or PC battles, our rewards and standings grow proportional to the time and effort we put into building our relations with the factions. That alone is something far more rewarding than mere pocket change.