Kristoff Atruin
Subdreddit
Test Alliance Please Ignore
1442
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Posted - 2013.12.16 13:53:00 -
[1] - Quote
The explanation I read that made the most sense was that most of the experienced vets are going Gallente and Minmatar because they want to be the good guys, and now with 1.7 because they have some of the best store items. So those guys have their FW option filters selected. But the newberries getting into FW for the first time have all the factions selected by default, which I can believe because I see tons of people who are surprised to find out you can choose which faction you fight for.
This combines with the current warzone control mechanics to make a broken metagame. If one faction has a population advantage right now it will inevitably control every district, because they can attack more often than anyone else. When you queue up for a FW match it seems to look for a friendly district for you to defend, and then if none are under attack it picks an enemy district for you to attack. This is why Gallente and Minmatar get so many scotty errors - there's nobody for them to fight. Then when the clueless newberries stumble into FW the system dumps them on the faction that is currently the losing side, the dinner bell rings and the starving dogs of war from the winning side tear them to shreds because these guys have no idea what they're doing yet.
What makes this worse is that if you get some experienced squads in on the losing faction's side flipping districts it's like pissing into the wind. They'll take the district, and then it'll get attacked again before that team makes it back to their MQ. The defending team...will be the clueless newberries. So it doesn't matter if you've got a bunch of really solid teams on your side, you'll never hold anything for more than 15 minutes.
I'm not entirely sure what the best way to fix this would be. I would suggest some kind of LP bonus for fighting for the losing side, but this seems backwards and counter-intuitive to wanting your faction to win. In Eve FW you get extra LP when you're the one controlling most of the warzone, but that wouldn't help us with the current state of the FW metagame. The problem lies elsewhere. Somehow the flipping of districts needs to be slowed down, but without locking out too many districts from the battle finder. Maybe if your faction is on the losing side and you attack / take a district, it becomes locked for a short period of time. This could help the system make it harder and harder to get 100% control the closer you get to it without introducing perverse payment incentives. Maybe the locked time could scale with warzone control, to represent the military power of the other side being concentrated into smaller and smaller areas. So if you're at 51% control the other side's districts might only be locked for 10 minutes, but if you're at 99% it's an hour or more.
It would also help if the default selection for factions in the battle finder was none, and some kind of tutorial explaining to people how and why they should choose a faction to fight for. |