RESPONSE TIME! DERPITY DERP DERP! :P

First and foremost I cannot thank you enough for posting such a well thought out and constructive thread. Truly awesome and amazingly appreciated. :D

Queuing system:
I mostly ignored this section, I skimmed it a bit but only just. Why would I skim it? Because we are throwing the current system out the window and replacing it with the new matchmaking system.

For those that are not aware, currently when you want to join an FW match you sit there refreshing the page waiting for a battle to show up and then hope you are quick enough with being able to join before others do. It's not the greatest by any stretch. I could go into detail about why it is like what it is like... or we could talk about what's changing.

So this is the reason why I only skimmed this section. We are completely revamping, actually wrapping up the changes now and getting ready to move things from our teams sandbox to the main branch next week, a new matchmaking system. One of the things the new matchmaking system does is allow us to actually queue players. So what we are going to allow you to do is take a squad, or yourself, select which faction(s) you want to fight for and then queue for them. Once we have enough people that are queueing for a faction that opposes the ones you have selected, and enough besides you queueing for the one you want to fight for, a battle is started.

It should be pretty awesome.

Not enough battles:
Again I basically just skimmed this for the same reason as above.

I will say though that there appears to be a misunderstanding as to how the current system works and I want to clear it up because I don't want it to be carried over to the new system.

You seem to be under the impression that PLEXing in EVE generates the battles in DUST. That is wrong. What controls the number of battles in DUST is how many people are playing them. We spin new battles up when all the current battles are full.

What PLEXing in EVE does is determine WHERE the battles in DUST take place. When a defensive or offensive PLEX is completed in a system with a temperate planet that faction gets a point in their favour for that system. As I said the spinning up of battles is not determined by this at all, battles spin up when all the current ones are full. When a battle spins up it looks at all the systems and picks one from the list based on how many points they have. Not going to go fully into the details of it but basically if the most PLEXed system is the Amarr offensive PLEXing a system then a battle will be started with Amarr attacking a district in that system.

This is not changing and will be carried over to the new matchmade system that we introduce.

So yes, defensive plexing does have an effect and there is no bottleneck here in generating battles based on PLEXing.

Hopefully that makes more sense.

The GÇÿfactionGÇÖ part doesnGÇÖt matter other than for RP reasons:
I have a whole design written up for changing this but it's a ways off from being implemented so I have not shared it publicly yet. It is on the backlog however and will hopefully get done late this year or early next year.

To give you an idea of what is involved in it: You fight for faction, you win, you gain standings, the higher the standings the higher your reward for fighting for that side.

There is a lot more to it, but that is a glimpse into it.

The GÇÿdistrictsGÇÖ system is flawed:
Unfortunately your understanding of the system is very flawed. Hopefully my explanation above about not enough battles helped clear it up a little bit. If you offensive PLEX a system in EVE and control all the districts in that system offensive PLEXing is not going to generate a battle of the other side attacking your district. That would be very counter productive.

Again, defensive PLEXing does have an effect, again though it does not generate a battle it generates a point and the system with the most points is has priority.

No different from instant battles:
So again I have a much larger design about iterating on FW, part of it is about the rewards you get and making FW battles more rewarding, and part of it is about making them play different.

First and foremost we want to enable friendly fire and we think if we have standings in we can do that. Shooting teammate lowers your standing, going negative means no longer being able to play FW until you pay or wait.... or something like that. Still a few details to work out. Losing standings is bad because high standings means higher reward.

Remove warbarge strike and make it so that acquiring orbital bombardment is something the EVE players have to do, much like how it was at the Fanfest tournament.

Allow full teams to queue. This is actually a design separate of the factional warfare iteration and is an iteration on the squads system allowing you to build squads that are entire 16 man teams. The new matchmaking system would allow you to queue for FW with these 16 man squads while restricting public matches to 6 man squads.

Dust players canGÇÖt see the GÇÿbig pictureGÇÖ:
Agreed and we are constantly working on improving this. We have some ideas we are currently working on but to be honest all the stuff I listed above is a much higher priority for us. Making the matches different, improving the payout, allowing full teams to compete, and that sort of thing is just more important.

Again though we are constantly thinking about this and trying to include it in the designs we do work on.

Hope that all helps give you a better understanding of where we are at and where we are going. So much we want to do and so little time in the day to do it. :(

p.s. I really have no idea why I put derpity derp derp in the first line... yea not a clue... sorry...