Capsuleers,
A part of the upcoming summer expansion is the introduction of Military Campaigns, along with a focus on making Factional Warfare more appealing and accessible to players new and old. Two key issues are being tackled to accomplish this, each currently acting as a barrier to entry:
Concern over losing standings among players interested in or already participating in Factional Warfare
Players getting killed by their own friendly militia members (commonly referred to as awoxing)
Factional Warfare is inconsistent when it comes to standings. Those only participating in PvP and focusing on the content around warzone control, like Capture Site, Advantage Objectives, Battlefields etc. will not lose any standings.
If, however, you participate in Factional Warfare missions, you will lose standings with the enemy faction.
Getting promoted may also cost you standings, which can feel especially frustrating to those who didn’t want to get promoted, because it simply happens at certain standings thresholds without opting in. This can make promotion feel like a negative consequence, rather than a reward.
Completing career agent missions with a new character could cost you standings through the final mission in the chain, through derived standings. There is no warning that this could happen (unlike in storyline missions), and it could lock new players out from joining two of the empire militias, based on the enemies of the career agents.
Attacking another character in your own militia will cost you faction standings, the intended design being that continually attacking allies will eventually hurt a pilot’s standings so much they’ll be removed from the militia.
This doesn’t apply to characters inside a player corporation, however, who can actually fall to -10.0 standing with their faction and remain enlisted, as long as the average standings of the corporation within the faction remain above 0.0. This creates a loophole where a character inside a corporation - with enough positive characters to balance out their negative standings - can attack friendly militia characters indefinitely without ever being removed.
Another loophole that gets abused is creating brand new corporations and immediately joining Factional Warfare with them, populating them with -10.0 characters, then proceeding to awox for a week until the corp gets kicked out when the average standings catch up.
We have already started to tackle the standings issue, with more to come in the summer expansion.
Career agent missions no longer give derived standings, so players no longer lose standings to the empire factions when completing the final mission.
Promotions no longer give derived standings, so players can no longer lose standings with other factions when getting promoted within their militia.
Level 1 & 4 Factional Warfare missions no longer have standings penalties for killing NPCs and structures found in the missions. The plan is to roll this out for all other Factional Warfare missions during the lead up to the expansion.
If you’re unfamiliar with the term, derived standings refer to the impact your standings with a main faction have on allies and enemies of that faction. For example, completing a storyline mission for the Minmatar Republic would increase standings with them, but also grant some smaller amount with allied factions like the Gallente Federation, Sisters of EVE, and the Thukker Tribe, as well as decreasing your standings with enemies and rivals like the Amarr Empire and Caldari State. This has now been changed, so you only gain standings with the main faction, just like in Epic Arcs. So now, you will only gain standing with the Minmatar in the previous example and not gain or lose standings with the Gallente or Amarr, respectively. This will make it impossible to lose standings with a faction while participating in normal Factional Warfare gameplay, while also ensuring consistency. Standings penalties from NPCs which appear in Capture Site complexes were removed in 2012, and we decided not to add standing penalties to the new content introduced in the Uprising expansion, such as Battlefields and Supply Depots. The hope is that this will now also give greater purpose to Factional Warfare missions as one of the best ways to raise your standings with corporations, and indirectly with your faction through promotion.
Additionally, the upcoming expansion will add new ways to improve your standings while participating in Factional Warfare, by allowing you to earn standings with your faction by completing objectives in Military Campaigns. To address the loopholes and issues with friendly fire, we are adding new restrictions to joining Factional Warfare corporations for characters with low standings with their faction.
Characters with faction standings below -5.0 will be removed from Factional Warfare corporations 24 hours after receiving a warning.
If the character in question is the CEO of the corporation, the entire corp will be removed instead.
Characters will no longer be able to join a Factional Warfare corporation or alliance if their standings with the faction, the corp, or the alliance they are enlisted with are below -5.0.
A corporation which is not a part of Factional Warfare will be blocked from joining an alliance already in Factional Warfare, or joining it themselves, if any member is already below -5.0 with the faction they are trying to join.
This should have the effect that players who repeatedly attack friendly militia characters will be kicked out eventually, while still giving a lot of slack for characters who may already be negative with a faction but want to join Factional Warfare for a corporation. This gives some leeway for players who might accidentally lose standings through unintended friendly fire, or by completing other content in the game.
We will also modulate the standings hits by applying a different multiplier for friendly fire inside a Factional Warfare site versus other areas.
Players who attack other players inside a Factional Warfare capture site, such as Battlefields, will now receive 2x the standings penalty currently on Tranquility.
Players who attack other players outside a Factional Warfare site, such as a Metenox grid, will now receive 0.5x the standings penalty currently on Tranquility.
The intention here is to reduce some of the frustration of players inside the militia when they might feel forced to engage a pilot inside their militia in unrelated content in lowsec, while increasing the penalty for those deliberately attacking their own allies in a Factional Warfare-specific context.
This is fairly experimental and we can dial these numbers as we see fit. If we notice an increase in awoxing outside of Factional Warfare complexes in an unhealthy way, we can increase the multiplier back to 1.0x. If things seem healthy and stable, we can also experiment with lowering the number.
We are aware of concerns about pilots “stealing” the LP payouts in Factional Warfare sites by simply hanging around while others do the work (commonly referred to as seagulling), where some feel justified in attacking members of their own militia they perceive to be leeching from their war efforts. While there are no current plans to address this in the expansion, we are monitoring it closely, with potential solutions in mind, should there be a pressing need to deal with the issue.
While none of this is a silver bullet for awoxing, our hope is that this set of changes should curb most friendly fire cases that currently exist, without being so rigid that it restricts the majority of players participating in Factional Warfare. With more ways to improve and manage your standings in the militia, there are also more paths to recovery, and with the removal of all normal standings penalties from Factional Warfare content, there are fewer barriers to entry for those wanting to dive in.
Standings penalties have already been removed from level 1 missions, as well as derived standings penalties from promotions and career agents. With the release of this dev blog, level 4 missions and the new penalty multipliers for friendly fire inside vs. outside Factional Warfare complexes are now live.
As the expansion moves closer, we will remove the penalties in level 2 and 3 missions, as well as implementing the system to kick characters out of corporations based on negative standings. If it is ready sooner and awoxing becomes a bigger problem in the short term, we may try an early release at a lower value.
Happy hunting.