Shadow of Cerberus EVE Community Forum

Sunset

Make hay while the sun shines has been my directive on the faction warfare site thing.  And now we've received confirmation from CCP Ytterbium that the sun will be going down this winter:

Current warzone control design is flawed as it does not encourage players to hold space, only to upgrade I-hubs when they need to buy stuff from the LP store to get massive reductions. Ideally we would want players fighting and struggling to keep control over their space, that is why we propose the following.

We would remove LP store price reduction in the new system, and only modify LP gained. As such, tier1 WZ would reduce all LP gains by 50%, tier2 would keep them on the same field as of now, tier3 would give a 100% LP gain bonus, tier4 150% and tier5 200% LP gain bonus. This would encourage factions to actually keep and maintain space to have the LP bonus rather than just push once in a while.

In short, instead of LP store items dropping to 25% of their cost when a particular faction pushes to tier 5, instead LP gain from sites will be tripled when that happens.  Interesting thing, though: along with other nerfs mentioned in the same post, this is shaping up to be something we've never seen from CCP before, a quintuple nerf.

First and by far the most important, this isn't mentioned in the post but buying virtually every item from faction LP stores requires both LP and ISK.  When a faction hits tier 5, the costs in both LP and ISK of items is reduced to 25% of their normal values.  This means that both LP and ISK go four times as far as they normally do at tier 5.  After this change is implemented, LP rewarded will be tripled but there will still be no ISK reward and as a result the ISK cost of items in the faction LP stores will be effectively quadrupling versus their tier 5 costs.  That's huge.  This one is the biggest current incentive to the large-scale running of FW sites by non faction warfare players.  Removing that incentive is a big deal.

Second, tripling the LP rewarded (at tier 5) is not quadrupling LP value (as tier 5 does today), so that's a nerf.

Third, it's relatively easy today to "push" to tier 5 and it only has to be done for short periods of time to gain the value from doing so.  When faction members want to "cash out", the faction tier is pushed to five for only a few hours at most, usually at a pre-announced time so the largest possible number of people can take advantage of it.  Since triple LP rewards will only be given when sites are run while the faction tier is that high and since maintaining that tier for long periods of time will probably be difficult (if not impossible), that's a major nerf.

Fourth, the post also states that the cost in LP to push to tier 5 in systems is being increased.  Granted "bleed" is also being reduced, but there's also going to be wastage during LP donation at high tiers.  That affects a faction's ability to defend their overall tier as they're building toward it.  There's going to be a buff to defending systems, but it will only be a partial bonus.  In the aggregate, particularly given the large number of systems that need to be pushed to high tiers to effect overall tier changes, I rate this one as a nerf.

Fifth and finally, vulnerable systems will apparently no longer pay LP, which unless I'm mistaken is going to greatly reduce the number of systems that site farming can be done in.  That will consolidate people running sites into fewer systems, which is a nerf.

When high-sec incursions were quadruple nerfed, this resulted in an enormous impact to the incursion community.  The exact numbers were shared with the CSM in May.  While the official Summit Minutes don't make those numbers public, rumors from the Russian version of the Minutes say that high-sec incursion site completions dropped more than 80%.  Expect to see the same here: just before these changes are implemented, we're going to see a rush on these sites followed by attempts to push to tier 5 by several factions so that a lot of occasional FW site runners can cash out for the last time.

After that, I expect FW site running on a large scale will all but disappear.  Should be pretty amusing.

But (and this is an important but) that change might well be an overall net positive for the real faction warfare players.  I know they hold full-time site-runners in contempt.  So driving them off might be regarded as a good thing.  There's apparently a second thread that will be started by CCP Ytterbium soon just on this issue.

So, more to come on this topic.
Source: Sunset