The Faction Warfare expansion patch is hitting next week, and of course we’re all curious how that will turn out. Right now, it doesn’t look so good; based on the test server and the dev blogs to date, it will be going live without any rewards except for faction standing and some badges/ranks that don’t do anything. The new faction ships are priced too high to make sense (as CCP admits, with a promise of future price rationalization), there isn’t anything else of interest in the faction militia LP stores, the new rats don’t drop much loot (though they do drop tags, for whatever that’s worth), and the missions… ouch.
Yes, the missions, which ask you to jump twenty or thirty jumps (round trip) through hostile gatecamps, then (if you correctly guessed the ship size limits for the mission) fight NPCs in deadspace while a system-wide beacon invites hostile militia to come and interfere with you. For rewards that are currently worse than zero-to-one jump PVE missions in high sec. And not just worse, but much worse. (Yes, they are supposed to auto-adjust — but unless the upper bounds are stunningly high, there’s no way they can auto-adjust high enough to compensate for all that pain.)
Now, I myself am disappointed by these early indications, but perfectly content to wait and see (1) whether things might look better after release, and (2) whether they get tweaked later to make the whole system attractive to the casual player (who needs something more than we’re seeing now, to compensate for loss of access to half of high sec.) However, other people are ranting. I really enjoyed the punchline to this rant about the horrid horrid mission rewards:
I JUST WENT TO FREAKING HELL AND BACK AND ALL YOU GONNA GIVE ME IS A PEANUT!!!!!!!!!!!!
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June 5th, 2008 at 6:49 pm
It seems to me that the sweet spot for FW rewards is just UNDER the equivalent rewards for regular missions. That’s what ensures that FW isn’t blobbed by the masses of EVE citizens who are trying to optimize their income and provides some space for people who want to try a little pewpew and have a little more storyline to get their feet wet.
Whether or not they’ll be able to hit the balance right, I don’t know.
June 5th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
You mean, “just under” in absolute terms? Or just under after you pay for all the lost ships and the hours of game time spent traveling back and forth to the mission sites?
If the latter, I agree with you. If the former, I think you’re completely nuts. Damn few regular missions require thirty jumps of travel; if I liked travel that much, I could make millions doing player courier missions in the time that will take.
June 8th, 2008 at 6:09 am
I mean relative, at least in terms of time required.