[2020] Factional Warfare updates now available for testing

Greetings loyalists,

As revealed in this news item, we’ll be making a few changes to Factional Warfare in the coming Loyalty to Lowsec update. These changes are now ready to test on Singularity, and we’d like to welcome feedback or to report on the discovery of any issues you identify. If you find any bugs or issues in game, please file a bug report from within the F12 Help window.

Non FW participants who choose to entering FW sites will now get a Suspect flag when activating the acceleration gate

Entering the site as a non-FW member will incur a 15 minute Suspect timer. For this change, we have also added a Suspect icon and yellow text to the Activate Gate option in the right click menu. Additionaly you must have your Safety setting at Partial or No Safety to be able to activate the gate.

A new FW Complex site will be added for Battleships and smaller classes

To coincide with the release of the Frigate Escape Bay for battleships, we’ll be creating a new site for FW that battleships can better play a role.

We have decided to change the definition of the current size of “Large” Complexes to be these new Battleship sites. Therefore the current Large sites will be renamed to “Open”, as they are unrestricted and have no acceleration gates inside preventing access.

These new sites will be available in FW space, as “[Racial] Large Outpost”

Increased activation ranges for Acceleration Gates in FW Complexes.

This change will allow you to activate acceleration gates from further away, avoiding the likelihood of being tackled whilst attempting to enter the complex capture area. This represents an alternative approach to the ‘gate sliding’ behavior used by players, which the ability to do so was removed some time ago during a rework of the underlying acceleration gate mechanics.

Currently on Singularity, we are testing different activation ranges and would like to hear feedback based on these ranges.

[Racial] Outpost [Novice/Small/Medium] to 10 km
[Racial] Outpost [Large] to 30 km - The new Battleship FW Complex
[Racial] Compound [Novice/Small/Medium] to 30 km
[Racial] Facility [Novice/Small/Medium] to 50 km
[Racial] Stronghold [Novice/Small/Medium] to 70 km
[Racial] Installation [Novice/Small/Medium] to 90 km

Note that the mapping of different gate ranges to site names is purely to facilitate testing. We do NOT plan on having different ranges for different sites upon release to Tranquility - we will pick one range for all, based on playtesting and feedback.

New Perimeter Lighting visuals will be introduced surrounding Acceleration Gates to show their activation range

All Acceleration Gates will now show new perimeter lighting effects, which will show in space without the need for UI. These will indicate whether your ship is in range of activating the acceleration gate or not.

This is also coupled into the above change to FW Acceleration Gates having an increased distance, and as such will be visible in space for everyone.

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Perimeter Lighting will also be added to the Capture point inside FW Complexes

To also facilitate visibilty into when you are within range, there will be Perimeter Lighting around the Capture points in Complexes.

Update:
We managed to go a bit further, and complete an internal “Stretch Goal”. The perimeter lighting effect surrounding the capture point, will now change color and animation depending on the state!

• Green perimeter lights - Being Captured by Defending Faction
• Orange perimeter lights - Contested / No control by any one faction
• Red perimeter lights - Being Captured by Attacking Faction

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Increased LP payouts for FW PvP Kills

We will be increasing LP Payouts for FW PvP Kills. The payout rate has been decoupled from the warzone tier multiplier, and now all FW PvP kills will payout at roughly the same as kills currently made in a Tier 5 warzone. In summary, the tier of warzone no longer affects the LP payout for PvP kills.

LP payouts for FW missions will be reduced substantially
We will be lowering the payout for all associated FW missions. This will therefore be increasing the relative value of FW combat when coupled with the change above for increased LP payouts on PvP kills.

And a final pair of war-related changes for the release:

If a war ends because the attacker failed to pay the war bill then a one-way force peace from attacker to defender is created (at the usual length of 14 days)

War HQ structures will now have a reduced armor reinforcement period of 24 hours (down from 4.5 days) giving defenders a realistic chance of taking down the HQ within 7 days.

Thank you for reading, and please feel free to discuss feedback on these changes in the thread, and again if you encounter any bugs on Singularity please file a bug report.

Fly safe o7

Enforced peace is always 14 days in the cases of surrendering, losing a war HQ, and now for failure to pay the War Declaration bill.

The current large are being renamed to Open.

Funny. I’ve seen a bunch of people in FW complaining about having to wait for the other person (non-faction war) to shoot first, because they do care about their sec status. Probably because they go into highsec to cash in their LP.

An unfitted hull isn’t necessarily worth much by itself because it is already mostly covered by insurance payouts, and we can’t pay out more in total than is destroyed. So most of the value will come from destroyed modules (or from destroyed implants for pod kills).
A rough estimate would be around 1 LP for every 3000 ISK worth of destroyed stuff (but that also depends on what that destroyed stuff is and where it comes from)

Generally, if you’re at tier 2 now, you’ll get about 3x more LP for FW kills with this change compared to TQ today.