War is Divine

What, no factional warfare?

The question on a lot of peoples lips for this patch, what about Factional Warfare? And rightfully so, considering it has been announced way back when the dinosaurs first inhabited the earth. So herein we shall attempt to explain why Factional Warfare isn’t in yet, what the status of it is and a little about what we're planning to do for it.

Some background

We'll start with a story. Once upon a time, Oveur and Hammerhead were sitting down, eating burgers and drinking. They were discussing Factional Warfare and the 101 design documents we had on it. Then they drank some more and had an inspiration and in an attempt to be cool game developers and creative types they wrote their ideas down on a napkin. The result of this got drawn up on our internal design tracking system the next day.

A little while later, the Content department was sitting around, while Fendhal rolled some dice to figure out what to nerf next, and they started discussing Factional Warfare. At the end of that everyone had agreed that the napkin idea was indeed not a simple attempt to look cool and get chicks, but great and something we all think would be a lot of fun to play.

So, then a wild design spree started and many ideas were bounced, a lot of beer was drunk, a large quantity of pizza was devoured, and at the end of it all was something everyone looked at and called Factional Warfare, version Awesome.

After that we tried to shoehorn it into our November expansion. Unfortunately, after a thorough review of the design it was decided that we couldn’t squeeze it in without adversely affecting the patch and the deployment of Factional Warfare as a feature we were happy with.

"Yet Again!" - I hear you say. Yes, we feel your pain as well, but we want to give you a finished feature rather than just chucking out tons of new cool stuff. To implement Factional Warfare we would have had to move programmers away from fixing and improving things into creating Factional Warfare, and this simply wasn’t acceptable to us.

However, while we know Factional Warfare has been mentioned time and time again, things are different now. We have a solid design ready, one which is ready to roll. We are also going over it and adding, expanding and improving the design.

Our Vision

Here is our vision, we want to promote small gang warfare, we want to create more accessible PvP and we want to create the feeling of the factions finally going to war. However, the system is not going to force or restrict people to fight this way. We are simply aiming for a design which encourages, rewards and makes it more viable to achieve objectives with a small gang as opposed to a large fleet. Of course there won't be anything stopping people from bringing large fleets if they so wish.

At Factional Warfare's initial release; it will contain everything that will make factional warfare a complete system that will hopefully be a lot of fun to play. But this is only the beginning, Factional Warfare will undergo constant revision, with releases being added to it periodically, as we study and observe and see how we can improve and expand it.

However, let's see if we can clarify a few points about Factional Warfare without delving too deeply into it, as we are still in the design process, which means parts of the design may change.

• Factional warfare will be fiction heavy. There will be strong story leading up to it; there will be a strong fictional background around it.
• It will be up to you if you choose to immerse yourself in fictional side or not, there will be no requirement to role-play.
• It will not be instanced warfare; all of EVE is a battleground.
• It will be centered around low security space, but not exclusively.
• Opposing Faction navies will take a sudden dislike to you fighting for their enemies. The pansies who currently take you on will most likely get fired and replaced with people who know how to shoot.
• There will be no "PvP lite".
• The first release will only involve the four Empires, but we have every intention of expanding this in the future so you can attack the pirate organizations or even declare war on the Empire factions.
• You will not need to leave your corporation to join factional warfare. Individuals as well as corporations can join the cause.
• It won't be restricted game play, it will still be EVE and EVE is a free form sandbox, this is just another type of sand.
• Fighting for an faction will have negative consequences on the enemy faction.

Like I said, we don’t want to get into too much detail, but what we do want is to get your thoughts and ideas on Factional Warfare. We want to know what you want, what you envision Factional Warfare to become and what you would like to do. We have created a thread in our Features and Ideas Discussion forum for this purpose, which you can get to if you follow this link.

Finally, we would like to leave you with a quote:

"War is not hell, far from it. War is beautiful. War is divine."
~ Grand Admiral Mekioth Sarum, excerpt from a commencement speech to Paladin graduates of the Imperial Academy, 23215 AD