When faction warfare went live with EVE Online's Empyrean Age expansion back in the summer of 2008, It was a magnificent success. It was intended as a way for newer players to get into PvP and as a stepping stone from the safe haven of empire to full-on sovereignty warfare. It wasn't long before large fleets were duking it out in low security space and for a time, it was great. Eventually, problems began to come to light that demanded developer attention. Capturing exploits and a lack of rewards were causing players to leave the war and after a year with no development, faction warfare was looking abandoned.

Rewards were eventually implemented in an attempt to revitalise the ageing faction warfare system and promote PvP. With the Dominion expansion came the most anticipated of those rewards - new tier 1 navy battleships available only from the faction warfare loyalty point store. Since the announcement that they were coming, mission-runners have been farming faction warfare missions like crazy for loyalty points. The promise of unique rewards from the missions was intended to revitalise the game and give pilots something to fight over. But did the rewards really improve faction warfare and promote PvP or was it a huge mistake?

In this three page exposé, I run down the history of faction warfare missions, from the development mistakes to the EVE corp that made almost enough ISK to build a titan. Did the mission buff revitalise faction warfare or did it put the final nail in its coffin? And just how did mission-runners make billions of ISK?

Continue reading EVE Evolved: The faction warfare mission debacle

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EVE Evolved: The faction warfare mission debacle originally appeared on Massively on Sun, 06 Dec 2009 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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