Is Factional Warfare Just Ritual Warfare?

A few lines in Votrian’s post today on the status of the Caldari – Gallente border war in lowsec struck me:

The war, if one can be called that, operates with specific battlefield areas. The prize being a change in sovereignity on a map and nothing more. It is almost like ritual warfare.

…

In contrast, the Gallente are not as interested in map changes and I know many a Gallente pilot, for example, in Oulletta (which ‘fell’ to the Caldari Fascists) happily living and shopping and flying in what is now classed as hostile space. There is no discernible change in environment. Not even the service charges of stations change to reflect the will of the fascist provosts.

Votrian’s post in in character, but translating that out to the broader EVE world of factional warfare, he raises a point that’s been nagging me since FW first launched: where’s the consequence?

FW was created by CCP for a variety of reasons – make lowsec matter and get pilots populating the systems again, provide an easy entrance point into PVP for newer players and longitme carebears alike, and so on.

To that end, it seems a moderate if debatable success. Despite the standard trash talk from longtime 0.0 inhabitants, the fights I’ve been in during a couple stints with the Amarr militia have been a blast – frigate and cruiser fights galore, minimal gate camping, short trips to where the combat is, and much less prep time than the mega fleet fights dreamed of out in nulsec space.

But it’s Votrian’s point about the lack of any practical impact on the change in Sov in lowsec systems that I think highlights the problem with FW: there are no consequences beyond bragging rights. When a system is “captured” nothing happens to the stations or their services. You can still dock/undock as you did before, regardless of faction alignment. The gaining faction gets zero enhanced benefit from those stations, and the losing faction likewise takes zero real hit in access, service or market prices, etc.

Contrast that to 0.0, where change in Sov in a station system has a massive impact on everyone involved – station services and market access can be denied, docking and clone rights revoked, and so on. The gaining corp or alliance now has a safe dock up, a revenue generator, a fitting station, a local market, manufacturing and research slots, etc. The losing group not only loses all that, but risks having large quantities of valuable stuff stuck in the station, perhaps for good (I know I have some interceptors and T2 lasers I’ll likely never see or sell again, which hurts).

Because that doesn’t apply in FW, you can see what impact that has on how the players in the various militias behave. Reread Votrian’s quote above – the Gallente FW players for the most part don’t care about the territorial war aspect of FW, they’re just in it to kill some ships. Who “owns” the system they do it in is largely irrelevant, just bragging rights that aren’t worth much anyway.

If you started denying station services, market access, cloning and docking rights to the Gallente (or at least increasing the fees prohibitively), I bet they’d care again and EVE would see a renewed interest in the shifting borders of lowsec.

Thanks for coming back for another visit!