Whaddup faction gamers!

We've seen hundreds of new players flooding into faction warfare... largely because Loru has been pumping out videos (1, 2) for the warzones. Watching a couple hundred pilots join various militia Discords is a beautiful thing. But faction warfare has a couple of rough edges, and some of those turn players off before they even begin.

Over the past few years, I've seen thousands of pilots struggle with loyalty points. Even corporations have struggled to solve it. I'd like to chat about that for a few minutes, and provide some resources to help in the short term.

Loyalty points

Loyalty points are the currency of faction warfare. Instead of receiving ISK for your efforts, you're paid in factional currency that needs to be converted into items, then sold. That's pretty common, a lot of income sources in EVE have a gimmick. LP just happens to be one of the less liquid ones.

The typical DIY loop looks like this:

1. Go to the Fuzzworks LP store
2. Select your loyalty points
3. Press Sell
4. Sort by ISK/LP
5. Buy some of the items
6. Haul them to Jita
7. Sell them for profit

Easy, right? For new players, not so much.

What goes wrong

• New players often use sell price because they don't know what buy price is. That leads to buying weirdly manipulated items- things that might take months to actually sell.
• New players often sort by ISK/LP. Many top items only support a few sales at a time. Many look wrong once you account for item requirements. Many hide real logistics costs.
• New players often try to haul themselves. They make a few hundred million ISK on day one, then don't understand that an Iteron Mark V isn't safe. They usually don't have the skills to haul safely, and they often don't even know the trade hubs yet.
• New players often don't have the capital to convert LP. Converting 1-2B of loyalty-point value can easily require more than 1-2B ISK up front.
• Scams are rampant. There is no loyalty point ledger, meaning brokers and players alike have to send a bunch of screenshots and rely on trust.

What you usually end up with is players coming in bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, wanting to pay for a T1 Thrasher, and losing their ISK to bad guidance.

The system is a house of cards

Alliances, corporations, and independent parties have done a really great job making life easier here:

• Most alliances and corporations have buyback programs
• Independent groups like Loyalty Point Brokers LTD let new players sell directly at reduced rates

But none of these solutions are healthy long-term.

• Pilots need ISK faster, so they can lose more ships and stay undocked
• LP teams and logistics teams have a high burnout rate
• LP programs often don't grow capital fast enough
• LP programs and brokers are going to see a massive logistical problem if the number of new players entering the system doubles.

Building a better tomorrow

Minmatar Fleet is working with loyalty point services and brokers to answer one question: How can we make it easier for pilots to convert themselves?

To start, we've released a joint effort:

• A better guide for cashing out loyalty points
  • Discusses various options
  • Discusses common pitfalls
• A better tool for visualizing faction warfare LP markets
  • Any faction can use it
  • Flags low volume items
  • Excludes items that are common pitfalls by default
  • Includes freight cost, sales tax, and other costs
  • Offers "hovers" so that powerusers can still get the information they want

These are built on the shoulders of Fuzzworks, EveRef, and decades of contributions from other groups. They'll keep improving with feedback from the LP network. This also isn't meant as a dunk on existing tools. They were built years ago for a system that wasn't supporting thousands of new players. They still serve an amazing purpose, but they're not suited for new players.

An ask to Fenris Creations

The faction warfare community will get as far as it can with the tools we have. We're not prepared for a future where the number of pilots in faction warfare doubles.

I'm not a game designer, so I won't provide solutions. But there are a few problems we hope you can help with:

1. FW receives ISK from nullsec, pochven, and wormholes. The LP economy is downstream of nullsec stagnation. The main ISK entering the system is nullsec and Pochven buying navy hulls. When those wars go quiet or they stop needing navy hulls, the whole loop stalls, and teams burn out.
2. The LP market can't support much higher new-player volume. In some cases, the demand for loyalty points is no more than ~200 million LP per week. A single battlefield pays 4,500,000 loyalty points. We've run tests, it takes about 40 million LP to meaningfully destabilize prices on a faction's loyalty points. Great if you want to pressure Amarr. Not great when way more new pilots need to turn LP into ISK.
3. Conversion requires too much capital for new players. Most conversion teams are using 25–50B ISK to move a significantly smaller volume, e.g 10–20 million LP. That is not realistic for someone trying to fund a T1 Thrasher.
4. No in-game guidance for loyalty point stores. You're lucky if you find the right guide, otherwise you might just log off / never do faction warfare again.

Faction warfare is booming for destruction, content, and fun. We hope you can help keep the economy stable and take some of the pain out of generating ISK for new pilots in the warzone.

https://discord.gg/minmatar

Posted on Reddit