Ty's currently at 2 months and 2 days with the small corp he and CB formed solely to take into Faction Warfare and, if memory serves, that means it's been exactly 2 months since we joined up. I'm inclined to take a look back and see how things have gone.
PvP Experience and Enjoyment
This is, ostensibly, what I wanted to get into the whole thing for, so how's that been going?
June was definitely a learning month; all told, I was on two kills for the month and lost seven ships (six of which had something to do with Faction Warfare (the seventh was just me running around nullsec in a Talos until I blew the thing up).
With that said, I learned a lot from those losses, and June also marked my first small gang roam with a FW group (netting a fine battlecruiser kill), and my first solo kill, ever. Pretty hard to complain about that.
Killboard efficiency is vastly overrated, in my opinion, but it's hard not to be pretty happy with both July and August. I turned around the numbers from June and have managed to maintain a 3:1 kill ratio and a stupidly lopsided ISK destroyed to ISK lost ratio (thanks to flying frigates and other cheap ships), in addition to getting a couple more solo kills and FCing a fleet for hilarious results. Again, I don't really care about the numbers, but it's nice to look at the big picture as well as review fights and review my many mistakes. :) (In all seriousness: I don't lose less ISK if I destroy someone else's ship, so who cares what my "ISK efficiency" is? Meaningless number.)
Income
The Faction Warfare screens are accessed in-game by drilling down into the "Business" menu, and that's no accident -- a lot of folks are there solely to make ISK, and though it's a secondary concern for me (I make more than enough from Planetary Interaction Colonies), you're going to make a fair amount of money even if you don't pay it much attention and just "try everything", as I like to do. In the last two months I've netted (not grossed) several billion isk from Faction Warfare as a result of truly, TRULY desultory money making effort on my part (easily less than ten percent of the time I've spent on FW, total), including cashing out my loyalty points at the "wrong" tier almost every time.1 On a minute-to-minute basis, there is simply nothing else I've done in the game that makes as much ISK in such short, discrete, instant-on chunks of time.
People will argue about whether the small gang and solo pvp is a bonus feature of Faction Warfare money making activities, or if it's the other way around, but it hardly matters -- if you want both, and plan for both, you're going to be pretty happy with the results.
Social
This is slower going, due to the necessary and justified paranoia that runs through Faction Warfare, but I've gotten fairly familiar with a couple groups, and can jump on (or ignore) their nightly shenanigans with zero drama. That 'social curve' is steeper than what a typical MMO player might expect (unless you're joining up with friends), but the rewards are worth it for me.
Overall
You know, the fact of the matter is, I didn't blog about EvE all last week because I was too busy playing EvE. I suppose that says a lot right there, and mercuryapp.com (which I use to take down the notes that eventually become blog posts) reflects my satisfaction with the last sixty days.
After a year or more in Wormholes (which, while fun, almost always require extensive scanning preceding any kind of organized activity, and ongoing scanning throughout said activity), the fact that I can log in, hop in a ship, undock, do something, fight someone, and make twenty to sixty million isk -- all within 15 to 30 minutes -- is a huge draw for me, especially right now.
In my opinion, Faction Warfare may be the best "mixed-discipline" activity in the game for a new player coming into EvE Online for the first time, though RvB and EvE Uni have a better infrastructure built in for training new pilots the ins and outs of the game. I'd highly recommend it for that new player, or any more experienced player looking for something different to try out.
1 - Can you make more money doing other things in EvE? Sure. Can you do it in ten-minute chunks of time, solo, in a tech 1 frigate or a cheap bomber? No.
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