Fac War: The Missing Niche

This one I'll keep short. Hell, who am I kidding? Buckle up it's going to be a substantial ride.

Dust 514 obviously has a whole suite issues, but one of the most pressing for its core audience is the lack of a gameplay niche with these primary characteristics.

1. Arbitrarily large grouping 
2. A queue system that pits these arbitrarily large groups against each other

Simply put, there's no analog to Eve's roaming gangs in Dust right now. You have two options as an organized group: 

• High security matches where you are limited to pitifully small 6 player groups. At the very least there is a queue which allows players to get into battles without fuss, and the consistency of ISK rewards allows players without the highest level of gear to compete.
• Low security Planetary Conquest battles. In these you can field the largest team size currently available in Dust matches (16), but they are scheduled affairs that happen once daily. Given the gravitas of PC matches any gear below prototype (maximum) level is a liability.

In Eve terms: You can either mine in high sec with 5 friends, or you can go fight sov. 

CCP had implied that with the Uprising Fac War would be assuming a role in Dust at least somewhat similar to its Eve counterpart. It would behave as a midway point between the anti-social but laid back high sec and the highly social and unpredictable PC. 

Thing is, the crucial element is missing. While 6 man squads can choose which battle and side they join, the best a group larger than 6 can hope to do is to synchronize joining the same match on the same side. It's a laborious process, and often gets screwed by smaller parties taking up one or two spots on the intended team.

The Eve-Dust integration side of things is similarly borked.

Suffice to say that coordinating with the militias right now is nothing short of a labor of love. The best a group of Dust-side soldiers can do is attempt to queue sync into matches on a particular faction's side, but that's inconsistent, painstakingly slow, and despite the star map's rework doesn't really have any discernible impact in Dust. Add onto that an inability for mercs to select which systems they actually fight in and the disconnect becomes even more readily apparent. In Dust, the Fac War mechanics are centered around what team you fight for. The "geography" of space is completely de-emphasized. Eve's mechanics are much more tactically directed, with single systems playing pivotal roles in the motion of the war.

Opening up FW to full 16-man-teams fills the missing niche and elevates them out of the realm of glorified high sec matches. Without that niche there's really not much of a social experience making Dust's heart tick for any player who doesn't have the 8 million SP necessary to lump it in PC, and capsuleers in FW will never really care about Dust side activity.