Fractured Skies Campaigns: Fenris Promises Fixes Next Week

Fractured Skies went live on 10 November, and with it the four Military Campaigns, one per empire, each with four objectives and a roughly two-month clock. Four days in, r/Eve has settled on a verdict: the targets look wildly out of reach. A Fenris Creations developer has already replied that changes are coming "early next week". Meanwhile, a different thread shows how a single Amarr module has started to bend the Faction Warfare loyalty point market.

We covered the launch itself, the new Navy battlecruisers and the first bugs here, and the campaign rules in our pre-launch piece. This article starts from what happened after that.

The complaint: objectives that look unreachable

The thread that got the most traction was posted on 12 November under the title Fractured Skies Military Campaigns. The poster wrote that, in their words, "the grand total of the progress by the Empires" in the new campaigns was 0%, and that the collection target for the hacking objective, about 10 million items, looked laughable next to the pace they were seeing, around 3,000.

Two days earlier, another player had tried to do the maths in a thread with the title "Did any of the devs run the numbers of the necessary campaign contributions?". Their estimate, built on roughly 30 items per site, which is their own assumption, was that the exploration objective needs 10 million items and the combat one 17 million. They also reported scanning more than 100 signatures across ten wormholes and finding a single matching relic site.

A few caveats are worth keeping in mind:

The official expansion notes do not give any target numbers. The figures above are what players say they read in the client, and we could not verify them independently.
The notes do say that the highest concentration of the hacking sites is in Class 1 to Class 3 wormhole space, which is the line commenters quoted back to the author.
Some players pushed back in the comments. Items are handed in to the empire's item trader in batches of 100 per token, a lot of people are probably hoarding until they have a worthwhile stack, and progress tends to arrive in chunks. Others suggested Fenris can quietly adjust the totals or the drop rates if the campaigns look like they will not finish.
The same notes say a pilot's personal contribution is not capped until the objective is complete, so a handful of players with many characters can move a number a lot.

Fenris answers

The most useful reply in the thread comes from a Fenris developer who posted at 21:01 UTC on 12 November: "We're aware of the balance concerns and will be releasing some updates early next week to address this." No numbers, no details on what will change, and as of Saturday afternoon we found nothing about it on fenris.com/news, where the latest items are the 10 November launch announcement and a 12 November post about the new CORTAO rendering technology.

A second developer comment, from 13 November, is less conciliatory. In a thread about the price of the rare faction uniforms, a player calculated that the jacket and trousers cost 1,500 tokens in total and that, in the fastest method they had found, roughly 33 days of non-stop play would be needed. The Fenris developer Kestrel replied that this is intentional: the uniforms had only been awarded once, in a 2022 lore quiz, they are scarcer than any Alliance Tournament prize ship from the last two decades, and they have traded for 30 billion ISK and sometimes as much as 100 billion. Fenris wanted to make them easier to obtain without "completely shafting" the people who already own them, and the suggestion was to trade with other players for the tokens.

Another request is gaining some ground: in a post from 14 November, a player asks that the SARO sites drop items weighted towards the empire of the region where they spawn, so people who want to support "their" empire can farm for it, instead of every site giving items for every faction.

A Faction Warfare side story: the Amarr LP windfall

The second thread to dominate the front page is about money, not objectives. Under the title Fenris Maths, a player posted a screenshot of one of the new modules in the Faction Warfare LP store and wrote that Amarr LP value was "approaching double Minmatar LP value" because of it, with the web bonus belonging to Minmatar ships.

The expansion notes confirm that the Amarr FW LP store now carries Imperial Navy blueprints for a stasis webifier, a warp disruptor and a warp scrambler, and they do not mention Republic Fleet equivalents. From the comments, which are player calculations and not official data:

One commenter put an Amarr pilot at roughly 850 million ISK per million LP and a Minmatar one at roughly 700 million, adding that the Amarr number could have been around 1.2 billion on the day.
The same commenter posted a comparison of the Imperial Navy and Republic Fleet warp scramblers: same stats, same 240,000 LP, but a total ISK cost of about 62.8 million for the Amarr one against about 110.9 million for the Minmatar one, largely because of the faction tags and materials.
Players are split on the fix. Some expect the blueprint copies to go back to a single run or the web to be nerfed. Others argue that nerfing an item people have already built and fitted would be unfair. Several say the synchronizer rigs and the LP stores should have been rebalanced together.

We have no confirmation from Fenris on any of this, so treat it as the market's reading of the situation, not as an announced change.

Something older and uglier: the PLA battlefield complaint

A third thread is not about Fractured Skies at all, but it reached 93 comments and stayed in the sub's top 25 for about a day and a half. In a post titled "Devs, GMs - Why don't you care about the health of your game? (PLA rant)", the author alleges that PLA uses characters in several factions during Faction Warfare battlefields: damage dealers sit on the opposing beacon while logistics from another faction's characters repair them, and shooting those logistics pilots would cost the attacker standing. The screenshot attached to the post is from a battlefield in Moclinamaud.

This is one player's account, and it is exactly the kind of post that we treat as a point of view. We have not verified it and found no response from PLA. What is interesting is how the commenters react. Many agree that assisting an enemy-faction player should carry the same penalty as shooting a friendly one, as in the high-sec rules. Another commenter notes that Game Masters usually rely on developers to tell them what counts as intended behaviour, so their silence could simply mean the developers consider it valid.

What to watch

The adjustment to the campaign numbers that Fenris says is coming early next week. If the objectives are lowered, the first empire to finish gets its general at the battlefield, and bonuses in sovereign and Faction Warfare space follow later, according to the notes.
Whether the Imperial Navy web and the other tackle blueprints are touched, and how the LP price of the two warzones reacts.
Any word on Faction Warfare rules for repping enemy-faction players.

Sources