Tier 5: I hate it, but I love it!

For one week running the Minmatar Militia has had tier five control of the Amarr-Minmatar war zone and a full week before that we had tier four control.  What does this mean?  If one is willing to painstakingly run faction warfare missions for hours on end; a plethora of ISK.  On the other hand this means almost zero activity in some of the more regularly populated systems of the war-zone.

If you're unfamiliar with faction warfare, each system in the war-zone can be contested or defended by closing faction warfare complexes.  Once a system is captured by a faction, it can be upgraded to a certain level (up to five) at the system ihub.  The combined total of all system's tiers contributes to an overall tier of control for the entire war zone.  At tier five control, most of the systems will be captured and upgraded for your faction giving a 220% increase in loyalty point gains (cha-ching!).  Controlling all of the systems also means that your enemies can't dock in any of these systems.  Imagine being unable to dock in any of the systems you are most active in.  You can see why activity can plummet when one faction has tier five control.

I have no idea who organizes these tier pushes, I imagine large alliances running shadow operations with alts behind the scenes.  When an alliance is running low on funds a cue is given and the alts amass to run complexes and FW missions until their eyes bleed.  They alternate factions between pushes to lessen the effects of market flooding that results with these extended high-end tier control stints.  Of course I could be mistaken, but high end tier control is a huge undertaking which I believe is out of the scope of either side currently involved in FW.

I have a love/hate relationship with the tier system.  On one end it allows me to make a ridiculous amount of ISK in a short amount of time, on the other it kills PVP activity in the region.  Either no enemies are out or all of the friendlies are running missions.  I go through this cycle where I PVP for a long period of time and eventually run out of ISK, at this point I'm praying for tier four or five.  When it finally comes I drop everything I'm doing and start pumping out faction warfare missions, these mind-numbing sessions of torpedo launching and watching netflix can go on for days.  When I feel I've established a good currency buffer I vow to never PVE again and start looking for fights, to my dismay the war zone is usually still inactive.

I believe that in order to fix this "problem" CCP needs to remove the docking restriction for systems in enemy hands or at least designate one system for each faction inside the war zone that cannot be captured, thus giving a base of operations for each side.  This would help to prevent the lull in activity we see every time a faction obtains tier 5.