I'd assume that everyone would be flying ships of roughly the same tier: e.g. tier 4 or 4.5. The hard tier system wouldn't make much of a difference at all in that case.
Look at his join date. He doesn't know old PvP. That said, I don't think that this could really gain much momentum. I hope it can. I would love for it to work. But as it is, I'm fairly certain I'll just have to continue grinding towards more FAW, more A2B, more beams, and more universal consoles.
I've been noticing quite a few threads about the state of PvP now vs. two or three years ago. Many people have been complaining about the overabundance of cheese: in consoles, in lockbox/lobi/crossfaction ships, in the incessant power creep, in borderline broken DOff abilities. And I like the concept of restricted PvP.…
What sort of weapons and DOffs were you using? For the old STFs, we had no access to any fleet weapons, reputation weapons, or any DOffs whatsoever. Or most of the Z-Store/Lobi items.