Wether they abuse it depends on if it’s CCP’s purpose or not, and I personnaly think it’s not. That’s why I say they are abusing it. Also, I call them pirates 'cuz they just want to shoot players, but since they don’t want to get into something dangerous, they stay in High Sec and use the war system. They’re not just bothering people, they’re also cowards, just as much as the people holing themselves in their stations.
I know a corp decced can call for help for free, but being able to issue “mercenary” contract would just bring more PvP content.
I’m not talking about a fixed number of wardec, but a number that depends on your corp. That’s different, if your corp grows, you can wardec more people. And having to pay to wardec is kind of a joke.
I knew that assisting someone with a flag earned you one, but since buff burst command didn’t do a thing when hitting someone else …
And shooting someone with a flag is scary ? As long as you can determinate if he has friends around and his firepower, I don’t see the problem.
Heh… people don’t usually throw stones in glass houses. Have Marmite stopped using neutral logi?
But yeah, Tora has the advantage that almost everyone in VMG has been in Marmite at a point.
No wonder he can make such claims, he even knows what alt belongs to who 
Seriously. Almost all players will ignore a suspect flagged player in high sec.
They assume that it is a trap. Sometimes it is, and sometimes means all the time to many of the players of this game.
It’s not piracy. Pirates are in it for the money. A pirate will ransom you, or demand money to drop the war. Just shooting people is, well, just being a pvp player in a pvp game.
The merc contract idea you have isn’t terrible, but you cannot compel a third party to actually follow through with their contractual obligations to you with the current mechanics in the game. Adding collateral to merc contracts is an interesting idea, but it’s almost uniformly a bad deal for the mercs involved. None that are sane would agree.
The war declaration mechanic exists SOLELY to drive conflict in the game and allow a form of legitimized PVP in high security space that does not involve duels or taking advantage of suspect/criminal flags of opportunity.
Once again, I’m not trying to put you down, but I do think you need to walk a mile in the shoes of those who do the war declarations before you endorse a strident opinion on the matter. Give it a try, it’s a LOT of work but you might enjoy it.
You make it sound like I dislike the wardec system ! I actually do.
Oh and some people actually do what you’re talking about, ransoming and being it for the money. Tho asking to stop the war for money is just classic surrender. That could be implemented, although the prize mustn’t be decided by either party but by the difference between corps. I don’t know how good it’d work tho.
The diffrence with science is that here we’re mostly discussing opinions. In science, you’re right or wrong ^^
Actually, I have been extremely careful in how I’ve worded my responses in order to not make you feel like you’re attacked or that I condemn your viewpoint. I understand that you feel strongly about the points that you’ve made so far, but as someone who has literally walked some miles in those shoes I am trying to encourage you to do the same. This will allow you to temper what you feel with the experiences that go alongside trying to actually work this system in a manner that could possibly benefit you in the long run.
Of course, this could be base sadism on my part as well. The system has been broken on a fundamental level so as to make it completely unplayable on it’s ideal level, and the options left in the wake of this are either boring to the point where genital mutilation starts to sound fun, or you literally find yourself camping one of a handful of watering holes that every beast in the savanna has to come to in order to drink.
I didn’t take offense no problem, I just thought that you thought that I didn’t like the war system.
Broken on a fundamental level ? There is still a good amount of players, it doesn’t seem like it. Well if it is, it may show interesting to look after if that brings more people to the game
The scientific process is, like most things involving people, is a social process. It is a process where scientists form beliefs and try to convince each other of that their beliefs are the correct beliefs. For example, there might be 2 hypotheses and each scientist will gather data and perform analyses in an attempt to convince the other and even additional members of their profession.
The idea that scientists go out, gather data and look at it and then proclaim the Truth™ is an archaic and romantic notion that is simply not true.
A bit more complicated than the scientific method. You are right to note the social aspect of people, but the scientific method is pretty simple, and it is either followed by folks doing science or it isn’t. The scientific method means to keep testing established theories, trying to prove them wrong by experiment.
Collecting data and publishing its correlation to nebulous phenomena (I have shown that the earth’s crust in the pacific is moving apart in a linear relationship to aggregate tech stock price increases) is not trying to prove any given theory wrong. It is just publishing for political effect, usually to sell stuff associated with a love of a theory that remains untested.
You know if you are speaking to a real climate scientist, for example, because they will know about solar flares and ice core temperature fluctuations, and the other things that a person would know all about if they were trying to break a theory.
This reminds me of the time when carebears formed a theory about ganking being harmful to the game because of their gut feelings and then CCP went out looking for data to confirm the suspicion but then ended up completely falsifying the theory. Good times.
I would counter that what is actually going on is the advocates of a hypothesis do not try to prove their theory is wrong, but to convince others of its correctness and that the other theories are problematic. It is a competitive process that eventually does work. Like the everyone else scientists behave in a self interested manner and we should strip away the romanticism that has cropped up in regards to science (and politics and many other areas of life).
And to be clear, I am not saying science is just gobblydegook, but that what many were taught in HS or even university is a bit simplistic and romantic.
I would contend that scientists are trying to breakt the Other Guy’s Theory™ not their own. Science is replete with examples of the top scientists shutting down a line of inquiry. In economics it lead Paul Samuelson to quip, “Advances in economics are made one death at a time,” implying that as the defenders of the status quo die it opens up the field to new ideas from younger practitioners. This is probably true not only in other fields of science, but also in other areas too.
Indeed. Look at the people who usually decry the analysis done by CCP Rise and his team. They are typically anti-gankers. Even though Rise indicated that he and his team found their results surprising. As a good Bayesian such a surprise should result in a significant shift in one’s priors. What does that mean? If one is open to being persuaded by the data, that one’s view should shift considerably. Yet people do not want to shift and instead spend considerable time trying to concoct a plethora of reasons to justify ignoring CCP Rise’s presentation, the evidence, and cling to their prior beliefs.
This is a totally human thing and I have caught myself doing it many times. I see a study where the conclusions are inconsistent with my current beliefs and I start reading the study looking for something…anything to justify ignoring that study. There are probably a number of cognitive biases that support this type of behavior and it is something we should always try to resist as much as possible.
I’m not sure there can be ownership of a theory. Even if a person independently comes to an idea, this does not preclude other unconnected individuals having the same idea. Therefore, one cannot break “the other guy’s theory”, nor one’s own theory. One either breaks a theory, in which case it isn’t valid and can’t be postulated as true, or one doesn’t break a theory despite trying, in which case it remains valid until somebody breaks it.
The idea that a theory is a club, a place where a person can share ownership with like minded individuals, is deeply unscientific. That is tribal, and superstitious. We believe things because the strong man says to believe them, we accept new myths as our forefathers accepted their myths before us.
One of the big obvious dilemmas about funding universities from state revenues is that you turn research and development of practical ideas into a religion for party members.
Any illiterate simpleton with rough iron tools can point to a mud hut and call it a university, and give his brother three goats and quart of milk to preside over it.
It’s not science unless folks try to disprove it.
CCP Rise did a study on the old style trial accounts (a very limited sample, you do know what a sample is don’t you?) and checked to see if ganking had an impact on them staying or leaving the game. From that certain gankers and ganker aligned players have said "Ganking has no issues in terms of player retention…, which is what I call wishful thinking extrapolation…
So if you lot want to sit there and go that this sample of trial accounts applies to all accounts then more fool you… LMAO!
Suspect Baiting
The question I often have in terms of this is what is in it for me, maybe a kill, but often when I see these people doing it I am not in the right ship. Of course when I see people doing it outside stations like Amarr or Osmon you know their mode of operation, it is a trap and am I wrong to say station games are not fun?
War Decs
I have said what I felt many times that the issue is the players on both sides, quite rightly war deckers want to win at all costs, so they make sure that they have all the advantages and will avoid a fight if they have any risk.
The defender has no real interest in this PvP, so avoid or ignore becomes the basic reaction.
The mechanics in themselves are quite good, but the player attitude on both sides is the issue.
Changes:
I would reduce the cost of war decs on major alliances
I would make it so that a war dec followed a player joining another player run corp
I would set up an OS to give watch list type surveillance in a constellation, but while it is operational it can be blown up without reinforcement timers, being a pure EHP take down.
What will improve things:
Hisec has turned into a place where it is mainly mission runner alts, indy alts of nullsec players who have no interest in other content, the content in hisec is pretty lame and CCP have finally realised this and put in place more interesting group content, hopefully this will enable more group play focused players to develop in hisec, from that perhaps an organised group of players taking it too the war deckers could develop. And that is a big if!!!
Reminds me of an article I read a few months ago:
In the second phase of the study, the deception was revealed. The students were told that the real point of the experiment was to gauge their responses to thinking they were right or wrong. (This, it turned out, was also a deception.) Finally, the students were asked to estimate how many suicide notes they had actually categorized correctly, and how many they thought an average student would get right. At this point, something curious happened. The students in the high-score group said that they thought they had, in fact, done quite well—significantly better than the average student—even though, as they’d just been told, they had zero grounds for believing this. Conversely, those who’d been assigned to the low-score group said that they thought they had done significantly worse than the average student—a conclusion that was equally unfounded.
Honest people are able to say that CCP Rise’s information doesn’t address every possible issue. Those same honest people would say that there is NOTHING that anyone can point to that contradicts it either.
The people who don’t want to accept that not only is there no evidence ganking (griefing) chases anyone from the game, but that those activities might HELP retention, are simply clinging doggedly to their worldview, because (as the article says):
“Once formed,” the researchers observed dryly, “impressions are remarkably perseverant.”
I’m like you, I recognize in my self when I am resisting contradicting information and I’ve learned to fight it. To me, honesty in the modern age can be defined as “forcing yourself to recognize information you dislike, and/or that proves you wrong”.
Even if ganking causes account attrition, nothing can be done about it.
Ganking epitomizes one of the core features of EVE, in that nowhere is safe.
Its a paradox to claim that what makes a game what it is, is killing it.
I will refer to my comments about the situation with mining ships before they were adjusted into their current status. Every single mining ship had the tank of a wet paper bag when all the destroyers had their DPS massively buffed. The miners who were in the main casual players found that they could not do anything to fit their ships or even chose a ship to mine in which was able to survive, some tried to work together and it was hopeless.
So they kept on losing 250m plus ships to people in 11m ships and they saw that all their progress in the game was being removed or deleted and CCP said HTFU, so they did, they HTFU out of Eve, they walked and quite rightly so.
It is all about balance, since the mining ships were changed to what they are now I have not heard of anyone I know leaving the game due to being ganked in a mining ship. Whereas before every person I started playing with left the game.
Ganking is part of the game as are war decs, finding the right balance is key.
The CCP Rise study, again certain people seem to think that a study on trial accounts applies to the whole client base, this is objectively false and meaningless and anyone thinking that is an absolute moron.
The whole thing about the war dec situation is that some people don’t like the fact that their gameplay is impacted by others when it is part of the game, again the issue is to what degree and if there are any ways around it, with the removal of the watchlist targetted hunting is harder, so they could easily do something else and not go to the main hubs, or use the main pipes or do missions in the main mission hubs, but they throw up their hands and log out, which is not how to play Eve.
What do you suggest?
Well balance is just part of it, another thing that is needed is someway to stop continuous war decs and dog piling, or at least to minimise its affect. Maybe CONCORD has a cool off period so that a corp cannot be war decked at all for a period if they have had a certain number of war decs over a period of time. Yes I know some people will game it but so what…
Most of hisec is made up of alts of nullsec or lowsec players, those that are not are casual players, who have limited time to play and thus hate the fact that their limited game play is disrupted so massively, those casual players who tend to be pretty solo minded need to develop more group play without jumping into PvP hell. CCP have made this change recently, it is a baby step and will take some time to develop, if at all.
This is not a quick fix issue, as we currently have risk averse easy kill players hunting risk averse avoidance players, it is never going to be easy to get that to be interesting in any shape or form.
This is already avoidable on NPC corp toons.
Ive never understood why players seem to congregate in high risk areas. Its like everyone wants to jam themself into The Forge, whereas there are, for example, vast swathes of Minmatar Empire space complete with the same value, with almost no risk of being ganked.
I dont get it. There is so much Empire space with almost no risk of PvP, from which its just a few more gates to markets, and from which you can contract freight at a laughably small cost if you want no risk at all to yourself.
On one toon, Ive operated in a tight, off the main avenue constellation that I chose for purposes of quickly running the circuit looking for DEDs and due to relatively low traffic. I have never, even once, in what amounts to hundreds of hours of repeatedly flying through the same constellation systems, seen a PvP wreck there.
Therafter I just contract my DED loot to a freighter (I use Red Frog, though it costs more, cos Im impatient and know they will pick it up post haste). Never once has one of those contracts failed and is picked up within 24hrs.
I dont get it. Why are people not more intelligently choosing their base of operation in HS?