You fail to realize eve is at the number of players playing at 2007, and eve has free players now. http://eve-offline.net/?server=tranquility
Well, Go to this section called Features and Ideas, and share with CCP your great wisdom on amazing mechanics that would bring in 100 times the players in today’s economic situation & gaming culture.
And then watch people point out the giant gapping holes in it and realise it’s not that amazing and not that easy.
I agree with the first three in Ima’s list. I’m a bit more sanguine about the fourth. Things like asset safety make citadels more attractive.
I haven’t played in about a year, but before that I was a consistent player who put in at least 20 hours a week for about 4.5 years. Most of my time was spent in highsec because I enjoyed doing industry and jabbering on with people about manufacturing and negotiations in a zone where I didn’t necessarily have to freak out about whether non-blues were within two jumps at any given time.
Scamming, ganking, and wars are, of course, a fact of life in New Eden. There’s some merit to the old argument of ‘htfu or gtfo’. That said, we all know the vast majority of players stick to highsec because they can’t be bothered with the politics of null, the paranoia of w-space, or the constant relocations of lowsec. Content creation, shiny new graphics, and system tweaks on the part of the dev’s helps, more often than not, but it’s all garbage compared to the underlying mechanic which actually keeps players logging in: their online friends and how you and yours deal with me and mine through the misc stresses of dealing with all the kinds of players you’ll find.
It’s true that a lot of players in highsec don’t have the stomach for war, but that’s because they see it as being a non-sustainable activity. It costs a lot of isk (relatively speaking) for casuals/carebears to be actively defending themselves against people who find it so inexpensive and so risk-free to declare war against those casuals on the hopes of getting a kill or two during the week. During that week, 90% or more of those casuals will simply stop logging in because it’s viewed as a better option than spinning in station in highsec - bluntly, it saves isk for the casuals to stop playing the game, and if they’re not playing the game then they’re not playing with their online friends in the eve community.
I offered to pay out full SRP under certain conditions to the players in my corp (because I was smart and used alts to keep the isk flowing), but a lot of them saw PvP as simply not fun and others thought that it wasn’t worth fighting because I wasn’t offering them ten billion isk in ship replacements every day and it, therefore, wasn’t enough entertainment to justify their time.
Now, here’s the important part: Before the watchlist nerfs and the retraction of the wardec fee increases, most of those same players would stay online when we received the occasional war. They’d go out and lose a few ships and then laugh/complain about it with each other. As of a year ago (and probably still today) the state of war in highsec is that you can’t so much as fly through a trade hub or choke point without risking getting war declared on your corporation that same day. War is so out of control in “secure” space that it might as well be lowsec. Casuals will not continue to play in that environment, and CCP loses an absolute ton of money as a result. They were forced into introducing a F2P model in order to make up that fiscal shortfall, but it’s only a band-aid on a sucking chest wound.
I want EVE to continue to at least their 20-year mark as a healthy and thriving community. Until there’s a solution where highsec can return to occasional wars instead of continuous ones … I predict it’ll only continue to decline despite whatever amazing technical innovations CCP manages to invent to slow it down. Even if you agree with the sentiment that the watchlist was too much free intel, you should also agree that there should be a replacement where you can still get that kind of intel while you’re actively, i don’t know, playing a minigame or paying isk fees or something. The fees for multiple wars also need to go back up … maybe not as high as they were at one point, but up.
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That’s a big leap, claiming wardecs are the reason for f2p. the biggest part of the f2p crowd is in nullsec. the reason to go for f2p is attracting simpler people, who can be easily milked out of their money. it’s always the money and when it stops paying off, game’s consolidate servers or shut down.
Plus, makin decs more expensive just, again, leads to merc grouping even tighter together. repeating a past mistake, hoping it turns out differently this time, is insanity. there were times when wardecs cost a fraction and were easily available even to new players and the game still grew.
I stand by my claim. I saw a lot of people stop playing up until the point where hardly anybody I knew in highsec was logging in anymore. It may be true that most of the f2p players aren’t in highsec, but it still made up for lost income.
pretty much agree with you on the war dec thing, the loss of the watch list created the situation we’re in now.
PVP pilots need content so everything gets war decced so the lads and ladies have something to shoot at and that’s to be expected.
bottom line you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink it.
If pilots don’t want to PVP they won’t !
nothing is going to make them do it, apart from forcing them to do so under threat of removal from corp which does sometimes result in a few getting into it for a while but only because they feel they must, it’s rare you get a true PVPer this way, it does happen but rarely.
but most, they don’t learn PVP or show a real interest in it, they just do it because they feel they have to do it. yea they enjoy the kill mails and the excitement of the fight but once they fighting stops they resort to their original play style, you never see them watching videos on it, or reading up on tactics, or working on fleet comps or ship setups, nope, it’s back to mining mission running and other NPC stuff.
the trick here is how to get these PVE people interest in PVP and getting them to stay interested.
not to lead the horse to water but to find a way for the horse to need the water and seek it on their own.
watch list should be given when you dec a target and if they are not active you should be able to end the war (at a cost)
The cost, yea that needs to increase and it needs to mean something, say 200m dec cost which turns into a fund which is shared between the warring parties when the war ends.
most kills gets the full amount.
same amount of kills shares it.
aggressor does not get any kills, full amount goes to corp that was aggressed.
Allies, to join costs the same as a dec (increases fund) with a limited number of allies being allowed.
nuetral parties getting involved ( nuet logi or boosting pilots) has always been an problem, prehaps if they get involved they are made part of the war until it ends, NPC corps would be a problem here but i’m sure CCP could code us up some magic to help stop it to a degree.
standings, these have been a mess for a long time, they pretty much have no meaning really when it comes to PVP, perhaps there should be a new standings table reflected by PVP activity between actual players and not just NPC.
lol when ya think about it there is much more to it than meets the eye and i’m sure lots will totally disagree with what i’ve said. I’m still on the side of thinking people should play every part of the game, you dont’ have to be good at everything, but it’s a huge help in sticking around for a long time.
i do have to say again (not in this post but in many like this one) that EVE isn’t for eveyone and that’s ok.
we can’t expect everyone to love EVE like we do and most gamers have a shelf life in a game of about 4 years or so, that’s if they like/love the game.
nothing wrong with people like wanting to PVP or not liking EVE, it’s like every other games life span, it will begin, it will have a middle and it will have an end.
we’re at the middle in EVE, enjoy it while it lasts 
o7
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Increasing the cost will change nothing for the better, because people will still have the same reasons to complain about the decs anyway. it changes nothing for the better and mercs will simply group up even tighter than before. why is it that people don’t learn from history and continuously behave as if they were insane?
repeating the same things, assuming that at some point something will change, is the very definition of insanity.
just… wow.
I always wonder how does it happen so Mercenaries “need to group” to pay whooping 100-200 mil ISK per week of wardec? People like to say that in today’s Eve ISK is very easy to get. 260mil ISK ticks of supercarrier ratting? 200mil from high-sec incursions? Burners? Ganking of overfilled with PLEXes freighters?
Is it similar to “passive moon income allows low-sec alliances to life because noone wants to mine”?
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People left because we have ships skins vs. proper ships rebalance, cause they shite up on further mods tierisation, cause they failed to fix meta levels and stats of mods, cause they still can’t make bp stackable etc. etc.
And pretty much as longer you play the more routine activities you have to deal with.
Oh and yeah, CCP do lies and kicked off valuable devs out of the 
.
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I agree, I made a post along time ago about BS vs BC, which was widely rejected. Theres a reason why you dont see many BS in pvp in game. Balance isnt a thing ccp is to concerned about, and the sheep fail to relize. CCP is only concerned about money.
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Ask them. I simply state that history repeats itself, when it is being forced to repeat itself. upping the wardec costs will not change anything for the better. on the contrary, it will turn it into an even more niche thing even less people do, but these people will pile up to one even bigger group than the currently biggest group. makes totally sense for a feature once widely available and enjoyed by the many, turning into a thing that eventually gets removed, because no one cares about it anymore. right?
the idea of upping the cost is seriously dumb and only makes sense when you look at it in isolation and have zero care, clue, or consideration for the long term. people who come up with it should have spent these two seconds for breathing instead.
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Well… The theory “history repeats itself” only works if you found real roots of previous historical event. Else it does not.
For this case: are you really sure that mercs group because wardec is too expensive? Isn’t there any other reason?
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I find watching war decs die through over fishing of a rapidly diminishing content base rather amusing, well played guys, well played…
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i can just tell you how they themselves said it happened, mixed with personal insights i’ve gained years ago. are you asking about the past, or the future? i’m unsure, so i’ll touch both. we need to be on the same page anyway. please correct what’s wrong and add where it’s necessary.
important to consider is that back then isk didn’t grow as easily as it does today. the 50mill nerf happened quite a good while ago. it became a necessity to group up, because it become a necessity to split the cost. CCP nerfed the game from a state of “many wars, many deccers” to “many wars, less deccers”. How that’s supposed to help is beyond my understanding. dare i say it doesn’t help at all. it does, though, silence the complainers for a while, until a new generation starts complaining.
i know that wardecs once were so cheap, that a lot of players (even new vs new) were encouraged to try it out, so they can fight competition. back then the average mentality of players was more “cut throat” than it is today. culture, etc etc. “mass griefing” wasn’t much of a thing back then, but of course ego trippers existed and took things too far eventually, leading to complainers blowing it all out of proportions (as it happens usually).
“the griefing of the few” shouldn’t lead to everyone being punished (a nerf to interaction is a nerf to interaction for everyone) and it shouldn’t lead to some self righteous people declaring everyone a victim. declaring everyone a victim by default, assuming no one has any sense for self responsibility, is actually horrible.
i’d like to add that “mass griefing”, btw, isn’t when players form corps to wardec others. back in the days it was a widely available feature and if there had been less people whining, and more people fighting and defending, the nerf wouldn’t have happened. “mass griefing” is different. it’s not griefing, when tons of players make wars to fight other new, or old players. no, that’s “working as intended” based on the feature provided.
it’s also not “griefing”, when mercs start to mass dec people, with only a miniscule percentage being actually affected. what’s “griefing”, in my eyes, is declaring everyone a victim by default and declaring deccers, who only deal with the situation CCP made happen, as the bad guys. i also consider it harmful when a few people, who declare other people as victims, declare that a miniscule amount of affected people should set the bar for what should be allowed, or nerfed.
And no, i’m not picking sides. i’m actually for serious punishment for everyone who dares to work against the community as a whole:
the “belligerent undesirables” group are pretty much the sole reason for the legal fire nerf. instead of being modest, they milked it. always when one finds a way of doing “shenanigans” with others, it also attracts selfish ego trippers. that’s how you grow groups in a quick and easy way. find a way to cause tears and the jerks will flock around you. as always it’s solely the ego trippers ruining it for the rest of us. they’ve been warned by people, but their egos didn’t listen and now we have this. and, of course, they’ve been angry about a situation they’ve caused all by themselves. Awoxbears.
And don’t misunderstand me, i have a lot of respect for Psychotic Monk. that doesn’t change, though, how inflated egos ruined it for everyone.
personally, if i had been a dev, instead of nerfing awoxing, i would have publicly slapped them with a threat first, and then - if ignored - put down the banhammer on them. reason: disregard for the health of the culture and community as a whole. yes, that should be a thing, because it puts the whole community and the health of society at the top.
what they did eventually ended in “mass griefing”. few people mass shitting on virtually everyone. the solution to this isn’t to make changes that influence the game for everyone, it’s to kick out those who only care about themselves, early on. Boom, problem solved until new ego trippers deserve the same treatment, and the vast majority of people’s gameplay stays unaffected.
Anyhow…
Back then CCP also didn’t yet know that isk isn’t a proper balancing factor. i don’t know if mercs back then made clear they’ll group up, when the nerf got announced, but i know they did it with the watchlist nerf. CCP knew what’ll happen and apparently were fine with it.
it makes no sense to try to fix a situation with a solution that’s proven not to work, and it also makes no sense to blame players for a situation CCP deliberately caused in the first place.
Regarding growing mercs even tighter:
you want to increase costs for decs, either proportional to the already declared amount, or the base cost. in the current situation, given how easy it is to make money, upping the cost does not help with merc’s tradehubmassdecs (let’s ignore how it’s blown out of proportions, as usual), unless it’s actually significant.
when it’s not significant, then it will have zero effect on mercs and only keep other people from declaring war, putting wardecs even further into the hands of a few. creating a monopoly isn’t really a good thing. nothing of significance changes for the few, but the many lost options again.
when it is significant, though, the mercs will just grow tighter. some will leave in disgust, the rest will group up to share the cost. here, too, all it achieves is further monopolizing wardecs, until a new generation of complainers starts complaining, eventually ending wardecs once and for all. And no one blames the root of the issue: CCP.
I don’t doubt their words and the history. my logic, based on what i know, is sound. that’s what i can say based on the information i have. Now, please, give me the information i’m missing, so i can complete, or correct, my picture of it.
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Given that mercs were already forming into larger groups before the changes people like to claim made them form… it’s pretty obvious that they weren’t the main driver. They certainly might have added extra straws to the already existing load of course. But by no means did they cause it.
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Thanks. I agree to most points.
Still connection between wardec price and grouping of wardeccers looks weak. Maybe it was just one of factors (like https://forums.eveonline.com/u/Nevyn_Auscent wrote)
if that’s the case, then i stand corrected. an actual merc would be helpful here. @Ralph_King-Griffin is always a reliable source of information, maybe he hears the call.
How about if you want 10 wars that month? How about 20? Or 30? Suddenly it is a fair bit of ISK for a single person to generate. If your average war costs 150 million, then we are talking 1.5 billion, 3 billion, and 4.5 billion respectively.
Keep in mind that alot of the HS war dec corps may be more casual in terms of PvP. If they were highly organized and had a solid logistics backbone then you might see them in NS. And yeah, they may not care for LS as they might find the odds less to their liking. I don’t care, this is a sandbox game and if they want to spend their free time kicking over people’s sand castles in HS…whatever floats their boat.
Dont worry im here as the RELIABLE INFO person
So no correlation between wardec costs and grouping of deccers.
Wars used to be cheaper, but many other factors/nerfs happened.
Biggest was the watchlist change to protect nullsec super baby bears.
Cant hunt diwn targets, so next best thing is to just mass dec everyone and wait in 1 place.
The solo or 2-3-4 group of players that would hunt indy corps or be small time focused mercs are long gone.
Why go through all the extra pain and time and hoops and struggles when after like 2 hours of hunting, you find out those people logged or were never online or docked up etc.
Better to just join your corp into an alliance and mass dec and sit in pipeways/hubs.
Price was a nerf, but cant really nerf on price, see supers/bling ships/pirate ships whatever.
Its so much easier to make isk now than years ago that the higher dec cost doesn’t matter.
Yes they should be way cheaper. But ccp won’t hurt the bears so aint changing.
Which is ironic cuz now just mass wardecs
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