Any theories on why so many people have quit over the last 2 years?

Well… 10, 20 or more wars at the time is what i would call “mass dec”. That’s exactly what should not be a case.

Look at this from the other side: if you want to pvp you have a choice (roughly speaking):

  • do it with t1 ships/t2 fit
  • do it with t3/pirate ships with faction/deadspace/officer fit.
    Choosing second option you have to be ready to pay a lot of ISK. And this is not the case when you chose first option.

The same with wardecs: doing it casually (having 1-2-3 at the time) won’t hurt your wallet. Doing it “not so casually” (having 10-30-more) requires you to pay.

Or i’m missing something here?

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Why not? Is this not a sandbox? Who are you to tell people how to sandbox?

The basic underlying philosophy of the game. If 50 guys want to get together and mass war dec so what? Why are trying to dictate what people do in game? Let them do what they want. So long as they are abiding by the EULA and TOS what they do in game should be based on what is going on in the game, constraining players via mechanics because you don’t like their sandboxing is not going to help and is probably why so many people have left.

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I’m not the Devil you summoned but… from my experience there is several reasons why mercs “need to group”

Short story:
Laziness/instant content - casual pvp’r who wants instant gratification of their small amount of playtime available.
Wardec cost vs cost of making corp - theres nothing stopping people reforming, no incentive to group up or have structures inhouse. Not fighting is the best option. A wider net is needed and that cost iskies.
Mindset - Instead of making their own content, people have gone into sheep mode. Just following content, not making it. Blob mentality

And… there’s also the mechanics to take into account. With Crimewatch 2.0 not iterated on to match the “new” wardec system made the loopholes in the mechanics to be used extensively over several years, and gave the general carebear the impression that it was impossible to fight back. Removing watchlist made it next to impossible to fight back if outnumbered. (it also removed the option to do focused wars)

But I would say the reason for grouping up and blanket decs is laziness. Its a way for few content creators to feed an army of casual players with content without working their ass off.

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Increasing the cost of the decs wouldn’t cause the mass-wardeccing hub-camping. It would just price most not-wardec-spamming hisec corps out of the things that aren’t.

The same thing would happen with the removal of watchlists without replacing them with anything.

Your idea of “Sandbox” is too simple that it fails already. CCP regulates the “Sandbox” when it gets out of hand.
Examples: supercarrier ratting/rorqual mining or PLEX intervention.

Btw: i haven’t seen you defending “sandbox” in these cases? Why? Using your own words “If some dudes want to mine in 100500 rorquals and crash mineral market let them do it! It’s sandbox! They do not break EULA or TOS …”.

But this is not what i was wanted to know. I don’t actually care about high-sec and wardecs. The only thing i’m still curious is about connection between increased wardec costs and grouping of wardeccers. And it looks like there was no connection at all. Which is understandable.

personally i think the war dec system has been in need of an overhaul for a long long time, since the watch list went (and lots said before it went we’d see mass decs) the mass decs started, i don’t blame them, what other tools have CCP given us to replace the watch list? nothing!

yea you can deploy alts to the sytems your targets usually hang out in, and wait, but the work load to do so is pretty unrealistic given the size of new eden, which leaves hanging out in trade hubs making the combat 2 dimensional.

before it’s said, yea the targets could gang up and help eachother, some do, but most don’t, crazy i know and perhaps CCP hoped the high sec community would band together to deal with it.

or maybe these people would pay other mercs to attack those attacking them.

didn’t really work out like that now did it.

there’s a degree of lazyness in all this, but that’s also to be expected from the more casual player, he or she doesn’t have the time needed to avail of merc services or be bothered to do so, much more easy to just log for the week and not care or totally avoid the trade hubs.

then there’s the war dec scam, a corp gets decced by a corp and they open it to allies, then the offers pile in from 2 man corps looking for isk to come save ya :wink: lol

corp a decs

corps b, c, d, e, f offers to save ya, for a fee :wink:

corp a owns corps b, c, d, e, and f lol

still going to say the player numbers could be better but they are not as bad as some would like to make out and i’m not at all convinced war decs or PVP in general has anything to do with people not liking the game or not sticking around.

people will like it, love it or hate it, it’s that simple.

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Of course they regulate it, but even in your example CCP is not stopping players from ratting in a super carrier. CCP rarely stop players from a given activity using mechanics–i.e. they do not see an outcome and then hammer in mechanics to try and obtain that outcome.

This is where you fail to grasp the point of the game. The point here is not that CCP dictates what we do, but that they provide the environment and let us decide what to do. Sometimes aspects of the environment get out of imbalance (or were out of imbalance to start with) and CCP adjusts and tweaks those. But CCP does not have a predetermined out come like: “mass war deccing is bad.” If me and some players want to be lazy and dec 10 corporations that use Dodixie and then sit around that and the immediate nearby systems and shoot targets of opportunity…who cares? Why should CCP worry about that?

Yup. Totally fine with that. I am totally fine because I understand things like economics and individual behavior and I am not going to try and mess up the game by worrying about possibilities that are so unlikely that I am more likely to win the super lotto and live a life of luxury with my hundreds of millions.

Of course there is a connection. You are looking at one part of the issue. With the removal of watch list and the increased costs of war decs there is increased incentives to group up, pool resources, and use mass war deccing to get content. Yes, to varying degrees this has always been true, but CCP’s changes to the game have made it harder to do anything but this. If you have activities W, X, Y and Z and CCP makes W, X, and Y more difficult why is it shocking that more people shift to Z?

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that’s true, to a degree. luckily nothing regarding wardecs is getting out of hand and players don’t deserve even more punishment. they’re doing this, because CCP made it happen. there is nothing wrong with the situation at all, especially because the amount of people who are actually being affected is tiny, compared to all those who aren’t. otherwise tradehubs would be empty, which isn’t the case.

if they bother you, find some friends who share your interest and simply camp the station like they do. when they dock, you win. when they fight, you win. it’s that simple. no need to ruin the game even more, just because some people can’t deal with the world they live in.

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I quit because I got bored and wasn’t happy with the direction the game was taking. SP trading was the final nail in the coffin. I had played since 2007. I’m not dissing eve, not at all, but there simply wasn’t anything to keep me interested anymore. My buddies had quit, my favorite hardcore MMO was becoming less hardcore, busy with real life and a lot of new games on the market ended up with me saying bye bye. I won’t forget about eve though, and the good times we’ve had. But it’s time to move on.

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Don’t let Teckos Pech trick you to believe i care about high-sec and war decs :smiley: He successfully trolled me (good job!) and moved point of discussion i’ve tried to do.

I will reiterate again: i tried to discuss connection between wardec cost raising and grouping of wardeccers.

At this point i still not sure about it. But i see no point in continuing without real wardeccer POV.

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Fair. :slight_smile:

Oh… I have a fiery pit you can burn in… “real wardeccer POV”?! :angry:
Dont mind me… I ran Devils doing focused wardecs for 6+ years…

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What your post was saying, basically, that there’s too many people who have too mucb money and want to play easy-mode, or just farm killmails.

is it okay to summarize it to this? it’d fit well for what’s going on throughout the game as a whole…

Also, know that you have my respect, Sir.

it’s a bit more complicated than that but yes.

When people log on they want to know their time is not wasted. so playing in “easy mode” does that.
But its not many people with to much isk as you said, its a few content creators able to fund a lot of content for their members.

Another thing is that with all the timers and so on is that highsec pvp has also adopted 0.0 ping mentality last few years.
So the ones with even less time to play eve can log on when there’s a ping or CTA.

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i need to think about this. it seems that it all boils down to the same things as everywhere else in the game.

thank you!

Sorry, i’ve missed it. Reread it now and yes, you gave what i wanted to find.

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Then why do you care at all. Just stop asking questions and let this part of the thread die. I explained why costs can lead to larger war dec entities. Others have explained it. You continue to insist there is no connection and then want to claim you don’t even care…for somebody who does not care you sure do protest alot.

Yeah, and when I explained it you said, “Oh, that sounds like mass war deccing and that is bad.”

So which is it…you don’t care or you do? Your responses are very confusing and misleading.

Holy crap…

Really, what parts of his response are in contradiction with mine? From Lord Razpataz,

Yup, I got that one.

Didn’t get those two, but they are good points. A war dec corp has to incur these costs whereas the targets can simply leave corp and reform a new one for a fraction of the costs. So if X% of the corps that are decced are abandoned and new one’s started and you have little to no ex ante way of knowing which ones this will also point towards “mass decccing”. For example, suppose you want a certain number of wars, for simplicity say 10. Suppose abandon/start new corp happens about 20% of the time. Instead of deccing 10 corps you’ll dec at least 12, maybe 13. As the probability of this abandon/reform happens then you’ll want to deck more corps.

For example, suppose we are living in your “war dec paradise” and each war dec corp wants to dec JUST ONE other corp. This effect could cause mass war deccing if the probability of abandon/start new corp increases. Once it gets to 50% the war deccing corp will want to dec 2 corps to ensure it gets 1. At 70%, 3 corps and at 75% 4 corps and at 80% 5 corps.

A similar effect would happen if people drop corp and just hide out in NPC corps.

In other words, these options for players getting decced pretty much lead us right down the path to mass war deccing.

Bottom line, if you agree with Lord Razpataz seems to me you should have agreed with my post.

Han Solo has great KB stats! Lot’s of kills and only one loss so far and even that only because some dude awoxed him.

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funny. i read your post and agree, and then immediately wondered if these thoughts relly go through people’s minds. in regards to the watchlist changes, which triggered the mass deccing phenomenon, it seems more of a “try to get what i can, because hunting became too much of a problem”.

idk, i need coffee.