Are Wardecs always going to be broken? Is a fix even possible?

Communications Center General Discussion
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Background: My ‘main’ is in a low-key indy corp for a little over 10 years now. Even though we’re small and out of the way and don’t make waves, we’ve been wardecced a couple dozen times. Mostly by corps we’ve never interacted with. And mostly they’ve been fizzles, with no kills either side.

Over all those times, the corp leads say “Don’t undock, don’t feed them, don’t give them encouragement”. Or sometimes they just don’t even say anything. Some people have hopped corp to avoid it, some log out, some just do very minimal stuff. We tried having our own Citadel early on, and also moved it to a holding corp ‘for reasons’ I guess, but it got nuked anyway.

No biggie, these decs have been more an inconvenience than anything. But every year or so I look up discussions on Wardecs and it seems like the reaction is always “They’re broken, they’re exploited, they’re no fun, they’re too cheap or too expensive” yadda yadda yadda. Mixed with a few lines of “Oh yeah they suck now but they were great ‘back in the day’ when we did super cool things with them”. Except nobody seems to agree on when exactly those great days were.

Saw some discussions recently on how they’re still broken and CCP even copped to some pretty bleak numbers on just how broke, and people saying “This will fix it” or “that other thing will” or the usual “just go back to the way it was 10 years ago”. Which begs the question why they changed it 10 years ago, I guess.

Anyway, that’s my question(s). Is something basically wrong with the idea of Wardecs? Did they ever actually work? Are the problems (which mostly involve wardec corps looking for easy kills and KB padding I guess) something that can be fixed?

It seems like something that should be interesting and should be very EVE-like but it’s just never quite worked.

Your thoughts?

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All corps should be war debacle.

A corp can only have 1 war HQ.

Remove cores

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The war system was completely destroyed by CCP in 2016. Its the worst mistake CCP ever made to destroy the butterfly effect and its the reason PvP has come to the state its in. Ive spent years and countless hours trying to get others to understand this cancerous anti-pvp system which we currently live under.
Back in 2016, CCP stood on stage and said. “Its a shame that only 5 corps have been responsible for 95% of the wars”
This was after years of them wrecking wars so bad that only 5 CEO’s could even afford to fund a war in highsec. I am one of those 5 and Im sick of talking about the damage CCP has done to us all. Yes, the war system is broken, CCP is to blame and nullblocks are the only benefactors to the detriment of us all. Not only that, but we are all slaves with no power or choice in the matter.
Is a fix possible? Yes. But CCP is not interested. They are out-right hostile. They claim to be helping the small guy but in reality they simply took away all your power and ability to compete while handing it over to an ever shrinking group at the nullblock top.

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War will always be “broken” because the attackers are organized and want to fight, while their targets are almost never organized and almost never want to fight.

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Sure, why not. So if I understand this correctly, initiating corporations need a structure in the region to designate as war HQ (low-sec, high-sec, etc.) to initiate wardecs? Does the wardec recipient also need a structure? Does the cost for additional wardecs go up exponentially?

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Still has to be high sec. No getting to use caps to defend it.

Only exception is npcs.

No, risk with more decs is more people you have to defend your hq from

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Basically this, with the clarification that the attackers don’t ‘want to fight’. They just want easy and safe kills, and maybe some loot or profit. They want a turkey shoot.

It’s the standard issue with EVE-style PvP: a few people talk about wanting “good fights” or “a challenge”, but very few people actually seek those. Common EVE sayings:

  • If you find yourself in a fair fight, somebody screwed up.
  • EVE combat is typically decided before the first shot is even fired.

Wardec corps almost exclusively declare war against targets they know cannot effectively fight back. It’s basically just legalized ganking so they can boost their killboards and maybe score some loot. All while sneering about the “carebears who refuse to fight”… but if anyone actually organizes resistance and fights back meaningfully, the wardec corp just docks up and waits for them to go away.

Every MMORPG that features mixed PvP and PvE attracts these groups of players who crave the experience of slaughtering every easy target they can reach. They’re a plague of locusts and always bad for the game. It’s a case of 5% of the playerbase destroying the gameplay experience for half the players. Which is why mostly-PvE MMORPGs featuring open-world PvP never succeed… pleasing the “I deserve to be able to kill everything!” crowd leads to the destruction of the player base and the elimination of their own targets.

EVE and other MMORPGs with open PvP only succeed to the extent that they limit and restrict this behavior. In EVE it’s due to Concord and the fact that space is large, many locations in it, travel is slow, Wardec mechanics etc. So the damage is somewhat limited by these factors.

Net result: yes Wardecs are broken. Yes, the nature of EVE combat always favors the aggressor. Yes, high-sec Wardec corps generally choose targets they can slaughter with no risk to themselves. Yes, a relatively small number of wardec players target and drive out of the game a very much larger number of players. No, they don’t want fights, they want easy kills and loot. They’re operating in high sec specifically to avoid actual ‘fights’.

Can they be fixed? Well that depends. They can be made less harmful to the game. They can be tweaked to provide slightly more interesting and less entirely one-sided, predictable results. But they will always favor the aggressor, otherwise they simply won’t declare the war to begin with.

I’ll stick some supporting info and references in a later post, and consider whether it’s worth posting “fixes”. But for now, coffee awaits.

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Or just make them never drop and thus remove the 600m+ guaranteed payout.

In order to fix wardecs, I think CCP has to first remove or minimize perverse incentives. For starters, wars shouldn’t generally be profitable affairs. It should be a costly venture that a group enters into only because it’s necessary to achieve their goals.

I also think war-immunity-by-default was a mistake. It was blunt instrument to correct a complex problem. My thought is that every non-NPC corp should be war eligible, BUT the fees to declare and maintain wars should be proportional to the size delta between participants:

  • Small corp vs small corp: $$$.
  • Small corp vs big corp: $$$$$$.
  • Big corp vs small corp: $$$$$$.
  • Big corp vs big corp: $$$.

Further, the fees for each active war beyond the first should increase exponentially (i.e., it should be costly to run a war, and very costly to run multiple wars at the same time).

EDIT to add: in order for the fee scaling to work, you’d also have to lock recruitment for the attacking corp, for the duration of the war. Members can leave the attacker but none can join until the war is over. The defender of course, may continue to recruit.

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The core issue is that wardecs were being heavily abused - mainly by a small number of groups. High-sec was essentially being “farmed” for easy kills - and as a result, high-sec players were increasingly opting to remain in NPC corporations.

I remember getting 2-3x wardecs a week on my tiny 1-man corporation and having to abandon it for an NPC corporation just so I could get in a hour or two of time every week without being harassed (gankers were still a threat).

I’m not sure if there’s an easy solution, because the current meta is to drop an overwhelming number of ships into an engagement. This won’t change if wardecs are tweaked, so I’m not sure how to avoid ending back up in the same situation.

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Firstly

Is beyond dumb… the only reason the cores exist is to drop. Remove them and correct the build cost back to how it was before they were added.

Secondly their is absolutely no need for scaling war costs. It’s better for the attacking corp to have more targets and it’s better for the defending corps to have more targets that aren’t them. You also don’t need to adjust the price based on corp size that already happens naturally. As a larger corp is more efficient to war Dec than a smaller one.

Likewise unlike the ordinal war Dec system having hqs and limiting them to only one active hq means the more groups you dec the more people you have to defend from.

Dec waves have also historically been one of the larger motivators for isolated hs corps to reach out, begin working together and otherwise become involved in wider politics often leading them to the track to exit hs entirely. So again you should not inhibit attacking large numbers of groups.

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Maybe high-sec wardecs should be limited to corporations with 50 members or less, ie: attack all the opposing corporations you want - but you can’t have more than 50 members.

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In Eve, if someone wants to wage war with you, you’ve already lost. They already know that they can win or they would not have initiated the war.

In Eve, there is still only one way to win a fight- “No be there”

Leave. Run. Jump clone. Log off.

Og get blown up just to let them get what they want so they’ll leave. Buy PLEX and get yourself a new ship.

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“A strange game. The only way to win is not to play.”

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How about a nice game of chess? :wink:

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I’ll ignore the ad hominem and explain that I was thinking like a developer with that suggestion. Changing the drop percentage from 100% to 0% is a 60-second fix. Removing cores entirely and changing the build requirements for all citadels is considerably more work, and creates problems for all existing citadels and owners of cores. It’s one of those situations where, once it’s out there, it’s hard to claw back. But yes, CCP could do that too. I doubt they will.

I disagree. A big reason for the present wardec mechanics is past abuse. Asymmetry is a vector for abuse whether that’s a 1-man corp wardeccing a 100-man indy corp, or a 400-man corp wardeccing a 10-man corp. The attacker sets the terms of the conflict, and that will always be to the advantage of the attacker. Scaling the fees will limit (not stop) this behavior. If that 1-man corp wants a hundred juicy indy targets, he can have them, but at a steep cost.

I didn’t mention it, but I also support your idea of a single attacker war HQ for all wars.

EDIT to add:

You’re thinking like a PVPer. For an indy-focused PVE-only corp, having “more targets” is not something they would see as a positive. “Hey, we’re a 10-man mining corp that just got decced by a 400-man corp of rabid PVPers! Yay, us! Look at all these guys to shoot!” is not how they’d react.

And in the past, all too often, that’s what hisec wars looked like.

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I’m thinking like an executive of one of the largest high sec alliances during the peak years of war decs.

We spent over three years under indefinite war Dec and were founded precisely because of the mentality of horrible ceos that were just telling new players who didn’t know better to “just log off”

Quite frankly it doesn’t matter what they “see” as a positive. What many people “saw” as a positive led to the current war Dec mechanics that are far more artifical, predatory, and have led to a near half decade long stagnation of high sec.

That said

Why would this at all be the reaction? I said the attackers having more targets that aren’t the defending corp is good for the defenders. Not the attacking corp having more people for the defenders to shoot. And this is very much a mind set those indy corps hold.

This used to be true and was the major problem with the old system. But the war hqs greatly remove that.

1 man corps can’t get away with safely war deccing 100 man corps because no matter how poorly trained the 100 players are they will pop your hq if it’s only you to defend it.

It’s the same with attacking large waves against multiple groups. They can all get together and remove that hq. The current meta heavily relies on the fact that nearly every corp places structures outside their main corp. This makes it extremely difficult for hs entities to actually know who’s been war decced and communicate with each other. And another reason removing immunity helps the defenders.

Currently if there’s a hs block that you know will work together you simply skip them when you war Dec. This is how powerful mutual defense is under the hq system and why that system should have been left able to breath on its own rather than immediately combining it with the eligibility mechanic.

This would be if i called you dumb, not your idea.

No, you weren’t. At least not an experienced one. Your idea leaves a major artifact of a system you no longer want causing bloat and potential complications. It’s messy and inefficient.

It’s not hard to revert the build cost to what it was before the cores and remove cores. This in no way impacts current station owners. They just no longer have a core or a core bay. It has a small impact on people that move cores to market for sale but npc buy orders correct for that. You’d have a bit of a lag time as currently manufactured structures adjust their market price up and that’s it.

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An aggressing corp should have 3-5 strategic targets. Each targets losing the corp half a billion in isk when lost, to avoid frivolous ‘joke declarations’

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actually CCP invented them after a certain group(dont remember which) anchored over 100 Astrahus in 1 day in several systems(as in 100 each) in nullsec… Cores should be required in my opinion for that reason as a Nullsec only req

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that was one very small reason the larger reason was do to asset safty and people complaining that there was no gain in attacking them particularly in HS. Cores don’t even really slow down setting up structures all that much.

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I remember when it happened, the Dev’s at the time said that was the very reason they created the cores…thinking Nullsec would have a hard time buying and transporting them from HS enmasse.