I get your point! I miss the spelling/punction police. Give us back a brutal game…
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I’m actually prepared to send isk for any wordsalid. The fact that no one sends frosty evemail to RP we can only try to create our own here.
Hello, new guy created yesterday. If you’re making that statement legitimately instead of as sarcasm or some other reason, that’s an incorrect assumption. There are many things in the game that aren’t working properly - CCP just has a lot of trouble identifying, understanding or even admitting to some of them.
And even for the things they know are a problem, there’s only so much they can work on at one time.
Wardecs were a problem for almost a decade, frequently pointed out by players, before CCP ever showed the stats to CSM that revealed just how much harm they were doing to the game. It’s quite possible CCP would never have admitted even that, if they hadn’t spent a brief period in 2018-2019 focusing on player retention. (Most likely driven by the recent sale of the company to Pearl Abyss.)
Once CCP realised just how much damage wardecs were doing, they quickly slapped a patch on it to stop the bleeding. As patches go, it was one of CCP’s better attempts, in my opinion (they’ve done some pretty ham-fisted ‘fixes’ in the past).
They gave players the option of being wardec free in ‘social’ corps, and pushed the entry-point for wars to “owning a structure”. Which meant any corp had to reach at least a certain level of competence in the game before they were drawn into wars. It’s not the best of solutions but it’s not the worst either, and I think they probably limited the damage that wardecs do by a fair bit.
What it didn’t do was actually address any of the significant issues that CCP identified with wardecs: extreme skewing in aggressor favor, lack of actual activity during wars, no reason for defenders to participate after a war was declared on them, etc.
As I understand it, that was the purpose of this thread. To see if those design problems with wardecs were ‘inherent’, and could never be removed; or if there were designs/solutions that could actually resolve those issues.
At any rate, good luck with your new character! Perhaps sometime in the future you’ll be in a war and can decide for yourself whether they’re working ‘as intended’ or not.
Ah, the great 60K myth. Anyone would think there was some extended halcyon days where numbers were over 60K. There wasn’t. Other than two very brief peaks where 60K was exceeded, the average between 2009 and 2014 was below 50K, and I note that no-one ever mentions the dips in that same period where it fell as low as 42K.
I mean, there really hasn’t been a drop as big as between January 2011 and November 2011…same time period as the mythical 60K…where numbers fell by 20K ! And yet this is the alleged halcyon days.
Also people rarely mention that the general trend since mid 2022 has been upwards.
All valid points. And let’s not forget that EVE was on the verge of going off a cliff in 2016 before the introduction of Alphas (which love or hate, probably saved the game).
The only thing that I would mention in passing is that we have far more multiboxers today than single players back when we were averaging 40-50k.
It would be interesting to have a crystal ball to gleam something out of the 20.3 million EVE accounts:
• How many players have logged in within the past month/year? (ie: how many are still semi-active)
• How many single players vs. multiboxers?
• How many Alpha vs. Omega accounts?
If I recall correctly, there’s Fanfest data from some year ( I think 2018, though may be more recent ) showing that the average player has 2.4 accounts and 4.6 chars. I recall arguing on an earlier thread that this didn’t leave much scope for vast numbers of players multiboxing.
Agreed. “Averages” are all fine and well, but how many “active” players do we have? (those that login at least once a day, etc.)
Say the peak of active players is roughly 30k (average) at any given time. Are we talking about 300k players for 2 hours each each, 600k players for an hour each, etc. And how many of these are Alphas, Omegas and single vs. multiboxed accounts? How many are multiple characters on the same account?
If that includes alpha accounts, then there is plenty of scope for vast numbers of multiboxers.
Mr Epeen 
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In your system, can you detail out some or all of the “wartime” activities that you propose will earn points during wartime? You implied mining- could that be done anywhere in Eve or would it have to be done in the presence of a structure? Or the enemy’s structure? What would these wartime activities be in your proposal? Specifically?
There is an unintended problem with Kezrai’s system.
Larger corps like AO…the members can mine all over the place. During the wars down south that we’ve been in, miners back in Oipo are 45 jumps away. In fact I regularly note in my travels doing suspect hunting that there’s AO miners all over the place. I know you mine some distance from corp HQ.
I suspect a smaller corp would be more limited in mining scope. I mean…they could mine all over the place, but I doubt a war would be incentive enough to do so. So the incentive to 'carry on doing what they are already doing ’ is greater the larger and more spread out the corp is, and less for smaller corps.
Make friends to help defend your stuff or use their infrastructure instead.
The numbers were growing. What part of this equation do you have a problem understanding?
While good advice for today’s game, it’s just a shame it’s come to this.
Keep in mind it’s not meant to be a detailed blueprint of every possibility. It’s just there to show that the specific problems identified on wardecs can be specifically addressed.
The proposal states:
All it needs to be is a decent spread of actions that corp members would normally do in space - mining, missioning, exploration, combat etc. It has to be in space, so the wardec corp has potential to hunt them or stop their actions.
Only actions taken in high sec count, because wardecs are essentially a high sec activity. Structures are not required for either attacker or defender.
It’s not a problem at all, it’s addressed in the design of the proposal. (If you’d spent a bit more time understanding it rather than chopping out a dozen half-sentences to label ‘hoops’ you might have caught that.)
First, attacking corps don’t get those options. Attackers can only score points through kills or through interrupting defender actions in progress. The attacker chooses the war, but the defender chooses how they’ll fight it.
Second, the per-capita scoring system means large vs small or small vs large is mostly irrelevant. If a small defender has only 6 members, but those members are all engaged every day in their war actions, they’ll have a high per-capita score. A ‘large’ attacker (or defender) needs to motivate almost all of it’s members daily to compete with that.
The system favors small, focused, active groups who are skilled at what they do; over large groups where players are just used to showing up for the structure timer.
The per-capita scoring is also what makes it harder for mass wardeccing. It’s much harder to efficiently chase down and target 60 different groups that are, as you say, “all over the place”… than it is to focus on a few. What’s going to matter is how successful the average member in your group is at their tasks.
I think wardecs can be fixed
- War HQ concept is removed
- Only corps / alliances with sov can wardec and be wardecced
- Members of corps / alliances that hold sov recieve a new booster effect
- Structures in high sec receive new bills, possibly based on System Cost Index. Failure to pay results in severe consequences
Take it or leave it
So youre proposing to fix the lack of participation by rewarding non-participation. There’s a reason i have jump clones and spare ships stashed in several corners of Empire space. It’s so i can easily jump and resume play if this sort of thing comes my way.
It’s good that mining and mission running in a region of dead space will be counted as pvp in this proposal.
Fundamentally, combat is flawed in EVE. Here me out on this one…
• If you go looking for a fight as a solo player, you’re unlikely to find an opponent that isn’t bait, part of a larger group lurking or some combination thereof.
• If you go looking for a fight as a small group, you’re more likely to get dropped on by vastly opposing forces than finding a comparable group to fight.
• The premise of N+1 doesn’t apply in EVE - there’s just no proportionate response. It’s N+10 or N+dog pile to ensure the hapless victim(s) lose so badly that there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of winning. And then we have the zkillboard to humiliate them further.
• “If you’re trying for a fair fight in EVE - you’re doing it wrong.” Well, there’s the fair fight, an unbalanced fight and then dropping a nuke. “Get more friends” is the common response. Unless you have a lot of friends - good luck trying to coordinate anything when many of them will be online at the same time. So unless you’re part of a really large group - good luck with that.
So what has all of this led to? Risk aversion. “A strange game. The only way to win is not to play”. How do you avoid having to replace losses that you can ill afford to lose? By not engaging in any activity or content that would lead to said losses.
Enter wardecs. In almost every scenario it’s simply easier to just stay docked, let the structure(s) be razed and pillaged and then continue on as though nothing happened. Why would you fight with asset(s) worth significantly more than the structure(s) you stand to lose?
There’s no mechanism to preserve, foster and encourage groups to succeed to the point where they’d actually provide content down the road. It’s too easy to be abused - so nothing changes.
What we’re left with is “seal clubbing”, ie: groups like Black Flag that prey on every corporation they can for the lol’s. Anytime they get a challenge, they resort to structure timer and similar games to avoid anything remotely approaching a “fair fight”. And they’re far from the only ones.
. . . . .
The only way to fix wardecs is to take down, dismantle or otherwise abandon all structures in high-sec, stop any and all PI and burn the installations to the ground and cease any and all trade at player-owned structures in high-sec.
This effectively dries up any and all content (and revenue) for any other non high-sec groups and turns high-sec into a veritable wasteland. Congratulations “clubbers” - you won! Enjoy the pyrrhic victory! Don’t let the gate hit your ship on the way out of high-sec…
Then and only then might wardecs (and high-sec as a whole) get some deserved and long overdue attention.
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