Before thinking about how much/what kind of a change to Wardecs might be needed, I checked some numbers to see how big of problem it might be. That gives an idea whether just some tweaks and adjustments are needed, or a drastic re-write. This will be long, with supporting facts, so here’s the TL;DR for you:
TL;DR: Yes, EVE wardecs are deeply harmful to the game, benefit very few players to the detriment of very many, and contribute relatively little useful or interesting content to the game. The base concept needs a full re-write.
Wardecs in EVE are essentially legalized ganking: they’re a license to attack things in high sec that would otherwise be protected by Concord. As such, they’re a sub-case of the generic MMORPG issue, “What happens in a mixed PvE/PvP MMO when you let a small group of attackers harass a much larger group of mostly PvE players?”
All past trends in MMOs with this feature show that a quite small group of attackers will always and endlessly kill every easy target they can reach, without restraint. EVE Online was inspired by Ultima Online, partly due to the fact that some of the original developers thought this behavior was ‘interesting’.
Here’s what the Ultima Online developers had to say about it (all sources will be linked at bottom):
“As painful as it may sound, one thing all the developers agreed on was that non-consensual PvP was a mistake. It’s a bit painful for me to write that, as most of my best MMO experiences took place in FFA PvP worlds, but Garriott noted that they had the metrics to back it up.”
“Rampant ganking and griefing and PKing drove players out of the 1997 sandbox by the thousands – “a truly distressing number of our new player acquisitions,” Koster laments – until the developers engineered countermeasures, patch by patch.”
“Eventually, the team, by then absent Koster, implemented Trammel, effectively creating mirror worlds safe from player-killers. “I wouldn’t have done it, personally, but there is no question that the userbase doubled once this went in,” he says.”
In case anyone thinks “Yeah sure that was then, things have changed”, here’s what the developers of Amazon’s New World (a game intended to be fully open PvP) had to say about why they had to re-write their PvP:
“One of the problems we observed with this system was that some high level players were killing low level players, A LOT. Sometimes exclusively. This often led to solo or group griefing scenarios that created a toxic environment for many players. To be clear, this behavior was not shown by all PvP players, but enough to cause significant issues.”
The problem wasn’t poorly designed PvP mechanics. The problem is there’s always a small group of so-called PvPers who will target every easy kill they can find, regardless of the damage it does to new players or the overall game.
Let’s take a case study from EVE itself. I checked the wardec list last week, it had 161 active wars. The top 5 wardeccers (4 alliances, 1 corp) had 121 of those wars (3/4). The top alliance, Blackflag., had 61, over a third of all active wars.
Looking at Blackflag alone, those 61 wars, costing them 6.1B ISK for the week, over 90% of them had no kills on either side. The 4 wars that resulted in any kills, showed 23 ships and 1 citadel killed by Blackflag., roughly 20B ISK worth. Enough of that was in drops (not hulls) that the loot probably covered the wardec costs for the week. None of the defenders killed anything.
Blackflag’s wars were against 33 corps and 28 alliances. The corps held a little over 500 members, the alliances over 25,000. Blackflag has 293 members.
So one wardec corp with 293 members (assuming no alts, deadwood or placeholder members) can threaten over 25,000 players, turn a profit from it, lose nothing… and that’s just one week! That works out to one small alliance with 293 members holding a gank-threat against hundreds of thousands of players per year.
Some people will say ‘hey that’s what makes EVE great’. Here’s what CCP had to say about it (I bolded some parts for emphasis):
“In the EVE Leadership meeting the CSM was presented with numbers resulting from research
into the state of war declarations in EVE and those numbers quite starkly showed how
asymmetric the situation is, and how war declarations allow a small number of players to
negatively affect a huge number of people, with low risk. These numbers may be discussed
further by CCP at a later date.”
“CCP Fozzie goes on to clarify that the metrics for the current system clearly show that it’s in a state that CCP is not happy with. The current system is extremely skewed in the favor of aggressors. There is also the fact that people involved in wars will simply not play whilst the war is ongoing.”
“CCP Larrikin pulls up activity data for players of corporations that have wars declared against them and it shows considerable activity drops in all activities during the war. They also show that the low activity continues after the war ends. Brisc Rubal noted that the numbers here were so stark, it would justify immediately removing war decs as a mechanic and promising a fix after the fact. The CSM in general were surprised at how stark the numbers were and noted it was clear this mechanic was having a significant impact on player recruitment and retention.”
“They (CCP) also want to see a scenario where the defenders who may not normally be interested in wars would engage in them as they see a clear scenario where they can get a victory condition and end it.”
Summary: It’s clear that just like every other MMORPG trying to mix PvE with open PvP, the very small percentage of players who target easy, safe kills regardless of the damage done, create a drastically negative impact for the game as a whole. As in, a few hundred wardeccers driving thousands or even tens of thousands of players per year away from the game.
And the “good” scenario where defenders actually engage in wars… simply doesn’t happen. Not to any significant degree. Wardecs are just a low-risk ego stroking and farming operation that profit very few and costs the game very many.
I have to conclude that the situation for wardecs is and always has been terrible - and I’ve got links going back to 2012 (when wardecs were still fairly new) stating the same thing.
A full and drastic re-write would be needed to fix this, not just some tweaks and patches. I’ll post a sample re-write next week, after I go through some of the notes I made over the years on this.
Sources: