I repeat.
Stop assuming fam
Just get out if that’s all you’re going to do
For those old enough to remember: Was there EVER such a thing as “highsec PVP” aside from station hugging and wannabe pirats that dock up as soon as there might be an somewhat even fight? CCP can’t kill what was never alive.
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Hunting corps outnumbered station humping ones before the watchlist went away
So your argument is invalid
It was just a question, not an argument per se. And I don’t care much for HS anyway.
And I thought you were masters of Eve mechanics.
You can’t be a master at something that doesn’t exist anymore can you?
…
@Yorrick_Kayne didn’t sound like a question 
sorry
I play EVE for two years now. I guess that you can imagine what impression highsec PVP makes on newish players. I moonwalked into the next best wormhole and stayed there.
What is the watch list and why would that be such an issue, it is easy enough to find people, as most tend to base out of a single system and move to do things at other specific systems. Seems a bit of a lame excuse on your part.
There’s nothing wrong with that 
Wars kinda ended up like they are atm in early 2016 (or was it 2015? @Ralph_King-Griffin) , before that you only had the major merc groups mostly staying in hubs or around. You also had a lot more smaller groups running around and hunting.
Nowadays you’re pretty much limited to bashing structures, camping hubs, pipes or mission hubs (unless you infiltrate corps and stuff to spy)
The past is something newer players can’t really know unless they’re being told about it
The watchlist was a nice list of usually around a thousand war targets that you had to sift through to find the half dozen or so that were actually online.
When it went away, so did the practice of actively hunting your targets to the furthest reaches of empire space and delivering upon your paid promise to do bodily harm to them.
Various alternatives and workarounds were explored exhaustively for many many months to follow it’s dissolution, with the ultimate result being that without any kind of ability to know whether or not your targets were online the active prosecution of any kind of war that didn’t involve smashing structures was pretty much pointless. A target corp can simply move or scatter and no amount of flying monkeys will help you secure a viable target unless you were literally willing to spend ALL DAY searching for them.
It killed any motivation to engage in war on a contracted level besides simple structure bashing or hub/pipe camping. It also destroyed a fairly significant ISK sink by making locator agents about as useful as tastebuds on an arsehole.
That’s pretty much the full explanation. Also, I wouldn’t dis Mortlake for being inactive. He, like Ralph and myself, were warmakers who enjoyed chasing a target twenty or thirty jumps just to deliver a quality beating to them in their own back yard. When you do that, you don’t come bringing the blingship lollipop to prolapse all in sight… you bring something small and fast warping. He went inactive for the same reason I did, CCP accidentally killed the fun of war in high sec to please the nullsec super pilots.
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That was the kind of awesome hunting I enjoyed evading. Now, its just no fun as its too easy to escape justice.
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Some suggestions for wars. Mostly likely well beaten to death already, but there might be something new.
0.) NPC corps have wars between them in a regular cyclic pattern. 3 NPC corps per faction (+1 FW), when one war stops, the next one starts. New characters are assigned in NPC corps with the most delay to the war start. So, there is at minimum 1 week before the war starts and at max 2 weeks.
You cannot change your NPC corp, so at some point you are due for a war (or join a player corp and are a valid wardec target).
Clarification: No standing penalty is applied for killing those players, and this war concerns only player ships. You can dock on corp stations and run their agents even during active war with them.
1.) Map showing war targets, selection of 15 minute average, 1 hour average or 24 hour average, separate docked/undocked. Does not show names nor ships, just numbers of all war targets. This should prevent the watchlist issues regarding spying specific people yet enable some sort of active hunting of war targets - it might help at least somewhat. Or it could help defenders even more to run, who knows? This 15 minutes should be short enough attacker should be able to see where targets are and get there before they are notified something is approaching.
2.) War follows for 24 hours if you leave corp. New corpmates are deemed neutral in this conflict and cannot help you without going suspect. New corp is notified of the upcoming your war. Likewise, you have the same 24 hours timer before you are involved in war if you join a corp - so the other members might fight while you still cannot.
Example: You left corp 4 hours before the war was going to start. So, you are safe for 4 hours but in war for 20 hours with your old corpmates. This includes NPC corps from point 0.
3.) Price of war scales on participants. Example formula could be 10m*log2(your_members * their_members). Your_members is taken at the war start, you need to pay extra if you want to have more people join your corp. Their_members is the sum of ALL opposing members at the war start (so, a sum of corpA + corpB members if you have 2 wars). You do not need to pay for already paid war if you take on another.
Example: 1v1 war is free, 1v2 costs 10M, while 16v16 one costs 80M. Due to log function it quickly saturates, 5k vs 5k massive war costs “just” 246M per week. So, it shouldn’t increase cost of war too dramatically for most conflicts.
Example2: 20 member entity wardecced 5 member entity, then a 75 member entity. The first war costs 66M for the first week. The second war costs 106M for the first week. From the 2nd week onwards, both wars cost 106M/week.
Example3: 20 member entity wardecced 80 member entity. 50 of target members left while 10 want to join aggressor corp. They paid 106M already and need to pay extra 6M for those 10 members.
Example4: 20 member entity wardecced 80 member entity that added 50 extra members to the corp, and 10 want to join aggressor corp. The same extra 6M for those 10 members is required.
Clarification: Bill can be paid at any point at that particular rate within 24h of the start of war stopping (which gives official 24 hours timer before the war completely ends). So, you can pay for war at any point after 6 days since declaring and before 7 days (5-6 days after war start) to keep the war uninterrupted and try hitting the best possible price. You can obviously also pay for another war during the 24h war winding down, but this will leave some gap where fighting is not allowed.
4.) Aggressor can wardec targets that are at max 4x larger or smaller than aggressor. If the target owns structures, the minimum corp size considered is 5 for M, 10 for L and 20 for XL structure owners (M, L, XL = rigs they use). No too big targets is completely optional and mainly to prevent cheap 1 member alt corp declaring tons of wars to cheaply spy on targets. The other purpose is that it is symmetric - if A can wardec B, B can wardec A. I admit these 2 points are a very weak justification for the limitation (which could be removed for all I care). The max size is to prevent a large corp blanket wardec the entire region of small corps that obviously have no chance to try fighting back even if they want to. The structure limits are to prevent parking XL crap in 1 member alt-corp where it would be indestructible due to size limits.
Example: A tiny 5 member corp with a L structure is considered to have 10 members for the purpose of war limitation - 3-40 member corps can wardec them. They are a 5 member-corp only for the purpose of war costs.
Clarification: If people leave target corp so it becomes invalid target, war cannot be renewed but persists till the end.
Clarification2: People cannot join aggressor corp if this would push it beyond the maximum number allowed for the war. Drop that war and wait 24h to have it end if you want to recruit more people. Note that 20v20 war where all targets ran to other corps is deemed a 20v20 war for all purposes until the next bill - so you can add 60 more people to your corp, despite the war target is now a single person’s corp.
Clarification3: If that 5 member corp enlisting 75 member help against a 20 member corp now grows to 10 members, this helper corp cannot remain enlisted and automatically starts the 24h war winding down thingy. Clarification4: Defender corp can also grow to 81+ members in this 5v20 example, which prevents continuation of the war at the next bill time.
Clarification5: Aggressor can have arbitrary number of total targets across many corps, it just cannot start war with a corp too big - for the very weak reasons above.
5.) Defender needs to pay the price difference to concord in case of allies and sizes need to adhere to the same size limitations.
Example: a 5 member corp facing 20 member threat can call up to 75 member corp to their assistance, but it will have to pay 40M for that in addition to what the aggressor paid (20 vs 80 war costs 106M, but 66M was paid for the 5 vs 20; so remaining 40M has to be paid).
Note that defender can add members to their corp free of charge for them in arbitrary numbers (and the extra bill will be paid by the aggressor on the next renewal).
Now, corp stuffing with inactive alpha alts could be a problem due to increased cost (point 3).
On the other hand, larger corp would be allowed to attack (point 4), so it could hopefully balance out, plus the cost difference isn’t that large - such stuffing is mainly viable for a one-man corp.
(possible fix: check number of omegas on the target side, while attacker needs to pay for all members. Another possible fix: max chars online at once in the last month is taken as the “active corp size” for this war cost and number of targets purpose)
Hard targets were fun for the aggressor too. I once chased a guy over ten jumps before I managed to land a point on his cruiser with mine. I managed to come out on top, but on that day he was my absolute favorite player ever for making it a real challenge to bring him down. It was nerve wracking, because when you’re hunting on the fly with no locates or backup you’re always wondering if you’ve taken a wrong turn and let them go… or are you flying straight into a trap set by their buddies. I really do miss it.
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You are certainly a step above the other posters here.
So let me get this right, you had an in-game system that enabled you to see at a moments glance if a target was online. Isn’t that massively over-powered in every sense of the word? And I see people talk about local as an issue. When I was looking at this game I was expecting players to do target selection and get to know the people they were hunting so as to be able to get them. Next you will tell me you have some way to locate them without searching for them or getting to know their activities.
You should consider joining the wardec discord and share those ideas with the CSM guys there
E: I can’t type
We first got wind of the change in 2016 after the watchlist got out of hand thanks to CCP Foxfour , I think he opened the API to write into your contacts directly either late 2015 or quite early 2016.
The change actually came in the March release of 2016.
A lot of the issue here stems from the fact wars been left be since 2012.
The watchlist isn’t the whole problem thought.
There were “cultural” (for lack of a better word) issues with empire war going back quite a long time, we’ve always had a certain amount of neutral logi spamming undock queens.
The reason the watchlist gets picked up on is it was the last reasonable tool left to keep people from the lecherous crap we see today.
Raz put it best when we stopped mercenary services.
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Take your hatred for others down a notch, Salvos.
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Read this
Well, it didn’t tell us where they were, or if they were permadocked or anything like that. We had to employ locator agents to find them and then actually scout out the system to find out if they were actually available to play with. Most weren’t, so even with that tool the finding of targets you weren’t assured a fight. Nowadays the locator agent is pretty much only useful if you plan on waging a permawar with a corp.
This does affect the economy a bit because if you’re dropping 250k per locate twice an hour that adds up, especially if you’re talking about over a dozen peeps online searching at once with an average of one active alt doing the same simultanous… it add up.
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