Please don’t quote me out of context just to start an argument. Reread the conversation and try to understand my point instead. Thank you.
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The irony…
Don’t troll.
THE IRONY…
Please, stop with the trolling.
THE IRONY…!
Three times the same statement, then caps followed by bold caps? I can only flag you at this point.
If you want to say something else now might be a good time.
Not what I would call on topic and only more reason for flagging, Salvos.
The CSM will do nothing, it doesn’t concern null so it doesn’t matter. Couple that with CCP having been catering to carebears for years now, since 2008 really, and the end result is… nothing.
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The CSM doesn’t necessarilly influence CCP on what their roadmap or future changes should be. They are more like an unspecialized focus group. Sure some of them are super informed on certain areas of gameplay but the CSM as a whole doesn’t represent each slice of the player demographic.
What will happen is CCP will eventually turn its eye to Highsec and present the CSM with their ideas and visions. They will give feedback and even maybe relay some of the community ideas that are posted here and on Reddit. I fully expect CCP to make some changes to wardecs, Crimewatch, ganking, industry, and missions… and with that comes the ideas and input of the CSM.
I think the CSM can be valuable in the way of providing feedback, but what bothers me is that the CSM doesn’t seem to ever really have anyone that has been heavily involved in ganking or wars. The heavy rhetoric is that ganking and wardecs are diving players away, when in reality I am more likely to push the blame on stale content all around, a supposedly dead lowsec, and a Nullsec that is almost as a whole in farming mode where the group with the most rorquals wins. What do I know though.
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Is it trolling to point out another’s hypocrisy?
- Yes
- No
- Depends who is doing it.
0 voters
Overall good post. I agree with some of your arguments as to why players maybe leaving, but I would urge caution when looking at things like the MERs. That data is aggregated and thus can “hide information”. Further, it would be awesome if we could get data on players regarding Ratting ISK/Mining Value. Not player information, but something like Ratting ISK and the number of Player or maybe Player “Hours” for both ratting and mining (and this data may not be available even from CCP). Alot of people point to the MERs and Delve and shriek “BROKEN!!!” But how many regions outside of Delve must one combine to get as many pilots that occupy Delve? If Delve produces say 10x as the next region in terms of ratting ISK, but also has 10x as many pilots out ratting…is that broken? Seems very much less clear.
System stats of players active could give a rough estimate.
Yeah, and Rambo was a real person 
The irony
Penance Toralen
This is patiently false. Complaints come like this;
The removal of the watch-list.
The players in NPC should be forced in a dec-able corp
Players should not be able to from drop a corp at war
Wars should follow a player everywhere
closing a corp and opening a new one
Do I need to continue?
I, for one will be interesting to see how the CSM will be handling the can of worms. This is on their to-do list after all. Just this thread alone should see some them lose the desire to stand for re-election.
Yes. Please do. Can players still leave ship, leave corp, re-board ship, fly away a marauder all while the ship is warp scammed? Lets add that. CCP Allowed players to leave corp to avoid war and then allowed them to do it in space. Was this decision based on something valid?
I have to admit. I do think, that the removal of the watchlist was bad for the highsec wardec game and should be thought over. And I do also think that just closing a wardecced corp and then recreating it without any consequences is a bit silly, although, considering the current state of things, that’s the least of my concerns.
All the other points on your list, although I find them ridiculous I have seen as well, and they have been discussed by the wardec community, so yes - those are all complaints that do come up here and there.
However, even still: Have a look around in the forums: Way more people complain about being wardecced, or being shot at some way in highsec. And, well, they aren’t wrong: They can still be shot at.
I would say the removal of the watchlist has undeniably been the downfall of highsec wardecs, except for hubhumping degenerates, how Ralph likes to put it. I may be going out on a limb when I claim that hubhumping is not the most entertaining thing to do in the game - neither for the attacker, nor for the attacked. Yet, without the numbers to back this up with (anyone got numbers handy?), I feel that exactly this hubhumping gameplay has increased, possibly due to the lack of options to do things differently. Also, there’s suicide ganking, and I would say that has grown as well. So, CCP has in fact not killed Highsec PvP, unintentionally or otherwise. The “victims” have it no better than they did before. They still get involved in nonconsensual PvP, and they still lose expensive ships to evildoers. The only thing that has been lost is a way to have a war against a specific target outside of tradehubs and -routes, and it has been lost without giving any benefit to the peace-loving denizens of highsec.
Now, the question for me is: What does CCP want, and what do we want as the community of this silly little game we are playing? Do we still want Highsec PvP? Does CCP still want it?
So, what do we do? If we still want highsec PvP, then this urgently needs to be fixed. Really, it would have needed fixing years ago - the longer we wait, the harder it will become as people who remember the days when actual highsec wars used to be a thing are starting to become a rarity. If however we do not want highsec PvP - if CCP doesn’t want it anymore, then all I need is a word from them, so I can stop waiting.
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This was changing well before the watchlist change happened. The watchlist change only very slightly accelerated this.
As always you are trying to address the wrong end of the stick. If you want high sec wars other than trade route and hub camping, then you need to make high sec corps meaningful. This means giving high sec structures something that highsec is best at, and I don’t mean ‘protection’. I mean actually best at. (The same is true for low sec etc also, CCP recognized this with the low sec capital arrays, then removed this foolishly with Upwell structures).
Give Highsec an area where their structures are the best and watch people use those structures, have large values of items inside them involved in some kind of industry which will then drop as loot, and since the structures can’t avoid a wardec you now have a reason to attack your neighbour in highsec.
And also a reason to form a decent sized corp in highsec to take advantage of this ‘best’ bonus, and to fight to keep it as well.
Then and only then can you bother to look at the mechanics of war, because till corps are meaningful you can never ever get meaningful wars.
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The “hunting” playstyle was hard before the watchlist change. It became impossible after. The watchlist allowed me to filter my targets somewhat: Yes, many people just logged out for the duration of the war - that’s life. If they dislike fighting me so much that they rather log out for a week, I don’t need to fight them either. However, if they didn’t log out right when I logged in, then chances were good that they weren’t scared of me. Some thought I could not catch them anyway, which then often resulted in a tricky cat and mouse game, involving all sorts of sneaky tactics and psychology (the best part, as far as I’m concerned), and others thought they could fight back, or lure me into a trap - rightly so, more often than not. However, with the watchlist gone, they don’t know if I am there, and I don’t know if they are there. They don’t know who to locate, and neither do I. Sure, I could spend 3 hours locating everyone in the corp and then randomly fly to those places to see if I can find someone, but that does almost never work out. So, unless they just stay in one place all the time, or I wardec a couple dozen corps and wait for the guy who didn’t get the memo at the Perimeter gate, encounters simply don’t happen anymore, even if they are willing to fight.
So, don’t play it down - the watchlist change is certainly not the only factor, but it’s the biggest one, and it was the final nail in the coffin.
I don’t necessarily disagree, though: I have pondered other possible ways to create encounters as well. One of them was structures. I have brought this up a long time ago, and I have received well put answers explaining, why structures may not be that good an idea after all.
But let’s think this through again: Let’s assume Highsec structures got something that they are really good at, and that other areas of space cannot compete with. Let’s say gathering a certain resource, for example, or manufacturing certain goods. This would need to be limited in some way, otherwise everyone and their dog would just anchor such a structure, and there would be very little reason to fight. So, let’s say it is limited, maybe by the number of moons or planets there are: If it really were profitable enough for people to care, what would keep the nullsec blobs from just rolling over highsec space and just claiming everything for themselves? If it were however not profitable enough to pique the interest of those large entities, then it would also not be profitable enough for smaller groups to really care about it. A good example are POCOs. Yes, they are limited, yes, they offer some profit, at least potentially, yes, they get attacked a lot, and no - they usually aren’t being fought over. Most of the time, the owner will just cut their losses and hide for the duration of the war.
My original take was a structure, that was strictly necessary to enjoy the benefits of a corp. Want to have corp recruitment ads? Want to have a corp Wallet? Want to set taxes? Want to declare war? Then you need to anchor a structure that allows you to do that. It does not need to be particularly expensive, it does not need to be particularly tough, and you can have multiples all over the place, if you want. But if you don’t have at least one, all you get from your corp is a common name and a chat channel. Maybe even the existing structures could fill that role - as long as you have any structures in space, your corp will work as such. If you don’t have a structure, then your Corp is basically just one of those “social groups” some people have been calling for. And then you have a reason to defend your structure … at least in theory.
But in practice, that’s just wishful thinking, really. Most people in Highsec simply don’t care. If they do not want to fight, they don’t fight. And if there’s a structure, this will mark a time and place where a fight would have to happen. This means, it’s always a fleet battle, provided an encounter happens at all. If there are just a handful of people in that corp willing to fight, they won’t try and do this alone, but hide with the rest of their corp. They will then rather accept the loss of all their structures and even their corp, if it means they can just ignore the wardec.
And then it will just be structure bashing without Dreadnoughts again, and only mining is worse than structure bashing without Dreadnoughts. So, unless we can find that magic sauce that will make people defend their assets in space and their right to have a corp, I do not think that structures will work.
Also, with structures, at least with how they work right now, there’s also again the danger of cutting out the smaller groups. A Large structure doesn’t cost all that much - 15B is by no means out of reach even for a group of just 10 players. However, without capitals, it’s almost unbreakable for an equally sized group. All the defender needs to do is time it for moontime on a weekday and have one guy online to defend it for 15 minutes in that time slot. It’s highly unlikely that the attacker can muster all the boys for that timer, and good luck breaking that thing with 5 people if it’s gunned. And even if you do manage to break it, it’s tedious as ■■■■.
On top of that - in the past, we preferred going against groups much larger than us. If the fighting is locked into a single location at a specific point in time, then fighting larger groups becomes pretty much impossible. Whichever side is larger will just draw all their people together around that single structure timer, so they massively outgun the other party - which will then in turn probably not even show up. Fast paced, flexible guerilla warfare needs to be possible, both for the attacker and the defender. And that does not work with structures.
So, ideally, fighting in a highsec war needs to be not about sitting in structures, but flying in space. How can we manage that? I have no idea. And I have not yet seen a good proposal either. But we cannot just keep things in this completely broken state forever.
So, until we have a better solution, can we at least get a way to tell if the guys we are supposedly fighting are even online pretty please?
2 Likes
HS PvP via ship explosions, in a nutshell:
- Suicide ganking.
- Mass wardeccing.
- Eternal wars such as Red vs Blue.
Thats a pretty bleak and short list…