Okay, so after a long time break from sov bull-■■■■, our sister indy corp was wardecced by some highsec war-dec nimnods. We go defend, things are fine - they didn’t even contest the hull timer at all.
We decide to do a bit more than defend, hoping to just get this stupid crap over with and go kick in their shield timer. Made fairly easy work of it, despite the enemy bringing in 3 neutral alts with overpropped Omens and bowling battleships sometimes 50km off of the rest of the fleet. During the structure bash it was an amusement as our logi was easily able to deal with any damage the structure managed to pull off, and we’d get a few of the fighters blapped. If they’d had a few more or with better piloting skills, they could have easily bumped the battleships and kept them out of range of logi while the structure mopped them up.
The really annoying bit was after the bash. They had a war-target in a crow that did what crows do with gates. Proper scouting and all that. But the Omen was able to bump battleships out of alignment, and managed to do it a few times with us missing it and leaving the guy behind, which would result in the solo battleship getting nuked before we could land on the next hole.
Really think that there needs to be a way to stop this kind of behavior. If one entity is going to war-dec another, third parties that cannot be retaliated against in any way should not be able to affect the outcome of a battle or war without repercussion.
Ideas that I’ve been spit-balling around in the brain:
- Detect bumping, and if bumping over X times on the same grid, make them engageable without CONCORD interference. Not sure how to implement this without triggering for every dude undocking in Jita though…
- Disable collisions for non-participants when in a war and in high-sec - I think this might be a better option. Then, if you’re war-decced, random idiots can’t affect you what-so-ever, without committing to the war and being able to be defended against. It would still allow for bumping if the bowlers are part of the war, but then would allow the ‘bowling pins’ to slap them. Since this stupid crap doesn’t apply in Low/Null, they can bump all they want – since we can melt their faces.
Either way, think its absolutely daft that the cops can’t figure it out. If someone was body-checking you repeatedly, they’d give you the right to cold cock the idiot.
Little bit of clarification below: CCP - Need to look at neutral bumping alts - #98 by Lillith_Sakata
Further clarification:
I never said bumping in of itself is not valid. The game has had the mechanic for as long as I recall. I use bumping myself every chance I get – bump heavy ships out of alignment so we can fight. Bump them off wormholes to force a fight or prevent escape.
The explicitly targeted thing I dislike and call out is out of corp, and likely alpha alts, being used to bump parties in an actual war. I’d have absolutely 0-shits-given if there was any risk to the bumper that didn’t involve the goal of it to occur regardless of intervention due to abuse of CONCORD mechanics in this case.
The point of bumping in this case is to get the allied in-war friends to delete a ship of the other side. If the other guy shoots the OoC bumper, they get CONCORDed. If they don’t shoot, they get blapped by the war targets. This is a completely one-sided mechanic, with no justifiable defence. Especially when the only real ‘defence’ would have been to either - log out DPS/logi to swap for a gank-ship, or violate ToS to log in/create an alpha toon to fly a gank-ship. Neither of which anyone in their right mind was going to do.