I think this comes down to a definition of new players.
We’re not talking about literal new players who just started the game yesterday and just finished the NPE. We are talking about players that have been around for a couple of weeks, who are just starting to feel competent about the game and have a general feel for it, who want to break out of the NPC corps and do something social with a group of friends.
That transition is a vulnerable one. You leave the safety of the newb corp, you strike out on your own and start getting involved in other aspects of the game. Getting people hooked means they need to be wiling to log in and do things they find fun.
If they get hit with a war dec at that point, they probably don’t have much of an idea of what to do, and the statistics show that most of them just choose to log off for the duration of the war, and then they never or rarely log in. The numbers for activity before the war, during the war, and after the war are just nuts. That’s what prompted my comment in the minutes about just tearing the thing out.
So the war dec system needs to change so that it doesn’t have a disproportional impact on players who are least likely to be able to deal with a war dec effectively beyond simply logging out for a week.