I will present my ideas for wardecs here. I believe you are a person who genuinely cares about the health and future of EvE.
Corp A wardecs corp B. Corp B has two options:
Option 1, make the war mutual - no changes.
Option 2 If corp B has no offices outside of highsec and/or no structures. Corp B can pay CONCORD the same amount as the wardec within those first 24 hours - and the war is invalidated.
If corp B has structures and/or offices outside of highsec - the attacker must place a marker in the same system as the structure or office. If the defender destroys that marker - the war ends. On the other hand, if the attacker destroys the structure - they win, and the war ends.
Lets face it, if corp B is just starting (maybe their saving for their first structure) - this allows them to work, save and learn together. This starter corp will have little to no significant impact on the game, but can take time to learn the game.
As a long time EvE player, this suggestion DOES rub me the wrong way, but if this is needed for the health of the game, I’ll swallow my feelings and support making the game better.
I would include demographics in that too. I would look at the ratio of senior players to junior players in highsec (senior being over 5 years). Because no matter how much we want the NPE to teach them, many only learn from other players. As a junior player, one of my characters was wardec’d in my first few months. It was the senior players in our corp (2003) that herded us together, taught us how to fight, how to use alts, and provided ‘protected zones’ for us to fly in since isk’s in those days were hard to come by. Without their teaching, I have no idea what I would be doing now.
Rubicon caused many senior players to either leave highsec or the game. I imagine that ratio has suffered.
We don’t need more data, we can see it every day over years. Corps which got wardecced and lose stuff just vanish. The players quit playing. This is the norm not the exception.
Indeed. Players quit every day. They quit after getting ganking, getting scammed on the market, losing a few fights in lowsec, running into a gate camp, or just being bored of missions. Wars have been here since the beginning, and the when they changed it was to was to nerf them. It hard for me to believe something so impactful was missed by Rise and Quant when they did all those studies just a few years ago looking at retention. I would be much more comfortable if the was some controls or relative comparison of other events and quitting, or even just to have it explained first hand what exactly they are looking at.
But regardless of the real impact on long-term player retention, I totally believe there is a “stark” drop in defender activity after a war is declared on them. Not undocking has always been a favoured and popular war strategy for highsec corps. It has been noted for years that a large number of corps just don’t engage with wars and that can’t be fun for either side.
Seems to me there is only one viable solution - let these players opt-out in advance of wars if they aren’t going engage no matter what. No amount of bandaids or incentives are going to make them undock. So give them a social corp or other lower tier corp that is safe from wars with the appropriate limitations.
I think this knocked the nail on the head for me - these 3 bullet points.
Could a possible solution be to have a high risk reward system in highsec (like missions or sites)? Like the Abyss content, but that is not fixed to being using Gila or Sacrelige or nothing at all.
Like NULL value loot in highsec, but you will need to be creative with fits and/or strategy? IMO this would be good.
Additonally, I would like to see a massive expansion in high-sec (also null and lowsec) exploration sites. The same old get same old very fast, but a long term commitment to adding new content in exploration sites could freshen up things. Assuming a new kind of thing to find could be added every month or so (say).
Also, new missions to run could also make things more interesting for mission grinders.
This idea sounds interesting. Kind of like a “roguelike” game. You go deeper and deeper into a dungeon, pushing your luck until you hit your personal ‘risk limit’.
I once owned a corporation with 30 active new players (half of whom were subscribers) and we were doing fine until we got war decced by a 3 player corp (+ neutral alt support). A week after my corp got wardecced and griefed hard , that 30 active players sharply dropped to 5 players regularly logging in. And even after the war finally ended, the active playerbase (myself included) gradually dropped to just myself and pretty much no-one was logging in. So pretty much the war-dec mechanic screwed us up badly, all to satisfy those 3 players who only cared about griefing new players for fun.
It’s good to see that people are finally realizing this is a serious issue, but too bad changing NOW instead of YEARS before won’t bring back these subscribers who quit so that a tiny minority of players can have few minutes of fun.
I’ve been pondering about what the best possible fix for this mess was. I came up with an idea: PVP ratings system. In other competitive games, there is a rating system that determine who is a pro and who is a noob. And this number is used to ensure fair match-up so that those who are pros are matched with other pros and noobs are matched with other noobs.
If we implement this system in EVE, I believe we can potentially generate huge content in high-sec. The ratings should be calculated from average rating for each player in the corp.
Players with high K:D isk ratio in the past 6 months will have high rating.
Players with low K:D isk ratio in the past 6 months will have low rating.
Players without any significant K:D ratio in the past 6 months will have no rating and will not be factored in.
So lets say a corp with high rating war decs a corp with low rating, the following should apply
-Higher war dec fee for aggressor
-Lower cost for defender to accept assistance
-Non-concord NPC support for defenders (create a story for this) that would involve the aggressor getting jumped by combination of ships that involves Warp scrambles, Webs, & E-warfare when aggressing against the defender target. The amount of NPC support would vary between 0.5 to 1.0 security status as well as ratings difference. Any “neutral” entity that supports the aggressor will get jumped by its own set of NPC entities.
-Longer wait-time penalty for aggressor to dock or jump through star-gate after aggression.
No penalty if a low-rating corp declares war on high-rating corp, low-rating to low-rating, high-rating to high-rating.
Maybe create a scoreboard for PVP ratings, so that this can stimulate competition for high-skilled players to get on the top and pretty much try to shoot each other down for content
The obvious way to game your proposal would be to create “noob” alts, much as goes in PvP games. So you’re playing, say, World of Tanks, and meet a Tier I guy who happens to have 15,000 battles in his log and essentially mops the floor of true noobs in his same rating.
Just in EVE it would be even worse since there is no way to know that the “noob” has a zkillboard record of 100:1 in his main.
Wardecs in EVE were appropiate to a certain ratio between griefers and victims. But EVE’s dwindling population has diminished the amount of potential victims, to a point where CCP might be worried that they’re losing way too many victims to way too few griefers. And the only solution is to close the door so griefers no longer have a hassle-free way to bash toddlers.
Ganking is enough for the purpose and there’s other ways to deal with structure overcrowding.
A noob character has better chance of defending against another noob character. And furthermore, the noob griefer will accumulate ratings very quickly, should they suceed in griefing of course.
So unless the griefer is willing to spend HUGE amounts on skill injector to give them massive SP edge on every new character, I don’t see this as a viable option for many.
Perhaps, we can tweak the suggestion a bit so that every corp below a certain rating that gets war decced gets some form of NPC support to help balance the scales.
While non-consensual war-dec has caused huge number of players to quit, it is still a neccesary mechanism, otherwise high-sec will be filled with structure spams. We need to look into the reason why people quit, they quit not because they died a few times, but because they were hopelessly outmatched against their aggressors. They saw no point in continuing to play the game as they saw no opportunity to fight back and return the hurt to the griefers. With small balances, such as NPC support to balance the scales, it will give them a real chance at fighting back against their foes.
You still don’t get the issue. In EVE as in RL, more time always beats less time. There is no way for the system to tell who’s got more personal skill for playing more and killing more. The system only knows what character has logged in and what are that character’s stats… and that’s a tricky matter. Judging what skills or actions in game mean what concerning PvP would be very difficult, and even the slightest mistake would be exploited to game the ranking in favor of the griefers.
You’re missing the point, the rating system I proposed is exactly designed to deter people from bypassing it.
It’s also very easy to calculate K:D isk ratio, all the system has to do is take all isk destroyed by a given player (divide by number of participants if multiple pilots involved in a single kill) divided by isk lost.
So unless the griefer is willing to fork big $$$ irl to keep up their griefing activity without any handicap, it’ll be difficult to bypass the ratings system.
The other suggestion, completely removing war-dec will not only target the griefers, but also regular corp-corp war decs the system was initially designed for. If we completely remove war-dec, what’s to say that we won’t end up like what happened to Runescape when they removed PVP altogether for a short period of time? A lot of their players quit as a result of trying to deal with few griefers that made few carebears cry.
The system can calculate the K:D ratio of a character. It can’t do it for another character in another account. The server NEVER and I say NEVER EVER NEVER accesses the information of other characters in the same account -let alone other characters in other accounts! It would be a nightmare if there was any s kind of gateway between characters and accounts -hack one account, hack all accounts by the same guy! Hoozzah!
So Tranqulity only loads the data for ONE character. And says “oh look, character 987654321 has 0 kills, 0 losses, he’s rank I”, and the next login says “oh look, characer 987654321 now has 10 kills, 0 losses, he’s rank III”, but that character never logs in again. And he wasn’t even Omega. And then character 987654322 proceeds to kill another 10 “Tier I” noobs although a GM or Dev looking at his (secret) stats could tell he’s got an actula K:D of 500:3 across 15 accounts and 38 characters, all of them Alpha.
Any effective solution will need to be multipronged in implementing new mechanics; no easy tweak of numbers in EVE’s data base or simple one solution will be the business answer CCP/PA is looking for and, make no mistake, this IS a business matter. If you think PA is fine with driving customers away or thinking that having a business model that partially depends on a large number of people paying their RL money to be FORCED to do something they don’t want to so that others may enjoy their discomfort, well, go back and relook at PA’s past history.
The past problem with CCP’s game design is , among many others, they fail to properly granulate/graduate the corp structure system and wardecing mechanics. It’s either you are in an NPC corp and not decable or you are in a PC corp and no matter your size, you can be wardeced as often and by anyone who wants to do it. What needs to be implemented is both a corporation tier system and a level of wardecing cost/ship use system that allows for a much better fine tuning of a players’ acceptable risk level. Add a damage deposit cost payed by the decer that is based on the initial ratio of attackers/defenders (ability to add new players entering decing corp frozen for 3 days) and would be split among the winners based on damage done to the other side. Allow for others to join the side of the defender (if needed) for free on a variable basis of the defender’s corp tier. While numbers need to be tweaked or ideas expanded on, the following rough idea may be worth a look:
From easiest to hardest corp/wardecing tiers:
Current NPC corp membership would remain the same. As safe as it gets in EVE. (i know, blue donut…)
Tier 1 Corp: NO structures, 1 corp office, not decable, limit of 15 members/toons. The true social corp
Tier 2 Corp: 1 Structure,decable at a rate of Wardec cost+ (2x) Damage deposit, ships up to destroyer size can be used by attacker, limit of 30 toons. Others may join the fight on the defenders side for free up 2x original attackers corporation size (ie, defender corp + add ons = 2x attackers).The emergent true PC corporation.
Tier 3 Corp: 1 Structure per constellation, wardeced at a cost of wardec + (1x) damage deposit. Ships up to battle cruisers can be used by attacker, limit of 45 toons. Others may join the defender up to 1x original attackers strength. A nice size mining/industry corp.
Tier 4 Corp: Unlimited structure, wardeced at cost of wardec + Damage deposit, any ship can be used to attack defender, no limit on member size. Others can join up to 1x original attackers size. The current model except that it allows for more even fights, a reason and built in method for others to join the fight (either have the defender pay them or have the damage deposit w/wo added payment be the incentive).
The goal is to still have plenty of PvP, but to make it more even (fun for BOTH sides), allow for a gradual introduction in corp PvP, allow for a few friends to form and (if they choose) grow their own corporation, while accepting more and more risk the more ambitious and knowledgeable they become. Higher deccing cost for unequal ratios of huge merc corp hopefully causes a reduction of these “wardec anyone undocking from Jita” tactics. It allows for more fun and, more importantly, reduces the feeling of helplessness that so many small corp feel when they receive a notice.
If we as EVE players cannot come up with some reasonable ideas to change the current EVE wardec mechanics and help the devs find an equable solution, rest assured PA will be more than willing to intrude and force the game’s direction purely as a business decision. I can’t blame them, cause the current model is not sustainable without jacking up monthly costs for all. People are going to have to be willing to accept reasonable change, even if it affects their current style. I mean, we do want EVE to continue,right?
I know you’re under a NDA, but I was wondering if you could answer a few questions on the wording in the CSM minutes:
I get the impression you changed your view on wardecs after looking at the data? Am I reading this correctly?
Did other CSM members change their opinion after seeing this data?
Did any CSM share your view of immediate removal of wardecs?
CSM Minutes, page 8 “Innominate says the issue with War Decs is they can’t be removed completely due to the high sec structures. Having war decs limited to corps with structures and adding victory conditions would be one way. Opting out completely would mean the corporations would only exist as a social structure. CCP Fozzie says this is one of the leading ideas at this time.”
What is the word “this” referring to? “wardecs limited to corps with structures” or “Opting out completely”? I originally thought the former, but some have suggested the later.
You know my views of how we got here. But if this is hurting EvE to the extent it appears, it must be addressed ASAP. Please continue to push this with the other CSM members.
Also add a better explanation on who the “senior management” that needed to be consulted to decide what is going to be done: CCP or PA? If it is PA, I would think that they will be far more aggressive in reducing the player loss through stronger/fundamental changes in the game, solely based from their past history and business acumen.
The thing is that using allies is already part of the game yet people keep bringing this up as a possible solution. I can only assume that the ally system is either not used very much or is not well known (possibly both)
@Brisc_Rubal: I don’t see anything in the CSM minutes mentioning allies. Did CCP have anything interesting to share about this? Have they done their due diligence and collected the stats as to how often allies are used during wardecs and how useful/broken the feature is in its current state? Or have they not thought about this at all?
I thought we needed to address war decs and I campaigned on it, but I had no idea it was as bad as things were when I saw that data. I wanted it done because folks have been asking for it for a while, but I didn’t view it as an existential threat to the game. Now I do.
I think we were all pretty unanimous that the data was bad, but we had already gone into the meeting having war decs on our top 4 priorities list.
Let me be clear - my comments were based on how crazy the data was, and a reflection on my surprise that things were that bad. I don’t think it’s the best way forward for us to immediately remove them with nothing in place - even if I think the data could completely justify doing that - but I hope it pushes this into the top of the priority list for CCP.
I believe Fozzie was referring to tying the decs to structures.
I don’t recall seeing any data about allies and I don’t recall it coming up - we focused largely on stuff like victory conditions, structures, trying to find meaningful ways to get defenders to show up, etc.
Thank You. I think the majority of the players will support changing something that actively hurts the game, especially after CCP releases their data and reasons.