Current war mechanics

PvP Gameplay Center Warfare & Tactics
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Heya,

since it accidentally got a long text TL;DR: should i give eve another try? and merry christmas to all of you :slight_smile:

I started EVE in 2007 but i’ve been inactive for a few years now with just a few log ins here and there but i miss the good old eve. Before i consider reactivating my account, i’d like to ask you for some info on how things work these days.

First some info on what I did and liked about eve and what made me quit:
A few years ago we fought many small wars that were mostly declared by us on small industry corps or other small pvp corps. We mainly focused on small corps because it was great fun to do the needed intelligence work. It was a great pleasure to actually hunt for targets when you only have a small pool of targets in total. It was personal, sometimes you really got to know your enemy within 1 or 2 weeks.

Then, unfortunately, the watch list was nerfed and hunting for targets was not possible anymore. Some of our “friend”-wardec-corps joined some bigger groups and started to declare as many wars as possible and camp tradehubs/routes. This had nothing to do with the hunt that we were on before and was not the way we wanted to do highsec wars but unfortunately it was the only viable way so we stopped doing highsec wars.

Before and after our highsec-war years, we all did lowsec, nullsec, highsec as defender and even some wormhole pvp. But nothing was ever as fun as these highsec war times so eventually we all stopped playing eve actively.

But as i said above, i really miss it. I regularily check what has changed and what is going on. To be honest, most of the stuff that recently happened does not sound that good from a non actively playing perspective. Don’t get me wrong. i don’t want to whine here, i stopped playing this game long ago. But maybe some of you can give me some insights. Hopefully it’s not all as shitty.

The first thing i want to know is: what is going on with abyssal sites? When they were released, i tested them and it was kind of strange. It was single player only and seemed to have no PVP involved but was pretty profitable. I didn’t really like the fact that this seemed to be developed with no healthy risk/reward ratio in mind. Sure, you were suspect when entering lvl4 or 5 sites but ppl were already avoiding this risk by opening a low level site directly after leaving the higher level site. Later i heard that this was made even worse by removing the suspect flag completely. Is that true and how profitable are these sites these days? In general the development of these abyssal sites made me think that “EVE is a dark and harsh world” is not a focus point for the developers anymore. It seemed like they are trying to transform it into a game that provides fast and not so meaningful success-experiences for a fluctuating player base. Is this also observable for other new/changed aspects of the game?

The second thing that i’d like to get some fresh insights of is lowsec: Last time i really enjoyed lowsec is like 10 years ago. We mostly flew battlecruisers at that time and many fights happened at gates under sentry fire. Later mostly small ships, that aren’t really capable of fighting under sentry fire, were flown in lowsec and almost everyone i engaged had some backup around. I know, this is eve and thats ok. What i’d like to know: is it still mostly frig/destroyer based PVP? How likely is it to find real 1v1 fights? How neccessary is it to use expensive fittings and implant sets? I know this is probably hard to answere but what i am looking for here is an info like “everyone flies around with complex fitting and high grade sets, if you don’t use it, don’t do lowsec pvp” or “t1 fitted rifter will still find killable targets”. No need to be very accurate here :wink:

And the most important thing for me are empire wars:
I know that the mechanic changed so that you can only declare a war on corps with structures and you need a structure yourself. When this was first announced i put much energy into preventing this from happening. In my opinion this is even a step further away from what i loved about empire wars. Back in our golden times it was a very special mechanic that no other game offered and even in eve, with all of it’s different kinds of PVP, it was really unique. We also know that the constant wardecs on all corps that had more than like 15-20 members was a serious problem but we thought there would be a better way to fix this than this “war eligible” stuff. We talked about this for hours and hours and i wrote our results to the CSM since it was a topic for at least one CSM member at that time. Unfortunately without any success. I don’t want to go into detail about all this since i lost all hope for it anyways… but we thought with the current mechanics, ppl would simply “outsource” their structures into holding corps and be wardec proof in their real corps. My question is: is this really whats happening now? Is there still a viable way for small corps to do empire PVP with the need to actually hunt for targets instead of simply camping tradehubs (and without having to do structure warfare which is boring)? Is there even a new way to hunt for targets?

To make it a bit more understandable what i mean with “hunt for targets”: when there still was a watch list, we added all targets to it and were able to see when a target is ready to be hunted. we had a good network of locator agents across all toons in our corp and used those to look for them and even create movement profiles. we gathered infos of when our targets are online, how and where they traveled around and then started to hunt them. We used neutral scan alts to locate them in space or just have a closer eye on them before we even declared the war. These activities in a whole in the environment of a high sec war and also the communication with the enemy during and after the war was what made it so special and personal for us. I know that locator agents are still a thing but without being able to tell if a target is online, it is really senseless to actually hunt them (trust me, we tried it several times… it’s just not fun anymore).

To prevent unnecessary drama: i don’t want to discuss whether the current wardec mechanic is better than what it was in 2012. At the moment i think it’s worse but i highly doubt that it will ever change back in my favour. I just wanna know a few things before i give eve another try and who knows… maybe the current wardec mechanic is not as bad as i thought it would be.

I’m sorry for the long text but i hope it’s a good insight of what i really liked about eve and what i’m looking for. It hopefully helps someone to give me a good suggestion.

thank you in advance :slight_smile:

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They are strange. They were designed to give bite-sized bits of content that could be accessible to players with short play-sessions. They also, I think, were designed to be a little different and the controlled environment, timer and ship class restriction provide certain levers to create different PvE challenges and room to experiment. However, it isn’t very Eve-like and doesn’t seem to have had the uptake CCP wanted, probably because it isn’t very Eve-like.

Honestly, most PvE in highsec is essentially as safe so I don’t think it fundamentally breaks anything. I kinda hoped CCP would have done more with it by now, but it seems they have focused more on bringing the Triglavians and the new PvE to the open-world and not instanced pockets which is probably for the best. The Invasion and the other Trig activity is much more in keeping with the basic idea of Eve.

It’s pretty much as bad as you think it is. Unless you want to fight over structures, wars are pretty much useless as a content generation tool. Hunting is dead, and until locator agents get a buff to give you some hint at the activity of the target, there is no viable way to stalk a target other than perhaps getting a spy into their corp.

You can use wars to try to generate some conflict by targeting highsec structures. It’s just not really the same thing as stalking a target as was done in the past. This may change some day - there are other uses for hunting tools other than wars and maybe some day a new intel structure, or a revamp of intel agents may fix this some. But for now, I think your assessment is sadly correct and that wars are not like they were before and you won’t be able to find the same type of gameplay you did in the past.

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That does sound good but…

… that unfortunately doesn’t. Thank you very much for your insights though… and for reading my wall of text :smiley:

I downloaded the client over night. Maybe i will look into lowsec again. Hopefully that can catch me somehow.

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perhaps wormholes?

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Thank you for the suggestion but wormholes were never really appealing to me. I did try to live in a wormhole when they first were released and also tried to randomly enter them and look for targets while still being based in empire.

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Ye we used to do the opposite lol, live in a wh and hunt wts in empire :stuck_out_tongue:

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Not paying the War Bill shouldn’t put a cool down timer in place. Concord should stop the war immediately for not paying the bills.

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“Current war mechanics”
Have got to be the worst iteration yet.
Notice i said ‘yet’…

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Since the war-dec is now structure concentric and structures can be located in the in-game Structure Browser. It should remain just as easy locate potential targets. Analysis of the structure will basically provide you with a commitment level of target. Are there rigs and are they tech2? Because anchorage is tied to a immediate area where the targets will be operating. e.g. miners will most likely using the asteroid belts in the same system or adjacent system.

The targets can; stand and fight, abandon the structure or attempt escalation. If they do not defend, you can still get a shiny killmail blowing up the structure. You have removed material from the game - as a part of the intended life-cycle of the sand-box.

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shooting structure is boring.

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thank you for the suggestion but what Turgun says…

structure warfare is and was always the most boring pvp content that ever existed. we first tried that stuff before wormholes were released and we actually tried it a year ago or something and a few times in between. it was always pretty much the same thing as it was when we first tried it 10 years ago in the Quantum Rise expension.

i did buy another 30 days though. low sec also doesn’t seem to be that fun anymore but i will check if i can find anything else that is fun to me…

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The structure browser will only list structures accessible to you, mind. If you’re looking for targets who keep their structures private, you’ll have to learn of them via other means.

How much this matters is debatable. There are plenty of structures to find if you’re just looking for them at random, but if you’ve got a beef with a specific target, finding their base may be significantly more difficult than consulting an in game list via the structure browser, either for weal or for woe.

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The problem is…

You don’t know how it works.

You can only see structures you have access to… and even as a declarer you don’t know… Only your structure is visible as the warHQ. Unless something changed in the past 4 months I have been offline.

In the past wars was limited to 3 war for a corp (with Watchlists). The reason for the watchlists removal was because null capital pilots were targeted back when capitals was still a status symbol. But like most of CCP ham fisted approach to development instead of developing watchlists not to work in null (Which is in line with Lore) and only have it work in Low/High they just removed it.

Now you have these mega wardec corps that hub camp and just steam role people . I mean we were 70 ships (maybe 14 people :slight_smile:) and had 300-400 ships attacks us, we lost 1 ship. Where in the past you had little 3-4 man wardecs groups that would fight each other and indy corps would also fight back and get kills because they had the numbers if not the skills to survive.

Sounds fun does it not? :slight_smile:

In any event, I adapted but I can dream right?

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unfortunately i can’t. i think that the mega wardec corp situation was stupid and very problematic for the defender side. but instead of improving it for everyone, ccp simply removed the best content this game had and it seems like they don’t even realize what they’ve done.

what i would like to see is:

  • remove this war eligibility nonesense
  • limit wardecs to 3 per corp again
  • bring back watch list or any other possibility to see if a target is online
  • adjust wardec costs so that it is cheap to wardec evenly sized corps, more expensive to wardec bigger corps and much more expensive to wardec smaller corps
  • make it more obvious to the defender that there is a war going on… maybe with a new interface element or something
  • add a new interface for merc corps to offer their service in a list or something
  • promote this list to the defender when a war is declared so that they know about this option

i think all 3 groups of players (attacker, defender and mercs) would benefit from that without breaking any basic eve concept (eve should be a dark and harsh world… even in highsec space)

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Another thing that should be changed: When the attackers offer to surrender, the war should not say that the defender surrendered. This is not portraying the reality and makes the defender look weak when the attacker in fact was the weaker party in a war.

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Agree.

War bills not being paid should end the war right away. No more free 24 hours for not paying the bill.

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Wrong. You can pull up the map and check every structure public or not in space by using the map in system.

Are still around, but is now a buddy list. You need to each add each other to the list and get notifications about each other.

Yes. Some do because it is the easiest way to find targets. Small defenders should stay away from these population areas during the war. --Or come ready to fight.

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Don’t cherry pick out of people post, you sound like a CNN/BBC/The Sun news article. It is known about structure visibility on the solar map. Take it in context what the discussion is about. The problem is finding the structure of a target that is not the Attacker.

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Which is designed to not be do able.

As people wrote, wardec are now structure centric : you don’t wardec a corp, you wardec a structure.
If you don’t know that structure, then you don’t wardec it.

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@Anderson_Geten your post gave me something to think about, that’s really interesting to me.

I’d been “raised” in EVE to war dec or be war decced because of an individual player’s or group of player’s actions.

Looking at it this way…

…colloquially “clears out a lot of the mental clutter” from that attitude, at least for me.

Looking at it from the perspective of the quote, the conflict becomes about the control of the “space” the structure occupies, and possibly the services the structure provides. The “players” using that “space”, i.e. the structure, become a secondary objective and or obstacle in the conflict, leaving your primary objective the destruction of the structure, or…“DDOS” of that structure to those using the structure’s services.

This view:

…can…I’m not saying it does, but it can…almost completely depersonalize a conflict. Sort of, from how I interpreted your statement, making other players npcs with a better grade of AI, cause I’m not fighting him, or her, or them. I’m fighting to control a “space”, and blowing up a structure may be all I need to do to control the “space”. I might not need to fight another player at all (which happens, certainly, a portion of the time, currently, in highsec.)

Which leads me to wonder what EVE would be like…if we could conquer, and take control of structures? Would it lead to more player interaction? Less structure spam?

Thanks for the post. It made me consider a different perspective than my own, and I appreciate the division at the moment, as I am currently affected by EVE’s own DDOS. :wink:

p.s. I know my post is off topic, per se; but I had to comment. You made me think, and I appreciate that.

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