Steve,
I love what you do on the CSM and how you are trying to flesh out a mechanic here that is better than what currently exists. I think what you are talking about is experiencing a lot of friction because of the additional ‘baggage’ your idea has. That is not to say it has no merit, only that increased complication will always create increased resistance.
I hope people reading this see beyond the discussion of implementation specifics and look at what the desired end result is.
This is a huge issue for the health of the game and not only limited to wars. The recent incidents involving bot driven super carriers undermine the confidence people have in the game and decreases the value of legitimate contributions. Player retention must be improved and changing war declaration mechanics is simply one means to achieve that desired result.
The feedback on this thread has some very good suggestions of using a tiered corporation experience which could be roughly divide players into:-
No Corporation → Players who do not care to join a corp and do their own thing.
Social Corporation → Players who would like to do group stuff with others under a ‘corporate’ identity but do not wish to be bothered by the mechanics of a war declaration
Aggressive Corporation → Players who would like to do group stuff and want to participate in the war declaration mechanic in all of its current forms
Sovereignty Alliance Corporation → Players who would like to do group stuff including null sovereignty warfare
The current game mechanics currently cater for the first and last two desired play styles, it simply needs to cater for the second.
Friendly Fire is a relatively new mechanic which is “Tick A Box” level implementation. As a first iteration, why not “Tick A Box” for “Social Corporation” and with that setting define some restrictions consummate with the level of protection gained?
For example a player in an NPC corporation has a fixed %11 tax rate and can’t deploy structures. These restrictions seem very good starting candidates for a “Social Corporation”, there are probably more like maximum player membership limitations and the inability to become/join an Alliance.
This is not going to achieve everything everyone wants but it would be a small iteration on what currently exists rather than introducing anything entirely new, perhaps it would be an improvement enough that other issues on balance become more important to improve and further iteration looked at later.