A: this change doesn’t give them any more tools than they had
B: this change removes a massive amount of playstyles and communities
C: just because they’re given the tools doesn’t mean they’ll use them, if they had the tools and could use them they wouldn’t even be a target in the first place because it would not be profitable.
D: they actually already have the tools
Yeah, they’d swap, undock, and warp. The amount of ‘warning’ is minimal, especially if you get the defenders fighting first.
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You seem to be mistaking my statements that this change doesn’t really cost anything too massive in terms of suspect-baiting as me saying this change helps the little guys. This change actually takes away tools they had. Again, I reference you to my first post in this topic. Specifically:
While this change removes neutral logi, it really does need those carve-outs. The problem there is that it’s extremely difficult, with the current method for war-tracking, to establish meaningful methods. The code would need to check if enemies of both repper and repped were on-grid, but that can be gotten around pretty easily by just having an alt-corp dec yourself and your ‘neutral’ logi wing, and then we’re right back where we were.
Mind you, CCP could just declare that an exploit, too. But that might solve the problem without a massive amount of sturm und drang, so clearly, that kind of solution has no place in EVE. 
While this change is pointed at addressing a one-off problem in one engagement that 99% of the playerbase doesn’t care about it also has the terrible side effect of removing massive amounts of content from the game.
Except that from the numbers and feedback CCP got before December, this change is not about ‘one engagement that 99% of the playerbase doesn’t care about’. This change is about consistent, systemic behavior that CCP is trying to eliminate.
The numbers from where? The feedback from who? Graphs that don’t take into account all the variable? PvEers that do not interact with other entities? F1 monkeys who only understand the surface level of the content they’re engaged in?
None of that means anything. I’m on the ground, doing the things this will affect on a daily basis. I know many of the other primary entities who are on the ground daily as well. CCP doesn’t know what they’re doing. They don’t know how their game works. They don’t know how it’s played, and they don’t know what’s good for it. This is why I was drilling @CCP_Lebowski so hard at first. You could tell by his responses that he didn’t really know the answer and didn’t want to give an answer too specific. When I finally got a specific answer out of him he took the path of least resistance and was wrong.
CCP doesn’t understand that they cannot turn this game into a themepark. It doesn’t work. The behavior is systematic because it’s how the game works, and has to work. There’s no change you can make, that will attract WoW players without killing the game. CCP is either cashing this game out and just trying to pretend like they’re listening to the playerbase or they’re living in a fantasy world where they think they can somehow morph “harsh PvP centered sandbox” into “spaceships on rails with microtransations”.
Nobody in their right mind is going to pay you $20 a month for an all but single player jello space simulator with a chat room. That’s all any of the changes they’ve made in the past 5-10 years have accomplished and it’s killing their game.
Structures for us are a means of making money of course, but more importantly we wish they would result in content. I can confidently say that most of us hate turning out for timers, but we do so in hopes of SOMEONE showing up to defend it. It’s a catalyst for actual good content. Structures are not actual good content.
@Bladewise has a very good point here Arrendis. I am a huge fan of his and his playstyle is exactly how I got into Eve Online. This change isn’t accomplishing enough to warrant castrating other emergent styles of gameplay. To me the best change they could have done was leave neutral logi alone (because it isn’t going to accomplish anything) and do as you have requested and have it where corps / alliances that share wars against a mutual enemy can rep each other (this will have to be tweaked to avoid overly confusing mechanics and abuse).
I’m not one to kiss and tell or sell trade secrets, but that’s not how it’ll be done. We will see how it works when patch day hits.
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Feedback from things like ‘why are you quitting?’ surveys. The numbers from data they’ve been looking at on wardecs and player behaviors for over a year. (And those numbers go back much further.) It’s great that ‘you’re on the ground’ and all, but when something like 3/4 of the game is in highsec, the idea that the 200-something people you maintain meaningful contact with constitutes the bulk of ‘how the game works’ is… honestly, it’s patently ridiculous.
CCP has all of the data on player interactions. ‘The logs show nothing’ is an old, old joke, but the fact remains that the logs exist, and they track everything. You want to call out Lebowski for not knowing the minutae of your play-style, great… but he’s QA. It’s guys like Larrikin, Fozzie, and Rise that need to know nuts-and-bolts, and if you look back to the winter summit minutes, Larrikin’s the one who raised the flag on high-sec conflict. And did so by pulling up numbers and behavior patterns. That tells me there’s a lot more moving parts to this than you seem to be seeing. Forest for the trees, man.
You want to talk about not taking into account all of the variables… you’re a lot more likely to be the guy who doesn’t even know what those variables are than they are, in this.
Which just leads to the other side of the issue, really. You seem to think they’re getting an incomplete view of things. I think they’ve got too much information. The problem with mountains of data isn’t that you don’t take everything into account, or that you don’t get past the surface… it’s that there’s too much noise. Too many variables, too much depth.
Look at the timing of when the changes went in, and when the number of ‘percentage of non-mutual wars with at least one kill in a given day’ spikes up. What’s that mean? Well, among other things, it looks like it means that in the days and weeks just ahead of the December update, people weren’t bothering killing war targets. The numbers dipped, after all. And when they went back up… well, other things were happening.
I’m not, for even one moment, trying to say that the number of wardecs in Thebeka are even a blip on the radar for total number of non-mutual wars. But that was 31 non-mutual wars. In 1 system. For about a month. And those kills had nothing to do with the wardec changes. They just coincided with it. And even CCP acknowledges the Perimeter fighting has skewed their data—and that definitely didn’t have anything to do with the changes. So how much of that uptick is actually a result of the changes… and how much is unrelated? How much, in fact, came in spite of the changes?
We don’t know. And I don’t think CCP has had enough time to really develop the kinds of filters to give that data any real meaning.
All that said, again, I don’t think these changes are any kind of panacea. I think they move in the wrong direction and are far too limited in scope. I think the whole structure of war in high-sec needs an overhaul, and making HS wars all about structures is a bad idea that basically just pushes people in the direction that leads to… us.
It becomes a game of N+1 on set-piece timers… and that is not going to help encourage people to fight back at all. Especially not when the only people with a ‘you have to do X to get what you want’ basically amounts to telling the defenders ‘if you don’t want to PvP, all you have to do is go PvP, 3 times. Against organized, dedicated PvPers. And win all three times. Despite being outnumbered. And inexperienced.’
Do that thing you don’t want to do.
Do it against people who like doing it.
And are better at it than you.
And you have to win… three times in a row. When they know you’re coming.
And you have to play the N+1 game to have a chance.
Without allies.
Seriously, as soon as PIRAT or Marmite put up a keepstar somewhere, all they have to do is stop wardeccing us, and it’s pretty much untouchable.
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Either way, we’re all agreeing anyways so the rest of it is a moot point. This change accomplishes absolutely nothing positive and needs to be removed. Hopefully @CCP_Lebowski and @CCP_Falcon will read this entire discussion and if we’re lucky come to the same conclusion. If there’s one forum rant that I’ve went on in the 10 years I’ve played this game that I’d hope they take into consideration it’s this one because this change is TERRIBLE for the game.
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Except they won’t, because your war dec will not be based on the Keepstar, but some Astrahus as far away as you can get in hisec from Goon space. And more importantly if you look at the killboard of PIRAT you see that the majority of their kills comes from interdicting people in hisec from nullsec alliances.
Of course you can always put up your own structure and war dec them and demolish their Keepstar. No idea if you will or not, but bored Goons can be pretty dangerous…
We’re not going to go wardecing PIRAT just to hunt a structure, no. Really, we just don’t give a damn about them. They’re a minor inconvenience that does us the service of culling our stupid.
Well I am just making sure you realise that they will continue to war dec you so as to pick off your stupid, I don’t think they have any reason not to continue war decking you.
If PIRAT the alliance has keepstar A, which is their war HQ for wardeccing high sec dwellers and astrahaus B which is their warHQ for their war against goons, there is nothing stopping goons from shooting keepstar A, because we’re at war with them. So if they worry about this, which, as Arrendis notes, they shouldn’t, having a separate structure for goons won’t save their keepstar.
You need to think that through a bit. Notice above that I mentioned the Goons having their own structure to do war decs and you might realise why I said that.
How about instead of being cryptic you actually say what’s wrong with what I said.
There is nothing actually wrong with what you said, but it was out of context in regards to what I said. I was pointing out that the war deckers will continue to war dec the Goons regardless.
However there is a nuance to this that you need to be aware of which is alluded to in my third paragraph and I am being deliberately cryptic, I am not going to explain it as I am intending to use it at some point.
They might, they might not. It depends on a number of factors, including ‘What does TEST do?’ And, while yes, the majority of their kills come from our idiots (as they have for more than half a decade), that’s not where most of their money comes from.
When you see statements like this, @Dracvlad, where they claim they’re looking for ‘content’ and hope someone would show up to defend structures… don’t buy it.
If that were true, then all of these 112 Corp pilots would still have been in PIRAT when this structure blew up. But someone showed up to defend the structure, so they immediately ran away, docked up, and jumped corp. They didn’t want ‘content’. They didn’t want a fight. They ran away from one, just like they always do. But it did serve to remind us to guard against that possibility whenever we hunt them in the future.
Random thought, would it really be that hard to just make it to where you can only rep someone with an LE if they’re in your corporation? You know, so as to avoid removing massive amounts of emergent gameplay unrelated to wardecs? @CCP_Falcon @CCP_Lebowski
I wasn’t there or even actively playing Eve Online at the time, but yeah we’ve used alt corps to dec a group for the structure timer. Typically it happens when the defense force is way too large for us to have a reasonable chance of winning (typically when its a contract kill, completing that is the primary objective). It’s all about risk management Arrendis, and most pilots and groups in Eve participate in risk management to a varying degree.
So yes, we are excited about fights. I can’t say we’ll be excited when / if we get blobbed by 300-400 pilots but it is what it is - we accept that.
I guarantee you they were setup for structure bashing and not an actual fight. This is why structure bashing is a horrible conflict driver. Also, yet again, high sec PvP is primarily about making money. If you want GUD FITES then go to Null Sec or Low Sec. You’re quite simply NOT going to be able to force High-Sec PvP entities into taking “fair fights” (and its funny to me that everyone in null acts like they dont overkill everything just as badly) and they’re certainly not going to take one that they’re going to lose.
Keep in mind also that a lot of the original members of the large High-Sec PvP entities came from my profession of suspect baiting mission runners and moved to professions like suicide ganking and mass war decs as the suspect baiting community was nerfed into oblivion by patches and changes JUST LIKE THIS ONE.
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