What is clear is there is a lot of players who just are not interested in nul sec and low sec. CSM just does not represent high sec. The war system needs to change as it is really hard for high sec players to build communities because some players just like to do missions and explore, and wars just force them to leave their high sec corp if they don’t want to be involved in a war. Let’s be frank though, the purpose for war was for high sec corps to compete as if it was null sec in high sec. That’s not how its being used, it’s just being used for some corps to bully people who don’t like fighting other players. Let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room. High sec is maintained for players who don’t want to fight and war is just a way to blow up structures. If you break down all the “wars” they often lob sided, null sec corps can’t even compete with the ganking that goes on in these wars, the attacker is often scoring more kills then the defender. It’s not a competition its just bullying and means high sec corps can’t build communities and people use structure corps anyway so players are not even invited to help defend structures in high sec. It just doesn’t seem wars are being used for what it is intended.
Some solutions may include an opt-out one time if you opt out of your corps war you can’t get back into it, to avoid abuse. People look at high sec players corp record and wonder, why are you going in and out of corps so often, well this is common for high sec players who don’t want to fight in wars. Why is this even needed? Why have a mechanic that is basically pointless?
Another solution might be make all wars mutual, with a period of time that the defender can decline as a whole corp to wage war. The attacker is refunded for its request. An abandoned structure/corp would not be around to decline and people would still have a chance to blow up abandoned structures.
Another way to handle it, for some, they are only interested in blowing up structures, just allow all high sec structures to be attacked and do away with the buggy system all together. As soon as a high sec structure is attacked allow the attacker to be flagged combat to be attacked by anyone. Only when structure attacker is attacked themselves will high sec people be able to respond.
One last way to handle this is very simple. Disable cap chains and rep chains in high sec or allow a structure to have a disruption weapon that disables chains, using cap and rep chains ships make it impossible for structure weapons to kill any ships at all. It’s not fair that null sec players come to high sec and use cap chain and rep chain strategies, it makes it impossible for a structure to defend. What’s even worse, is it is not obvious to a high sec player as to why these groups using cap and rep chains are able to be entirely immune to all structure weapons, it makes it seem as though the bullies have an “mystery” advantage and discourages people from play. Disabling this could make it more interesting for people to actually engage in warfare, but the reality is people just don’t and are discouraged from game-play. Consider that every MMO game that has healing also has a healing disrupting power in pvp so people can feel one on one combat has a purpose. A single person multiboxing 20 ships or even 10 ships should not be able to take down a manned structure with weapons in high sec, its just not fair at all. Cap and rep chains maybe are important in null sec and low sec but in high sec the advantage needs to be removed or one of the above suggestions should be used.
Most importantly high sec wars are not really used for fair competition, it would be actually a lot of fun if it was, but its not, its just used for bullying and it isn’t fun and people just stop playing the game.
