Hello,
I had not much time for EVE or the boards yesterday but I do want to sincerely thank you for your input. It has helped me greatly to understand the issue with the wardec system from the declaring side.
I have read some of the old topics and discussions between the CSM members who pushed for the wardec change and the wardeccers who had to deal with those changes the most. The argumentations are quite interesting, from both sides.
I have a final question, because I just don’t understand what your “gain” (in terms of entertainment, fun for the time invested in the game) is from all these wardecs? You said you spend like 50-60 billion ISK a month on wars because you need like 500 wars to even find targets to shoot at. And nobody really seems to like shooting back. Your killboard (not your personal, I just checked BLACKFLAG Alliance) rarely shows anything that I would call an interesting fight? I mean, your alliance does lots of kills, but they are 99% haulers, frigs, lonely miners or a lone battleship gangbanged by 12 people? In all the structure grinds, no one seems to ever fight back seriously… Wouldn’t you just have a lot more fun just going to lowsec and poking structures there or invading a C6 of some real rich WH corp or stealing from ESS in nullsec all day long?
Please don’t be offended, its a serious question out of pure curiosity, I have done lowsec gatecamps a lot myself in the earlier days but I remember that the only thing that really gave the thrill was the bait or bust that would come inevitebly if you stay in the same area for too long, which led to a real fight if one side wasn’t just blobbing.
So long story short: Why do you even bother with all the wardeccing if you could save 60bil a month and still get tons of entertainment for your members basically every day, just out of highsec?
Groups like Black flag are a necessary evil. Call it a thinning of the herd. Without merc groups like them, there would be 50+ citadels in every high sec system…
Exactly. They serve a purpose, just like high sec gankers do. Without gankers there would be tens of thousands of Orcas and barges all over high sec, mining in perfect safety, flooding the market with billions of units of resources, rendering those resources all but worthless. Without groups like Black Flag taking out citadels there would be thousands of them in 0.5 systems all over high sec mining moons, creating the same problem…
Then how should a good wardec system look like from your perspective? You said they shouldn’t tie it to structures, but the current opt-out method that does exactly prevent the structure-spam? Should there even be any kind of opt-out method? And if wardecs become really cheap, wouldn’t that just enable the wardeccers to basically constantly waredec anyone that moves, making HighSec a kind of Lowsec without caps?
I’m not going to pretend that I know how to fix it or what a perfect system looks like. I just know that wardecs are a necessary function of balanced gameplay. Without that balance, things would run amok rather quickly. On the one hand, we can’t allow everyone and their dog to have a structure in every system, but on the other hand we can’t allow mercs to keep everyone wardecced 24/7 either. Somewhere in between there is a balance. Where that balance lies is up to CCP.
Personally, I wish they would revert back to the old POS system where you needed high faction standings to even place a structure. Under the current system, everyone and their dog can place a structure wherever they want…
Agreed. I really like the idea of having a vital and rewarding (and not frustrating) war/merc gameplay mechanic while protecting beginners from being wardecced all the time by bored vets. But that seems to be a rather difficult project since good design ideas are pretty rare.
Hmm, I think they removed the standing requirement because it was circumvented constantly anyway by just dropping characters with low standing in and out of the corp, making things overly complicated and frustrating without really achieving the goal of preventing the anchoring. But I agree, the current system of letting everyone having any structure anywhere without real requirements is a bad design, not only in highsec.
Any mechanic you introduce that provides an “out” will be used by newbies and vets alike, and now you have the same problem once again. A class of game-mechanically-protected players, run by humans who are new and vet alike.
The reason the good ideas are rare is because there is no technical / game-mechanical solution to this cultural problem. Simply stop trying to provide “an out” for new players and instead build a player community that A) wants to mentor others and B) helps funnel new players that need it, there.
Eve players are exceptionally good at bending every rule or ignoring it entirely through game mechanics. I think we have an idealised idea of how things “should” be, but in reality when playing games, players tend to act like sociopaths or just outright like the idea of doing things the game dev didn’t intend.
The war system might actually be better than it ever has been (it’s less abusable right now compared to in the past) - but it’s still not providing a lot of impact on the game. It mostly ends up being used as a way to structure bash without being concorded. Increasing the costs of structures by so much that it’s worth losing fleets of ships over it the only way i can see that people would chose to defend, instead of just building a new one with a new corp.
My only opposition is the structure requirement, I know it acts as a switch for war eligibility, but it’s a pain if you want to help out someone in a war, yes you can drop a pos tower but if your a threat to the war dec group it will be taken out fast.
Just as people jump out of corps at war time, people can jump in but I don’t want to be jumping in and out of corps every five minutes but it may work with alts, then you run into trust issues
but this is my opposition to how it is now from my own play style, the whole thing has many sides to it and then you have to factor in the idiots that will try and grief any rule made.
Can you even set a POS as your War HQ? I have tried to anchor a POS and declare war on someone with an alt, but it didn’t work, an Upwell Structure was needed.
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Anyway, as idea to improve the wardec system how about a “Mercenary System”:
A corp or alliance can enlist themselves as “Mercenaries” to CONCORD for 30 days for a fee.
The larger your corp/alliance, the higher the fee, can be set to autopay.
Benefit:
Mercenaries can join in as ALLIES for DEFENSIVE wars without a required structure on their own.
There can be an ingame page for Mercenary Service advertisements to browse.
Drawbacks:
Enlisted Mercenaries are war eligible by default, even if they don’t have a structure.
They cannot accept new members while they have an active war assistance running.
This way players can participate in the wardec system without the need for additional structure spam&grind. Maybe some smaller groups have ideas how to offer valuable service even against superior attackers if there is no structure requirement attached which only leads to a billion ISK guaranteed loss. Like an EWAR- or Logi-Wing or a Bombsquad for hire.
She isn’t saying to drop a structure to be able to declare war, only to drop one to assist in a war.
Only the aggressor in a war needs an Upwell structure anchored in highsec. Any corp that just wants to be eligible for wars, just needs a structure anywhere (and not only an Upwell structure. A POS tower is fine).
Thanks for the info! I thought joining in as ally would need you to be able to declare war on the initial aggressor.
Well in that case, why doesn’t she drop 20 incredibly cheap and annoying small POSes with only hardeners and jammers/damps all around highsec and go for it? They don’t even offer any loot to the attackers and with nicely randomized stront they even have weird reinforce timers all over the place. A nightmare for any opponent to grind trough
Drop a tower anywhere in eve. Nobody beside the person dropping will know unless he tells everybody.
And then you can assist on wars. In the past the biggest pain was finding a person POS. In the past we ended up buying spreadsheets for isk detailing every moon that had a pos and its owner. That kinda intel was a thing.
10 mil is pocket-change . one complaint about the old system was that mercs / war dec corps had no skin in the game . the structure core and raising dec cost addressed that , but your own example of spending 60 bil / month shows that’s not a real concern .
limit amount of outgoing wars how ? by corp , alliance … easily worked around . i would like to have seen some type of performance requirement , where a war that had no kills caused the dec’ing corp to lose a war slot for a week . this may have helped to limit the mass dec / sit outside jita crowd .
the problem allowing any corp to be dec’d was the small , one-man-and-his-alts corps dec’ing a solo player . many one-man corps were formed to avoid the npc corp tax . these small pve / mining corps were used as an exclusive farm and had no recourse .
originally called the ‘buddy list’ for keeping in-touch with online friends , it was rarely used as intended . ccp changed it to watch-list in a ‘we meant to do that’ moment . a real-time , IRL list of logged-on players , providing an automatically-updated list of war targets , for free , was ridiculous . you can have the same functionality thru locator agents btw . just not freely provided by ccp . it was a crutch , and i was glad to see it kicked out from under those using it .
wars haven’t changed all that much over the years . there’s not much ‘punching down’ as some have stated . it’s mostly dec’s against the big alliances , giving thousands of possible targets . and nearly always involves camping within 5 jumps of jita , or structure take-downs .
it was fun , fighting smaller groups . they were usually friendly and sporting , and i understand how you may long for those days . but there was simply too much abuse , and nobody’s suggested a better system that closes all the loopholes , while still making hi-sec pvp fun and ‘fair’ , if i may use the ‘f’ word …
I’m fairly sure you can “assisst” in wars - a war-dec’d corp can add you to a defenders list and your corp becomes an ally in that war.
But as a solo player you’ll likely just get blobbed. People taking hi-sec wars are almost universally gankers and wont ever take anything that looks like a fair fight. If it looks fair for you, it’s probably a trap.