In my opinion the problems with war deccing are too many groups use it as a system to flag people for pvp in trade hubs and nothing more. It’s too easy to avoid the war dec for people wishing to fight a war.
The first fix I propose is one that I think has likelihood of being implemented in some fashion.
Instead of charging isk for amount of pilots decc’d charge isk for amount of wars declared.
Make it double for each war starting at 50 million isk. The price for war is the same across all wars. If you have two groups decc’d its a weekly fee of 100 million per group. 3 groups decced is 200 million per group.
Secondly people who quit corporation during a war should remain flagged as a war target during the duration of the war.
If my structureless group is trying to push another structureless group off of an ice belt in a system I should be able to do that without them all going to NPC corps and continuing to mine the ice belt.
Charge players who leave corp a weekly fee for not being flagged a war target. Balance this fee in some way, double their skill points maybe.
Allow us to wardec single players in NPC corporations. This way I can push off that orca in the ice belt i’m attempting to take control of. Allow them the weekly fee for not being flagged.
First idea is something that has been suggested a lot and makes a lot of sense in many ways.
That’s a horrible idea. The end result of such a move would be that all non-gankers in high-sec would just stay in NPC corps permanently. Main reason people stay in high-sec is the relative safety, and if being in a corp gets in the way of that then people won’t be in corps anymore.
I agree that there should be a system in place to let groups fight over resources in high-sec, but this is definitely not the way to do that.
If you let ganker groups like PIRAT do that, you may as well just delete CONCORD and get rid of high-sec altogether.
Bad as it would be, I’d rather see them put limits on what NPC corp members can do. IE: not able to use shared/combative resources (like ice belts) and some ■■■■ like that. - That still a bad idea, just a step or two better on the badness scale.
Holy crap how this setup would get abused by SP farmers. - Hard pass on that.
It wouldn’t make them stay in NPC corps if you could dec players in NPC corps as well as they would get no advantage from it.
With a new price structure of costing isk per declared war, It would be too expensive for pirat to maintain a dec on every body. The only affordable solution would be to fight wars against a few groups that give them targets. Being able to dec single players would also greatly benefit bounty hunting gameplay.
I see no way that a cost associated with SP could be abused by SP farmers.
No, it would instead make them quit the game. CCP have stats on this and that’s the whole reason for this change.
Being able to dec individual players is a recipie for outright griefing.
CCP Also has stats that say some one is more likely to become a long term player if they get blown up. I, for one, fall under this statistic. I got jet can baited in my first few days, and it just made me play longer and harder, as well as learn what a warp disrupter was.
Wars are fun, but players can’t find that out when mechanics encourage them to avoid the content so easily.
No, CCP does not have stats that say that.
CCP has stats that said people who kept playing were more likely to have a PvP encounter in their first (month I think it was).
It does not say that people become long term players by getting blown up however, don’t misuse statistics.
I remember specifically them saying “getting blown up.” It doesn’t matter any way you’re looking at it through jaded glasses just seeing what you want.
You really think a month old player got into a pvp encounter with pirat and survived? Doubt it. 90% of first month “pvp encounters” result in a loss mail.
Which is irrelevant if they survived or not.
The stats CCP has only say it was more likely that players who stayed had done that.
Not that getting blown up made them stay. CCP never isolated the factor and checked if it was anything more than people who stayed put more hours in for the first month, or if those played 15 minutes and never undocked players skewed the stats of the group who left so much.
So you can’t take those stats to mean that blowing people up is good for player retention. All they do is suggest that blowing people up is possibly not bad for retention either.
However even if blowing people up isn’t bad for retention, receiving war decs most certainly is.
The stats CCP has only say it was more likely that players who stayed had [pvp’d]
Not that getting blown up made them stay.
what? lol
Which is it the pvp made them more likely to stay or didn’t?
You can argue semantics all you want, The fact is that Eve is a PvP game and players who find that out stay and the ones who don’t get bored and leave.
Encouraging new players to stay in NPC corps is the single most efficient way to kick them out of the game. You need to play Eve with people to have fun and war dec mechanics encourage them to leave corp or not join. Changing these mechanics is a sure fire way to keep players in corp working towards a goal.
Causation vs Correlation.
Things can happen but be caused by other things.
CCP only established a correlation to do with PvP and new players, not a causation.
CCP however went much further in establishing a causation with Wardecs because they isolated wardecs as a possible cause, and saw a consistent trend in response to it, across a cross section of players.
As much as possible we want to avoid having the game’s systems push players into situations where avoiding social interaction in NPC corps or logging off for a week are optimal choices.
From their dev blog.
I’ve read the CSM minutes and all the correlating dev blogs I can find. Where do they point out that war decs are causing new players to leave the game?
Also, you can’t just summon Causation vs. Correlation as some sort of tribal incantation to say some otherwise unrelated argument is invalid. Correlation is often enough.
Correlation means nothing by itself, especially since it goes both ways : A correlates to B means that B also correlates to A. Just because you “like more” that A causes B does not make it true.
Just take ANY lesson on statistic, you will learn that.
CCP Larrikin pulls up activity data for players of corporations that have wars declared against them and it shows considerable activity drops in all activities during the war. They also show that the low activity continues after the war ends.
Here this is a temporal causation, that is, an event A is very often followed by an event B.
I agree it does not mean this is a causation though. There is just a very high correlation rate between “corp A is wardcced” and “corp A activity decreases”.
Here this is a temporal causation, that is, an event A is very often followed by an event B.
I agree it does not mean this is a causation though. There is just a very high correlation rate between “corp A is wardcced” and “corp A activity decreases”.
If this correlation was enough for CCP to start making changes how can it be “nope, never” enough?
The correlation alone is not enough.
What makes you thing this is the only data they have ?
CCP is losing customers. They need to understand how to stop the bleeding. So they need to make analysis that makes sense, even if it is wrong in the end. And the more likely analysis, when taking human factor into account, is that those players stopped playing BECAUSE they were wardecced and could not play.
So maybe there is a third factor that both makes a corporation be wardecced, and makes people leave the game. But CCP can’t find it, and rather act and stop the wardec abuse, hoping it will stop the bleeding, than close the eyes and wait .
stop editing your posts and make new ones. There is no notification when you edit.
But any how…
This topic is about suggestions to fixing the war dec system, I will no longer participate in argument over whether or not correlation is enough evidence to make changes. (It is.) I will also no longer participate in argument over why the war dec system needs changed.
If you have suggestions on how to fix it, link your posts or post them here. Alternatively, you can post argument on why my changes are bad.
War decs cause new players to quit is an acceptable argument to not allowing wardeccing specific NPC corporation players. I don’t agree that it causes new players to quit.
CCP Larrikin pulls up activity data for players of corporations that have wars declared against them and it shows considerable activity drops in all activities during the war. They also show that the low activity continues after the war ends.
This is an obvious response to a war that is bound to happen. Players know they can’t frivolously mine any where they want and that they need to be within helps range or in fleet or w/e their corporations plan is. Mining alone in a belt not in fleet will have to stop or it will result in loss mails.
Corporations that can’t get their players together to do activities during war should rightfully die. I recently participated in a war against a group that shut down all non fleet activities. (There is your activity going down.) However, they have FC’s run fleet ops daily. (They were doing level 4 missions when I was watching but I think they plan on mining too.) This is a great example of what a corp SHOULD do under a wardec. They haven’t died like all the others who continue to do nothing.