That sounds to me like war was just a trivial thing…with nothing to signify the end of it. Lots of minor skirmishes. Who decides who won ? Of course there’d be ‘more’ wars in such situation, but it seems more like a recipe for chaos than a true victory or defeat mechanism.
There are no systemic victory conditions for wars today, just like there weren’t in the past. Victory conditions were decided in chat windows, and not the in-game interface. Which is why wars weren’t trivial before; because players made pacts and deals directly with each other, and the relationships thus formed guided war conduct. It most definitely wasn’t a chaotic system like you imagine it was.
The only mechanic that remotely approaches systemic victory conditions today the ability to forcefully end an aggressor’s war by taking down their HQ, but since 99% (if not more) of the wars declared today are declared by groups whose HQs can’t truly be endangered, this is a meaningless victory condition in practice.
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But that’s just totally arbitrary…and I can see why CCP introduced war HQs.
What you are describing would allow me to declare a 1 person war on some 30,000 member corp, and effectively have free highsec ganking. I don’t ‘have’ to declare any terms for defeat…or ever even admit I have been defeated. It’s hard to see how this even qualifies as ‘war’…especially given that no territory or structure need be lost.
Having to have a war HQ de-trivialises it all. There is then an expensive ‘capture the flag’ type mechanism that ends the war. That in turn forces the 1 person corp to have allies…or to be an ally in a war that can call up more people. It also gives a far more genuine aspect to being a mercenary.
You complain about the current mechanism…but at the same time you have done pretty well out of it.
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If a 30,000-member EVE organization can’t deal with a 1-member organization declaring war on it through conventional ship combat means, and feels so bullied that the only way it can fight back is by forcefully ending the war by gang-banging the aggressor’s war HQ with a null-sec-style blob, that speaks volumes more about the flaws of the 30,000-member group than it does about the game’s war declaration mechanics.
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But without a war HQ its hard to see that there is even a war. There’s just some pesky 1 person solo corp picking off people ad infinitum. What constitutes victory or defeat in any of that ? All I see is a mechanism for bypassing highsec and turning it into nullsec…for the ‘war’ declarer. Why would the bigger corp not want the opportunity to remove this pesky person from the equation…at least for 2 weeks or until they can afford a new HQ.
Of course it is expensive…but then that is precisely how the whole process is de-trivialised. This also makes wars far more about attrition…which ought to be the case.
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Destiny has lost a few war HQs, and thinks its all due to the current war mechanics, and the “hegemony” of high-sec war dec corps.
This could be true, but somehow there are several small corps declaring war every day in high-sec and they don’t seem to have their war HQs deleted on every war dec.
Wonder why?
If that one person gets destroyed repeatedly by anything resembling a task force set up to deal with the attacker, and then goes away on their own volition, that would be classified as a victory/defeat. Needing to be able to bring a blob to forcefully close the war is a crutch that a 30,000-member group shouldn’t be entitled to when being attacked by a solo pilot. If the 30,000-member group isn’t willing to spare a single combat pilot to stay on top of the threat, well, I just don’t know what to tell you. You’re really fond of blob warfare at the moment (because you luckily happen to be part of a coalition that wields the biggest blobs around most of the time), but you don’t be when you’re on the receiving end of it.
Also, forgot to mention, when I say:
If the 30,000-member group isn’t willing to spare a single combat pilot to stay on top of the threat, well, I just don’t know what to tell you.
All of the little war outfits used to get hired against each other for this very purpose. EVE had an exceptionally vibrant mercenary community, with actual paid work like protection and assassination contracts. CCP completely destroyed that. These days, mercenary work effectively terminates at paying the biggest blob around to go and blow up a space hut. In ages past, if some 30,000-member group was being harassed by a single player through wars, they could easily go on the mercenary marketplace and hire someone to take care of the issue if they didn’t want to do it themselves.
Because they beg to join the sole superpower and pay protection money for the privilege?
Also, I don’t know what “several small corps” you’re talking about. There are no small groups doing wars, except a few tiny groups that are farming abandoned citadels, and not engaging in any actual ship combat because their targets are quite literally AWOL and without any in-space activity. We were the only small group in years (just 3-4 members) to even try something like that. We were even able to successfully defend our HQ against two different null-sec groups that came to take it down. The only other group in recent history that tried to do wars was “EscapeFrom Jita” and BLACKFLAG. effectively destroyed them as far as I know.
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With only a war HQ, it’s hard to see that there is even a war.
In a real war, you can attack targets, like freighters and barges. However, under the current system, groups like Absolute Order (and most everyone else) keep most of their infrastructure non war-deccable. If you love shooting structures, good for you, but war decs were more fun when you could go out and hunt targets rather than setting a timer and logging in for another wholly uninteresting blob. The wardec system needs to be changed so that bloated groups like AO and SICO have to defend their miners, instead of hiding behind overpowered CONCORD mechanics.
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Im going to agree with you on this, back in the very old days of eve, 2003-2006 I can say there was a lot of work for merc corps. The scale of the conflicts was a lot smaller, but it was fun and lucrative (relatively).
There are a few small corps doing war decs, but the scale of their wars is perhaps not what you have in mind.
I’ll let the gentlemen from EscapeFrom Jita speak for themselves about when they plan to resume war decs, i do know the last couple of war HQs they lost were at the hands of null blocs not high-sec groups.
I watch the war interface like a hawk, religiously checking it at least once every day for viable wars on which we can ally in. There isn’t a single war right now that is conducted by a small, independent group that isn’t either:
- for the purpose of shooting abandoned structures
or - a mutual war for whatever reason (usually without any actual combat taking place)
or - just a random outlier war (also usually without any actual combat history) for an unknown purpose by a group that doesn’t regularly engage in wars, e.g. something like this:
I can 100% attest that this has been the case for at least one year. There hasn’t been a single small group, aside from ours, that has remotely tried anything like this. In fact, outside of the current landscape, the only other groups that engaged in wars were RIOT and EscapeFrom Jita, which weren’t small groups.
That’s just totally ass backwards…to talk about exercising the full force of a corp as somehow a ‘crutch’. What’s the point of having a 30,000 member corp if not to wield the power that comes from that membership ? If the little guy suffers…well, they are supposed to. That is their incentive to not be the little guy.
On the contrary. I think there is some mechanic missing in between ganking and war HQs that ought to provide some mechanism for ‘warfare’. Perhaps some mechanism whereby a person could attack anyone…but likewise be attacked by anyone. With a fee to Concord.
How many Parabellum miners are now mining in Finanar ? By destroying the entire structure there, all the mining ops, and by the sheer level of ISK attrition, it will be months before they return. My only concern is that scarcely anyone has moved in to fill the void and the systems around there are practically empty.
This is a video game, and video games (even open-ended ones like EVE) have design considerations for the purpose of making them actually fun to play. Engagements with unreasonable odds aren’t particularly fun for anyone involved, even if the side that fields the absolute numeric superiority might “accept” such engagements because they go in their favor. The game is simply more compelling if it guides players toward more even engagement odds (e.g., for your example, the 30,000-strong group sending a small detachment of fighters to deal with the threat, or hiring some local tough-guy mercenary to do it for them). And it was exactly this that made EVE so special during its first decade or so.
But when an overkill mechanic exists in a competitive environment such as EVE’s, players will automatically default to it. This results in much more safe, predictable, and stagnant gameplay that hurts all players, even if they don’t consciously perceive that it does.
I don’t think you understand just how much of a chaotic bloodbath this would lead to. I mean, I’m not totally against it since I’d be a beneficiary of such a mechanic, but I’m under no delusion with regard to how unbalanced it would be.
Hang on…I’ve got Aiko telling me most of the alliance can and does hide behind non wardec corps and structures, and I’ve got you telling me that there’s some kind of ‘overkill’ as if the full force is brought to bear.
Why would it be any different to declaring war on multiple corps under the old system ? I mean from what you’ve described the old system was a bloodbath anyway.
Those are two different things. Lots of big groups are war-immune (even though at their sizes, they shouldn’t be), but lots of other big groups aren’t, and will use overkill to end the wars as quickly as possible. Case in point, The Initiative brought in nearly a hundred people to take down my HQ pretty much the very next day. They didn’t need a hundred people for that task. They probably didn’t even need twenty people. Do they do this when a much bigger group declares war on them (e.g. BF)? No, they just let it slide and take their licks, feeding the attackers tens of billions over the course of weeks.
I don’t blame them, because the game allows them to do it, so why shouldn’t they? I blame CCP for poor game design.
Also, the whole “running a mega-alliance that is war immune and able to take advantage of owning structures via holding organizations, but not having to put their non-combat pilots at risk from attacking forces by selectively having their combat characters jump out to defend structures when necessary.” It’s just obscene.
Because the old system had lots of checks and balances in terms of all of these groups competing with each other. This, on the other hand, is equivalent to ganking as an outlaw without a CONCORD response. Players wouldn’t be able to interfere with each other doing this because everyone is a target, which makes engagements 100% unpredictable, as opposed to the old system, when everyone knew each other’s viable targets, and could plan accordingly.
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The state of high sec wars today really are a joke compared to a decade ago.
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The worst part is that CCP tried to justify all of it with quite possibly the most egregious attempt to lie with statistics that I’ve ever seen from the company in this blog:
Like for example in this graph:
They literally went from a weekly sample of more than 1,000 wars to a sample of about 100 wars (because the changes eliminated war eligibility for over 90% of player groups overnight), but kept the same plot.
Had they kept the entire war sample consistent across the entire graph, it would’ve looked something like this:
(The replaced section would oscillate more, but the trend line/average would remain the same.)
Which is to say that across wars that were seeing activity/kills, there was no perceptible change to the amount of PvP activity, which is what they tried to pass off as something that did happen. It’s just that with their graph, it looks like there’s suddenly a higher volume of wars with actual daily kills, when in reality that’s not the case at all.
Shameful.
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For one to measure the value of isk in the trillions one must first consider that knowledge is worth more as knowledge was made up from time were time is worth a lot more than isk.
By suggesting those Capsuleers don’t actually have trillions is not really looking at the facts.
Theres lies, damn lies, statistics, and then CCPs statistics about high sec.
edit: you didn’t mention this but it’s worth saying: the other graph they show (new players joining a corp by day 3) has no Y axis values. This is like grade school level, banana republic dictator kind of cherry-picking propagandized data that most people simply call „bull ■■■■“.
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That’s a false premise even before we get to the actual statistical math part. New players (i.e. younger than 3 days, as mentioned in the blog) have no concept of high-sec wars, and wouldn’t be guided by that particular consideration so early on. Which means that the graph is most likely tracking the amount of new alts that are joining corporations immediately upon their creation (I don’t believe them for a second when they say that’s not the case).
Or the much worse possibility is that the change instantly led to the proliferation of SICO-like rookie harvesting groups. Which is actually exactly what happened:
(Marked at patch deployment.)
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