I’ve never said structures are not viable targets, but the structures are not players, and most of the players are wholly unaffected by structure loss. If you can’t hunt their Orca, or their Golem, you really aren’t affecting them at all. The only thing it changes is that they move into some other corp, which can’t be war decced.
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But what you want is a situation where you can be an ‘ally’ in a war…without any consequences and with nothing to demarcate victory or failure. That’s not really war…that’s just an un-ending free for all that effectively turns highsec into nullsec.
It seems to me your primary gripe is that you can set up a war HQ for your mercenary tasks…join some war as an ally…and then along comes 30,000 member corp blob and demolishes your war HQ. But why wouldn’t they ? You’ve chosen a mechanism that allows you to pick off their members leaving Amarr or wherever with relative impunity. That part of the mechanism is totally balanced on your side as you are effectively getting ‘Concord free’ ganking.
What’s more, if your ‘allies’ truly saw you as such…would they not come help you defend your HQ ? It’s not much of an ‘ally’ system if you are left to fend off a 300 person blob on your own.
How is that a bad thing?
That’s how the game should be: chaotic balances of power where you don’t have to worry about sov, and creative player-driven playing within the „lawful“ rules.
Laws don’t mean peace and order. Laws mean they’re meant to be bent, bribed, corrupted, or broken. And give rise to player grudges, informal agreements, shadowy under the table deals, all under a veneer of „lawful“ society that is nominally „owned“ by some NPC. This is what makes great player stories.
If you want peace just delete the „laws“ of high sec and hard code it so players don’t take damage, phase through each other without collision boxes like every other MMO, and cannot activate AOE nor EWAR on each other, the end.
Nullsec is the same but you can slap your name on the system.
Not only would high sec be more interactive and engaging for folks it would not deceive people into thinking they’re playing one kind of game when it is really another kind.
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You don’t need a war HQ to become a war ally.
Also, that aside, I don’t know what sort of “impunity” you’re talking about. If they don’t like what I’m doing (interfering in the wars that they started), they can bring a combat force and try to take me out. It’s not like they aren’t able to attack me at any time. And if they’re too chickenshit to do that, or simply don’t care enough to bother, then I’m going to turn the entire area stretching from Neesher to Jark into a no-go zone for half a dozen of the game’s largest alliances, and they’re just going to have to deal with it.
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You need to have a structure…and that effectively counts as a war HQ for your corp, as if you lose that then you are no longer eligible for war, unless you join the corp originally declared war on.
Over and over and over and over ad infinitum ? At what point have you been ‘taken out’ ? Even the ‘100 years war’ eventually had an end. I can see how your system just ended up with lots of minor skirmishes with arbitrary victory conditions…and I’d bet loads of people refused to ever concede they had been beaten as there was really no victory mechanism.
The current system is not perfect. There’s a lot of changes I’d make. But I can see why CCP introduced the war HQ system. It de-trivialises war when at the very least one has to have some 2bn ISK structure. It makes the conflict a definitive thing with victory or defeat mechanisms…rather than just random skirmishes.
Holding corps are the real issue…and the ability to corp swap into the wardeced corp. A ‘fairer’ system might be one that froze corp membership for the war…but that move would go down like a lead balloon.
What you want is basically what nullsec is there for.
However, that’s the exact opposite of a real war. In real wars, victory is not defined by any mechanic, you don’t automatically win just because you take a castle, and most of the fighting is in fact random skirmishes. The war ends when both parties decide it will end, not when some arbitrary win condition is met. By gamifying wardecs and forcing them into scripted setpiece battles, CCP has dumbed them down, and removed “random skirmishes” which were the most interesting content.
The original appeal of this game was it’s sandbox “anything goes” nature. That’s why it was popular, and the game has become increasingly less popular as CCP replaces unscripted PvP with mechanisms which limit what people can or can’t do.
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No, a war HQ is a war HQ. It’s a very specific mechanic with a very specific functionality for the purpose of declaring wars. Qualifying to become an ally only requires the ownership of any structure. Additionally, becoming war-ineligible doesn’t break the duration of the existing ally contract, which is by design.
If I’m willing to do it, why aren’t they?
The vast majority of wars have defined territory as the ‘condition’…as its a bit hard to mobilise a force when you no longer have anywhere to mobilise them from. Sure there’s guerilla and partisan wars…but they generally need outside assistance. The attrition aspect and the taking or destruction of structures is simply the ‘means’ by which territory is gained.
I mean, you try winning Rome : Total War without capturing a single town along the way.
Absolutely not.
If you read Clausewitz, which you should if you want to have any kind of serious discussion about what a war is or isn’t, you will note that he defines the variables which determine a war’s outcome as being societal (ie: public war support and economic power), governmental (policy and leadership decisions), and military (ie: equipment, morale, firepower, etc.). At no point does he argue that territorial gains and losses are definitive, as they are only secondary factors which may influence other factors. History is filled with examples of an army which hoped to secure victory by taking an objective, only for the other side to continue fighting. Many leaders thought they might win a war by seizing territory, but they were dead wrong. There is not, and has never been, any external force which decides when a war is concluded, as soon as one force captures the flag or crosses a finish line.
Wardec changes have taken a system which reflected the chaos of reality, and replaced it with the stale boring content of a videogame battle arena. It has been reduced from war to sport. I agree that for lots of people such content is engaging, obviously you enjoy blobbing with a bunch of other people and shooting a structure, but that’s not what originally made this game popular. People want to define their own goals, and when it comes to war the most interesting enjoyable part (which you do not seem to have ever experienced) involves hunting targets, and yes, in real wars, you generally want soft targets which ideally are unable to shoot back. Other players should keep themselves safe, but CCP has replaced personal responsibility and player agency with a nanny caretaker system which decides winners and losers according to a script. That’s just not the same game.
Structures should not in any way be tied to the ability to wage war. That’s simply a system which limits content and prevents PvP.
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Even worse is the fact that it’s a sport arena that allows a side to field as many team members as it wants, as long as it greases the pockets of the governing body. Like if the Yankees gave the commission a sack of fat stacks, and now they get to have 20 outfielders at a time.
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That’s just pure semantics. Your personal eligibility for the war depends entirely on your structure…not on the defending corp’s ‘actual’ war HQ. Sure there’s a concise Eve definition of ‘war HQ’ for those who have Level V Dictionary Quoting…but I did use the word ‘effectively’ and I’ll stand by that.
Because incessant declarations of war from one person corps are likely more a pain in the **** than a real challenge.
Another possibility is that declarations of war are a challenge, which one might describe as a pain, but a challenge nonetheless - and rather than facing this challenge, some people want to dumb the system down so they can AFK bot without significant risk.
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The Romans burned Carthage to the ground. I’d say that was pretty conclusive.
I’m not entirely sure why you’re having difficulties differentiating between war HQs (a mechanic implemented by CCP to specifically act as a requirement to declare outgoing wars) and structure ownership, which is a requirement to be open to attack. I’m sure you’ll get there at some point though, just like you did with your viewpoint about ganking.
Please give me a moment while I search for my tiny violin, so that I can play it for the five-digit-member alliances that are so unjustly bullied by my presence, and can’t deal with non-consensual PvP harassment from a single player because they have much more important things to attend to, like maintaining the botter ISK farms that are paying off their leaders’ second mortgages.
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Rather than baseball, soccer is a better analogy. If this policy were applied to soccer, you would inevitably have teams which dominate every game, based purely on numbers rather than skill.
It’s a poor system which fails to meet the criteria of an open-ended unscripted sandbox, and at the same time fails to meet the criteria of a fair fight arena. I have no issue with the fact that some groups are larger than others, that’s perfectly reasonable. However, if you are going to change the nature of the game from unscripted PvP to an arena mode, then it certainly does not make sense that larger groups can compete with smaller groups. The solution then is to make the arena battles even more fair, with even teams and even resources, which would reduce EvE to something like World of Tanks or Starcraft. However, that would no longer be EvE. CCP should return to the sandbox concept, allowing players to do pretty much whatever they want, and expecting other players to adapt in order to survive. CCP itself should not be trying to regulate player activity.
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Yes, they enslaved and killed all the miners. However, CCP doesn’t allow wardeccers to do that. You can’t hunt the farmers. You can’t touch them, unless they are foolish enough to be in a wardeccable corporation. In fact, under CCP’s mechanics, Carthage may have won immediately once Hannibal fulfilled his initial objectives. In reality, however, there were no such mechanics, and the Romans continued the war even though Carthage assumed victory was achieved. The Carthiginian conflict is a great example of how occupying enemy territory did not translate into victory, which was only achieved by the destruction of a civilian population (not war-deccable in EvE).
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It actually feels surreal to me that I’m arguing against a stance of “it’s necessary for a 30,000-member group to be able to end wars by blobbing a solo player, because otherwise it’s unfair to the 30,000-member group as it will be perpetually harassed by the solo player without being able to do anything about it.”
I hope this is all one big troll, because my fragile psyche is otherwise ill-equipped to deal with this level of space-cuckoldry.
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No…you just need a dictionary with the word ‘effectively’ in it.
You want to single handedly have the same weight and standing as a 5 digit corp ? There’s just something odd about the way you frame it…as if they are bullying you but you’d otherwise be bullying them.
What’s more, as I have seen you refer to your killboard a few times in the past…its not as if you are doing badly out of the current mechanics. You have 220 kills…over 200bn worth… this year and 1 loss…and there’s a problem ?
Methinks thou dost protest too much.
A good example is the war of 1812.
The British occupied the American capital, but the Americans did not surrender. Likewise, in 1863, the French occupation of Mexico City did not end that war. Nor did Poland capitulate when the Germans occupied Warsaw in 1939, and the French continued “random skirmishes” after the German occupation in 1940. Seoul fell in 1950, but the Koreans did not surrender. I could go on and on…
It is wholly erroneous to conclude that wars end because of territorial occupation. This may trigger capitulation, if one side is sufficiently demoralized, but in many cases they are not. CCP’s mechanic replaces unscripted player agency with a literal bot.
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I am not declaring wars. I do not own a war HQ.
I think you are just really confused about the mechanics in question.