HS War Mechanics

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
1

One of the many topics discussed during my CSM campaign was the much needed revamp of the HS war mechanics. At the current moment it is heavily a one sided in favor of the aggressor. Allies in war arent even able to logi each other. Merc/Pirate groups send out a dozen war decs a day just attempting to punch down. Ill mostly copy paste that section of my CSM thread here to expand on.

For Wars I’m wanting to return to an older format of not needing structures to wardec/be wardecced. This would require a few guidelines in an attempt to prevent people from abusing it like the old days.
-Take into account the member number difference. A massive pvp corp/alliance (few hundred members) shouldn’t be able to dec a smaller industrial corp. (anything under 100)
-A max number of wars you can dec at one time to prevent those corps that just dec everyone because they can.
-Some sort of recruitment stasis during a war to prevent a spike in numbers from people trying to get around the first ticker listed here
-Some sort of stasis on leaving a corp during a war to prevent people from dodging a war just by leaving a corp.
-Max number of allies you can have in a war assisting you.
-Assisting allies should be allowed to logi each other.

4 Likes
2

I would also like a return to proper Highsec warfare - though I do not agree with your views.

I picked the above statement because it rather jumped out at me, RGC. In the ‘old days’, it was not simply the numbers some wardec corps were able to field that led to their success; it was also the experience of the pilots and other corp members.

Many of them were highly skilled PvP characters, with extensive connections to (especially) Nullsec, and Lowsec. A lot of so-called industrial corps in Highsec had no-one who had even trained up fighting skills of any sort, just lasers, light combat drones, mining drones, barges, exhumers and Orcas. That, of course, was no fault of the wardeccers.

Instead of ensuring that corp members could at least be useful during a war, the CEOs were usually only interested in making sure that their members could be useful in an asteroid belt (profit). I know that some of them wanted to train fighting skills, and were discouraged from doing so. Not surprisingly, the results were disappointing.

So, what happened most of the time was that many of them simply docked up for the duration of the war, or took other precautions. Anything to avoid the encounter altogether. I’m sure you’re aware of this.

I think CCP will be careful about introducing changed wardec mechanics to Highsec. For the record, I do not believe that the current structure-based war mechanics are either interesting or engaging - at least I certainly don’t find them so.

If we want change in this gameplay, then the CSM must be able to present a complete, a comprehensive proposal, one which is reasonable and deliverable.

Regarding your mention of repping with Logi, this will have to be a consideration. I have long advocated an overhaul of the Crimewatch mechanics, but that is a mammoth task in itself. I don’t think CCP has the bottle appetite for it, but I’d love to be proved wrong.

3 Likes
3

What would determine that a war had been ‘won’ ?

I’d prefer a method still using structures, but introduce a new structure similar to territorial claim units in nullsec. These would be way cheaper than Athanors, Raitarus, etc…maybe only 100m ISK…but hard to destroy ( a bit like the old POS stations ). The unit would effectively be a ‘flag’ to be captured and serve no other purpose. The way I see it the real problem with wardecs is the cost for a smaller aggressor.

Putting down one of these units would make any regular stations owned by the corp vulnerable too. So Athanors, Raitarus, etc, would still be bashable…but this method allows someone with none of those structures to declare war.

1 Like
4

I don’t know if you were around at the time, Altara, but wars had a set duration. If, at the end of that period, the aggressor hadn’t paid for a further period of war to take place, it ended.

At that point, players could see the respective number of ships/amount of ISK destroyed, and that determined the outcome.

Sometimes, an agreement (usually financial) was reached without a single shot being fired. Wealthy industrial corps (with alts/mates in Nullsec) might take this course in order to avoid ‘bloodshed’ and, perhaps, to retain their dignity, since the results were a matter of public record.

2 Likes
5

Well, yes, but surely that also meant that wars could be declared on corps that had no structures, and the process repeated ad infinitum, and that is precisely why the requirement for structures was brought in. The problem with the structures mechanic is it then makes things hard and expensive for those smaller corps that do want to declare war. CCP have set the balance too far the other way.

A good deal of the wardecs in highsec exist for the purpose of capture the quantum core…so that mechanic added a whole new looting mechanic that has led to ‘wars’…that I myself have been involved in.

That’s why I suggest cheaper ‘capture the flag’ type units for highsec.

6

Yes, basically. I’ve just checked back on what I wrote and some of it is unnecessary because there’s no change from the current mechanic. I apologise for that.

Small mining corps would cower in terror if (insert name of well-known 'deccer) appeared on the Wardec. Undoubtedly, there was disappointment.

There was also the practise of corp-hopping, so that the 'decced corp became moribund and the escapee/s continued to enjoy EVE as they had previously.

It is certainly prohibitive for smaller corps with the will to fight, to defend their stuff and carry off trophies.

I don’t know about the current mechanics (…clearly :grinning:…), so thanks for telling me about the Quantum Core bit. But, if it doesn’t encourage more wars and/or more meaningful wars (meaningful to the participants) in Highsec, I’m kind of left hanging.

‘Capture the Flag’ stuff is a more game-like proposal, and would certainly attract some players (though not this one…). If it achieves a resurgence of eligibility and engagement in Highsec - then, why not?

I think I once had a one-man corp (with alts) which declared war on a similar outfit, in Highsec. It was cheap, and fun. I guess I just want that simple freedom of engagement back again. Ah, well…

2 Likes
7

I like how citadels are tied to wardecs in HS. The old system where war cost was based on characters was horrible. Nice to not have to worry about some war spammer declaring wars on every corp they see for little ISK.

Wars are won if the HQ of the enemy is destroyed. Simple.

2 Likes
8

That’s what I’d like too. The ability to declare war on any corp…without having to pay 1bn or more plus the cost of a quantum core that any pirates can just loot. I have no personal use for a Raitaru or Athanor. But I do think there ought to be some module one can place that has the ‘capture the flag’ effect. My understanding was that was the original purpose of the POS stations that one still finds a few of scattered around Eve. And they are much harder to destroy that later stations…and can be surrounded by guns/turrets etc. I recall the last one Wrecking Machine destroyed was over an hour of 15 ships firing at it…and that was after all the guns, webifiers, etc had been taken care of.

1 Like
9

The problem with that mechanic is that it leads away from ‘political’ wars and towards ‘wars’ where the primary purpose is to loot the structure and get the quantum core and whatever other modules drop. Which is not a bad thing ( as it is a lot of what I’ve done in Wrecking Machine ) but really it just leads to corps vs pirates rather than corps vs corps.

2 Likes
10

The RR side of things you got spot on, but what about what I wrote in my bio.

Hisec war decs - The biggest issue is the inability of allies to operate as a fleet due to the RR change that was implemented at the same time as the change to requiring structures. It was always going to be difficult to create the will to fight, but this made it pretty certain that very few people bothered, thus the changes to war decs ended up being a failure.

My proposal is to enable all allies to rep and be repped by the defender and other allies. Another proposal is to remove the requirement to have a structure to be able to war dec and be war decced, but limit the max number of concurrent wars to 3 for each entity. If a war deccer wants more than 3 wars they will have to setup a war HQ and link those additional wars to that structure. The war should also follow the character for 24 hours.

Blanket war deccers need an additional cost, which is the war HQ, but the RR is what killed it. I was in the war dec discord in the lead up to this change, and there were war deccers complaining about neutral RR and how unfair it was. I as a supposed non-war deccer and to many of the people there a carebear had no issue with neutral RR, that was how stupid it was.

This system is shite due to the RR, but the previous system was even bigger shite…

4 Likes
11

Some are obviously still yearning for easy targets as those in other areas must too hard for them to tackle.

1 Like
12

Yup we do trade 1 thing for another.

13

The problem with your proposals is that, like CCP, you lack any vision of a sustainable war environment. Your concepts are all about limiting players options until they have no choice left but to participate in wars in the ways you think will work.

News flash for ya: they won’t. The listed proposals don’t in any way change the fundamental broken mechanics of EVE PvP. Which is broken because it’s not about fighting or declaring war, it’s about avoiding loss.

Closing off options, building fences to herd people the way you want them to go, and trying to limit them to specific behaviors is never going to work. If you want people to war better and more, you need to provide more incentive than “war with us or lose your stuff”. Or “war with us so you can get back to playing the way you want”, which is obviously never gonna happen. Since someone else will just declare the next war.

Because EVE PvP is all about loss, players use strategies that minimize their losses. So carebears don’t PvP because they know they’ll lose to the PvP wanks. And small corps just log off (and often quit) when wardecced by practically anyone. They know that, in general, the other side only wardecced them because they knew they could win.

So long as EVE combat is effectively driven by “combat costs me, so I’m only going to take fights I know I can win”, then you’re going to have the vast majority of players and corps opt out of combat. By whatever means necessary, even if that means simply quitting the game.

Think of ways to make wars and combat worth participating in, and maybe next CSM campaign you’ll get a few more votes.

5 Likes
14

I know where you are coming from, but at times we managed to develop some allies, and I was so hopeful that if I could develop a network of allies then we could fight some choice wars and get the ball rolling, and then CCP applied the RR rubbish, I was so disappointed it hurt, in fact I was devastated. I have fought some wars since, and I have been involved in some pretty decent wars blowing up structures belonging to war deccers. But the inability to have real allies is just terrible when you are trying to help groups defend themselves, you can’t even be in fleet with them as allies, it suck big time.

I had some, albeit a limited experience of getting people to fight but it was there. I don’t bother with the current RR system, ugh!!!

1 Like
15

The net effect of wars being defined by structures is that there are only half as many structures about as there were 4 or 5 years ago. It was only a year or so ago that Absolute Order, Wrecking Machine, and others, decimated over 150 Parabellum structures…which by and large have not been replaced by anyone else. It was fun doing the destroying…though I recall thinking at the time that if we carried on at that rate there would simply be far less structures around to destroy. As is the case.

I think structures ought to be destroyable, but as the end result of some longer process. Sort of stage 2 or 3 of any war. I’d have the first stage be people vs people or some simpler ‘capture the flag’ setup. Or some variant no-one has thought of yet. At any rate…I think few people are happy with the current setup.

3 Likes
16

I do think it can be better in some way between what we had before (no restrictions) and what we have now (restrictions on wars).

1 Like
17

It did not help that CCP made the strudrues even easier to kill because sov nullsec wanted that.

I can say that I at the current moment will never put a structure up in hisec.

What do you think about the criminal RR and the inability to rep allies?

18

Hmm. Well that is also all tied up with the issue of corp swapping. Another contentious issue.

19

This is a good idea, and I’ve never been fond of the structure-ownership requirement for war decs which, unless you specifically want to be involved in war decs, means you should obviously put your structures in a shell corp. It’s extremely lame that massive entities like SICO are un-deccable under the current paradigm.

The rest don’t really do anything - they alter the rules in a way that wouldn’t fundamentally change the nature of high sec wars, and would likely be gamed around or require a bunch of additional special-casing to prevent gaming around them.

In my little head-fantasy of an idealized Eve, there would be wars between Bob’s Midsized Highsec Corp and Tom’s Midsized Highsec Corp, and the wars wouldn’t necessarily be an end unto themselves, but a means of furthering the strategic goals of the respective belligerents, but I don’t really see a way for that outcome to ever be achievable given the realities of the game.

1 Like
20

Outside of ganking and wardecs there is no meaningful PvP in highsec. Even more so with fewer stations around to bash. So a request for changes has nothing to do with avoiding loss. I’ve engaged in plenty of lowsec and null stuff lately that involved potential loss. But since Wrecking Machine started doing less station bashing I’ve done practically nothing in highsec…and I’d like to.