It seems to me that wardecs offer, at least on paper, the gentlest entry into group PvP as compared to everything else. You get warning, have defined opponents, an can leave the war at any time. I agree, that in practice there still is a massive learning curve, especially for true new groups that lack guidance from veteran players, but I don’t see how you could make things easier to minimize the fear of PvP by tweaking the mechanics of wars.
I think the best would be to build a more artificial way of easing new players into PvP, perhaps with some extension of the NPE into lowsec where it places new players on various sides. New players and new corps are still going to be challenged, and lose, to more experienced players, but having some system to get them placed with and talking to veterans, not throwing them to the wolves with no support, would help the with easing into the game. The current highsec war paradigm doesn’t seem like an effective way to get new players integrated into the competitive world of New Eden.
As for wars and everyone else, they are largely fine (perhaps with the exception of corp hopping and neutral logi). There are general issues with hunting and station games, but wars themselves work perfectly well to enable fighting between groups and fighting over structures. The major thing that is missing is a way for players who don’t want to fight in wars, but yet be part of a social group, to have access to mechanism to do so that doesn’t involve constant hopping of corps or staying alone the NPC corp. Just make a lower tier social corp, or secondary level of social club, so that those that don’t want to deal with wars can play the game in a lower risk/lower reward way accepting all the mechanical limitation of the NPC corp, but yet still having access to a shared identity.
The problem of wars is that you cant easily escape them (except if you leave your corp).
The easiest way you get ppl into trying something is to allow them to hopp on hopp off. EvE is not a PvP game, it only has PvP elements and i found this way working very well in other games. You try PvP and you can go back to what you did before at any time. Wardecs dont realy offer that. You suddenly end up with war targets all around you limiting what you can do by a great margine. They might even undermine PvP. A friend of mine has a Killright and would like to go out and kill the guy, he doesnt because he dont wants to have a Wardec on the corp. I dont go out and try PvP ever for the same reason. So for him and me Wardecs are a reason to stay away from PvP at all.
What you need to tweak is not only the mechanics of war, but also the penalty of PvP. You can loose your pod, which means you have to go low on the implant side, at least as beginner, and you get issues with the event accelerators (as far as i know they get destroyed as well and supply is limited as well). So for new players in this area its a real penalty on learning speed if you want to limit your losses. Which makes it even less atractive to try it out.
That’s sort of the point of wars. They are the non-consenual way for groups to fight each other in highsec. Yet they are between groups, not individual players, so you can leave one if you had enough, at any time and instantly (well for those without roles). There can’t be a way to opt-out of them, or their use to attack corporation assets in space would be severely undermined.
They solution as I said, is to have some social grouping other than the full, competitive corp that is the only option now. That way, you can opt-out of wars completely if you aren’t ready or don’t want to compete, and still have a social group to be part of. I see no other workable way to solve your “problem” that won’t be abused by veteran players to make themselves invulnerable to attack.
Again, this is sort of the point of wars. Eve isn’t a game where you get to consent to where and when you are open to PvP. The game is designed so chasing increased rewards puts you at increased vulnerability to other players. You can’t just allow people to turn of PvP when they want so they can go farm in safety.
I am totally on board with giving players more tools to control how much risk, and thus how much reward, they are willing to take on. You should be able to play Eve in a relatively safe, non-competitive way. But you can’t expect to be able to access all the rewards and benefits of the game while not offering yourself up as content to the other players. Otherwise, in a sandbox game like Eve where we all are each other’s content, there wouldn’t be much to do other than grind and farm endlessly in safety, and engage in consensual, meaningless “good fights”.
That’s why you should be able to form a social group with all the restrictions of NPC corp. Then you are safe from wars, and if you want to engage in some “fun” PvP there are other ways, like signing up for FW. If and when you are ready to grow and plant your flag as a group in New Eden, you can then form a full-on competitive corp and enjoy the increased rewards, and risk being attacked by another group.
The penalty for losing a pod has already been reduced with the removal of clone costs, and with Upwell structures, you now have the option of swapping into an empty clone and back again without the normal jump clone timer. Further, I am almost certain you don’t lose the cerebral accelerator boost upon podding (yes, that is true: https://support.eveonline.com/hc/en-us/articles/203217232-Cerebral-Accelerators), but really, in both highsec and lowsec your should almost never lose a pod as there are no bubbles. It can happen of course, especially when you first are learning, but your pod instawarps so saving your pod should be the first PvP skill you practice.
So while I sort of agree with you that a better system to allow players to dip their toes into ship PvP might help with the psychological and training barriers that keep players away from the greater game and send them on the path to a short, and unfulfilling career in highsec before quitting, I don’t think that is a role that can ever be filled by war declarations. Non-consensual wars are absolutely necessary at a minimum to remove structures in highsec, so therefore it is impossible to allow at least structure-holding corps to opt-out of wars. The only solution I can see it to build some other mechanism for players to form a group that has more mechanical safety (i.e no wars) but is restricted similar to the NPC corps.
I don’t understand the need for this under current game mechanics. What would that accomplish that you cannot easily get with an in game chat channel? The shared identity?
I think you will agree with me that this info should be put into the accelerator info texts. So far i was under the impression that they stick to the clone and get destroyed with it, which fits how everything else works.
I dont think this either, but i think that they work as a dampener to PvP to some degree.
It sucks. Remember war cost the aggressor 50 million ISK! As the defender you have the upper hand. They are looking for easy kills. They are preying you rage quit. Here is effective counters.
Log on EVE and go to a movie. Nothing made my day then seeing a bunch of blood thirsty pilots wasting their time.
Start your own one man corporation and train one of your three alts to be the CEO. War dec happen drop your main and go mine or mission 20 jumps away.
DO NOT! DO NOT! DO NOT hire a mercenary corporation to protect you! Mercenary corporations have back channels to other Corporations who war dec prey corporations. When you buy protection you are funding the very war dec corporations you are attempting to escape. Look up the pay for protection racket on google.
Ignore all post in local. Don t get baited by people with STRONG INTERNET MUSCLES taunting you!!!! Most of these pilots have crummy jobs, live in mom's basement, and only get laid when they utilize the services of a prostitute. Do not let them into your mind.
After the war assuming you did feed the enemy with juicy kills give yourself a medal citing your ECONOMIC VICTORY !!! War is fought and won and lost over economics.
It been said before there is no reason for a High Security corporation! To be brutally honest if you are frustrated by war you skill set is vastly too low that High Security bling items are economically viable to you! I by BPO copies and make ships for profit. Sure my margins calls are lower but m risks are NILL!!!!
Fly safe and send me some ISK!!! I AM OPPRESSED TOO BROTHER !!!!
But you already moved to new corporation? Did they follow? If they did you could repeat the same process making them wasting money on you and not profiteering from wardec.
I think. Ask Xebov and his friend why there are in a corp that opens them to wardecs at all? I’ll bet they don’t have a structure in space, yet they still feel the need to form a group with an identity and have taken on that obligation to defend themselves from every other corp in the game for practically no mechanical benefit.
Wouldn’t it be better to let them do so, with a few restrictions of course, without worrying about wars? I know they can functionally do so now with a shared chat channel, but that lacks a name and identity and for true new players the risks and responsibilities of forming a corp are not always apparent.
The officers stayed in the old corp, and the regular guys moved to the new corp. Since the officers were still in the old corp, they never knew about the new corp. They may have seen that there were less members in the old corp, but they had no way to know where they went. They’d have had to have our names, before we left.
Right, we could have made them waste money on wardeccing the new corp. But we were tired of being pinned in a camped station. It wouldn’t we worth us to us to be 'decced again and in the same situation.
And they offer a mode of “learning-by-doing”. Of course if one is going to learn this way in game then one has to be willing to accept losses and defeats. This could also be considered a trial-and-error process and the errors are just as important as the successes as they tell you what won’t work. Of course, one has to be willing to learn from their mistakes vs. complaining about how unfair the whole thing is.
Jamwara is Jamwara.
Outside of Devils Jamwara keeps/kept a pretty low-key presence, but was also a pretty good mentor to anyone who recently entered the fold.
Jam is the one who lured me over to the dark side with promises of cookies.
Jam taught me how to murder my fellow man in absolutely absurd fashions.
Jam taught me how to stay alive when there were over a thousand players on any given day who could bad touch me if they felt like it.
Jamwara has my respect and gratitude for opening doors to content I had not been aware of up until I picked up my throbbing red light saber.
You, I don’t really know you… aside from rampant shiptoastings I keep seeing, I got nothing when it comes to you.
I do hope that at least I’ve resolved your confusion and or curiosity when it comes to your question though.
And I’m thankful for it.
I would have quit the game years ago if i had continued on the path of grinding just to refuel my POS so I could make more BPC’s that I would never use.
Having someone take time out of their day to show me how to use the tools I had in a manner I was completely unfamiliar with was engaging and exciting. Taking what i was taught and applying it to achieve my first solo kill, an incursus vs a gnosis (who dropped a 50+ mil isk module btw), was nothing short of pure adrenaline. War didn’t even enter my mind until weeks later, when I came down enough off the euphoria of being able to WIN in a fight to realize that we were constantly at war.
I got wondering.
There were literally over a thousand people who could kill me legally at any given time.
Never once did I see a red flashy come into my system.
Why? I almost always fly solo.
My playtimes were at odds with most in the alliance, so even with comms I really didn’t have any back up.
Yet nobody ever came. When I finally mustered the courage I went looking for those red flashy folks. I wanted to contribute. I wanted to paint the board green with the blood and tears of our enemies.
It was harder than I expected.
Even with the watchlist, I had to tag hundreds , if not more, contacts… Then i had to sift through the few that were actually online and then pay off locate agents to try to find them.
Most were foreverdocked. A rare few were in space. Those I hunted.
20-40 jumps later it was deep into the land of hit or miss. Sometimes I had support, and that was the best.
Most of the time it was just hoping to catch them with their pants down though. This was before CCP cut our colllective nuts off, and it was still pretty hit or miss then.
Nowadays, not getting warblapped simply boils down to not sticking your tender bits into the blender. Most folks aren’t going to go through the effort to track down the specific system you’re running a mission in, because you are simply one of a myriad and not worth the time to isolate and destroy.
TL;DR: the beary bears have it easier than ever now, and for some reason keep screaming louder and louder with each passing year. Mute them and carry on.
Yeah, but paying them painted big bulleye on your back. They could just let others know that you have money you easily spare with. Or they could make another wardec using their alts.
That’s why one of war dec rules: do not provide fun and don’t pay to attackers.
I see your point. That was in 2008, wardeccing for fun and profit wasn’t as developed back then. These guys weren’t full-time wardeccers, they were a pvp pirate corp, and trying to get merc work as well. They didn’t come back again, but they probably realized that they’d drained our newbro corp’s funds down. We’d be too poor to extort again for a good while.
You’re wrong. There are quite a few documents there with individuals proposed changes and opinions on wardecs. The problem is getting them into the proper set or eyes and hands.
If you think CCP reads these forums and values your ideas here you’re mistaken
