There’s no harm in fighting ignorance.
Ah I understand. Thanks for dropping by and leaving a response much appreciated.
I feel as though since no one really talks to each other in local and there isn’t any real interaction
(other than in the trade hubs) why not have other things to look at and enjoy to take some of the loneliness away you know?
Because, as I said, that’s not fixing the actual problem that makes highsec space feel lonely. Having more NPCs out there is not going to change the fact that social interaction in highsec is on an all time low and with more NPCs pretending to be players, someone could make the argument that there’s no need to ever fixing the broken state.
What you’re saying is, basically, that someone hurt his head with a hammer and now he has a headache. To fix the issue, he should be taking pain killers every day instead of going to the hospital fixing the damage. No, pain killers do not cause the reasons for headaches to go away, they just mask them out.
That’s, basically, why CCP should not touch this before fixing the actual issue. Back in the days I would have been completely on your side of this, because I too would have loved more NPC activity happening due to NPCs being “actual humans living on planets, heading to space” and that would have been great! Nowadays though doing this would only be like taking morphine instead of fixing the cause for the pain.
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Paying NPCs to protect you in a war dec?
You realize players can do that?
-1 no.
And for sure you can trust every player with help, after he takes money, also who would take it always and have a clear tariff for everyone? 
If you will not work with others then you are doomed. 
But that is nothing new, that is just a truism. 
I wonder how much PvP corporations want for helping with wardeck now.
Careful what you wish for, OP, you might get it.
The idea was for players to do the things you refer to.
EVE is about player interaction. You don’t need mercenary NPC, we have mercenary players
Every time I enter local, people start talking. I’m not kidding. Do you know why? Because I kill some miners and present a target and a challenge to the locals they didn’t have to face before. Some get angry, some get interested what is going on, some want to defend the others, some want to see how things are burning. Whatever they reason, people start talking in local because player interaction happens.
So you see, this is quite the opposite of what you propose. You try to lower player interaction by introducing more NPCs will not enhance the illusion that you play in a sandbox with other players. It will still look like an empty scripted game background without actual people.
Somewhere between nothing and a whole ■■■■■■■ lot. It really depends on who they would be up against and what exactly the client expects them to do. If the client just expects them to join the war, look threatening and occasionally shoot the aggressor when they stumble across them by chance, there are groups around that would happily join the war for free, because in the end it just means that they don’t have to pay for more potential targets.
If it was me, though, I would charge a hefty sum if the client actually expected me to protect them and go after the aggressor. Think about what that would entail: Without the watchlist, the mercenary could not tell if any of the clients enemies are online. They could only hope to strike any blows to them by waiting close to where the client is, it would be a 24/7 job, and it would be mindnumbingly boring.
If the watchlist were still there, the mercenaries could do whatever they do, and only spring into action when enemies log in. And then they would not just need to camp next to where the clients members are running their missions and mining their ore all day, but actively hunt for the clients enemy by locating them when they are online and flying over there.
With the current state of the game, hiring player mercenaries is really not a good option to defend against wardecs. The solution to that should however not be to replace player mercenaries with NPCs, but to fix mercenary gameplay and highsec wardecs.
That is of course not an easy task by any stretch of the term. However, designing a whole bunch of NPCs to fill specific roles in player-on-player interaction would not exactly be a breeze either. Before time is sunk into adding more NPCs, problems with player-on-player interaction should be addressed.
If CCP were to take the other route and implement NPCs to fight for you, why should the attacker not have that option as well? One could also implement NPCs that mine for you, or run missions. And at some point it would just be NPCs against NPCs. NPCs should not fill roles that players can fill.
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I once made a proposal that was meant to be RTS expansion, fights on planets for planetary infrastructure and who wins can loot the product and war would end. When DUST was not dead I actually proposed tying DUST players into it, as additional forces, sort of planned battle events.
Something like mercenaries with NPCs for in space structures, battles tied with wars, with project nova?
With Project nova being close, avatar improvements on the way, and some discussion about wars… but I dont think in current CCP it is feasible actually, even in future. They did some steps towards that with DUST, those battles when you could bombard planet. But back then more people were playing both games. Now with reduced dev crew and with less players playing EVE? If Nova will get a lot more people, I think CCP would just stay with it, not experimenting with tying both games together.
CCP wasting a lot of development time has been a problem more than once in the past. Dust 512 was a dud, and gone were the plans to connect it and Eve. World of Darkness never saw the light of day, and Walking in Stations died with it. Sleeper incursions were buggy as hell, and CCP never managed to fix them, so they were removed. Resource wars are laughable, and nobody really plays them. All of that is a lot of time and money wasted, and I have no reason to believe that CCP have gotten any better at that now.
Abyss sites are broken, and we have yet to see if CCP will manage to pull them out of the mud. The Upwell structure rollout is still not done after 2 years, and even after all this time, those things are nowhere near universally loved, and there are still a lot of things about them that don’t exactly work well.
If it was for me, CCP would still focus mostly on keeping the game intact than adding more things to it. Not because I don’t like or want new things, but because they have proven time and time again that they simply are not good at making them.
An RTS like mechanic to gain control over planets would be awesome. As would be a 1st or 3rd person mechanic to explore ancient ruins or ship wrecks, like they have shown during fanfest presentations in the past. But I doubt that CCP is capable of making something like that. It’s not that their ideas are bad, and some of the technology they have developed is awesome, but they don’t have the endurance to actually bring those projects to a stage where they could be considered to be done and ready to play.
And Project Nova: No matter how good it will be, it will not have staying power. Even popular, competetive FPS games have an active lifespan of maybe 2-3 years, with only very few exceptions. After that, they quickly shrink to nothing, as players move on to newer games that offer the same mechanics and gameplay. If Nova does not get tied in with Eve (and I too doubt that this will happen), which has much greater staying power, there will likely be nothing keeping players playing it after a while.
+2
Worth mentioning that it actually was profitable, and would still be running if it had been on PC. That mistake is now being corrected with NOVA, and lore indicates that it’s right on track and getting closer.
There is actually quite some new World News coming up in recent times, which means that some things are happening.
Btw, if anyone else sees arabic letters on twitter … please tell me. I don’t use twitter, I did not change anything at all, yet for some odd reason it’s all in arabic or whatever that’s supposed to be.
i think that’s gonna go next to WIS in terms of improving the immersion but isn’t going to be worked on because it’d be considered unimportant.
i think if you scale back on some of what he asks and just put more NPCs buzzing around it’d be an uptick in immersion.
I’ve merged quite a few threads together into this single one, all on the topic of War Declaration mechanics.
This topic has become just as heated as the topic of “AFK Cloaking” has been for years and while the more recent announcements/actions have put more focus on this one, this too have been coming back into the light every now and again for many years.
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Thanks a lot 
<3
Unfortunately ISD decided to bury a 2-day old suggestion that was getting a least a few looks behind a bunch of 3-week old posts that everyone had given up on apparently.
If you want to see a combined WarDec/Social Corp/Growth Corp proposal that maybe has some useful ideas to discuss, just jump back to the post this is a reply to.
Thanks for reading!
(link for jumping to the actual post - so you can see the follow-up posts:
I’ve been reading War Dec change proposals for quite a while now and they come all up with arbitrary fixes and the introduction of convoluted new mechanics. The target for a war dec fix should be to keep it as simple as possible, so here we go:
Why are corps declaring war on other corps?
- to get possible targets while camping
- because someone pays them to put them onto their list of possible targets while camping
- to reach some strategical objective (removal of specific trade hubs, clearing an ice belt …)
- for personal reasons
Which of those reasons are perfectly fine from a game play perspective?
Obviously 3. and 4. because the war dec mechanic is used to achieve a specific goal target at a specific corp. 1. and 2. is not, because the targets are exchangeable, the resulting content is often shallow (which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad, but it’s rarely good) and results in very low gameplay per war dec.
Who is losing stuff during a war dec?
- people who don’t know they are at war
- people who know they are at war and don’t know what it means
- people who know they are at war and accepting the according risks (either getting caught or engaging willingly)
- all losses that can’t be avoided except through successful defense (like structure losses)
Which of those losses are perfectly fine from a gameplay perspective?
Well, there used to be a time when the answer would have been “all of them. it’s their own fault if they’re stupid”, but that time is apparently over. Therefore:
3. and 4. are fine, it’s actual gameplay resulting from war decs. 1. and 2. can still be blamed on the victims, but their corps and the game are also partially responsible.
This is where I would start with fix 1:
Put a marker in the log-in screen “your corporation is at war”. Along with a tool tip giving a link to an explanation what this actually means (“Another corp declared war on your corporation. All members of both corporations can shoot each other legally in high-sec. You can see war targets in local and the overview… they are marked by… You don’t have to be logged off… talk to your corp mates…” and so on, you get the picture).
And while you’re at it, CCP, put a warning for low sec status and low standings right next to it 
Now, we drastically reduced the number of involuntary war targets - fix 2: Re-enable meaningful warfare
Give war-dec griefing corps the ability to be offensive mercs back. Any more or less efficient method to find out if war targets are online and where they are will do. Be it by rework of locator agents or some other mechanic that gives a one time update on a specific map view showing opponents.
There were already lots of suggestions regarding this for the last few years - basically since the watch list removal - and there were certainly some very reasonable, with low implementation effort that would do the trick.
Now, we have reduced the number of involuntary war targets and re-enabled the merc business. The only thing that remains is to “encourage” attackers to get active (if this is even still needed); on to fix 3:
War dec costs are fine and the the possibilities to dec and be decced without limits are also. What we don’t want, are blanket wars without resulting in (meaningful) gameplay. To “encourage” corps to only declare war on suitable targets, I would penalize the aggressor for every war dec that doesn’t result in a win by raising all costs of all war decs for multiple weeks by a certain percentage. To throw some example numbers around:
Any war that isn’t won makes all following wars 20% more expensive for the next six weeks. you can imagine what happens if have 100 wars per week that result in nothing…
This should make war deccing corps choose their targets much more carefully.