The last part of the war declaration changes is now available on Singularity. This includes the requirement for a War HQ for aggressive wars, cost changes, UI improvements, and mutual wars are now declared separately (it is not longer possible to switch back and forth).
All details for those changes can be found in this dev blog.
All functional changes should be working now and please feel free to start playing around with them, but please keep following known issues in mind:
Known Issues:
Please do not send bug reports about following (I will update this thread as soon as those are fixed):
Many texts in the UI (especially tooltips and notifications) are place holder
Several notifications are still missing
The war tab in the corporation window is partially broken for characters in NPC corps and in faction warfare.
edit 2019-05-18: all known issues should be resolved now and all texts have been updated. Please send bug reports, if you find anything wrong.
The multiple war HQ thing effectively shards wars. It prevents meaningful teamups against entities that spam wars.
Each decced entity needs to take down its own individual war structure, at which point they’ll be shortly out of the war.
In comparison, with a single war the decced entities can team up and shut down the wars of the spamming entity. It enforces a real risk to decspamming that gets out of control. This isn’t present otherwise.
Given that allies cannot rep each other and that there is no roadmap for a fix to this, please, please, please at least give groups the ability to help out via targeting the HQ together. It doesn’t fix the logistics problem, but it does mitigate it somewhat.
CCP may feel that more internal Alliance conflict that comes from Alliances getting bigger is good for the game, when it also can lead to more players getting frustrated and quitting due to game mechanics.
Alliances feel forced to take on corporations that may not agree with each other’s politics because they can help with a war situation fleet fight, where previously these independent corps could do their own thing, while occasionally risking being the much-disliked “neutral logi” and get shot if the other side could find some neutral friends to counter.
CCP Lebowski has an idea that might help both limit the scope of wars and permit allies in a war to remain separate entities - now may be the last time to address this topic for many years, as I expect CCP will move on to another equally challenging problem that needs solving.
The purpose of these changes isn’t to prevent war spamming - it is to provide a target for a defender to counter attack. You can’t stop war spamming - not as long as both players can hop corp on a whim, and I guess corporations can join alliances and bring wars at will. Such a restriction would be easily bypassed by players gaming joining and leaving groups, or open other possible exploits/holes around how war propogate.
Besides, the fact you can’t even kill a structure in highsec before the 7 days of a war should make it clear that these changes are not intended to give players an easy way out of wars, nor should they. But they do give an avenue of content for a group, or groups that find themselves in a war and want to inflict damage on the other guy.
While I wouldn’t be against groups being able to provide remote assistance to allies, I kinda like that corporations have some more meaning - the corp is like the basic unit of conflict in this game. They still can absolutely help allies with objectives, they just have to do it with the minor limitation their logi/boost wings have to be separate. If someone declares a bunch of wars from multiple structures, they are risking more and there is nothing stopping all the defenders from coordinating to take down a structure, and can even join each other as allies to finish the job if they want. It seems a little silly to fixate on a tiny limitation in coordination when almost all structure battles will be decided by who shows up, not how efficiently one side can rep each other intrafleet, and allies can collaborate on that.
Well, this thread is suppose to be about feedback, not me commenting on the upcoming changes. I’ll be quiet until I actually have some.
All previously known issues and text changes have been completed now and Singularity has been updated with the latest version (only a few bug fixes for edge cases are still missing, mostly around joining and leaving alliances while at war).
It would be great, if you could take a look at the feature, if you are either experienced with war declarations, or just interested in them. Please send bug reports for everything related to these changes which looks wrong (for example also including typos in the new texts). It would also be great to hear through a bug report, if you find any particular ways to abuse these feature changes (which you might not want to spell out here in this forum).
Regarding the discussion about multiple War HQs: We discussed this also once more within the team, but we decided to stick for now with the current design of allowing multiple War HQs for different wars. On one hand it would have probably opened up several problematic edge cases and on the other hand the benefit of a single HQ for all wars is even not as large for the defenders. They can still hit the War HQs together, the wars are just not ending at the same time, when one of the War HQs explodes (assuming the attacker splits the War HQs). But we will for sure keep on eye on this, on how this part of the feature will be used.
Nearly everything is implemented as in the original dev blog, but here a list of various UI changes, which were included and which are mostly aimed at informing players better about ongoing wars and preventing accidental losses:
New “War Info” tab in the corporation window under the Wars tab, which gives explanations about war declarations and the current status for your corp
New “War History” tab in the corporation window under the Wars tab, which displays previous wars and currently enforced peace periods due to surrenders and War HQ explosions.
New “Mutual War Invites” tab in the corporation window under the Wars tab, which shows all the current incoming or outgoing mutual war invites. Here you can also find a toggle to block incoming mutual war invites.
The general “Kill Reports” tab for corporations was moved out of the “Wars” tab into the “Home” tab of the corporation window.
Improved the war history section in the show info window for corporations and alliances
Updated and improved the war report
Added a “Wars” tab to the show info window of Upwell structures, if they are a War HQ
Added an icon + tooltip to structure entries in the structure browser, if they are a War HQ
Added icon (including tooltip) about currently ongoing war decs to the character selection screen.
Added icon (including tooltip) about currently ongoing war decs to the crimewatch timers section in the top left of the screen.
Added icon (including tooltip) about currently ongoing war decs to the character sheet
Added suppressible popup at undock in High Sec, while being involved in a war.
Updated and added several war related notifications and warnings.
