Of course, but it also depends on what kills you and in case of games is EVE rather a survivor, all while being designed for a narrow player group.
It may well be the secret to its longevity, repelling hordes of dumb consumers and giving home only to the strongest and fittest minds.
The strongest and fittest minds are the ones who can PvP against actual prepared, capable targets.
The lameoids crying that they absolutely need to be able to PvP against weak targets in hi-sec are merely the bottom-feeding scavengers who can’t hack actual PvP against actually challenging targets.
CCP finally bothered to gather and look at their own data, and apparently they were shocked, shocked I say, to find out that the things players have been telling them about their game for 10 years were in fact correct.
While “being able to bully newbies who have .005% chance of winning against you” may well be the secret to EVE’s longevity, it’s much more likely that it’s the secret to repeated rounds of layoffs, downsizing, talent departures, and finally the outright bailing of the owners and sale to another company.
Just saying; in case you’ve been living in some sort of denial bubble and not noticed what’s been going on for the past 10 years.
And the weak minds can create drama from almost anything.
I have certainly noticed what’s been happening and I sure hope it continues, because groups such as Marmite, CODE., PIRAT, but also Goons, are like the Damocles Sword above our heads, making EVE into a game worthy of kings and making peasants cringe.
Brilliant deflection there. Although to answer your point (even though you ignored mine) my posts were part of a reasonable debate and didn’t get personal until you got involved.
No-one is telling anyone what to do. The game has a set of parameters through which it can be played - an ethos on which the game was founded, an ethos that is the reason EVE is still in the market. Hisec wardecs were within that set of parameters. If wardecs are griefing then surely scamming, ganking, gate camping and bumping are griefing as well? Unpleasant careers, but perfectly legitimate and encouraged by CCP in the past.
More likely is the raft of failed side projects
I do not get how you associate one thing determined to be griefing making other things that aren’t related to that as griefing. Just because you say they are related doesn’t make it so.
Apples and Oranges are not the same thing, although both are basically round, delicious, and colorful.
The smartest ones take them by surprise 
“Determined to be griefing”? By who? Not by CCP certainly. I’ve only ever seen one article by CCP regarding griefing and that was specifically about certain new player systems that are off limits for ganking. I could just as easily say to you, just because you say something is griefing, doesn’t make it so.
Those gamestyles are related (apart from gate camps maybe) as they all take advantage of hisec players who are either taking risks, ignorant to the risk or are not paying attention. Wardecs (along with ganking) only generally affect players who take these risks in the major pipelines between trade hubs or from lowsec to the trade hubs. With hunting so rarely done nowadays, not many will get caught in backwater systems.
This isn’t comparing apples to oranges, it’s comparing oranges to satsumas to clementines.
The really smart ones don’t get surprised 
I feel the horse we were beating is long since gone and we are now beating the ground it used to lay on.
And the super smart ones try to get CCP to help them. 
Meow.
(A picture of James Dean, who is trying to charm a cat.)
We know we cant force players that dont want to PvP, to PvP.
Yes, you can force them into non-consensual PvP, thus forcing them into PvP, but after that they log off and dont return.
I dont belive that any incentive for players that dont want to PvP, will cause them to PvP.
Much better is to incentivize PvP between those players that do want to PvP.
See the difference?
The watchlist nerf a couple years ago fundamentally changed the nature of wardecs. It was no longer feasible at that point to target specific corporations (except in the unusual cases where your goal is to bash a structure). This put nearly every small wardec corporation and solo operator out of business. Wardeccers either left the game or consolidated into larger alliances like Marmite or PIRAT, which have a very different (and to many, much less interesting) focus and MO.
At that point, wardecs became a much less effective tool to create stories and drive game content. Highsec also became much safer as a result, but of course there was no corresponding decrease in carebear whinging. There never is. So now you have a situation where the whinging continues unabated, and there is nobody left to offer any counter-argument, so the carebears have CCP’s exclusive attention.
Fact is, wardecs do need a rebalancing pass, either to restore them to their former role in the EVE ecosystem, or to give them a new and better role. I am skeptical that CCP feels the same way, unfortunately, and predict that any changes will serve only to make them less interesting.
No. I can understand why someone would want to make this interpretation, but it is the players’ behaviour, which has changed and because of the change to the watchlist. Wardecs are only a tool in all of this much like spaceships or your ammo.
What it needs is to provide warfare with new and better intel tools. And players have been asking for those.
And like @Proteus_Onzo just above you pointed out, should one not nerf wardecs because of those who don’t want to PvP, but to make the game better for those who do want to PvP.
I think CCP have wanted an excuse to destroy wardecs for a while, and so they actively looked for numbers to back it up. I’m not saying it’s fabricated evidence (I don’t believe it is), but it’s easy to find numbers to back up any claim if you look hard enough and interpret them selectively enough.
Also, let’s stop calling this a nerf. This is a wholesale destruction of wardec mechanics which will, in all likelihood, reduce wardecs to a mechanic to remove structures only. This isn’t reducing the number of active wardecs to a more reasonable number which would encourage more targeted wars. This change is using a wrecking ball to crack a nut, but instead destroying the nut and the wall behind it.
Player behaviour is moulded by the tools available and if tools are removed, they will turn to others - possible ones that cause problems. Those who wanted to continue actively PvPing in hisec had only 1 option in order to maintain enough targets to not get bored - blanket wardecs.
You are unable to work out that the solo and small group war deckers had largely joined up with the blanket war deckers before the watch list was removed because the fun content had already dried up and that really was evident about four years ago.
And you are whining about carebears too.
CCP did some analysis and found some unsettling information which they had to act on, continue to whine about that please.
And you don’t even war dec, all I can see is ganks and the last one well over a year ago, fail… And look a war dec in 2014 against a POCO…, right …
No, there never is. And I find it strange where there is no evidence whatsoever that increasing highsec safety increases player retention or activity:
If you plot the major buff to highsec safety in recent years which included CrimeWatch 2.0 which killed can-flipping and can-baiting, the addition of the friendly-fire flag that put a stake through the heart of highsec Awoxing, and the doubly-whammy of the DCU changes (which were a significant EHP buff to industrial ships increasing the cost of ganking) and the watch list nerf which made hunting, including in wars too tedious, every one correlates with decreased activity in game. I know, it’s just a correlation and there are lots of other changes going on all the time, but there is no hint of real data that says making highsec safer increases player activity. In fact, all we see is in periods after such buffs to safety activity drops - which is what you would expect when you remove or significantly nerf how people play your game as a number of them are just going to go away.
Wars need to be improved, no doubt, but that doesn’t mean just making highsec safer. Sure, it needs a safer space for newer groups or ones that are completely defeated or outclassed, but more importantly it needs content and activity and reasons to play the game. If you just make wars impossible to use by everyone but the largest groups in the game, activity isn’t going to increase. Despite what the carebears claims, there is not a tidal wave of potential Eve players out there waiting for highsec to made incrementally safer yet again before they pour in. In fact, every time CCP panders to these cries for safety, the game gets less active.
I don’t think showing a graph with overall head count proves anything about hisec.
No, currently it’s the time to say that this is a stupid idea that will change nothing and ads nothing interesting for anyone.
The time to addapt will be when it hits the server and when we will abuse whatever stupid mechanic CCP came up with and you continue to cry for more nerfs.
Well not everyone will wit, I know at least one person who just created a massive ganker farm because of this
