Objection! That requires an honest answer, and we just don’t do that sort of thing here.
Oh, wait. I may have seen too many courtroom scenes…
Someone give @Arrendis a medal for finally ridding us of the Salvosher
Humans are not a great species.
Is this your final, final, final word on the subject?
I’m asking because frankly I am worried. If you aren’t leaving what in the nine hells am I going to do with all this cake?
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Now call me silly, but I used to think of social corps as a kind of club, with a private chat channel but not much economical content. They would be like a place to go after work, with your main corp being like the workplace, and the social corp a meeting place like a sports club. It would be a place to meet poeple from other corps, recruit or be recruited, and just general socializing without the whole let’s-do-something-together of ordinary corporations. Maybe they would allow to form fleets for PvE, but the key would be the social tools: Show large avatars, have a robust and effective set of chat tools (whisper, room-talk, general talk…) or maybe you could even know when your “club mates” are online unless they blocked it specifically -cough. That would allow to keep contact with corp members even if some dropped corp in a wardec and generally meet new people based on non-economcial stuff, not what-you-do ingame but what-you-like out of game (for an instance, biking).
I know it’s silly, but… what if social corps were intended just for socializing? 
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That sounds very much like a lot of the out-of-game infrastructure most of the large blocs have via clients like Pidgin, running Jabber servers.
Putting that in-game in a player-created construct… kinda feels like asking for chaos.
Well, in the current state of the chat service, it’s out of the table. But I know for sure that chatting is a powerful socialization tool, and chaos could be prevented if CCP dared to control who creates what social corp… or even creates them itself
It somewhat soudns better than a corporaiton deprived of whatever conent is too-good for noobs or can be abused by experts players or whatever hops should have to amke some peopel content.
Seriously. Let people talk across the borders of what they do ingame. It’s what the language channels used to be until CCP shied out and threw them under a bus.
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They did. There’s 12 of them, and you start in one.
You seen to be under some delusion that belligerents might use Social Corps as a way to avoid retribution. Let me challenge you. When has there ever been a threat to the groups that currently hold sway in Uedama? It is clear that there is no incentive to “be the hero” to punish these villains. (I’d like to hear from the CSM if this is also on the table/radar). Given that there is no opposition now, how would it magically appear if Social Corporations were an option?
And why should a Social Corp be restricted to high-sec? It is actually beneficial if a group decides to take a risk. Maybe they want to be manufacturing Boosters, or attempt Level 5’s in ships they are willing to lose. Maybe they want a day trip to the wreck of Steve or visit the Eve Gate. These sorts of things are growth - which is the entire point; giving newer players the space to mature on their terms or pace. Bottling such players into mining or L4s - just screw down the lid and asphyxiate them now.
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Just to stir the pot a bit more; another opinion and comments:
https://massivelyop.com/2018/10/14/eve-evolved-wars-are-literally-ruining-eve-online/
also offers another contact to email prior to EVE Vegas with questions wanting answered; perhaps the press will get better access.
personally I’d like a little support in game for cross corp groups. Covers things like bombers bar, as well as things like SIGs.
You can already make public chat channels, and use them as a lobby for chat channels that require specific access (ie: cross corp group channels). Forming fleets through a social group would require recoding the fleet interface… unless the member list of the chat channel, or standings, are used—both of which can be done now. You might even be able to do something similar with a mailing list. You can certainly use a mailing list to set up and coordinate ops.
Showing large avatars, while it would be nice, is the direction CCP’s been moving away from (no matter how much those of us in the RP community would prefer they didn’t). As for more robust chat tools… that list sounds a lot like different channels, unless you’re talking about voice tools, which, again, they’ve specifically moved away from.
And that last bit is the old watchlist. As it is, you can get notifications if you and the ‘club mate’ have one another buddied.
So, breaking it down, there is a little support for cross-corp groups. ARC uses them. SERAPH used them when it was active, too. Using those tools, though… there’s little to no information about them. Just like there’s little to no information about… literally everything else that lets people organize and do things together.
And that is definitely something they need to fix.
On another note… I was talking on Talking In Stations Discord with a few people, including highsec players, a couple of wardec’ers, and a CSM or two, and there’s… deeper issues to look at than the wardec itself. There’s the why of it all.
Why do wardeccers do it? Why do gankers? Why do they go hunting people?
By the same token, why do people stay logged off and then drift away from the game?
The answers to those questions may not be what we’ve discussed in here. As has been said upthread, we don’t actually have enough data to extrapolate precisely who the players who are quitting are. We can’t say ‘these are people who won’t PvP’ anymore than we can say ‘these are newbies’. We can’t rule any of that out, of course… and the things said upthread still stand: that there are ways to fight back if people want to… but let’s set that bit aside and come back to it in a bit in favor of our questions in this post:
So why do they all do it?
Well, the wardeccers had an interesting answer to why they do it: ‘for the human interaction’.
Others, mind you, came up with ‘they do it for the tears’. And the wardec pilots kinda confirmed that that’s part of it. But in the course of discussion, we got to something deeper: why the tears? What is it about the ‘human interaction’ that makes it important?
It’s because it matters. Because they feel like they’re having an impact on other people. Good or bad, they want to feel relevant.
On the other side, maybe that’s why people are quitting over wars: Even if there are ways to fight back, they feel helpless. They feel like the things they do don’t matter.
That actually all squares pretty well with the information CCP’s been telling us over the years: People are more likely to stay if they’ve been blown up than if not. They’re more likely to stay once they start to make connections with other people. And now we add to this ‘they’re more likely to leave during/after wardecs’.
Sounds like ‘when they feel like their actions matter, they’re more likely to stay, and when they feel like what they do doesn’t matter, they’re more likely leave’, doesn’t it?
So… it’s inevitable that sometimes, you’re going to find yourself in a situation where you can’t win. Not by yourself, not through direct action. There’s just no avoiding that.
So how do you build a system where what you do matters, even in the most hopeless situation?
Answer me that, and I think we’ve got the answer to… a lot.
And, just because it’s a separate thing…
I think this little fact ties into the other bit that I was saying about the tools that exist for social groups in-game: People don’t have the information. There’s nothing in the game to tell them what their options are. There’s recruitment ads in structures, but when’s the last time you saw one of those ads say ‘hey, do you need someone to protect you from a wardec?’
The same corps that do wardecs do protection, too. Even PIRAT has defense contracts. But how many people know about them? How many of the people who most need those services even come to the forums to find out those services even exist?
We need more ways to get more information to people in-game. The launcher news box is nice, but how many people hit the launcher, click ‘play’, and then alt-tab into their web browser while the game loads?
If the information isn’t presented in the game, it doesn’t exist.
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Well, the problem for the target of the wardeck is usually twofold:
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The odds are almost never in their favor. They are usually greatly outclassed in shear player numbers. Add to that problem, the attacker is usually made up of PvP players, more sp in PvP skills, more PvP assets in terms of ship class and raw numbers, allies or alts in neutral logis,etc. The defender is usually greatly outclassed,outnumbered, and out financed.
Getting pounded on and having almost no chance in even winning one skirmish doesn’t build character, it builds another different MMO player -
Even if a corporation tries to join battle, any effort on their part makes it worse for the majority of those in an unequal fight. The war continues on because while they are providing content for the deccer, the defenders war costs rise in lost ships and wages. The more fight you put in, the more damage the defender does to his own corporation.
If there was some way to offer a low scale war to a corporation, perhaps more would remain active. The defenders are more likely to stay if they risk one or 2 frigates verses a cruiser or bc they saved up for over several months of, what was to them , hard work. Ditto if there was some way to guarantee that the wardec would end, especially if they offered “content” to the deccer. Even if they didn’t, a short war followed by no war would at least allow the smaller corps time to recover and PvE some more before the next dec. At the moment, CCP is asking people to accept paying a fee so that they are prevented to do activities they want to do, have their hard work and it’s reward be destroyed through no fault of their own, against much stronger and experienced players who derive enjoyment in the damage and pain their overwhelming advantage in the current mechanics allows them.
…and it is only just now that CCP has discovered there may be a problem in their thinking.
Yup. Totally agree with all of that. But ‘a short war’ right now is a week. A week is enough time to go and get involved in something else, and that—getting involved in something else—is the most damaging part. People are creatures of habit. They stick with their routine.
So other than saying ‘you can’t wardec people long enough to kill a single structure’… how do you give those on the receiving end a sense of agency within the game? Because right now, they’re exercising their agency… by changing their habits.
In part, you have to offer the defender some feeling of control over what is happening. At the moment and with the current game mechanics, my previous post offers a good summation; why fight when you have almost no control (or hope) of winning in any part of a dec. Let the defender and his corp decide the level of risk they are willing to accept and tie that into rewards of more benefits/gameplay. I fall back into granulating both the corp types and levels of wars as an example. The players decide on how much risk or war they are going to ante up for in assets/interruption of their normal gameplay. A war can still last a week, but a corporation could still fallback to a lower level corporation if the current war level was too tough. Make all corporations climb the corporation tier system so that all players in a corp slowly gain knowledge/experience in corporation warfare and that the corporation decides as a group where to stop their advancement.
All new players should be forced to completely finish the NPE and then are put in a 2-4 week PvP NPC corp along the lines of RvB and where their personal losses are either limited or reimbursed by the npc corporation. Have the missions they have be against other players in equal type ships: 1 vs 1, 3 vs 3,etc. Teach them that everyone loses ships, that joining up with strangers isn’t always bad, perhaps have e-uni type of players circulating through the missions offering advice. CCP tried to do this with RW, but made it optional and for poor reward.
If you can convince people that they have a reasonable/fair chance to win, even if they don’t, they still gain some satisfaction. Teach them to engage in fair fights first and you may convince them later to accept unfair ones. I find it ironic that the deccers find relevance in making other people feel irrelevant…and complain when the others don’t want to stick around to keep making them feel relevant.
Your insight about what each side feels and needs/expects is vital, but are they mutually exclusive?
For EVE’s future, I sure hope not.
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Right. Totally.How?
Will there be enough new players to do that matchmaking?
Yeah, me too! But, you know, solving a problem needs understanding the problem.
Good question. Even if experienced players create alphas, if a certain number of victories in combat are achieved, a pilot is promoted to escape the new creche systems and become a full fledged pilot. An experienced pilot would either zoom through achieving his victories or be “forced” to throw mission matches to stay in the creche. Either way, his experience would help teach the newer pilots skills before they put hard earned assets at risk. It all depends on how fast CCP initiates significant changes AND informs the world’s gaming community of any significant wardeccing change.; don’t expect it to naturally filter out and around all the possible customers out there on its own.
The only current idea I have is offering the defending player someway to mitigate the war quickly if they want to through the above method of being able to reduce your corp tier (via some sort of isk cost as well as loss of abilities) and rewarding engaging with the deccer by offering some sort of perk like increase sp or lesser taxes AFTER the war is over. Problem remains, however, that EVE players tend to always game the system, even if it is at the cost of adversely affecting the game’s health. I , at the moment, cannot think of any reward that wouldn’t be ripe for gaming/exploiting by the deccing corporation; I can only think of possible rewards for the defender revolving around lessing the total cost in time and expenses by either engaging or reducing their corporation’s ability. Truly, the short end of the stick.
That’s another issue: experienced players would be forced to go through the entire NPE, too. Right now, they *don’t. I don’t expect that to change.
Any system can be gamed. Other than trying to curb the worst-case scenarios, you can’t really design for ‘how do we keep people from gaming this system?’