WTF Did They Do to Wardeccing?

fly to jita or amarr- im sure you will see your wardeccers around + their out of corp ewar and logi wings

stay more than 2 jumps from those hubs and the pipe connecting them and you can mine/ run missions as normal as they wont come to find you

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That depended on your goals.

If your goal was loot, yeah it was better to mass dec in a large aggressor entity even then.

If it was to win strategic objectives, or get fights - surgical deccing was better.

I did a bit of surgical wardeccing back then, we had a tight bunch (8-10 players, 20-25 accounts, usually less than half of us online) and would dec 3 to 5 corps at a time, mostly for fun. The highpoints were when you got good fights where you were outnumbered but could set traps.

Now none of that is possible. If I was still actively deccing, I’d join Marmite.

It’s also like how other changes have forced gankers to professionalize. Small groups can’t do much now, so almost all ganking is done by three groups - CODE., Miniluv and the Russians. The independant people have almost all joined one of those groups (a couple have found really unique niches).

The watch list has played a big part in wardecs, also the general playstyle of a wardeccer these days is to catch you by surprise on a main route.

Neither party knows if the other is online and it will take more work to find out if they are online, and it seems the wardeccer is not bothered to find out.

This thread should be titled “WTF Happened to the Wardeccer” because theres nothing wrong with the system, the issue is the party initiating the wardec are no longer bothered to do anything more than sit on a main route waiting for targets.

Burn fire upon lousy wardec playstyles!!

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Yes. This is so true! I’m totally not flying 20+ jumps right now to kill a wartarget I’ve been stalking for 2 days!

while not as flexible as the old watchlist.

Adding the Wardeccing Corporation as -10 to your Corporation will at least show their pilots on Overview that are in the same system as you and your Corporate Colleagues.

:warning: Works wonders for CODE and their cronies :grinning:

That’s not even close to being anything like the watchlist. If you get war dec’d, that’s just basic stuff to add your aggressors to -5 or -10 on your alts / scouts. Works well to do this before the war goes live so you can see if they are stalking you or doing anything sneaky.

There is a way for determining if a pilot is online currently, but it is very likely not an intended feature of the mechanic. It’s something that CCP can and will likely patch out at any moment, and shouldn’t be considered a viable option.

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Sure, if they’re in locale.

But.

  1. It’s useless for telling you someone logged on & it’s worth using locator agents to try & hunt them (or log off & use a neutral alt to avoid them) which is what people used watch lists for.

  2. Using standings was something we always had available as well as watch lists & you always used both of them if you weren’t daft.

So our tools are halved.

So that’s by no means the consolation prize you appear to be trying to suggest is it :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

It’s definitely not a new replacement feature for watch lists as that line appears to imply.

On one hand the watchlist removal actually helped me, because before me login caused half miners in the constelation to logoffsky and the other half to dock.

On the other hand I really liked the ocational wardec, but assomeone who plays solo most of the time the whole hunting after offline people really removed that content from the game for me.

Now the only people I had fun with wars are in ~200 man corps who try to ‘claim’ some highsec systems as their own and therefor stick around.

250,000 ISk & a 4 minute wait just to find out if someone is online, makes that very understandable.

Do you get the ISK refunded if they’re not there or is it charged for the attempt (been an awful long time since I used one & I forget)?

That’s just for a locator agent to tell you the location of the person you’ve ran the locate on. This in no way informs you if they are online. This basically means that you can run all the locates you want, if you want to verify that they are online and viable targets then you’ll have to run all over New Eden to visually check local.

You’re basically chasing ghosts.

No, your ISK doesn’t get refunded at all.

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Huh! I thought you got a cannot be found result back if they were offline, said it had been a while didn’t I, well… that makes it worse than I thought it was then :frowning:

The only message you get like that is if the character is out of the locator agents area of influence.

Here’s some information on locator agents

Bit off-topic but…

So CCP more or less destroyed one ISK sink (I can’t see anyone using locator agents with things like this) & enhanced a faucet (Capital Ship farming, they can log on much more safely without watch lists I imagine) in one fell swoop.

I’m curious about what the reasons where now :confused:

Wasn’t around for the change but that must have had an effect on the economy surely?

I’m not sure about economic effects, but I do know one thing…

People complained about the watchlist FOREVER. Their arguments were at least valid points they could stand by and argue.

The ONLY reason CCP actually did anything about watchlists is because groups like RC were abusing the watchlist notifications with the log server. They were using the log server to scrape log-on notifications that would then essentially PING that a specific pilot was online. Then it was just a matter of logging in the correct HIC pilot and catching him (they’d keep them logged off near where they were last seen).

So basically they could have their entire group playing Hearthstone or something and then get an out of game ping about someone that logged in on Eve Online, then form a fleet to kill the nerd. It’s ■■■■■■■■, really that CCP would use a hammer instead of a flyswatter. As far as I’m concerned I don’t feel the least bit bad about how wars are done now. CCP amplified this mess and they can deal with the complaints.


It’s a two-edged sword really. Watchlist was only good for those that actually used them. So if you were a wartarget and didn’t bother to add your aggressors, then it was useless anyway. If you were a target and added your hunters to WL and docked or stopped ratting when they came online, then it was a major annoyance for hunters.

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I have a feeling that history of watchlist can be used as example of what will happen if local is removed in 0.0 space.

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Locator agent usage is down 2/3rds since the watch list removal:

Maybe more by now. That said, the locator agent fee is so small as part of the overall economy, it doesn’t even merit a line in the Monthly Economic Report:

In total, it must only be in the tens of billions per month (in the ‘other’ category) and thus is a completely negligible ISK sink. Even the war fees themselves, are only a minor ISK sink in the grand scheme of things with more ISK spent on contract fees than on wars.

Kinda makes you wonder why so many tears are spilled over such a niche aspect of the game. No wonder increasing the number of wars was a goal of CCP’s last efforts to revamp wars to boost use of the mechanic. Seems like they still have a way to go.

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In my experience of surgical wardeccing, we used about 5% as much ISK on locators as on war fees.

Scattergun wardeccers probably use next to no ISK on locators.

I’d expect it was around 1-1.5% of the amount spent on war fees that was spent on locators. (I never saw locators used much by anyone else except possibly the most profit-oriented gankers chasing known owners of bling modules).

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Could be. That would be about 3-5B ISK if everything else being the same although perhaps the fees spend on wars has drifted up with the move to more scattershot war declaration.

In any case, a few billion or even tens of billions isn’t an ISK sink worth considering in a quadrillion ISK economy. Markus is right though that capital-ship ISK farming faucets have moved from ‘open’ to ‘full blast’ in the last year, although the changes to the ships themselves are much more responsible for that than the removal of the watchlist.

In my estimation, it is the niche nature of wardeccing and hunting in general that resulted in this collateral damage. First, the lack of a highsec antagonist on the CSM meant the impact of this change was not likely communicated properly to CCP. If you recall, the uproar from super pilots when the power of the tools being use to hunt them was so strong, CCP moved quite quickly in removing the watch list leaving little or no time for discussion with the community. They went with the easiest and most expedient way to solve their problem without considering the impact on the other users of the tool. Perhaps they still would have acted the same way if a proper case had been made to them on the impact these because of the amplitude of the uproar (and the super pilots really did have a point), but I doubt anyone told them it would be a such serious problem for targeted wars at all and I get the sense they were completely unaware of the damage this change would do until after it was implemented.

Now the same niche status, made even more niche by everyone who has quit the game or at least quit targeted wars because it is way too tedious to hunt other players anymore if you don’t know if they are even online, makes fixing the lack of intel tools a low priority for CCP. That means in this modern age of limited development resources, it is going to take years, if ever to get fixed. I am optimistic that Observatory Arrays will address this, and CCP Rise confirmed they are on the roadmap for next year a few months ago, but there is no guarantee that CCP will find the time to fix the problem and targeted wars may just join all the other game play that CCP has yanked in the name of expediency or pandering to new players.

If you just keep removing gameplay you it is not surprising that less and less people want to play your game.

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Well personally I probably couldn’t care any less about Super pilots than I already do. That’s just a part and area of the game that I just don’t have the real life time to get into.

I’m quite frustrated that CCP nerfed a very useful tool (for both the deccers, AND their targets), for some risk-averse players out in null. You would think CCP would want more supers and titans blowing up; but I guess not.

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The really, really sad thing is that now that Citadels have been implemented, super pilots have a safe place where they can park their ships and the intel of knowing when people log on would be much less useful for people trying to hunt the bulk of them.

No, it was pretty stupid that players could build a tool to ping them when a super pilot logged in and tackle them before they could even enter warp. I get that. But I agree a whole lot of other game play was thrown out to fix that situation. Even a simple change, like locator agents reporting online/offline status would have been enough or perhaps a short delay before list updated, but instead, likely out of ignorance, CCP just pulled out the axe and cut a content-enabling chunk of their game out to make a problem go away and left it at that.

It makes no sense in a game like Eve to have no method to know when a potential target is vulnerable (or conversely, a threat to you). It doesn’t have to be free or instant (although Eve functioned perfectly fine for a decade like that with only one notable exception), but there needs to be some intel tool to enable the viable hunting of other players.

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