Interesting appreciate the feedback 
assuming a decent increase in the number of âscattergun wardecsâ it might not be unreasonable to assume a net increase in ISK leaving the game instead of a loss in this instance then?
Ouch! that does sound bad 
far worse than Iâd realized things were for the cap pilots (especially as they couldnât dock back then), wasnât aware of that âtacticâ, not in its full glory as you describe it.
Sounds very exploity but iirc scraping logs isnât âaltering the clientâ so would have been within the eula? which may be why they just changed the mechanic being âabusedâ 
Personally would have been happier to see them declare it an exploit so we could keep the watch list but I guess that would have caused far more headaches (& work) for CCP?
EDIT:
Though a couple of thoughts do occur.
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That Capitals are (well) Capitals, they shouldnât be common (or easy), theyâre supposed to be vulnerable to large fleets of smaller ships that move too fast for a Capital to effectively target (rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock) & you shouldnât be able to move them safely around the map (& perhaps even log them in?) without an entourage of smaller ships in support.
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Also capital pilots have always been dedicated alts so there was never anything stopping people using their main if their CapAlt was logged off somewhere unsafe, until they could scrape up enough friends & support to form a fleet to get it out safely.
So all those problems with caps (logistically) could even be called content (having to organize a fleet to move it) & maybe it shouldnât have been nerfed?
Aha! so perhaps we have an argument for the watch lists return now (âthe supers donât need it to be gone any moreâ) 
In February 2016 war fees were 432B ISK, while last month they were 329B ISK so they have in fact gone down by about a quarter. Highsec activity (measured in terms of jumps) is about the same now (70,986,779) as in February 2016 (76,852,125) so in fact it seems that we have less total wars overall of all types including the âscattergun wardecsâ.
I think everyone, including the important developers at CCP, recognize now there are issues with wars and how they have been made much worse by the watch list removal. But the problem is that even before the nerf what, only a few hundred players were regularly using the war mechanics, as compared to the thousands who fly capitals or tens of thousands who live in nullsec and this is where CCPâs limited attention is focused. If CCP canât find the time to fix Faction Warfare, there is very little chance they will take another look at wardecs anytime soon.
The watch list nerf was just another in long line of changes in the name of nullsec players or new players that have had a significant off-target chilling effect on highsec content creation. The best hope for wars is that they get a positive side-effect for once from the intel capabilities of the planned Observatory Array structure. Otherwise, I fear the future looks very bleak for those who want to revisit the fun they had with targeted wars back in the day.
But who knows, there is an Eve Vegas keynote in just 4 days. One can always hope that âwardecsâ or âlocator agentsâ will appear on some updated mid-term roadmap CCP is long overdue to show us.
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Wardecs are such a minor ISK sink that it is unlikely to matter.
The fact that more aggressor entities have merged may have a bigger effect than the need to maintain more concurrent declarations.
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Could that be a seasonal bump, one of the normal expected ones?
Or might it perhaps reflect the merger of many smaller war dec corps into single entities? so just as many (or nearly so) players still involved in wardecs just in larger groups to share the costs?
EDIT / AFTERTHOUGHT:
just in larger groups to share the costs
Or (perhaps more importantly with watch lists gone?) to share the leg work needed to cover all the likely gates, pipes & otherwise hunt / track the targets?
AFK cloakers.
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Yeah, thatâs what Sabriz proposed above.
Donât know. Maybe scraping wars and kills from zKill (if that is possible) could let you see how the aggressors in wars consolidated over time. It does seem reasonable to me though that a lot of that went on.
As for seasonal effects I didnât look, but these monthly economic reports from CCP Quant go back to the fall of 2015 if I recall correctly. You can look through them here and see if you can spot any trends in the âWar Feeâ data:
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It was the only fun way to do it.
I had absolutely refused to join the campy corps before the change to watchlists, then I joined for a relatively short time.
Mercs which werenât bound by an area (as they were hunting all over) suddenly became bound to a system, never straying far from it.
A hunter then relied on skill to seek its prey, now a âhunterâ relies on luck and 10 times more war than they used to needâŚ
3 Likes
When I was playing as Cannibal Kane I use to spend a lot of ISK on locators. I would say billions in the locates r us channel alone, so much they made me an admin lol. I did some wardecs when I logged back in now after 2 or so years of downtime but finding out if a person is online after getting a location is just to much pain.
Which is why I understand why you find hub/trade campers now. It is just not worth the effort anymore to do surgical wardecs. I have found a way to work without the watchlist but even then I wonder if it is worth the effort. As a matter of fact, it is prolly better now to do surgical suicide ganks.
This change was shoddy at best and basically killed targeted wardecs or merc work if you get paid for it. If CCP brings back something similar to watchlists for wardecs I would be back in a second with my alts.
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Here you go CCP. The man has spoken.
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No because Dotlan and the Eve map will allow hunters to locate active players easily.
No, it is not as simplistic as that, risk averse, keep repeating that as a mantra to cling ontoâŚ
With watch list lists of Titan and super pilots they would watch for mass log ons and such so they would know that the big toys were out and they would also know that the big toys were coming, this meant that many fights stopped happening before they rally started, due to people having too much intel. Of course now we have people watching their staging Citadels like a hawk, but that can be got around if you work on itâŚ
I suggested an EA with watch list type capabilities per constellation, which would work and I hope CCP do this to bring back hunter killing in the game and at the same time giving the poor hopeless saps at least something that they can blow up to cause pain to the war deckersâŚ
If thereâs no local you canât confirm/deny that the guy youâre looking for is there 
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Explain B-R then
Why did anyone fight if they saw mass logs of super and titans?
People can easily take advantage of watchlists not just to observe, but to bait/counter-bait
Itâs a tool that worked both ways
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Youâre either talking about removing local or needing closet camping.
I was in Marmite during both the period with watch list and period afterwards. Many of my friends such as Sam Raymond and Talon Kain are practically nonexistent in the game now. We used to hunt juicy targets such as mission or incursion runners. We werenât always successful, but we had some good times. After the changes, many of the true merc people stopped playing, with the exception of those who wish to keep it alive.
I would love to see watch lists come back, at least to a limited extent. Perhaps make a function that would make it so that in null and WH space, it would not function, similar to how they wish to remove local in null and hide local in WH space. Hypothetically they have the code to limit a particular function to specific segments of space.
If you look at it logically, or even based on lore, it makes sense. Generally, people in hisec and lowsec are docked in NPC stations (or player-made stations, but less do I think). high security and low security stations, even if player made, could be said to have, by CONCORD rules, âcommunications linksâ that help to ensure lawfulness. Whereas, in null/wh, where there is no security, those links are not established.
Does that make sense? I hope it makes sense, because it does to me lol. Iâd be happy to answer any questions about that.
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Because in that instance both sides thought they could win it.
What happened is that smaller groups of players started using their caps and taking more risk, this is basic stuff mate in terms of 0.0 and lowsec activity. As a 0.0 player there is now more secrecy around using big toys and it is so much better.
They find someone active by noting the number of PvE kills plus seeing that people are in system and how many are in stations, though I have never bothered to check if that works with Citadels.
No I am not!
Explain yourself!