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OK, so you as a small corp get decced by this '2000 man alliance'

Whats stopping you from putting up free ally contracts for people that want to shoot at this '2000 man alliance'

I'm sure you will get plenty of takers, and the war might not last as long as you think

Its this small fact that is being forgotten about.

First off, I want to say that I'm glad that CCP has shown they're willing to listen to the playerbase regarding the war dec costs. With that being said, I share the sentiments of many people in this thread when I say that there is still a lot of tweaking and adjustments that need to be made.

The current issue I see with the new fixes is that they address many symptoms without actually fixing the root cause. The increased pricing scheme is successful in that it will cut down on the 1-5 man corp "pointless" decs against blanket targets with corp hopping as the main mechanic behind them, however, when you add it to the 50m isk per war dec stacking penalty it doesn't just destroy the Privateer model of deccing large nullsec alliances, it completely shuts down any group that wants to have more than 4-5 decs at any given time.

I think regarding these changes there are few common misconceptions between the current reality of highsec decs and the public perception of things.

1) When you look at the raw numbers with 5+ war decs, it looks like you have tons of targets to shoot at. The truth is, things have changed significantly over the years and mass war decs don't really create the target rich environment that it used to. People have gotten smarter and groups using the Privateer model have been struggling to sustain themselves financially and member count wise due to lack of targets to keep things interesting. While the Privateer model might seem to go against the original point of war decs, the fact is war decs have evolved as a means of creating a target rich environment in an arena without bubbles, supercaps, and titan bridges. CCP wants to give war decs more meaning, but in order to do this you need groups that are still willing to war dec. In this regard, I feel like they are missing out on some of the fundamental psychology behind groups that war dec. If the large war dec alliances are struggling with with 6-8 nullsec alliances decced each week, I can only wonder at how groups that war dec smaller organizations will be able to maintain interest. The reason that you don't see more decs against 400-600 man Highsec corps is because they don't really exist and when they do get that big, they generally get war decced into oblivion. War deccing 100-150 man alliances is also relatively pointless unless you just want to grief/extort them (usually too poor to extort or even hire mercs) because they'll only have maybe 10 active targets on at any given time, maybe 1-2 of which you can actually kill, and the kills you do get dry up fast.

2) The myth that war deccing is this huge cash cow and you make tons of ISK if you do it right because you get all these fat freighter and mission runner drops. While I can only speak for Moar Tears in this regard, this used to be true maybe 6 months ago but really isn't the case anymore due to terrible drops from the loot fairy and the decreasing number of mission runners that pimp fit and fly their ships during war. Just because we spend 2b+ ISK a week to kill 50b+ ISK that doesn't mean that we get anything remotely in the area of 50b isk in loot drops.

3) Finally the perception that there are no "goodfights" in highsec because of neutral logi is unstoppable and fighting in highsec is more trouble than its worth. I think that the cheesiness of neutral logi does need to go despite having counters, its ruined the public perception of highsec PVP so much to the point that noone wants to fight in highsec anymore. Believe it or not, not even a year ago, you could get fights in highsec and I think that fixing neutral logi will go a long way in fixing this by itself. With that being said, the reality is that part of the reason people who want to fight in highsec struggle so much is they're just bad at highsec war dec fundamentals like setting war target only overviews. A CFC FC complained after the Burn Jita event that CCP needs to implement a way to set war target only overviews, even though you already can. In fact, at least half the time we've fought nullsec fleets in highsec, at least one of their fleet members goes GCC and gets blown up by Concord for shooting someone not at war. I think its obvious how this would discourage someone from wanting to fight in highsec ever again when they can just shoot any and everything in nullsec.

I want to finish by saying, it doesn't really bother me to see the Privateer model go thats not what I have an issue with, despite disruption of nullsec alliance's highsec logistics chains being one of the few legitimate "non-griefer" applications of war decs. My main concern is that CCP isn't completely in touch with the reality of why war decs are as "broken" as they've currently come to be. As it stands now, most groups i've talked to within highsec that intend to continue war deccing plan on becoming defensive mercs, but if all the organized groups plan on doing this, will there still be groups willing to be the aggressor?

Not sure how hard anc boosters will change things since I'm mostly flying active armor solo setups. And regarding AT - maybe for qualifying they might change something. But for finals... logi pilot in a team is a key to keep its team alive, not a anc booster on any ship.

North

The reality is, a lot of groups have been more strategic with the groups they dec and have been for quite some time. The only way that groups could take this further that they currently don't is through implanting spies in the target corp, which IMO is even cheesier than neutral rr.

Unless you're deccing a well known target or a target you've decced before, you can research all you want, but for every 3-4 decs you put in, only one of them will usually be worthwhile. Also, regarding your comment towards EVE Uni, they were never really that great of a dec, they just get brought up in examples after they garnered a lot of recent attention due to their dec shielding and teaching style geared towards complete avoidance of all highsec combat.

To achieve the goal of Null Sec corps actually bothering to declare war on each other the enhanced killboards and such were implimented. This was a necessary step, but I don't really think that this alone will encourage Null Alliances to shell out the coin to attack each other under a war dec instead of just shooting each other in Null for free as they do now.

If you really want Null alliances to use the war dec system you need to make it a necessary component of officially taking Sov... and for this to happen you need to be able to set victory conditions for both sides when a war dec is in play. In this way, Sov can "officially" change hands only if the war dec conditions include it, or a surrender happens. A case could be made for the development of various types of surrender, including unconditional.

Slap fighting in Null without a war dec would be for fun, but when a war dec is issued with SOV capture being one of the victory conditions... then you know things just got serious.


To satisfy the goal of encouraging use of the War Dec system to promote more "good fights" and deter nuisance war decs between corps of vastly different sizes (either way), the war dec fee needs to be based on the difference in "active members" (logged in within the last 30 days).

To deter corp hopping to avoid a war dec you restricted players from rejoining their corp until either the war ends or 7 days pass whichever comes first. This does nothing to deter corp hopping to avoid a war, in fact in does quite the opposite.

If you want to actually deter people from corp hopping, either make the delay to rejoin at least 7 days after the war ends (preferably longer)... or a vastly better solution would be for them to carry the war dec with them until it's duration is over or 7 days have passed, whichever is quicker.

If these changes were made to the excellent work done otherwise, the war dec system would finally be what it needs to be for the EVE Universe.

Inferno, or how to nerf Amarr and Gallente in a single expansion

So, CCP ran the metrics, listened to player feedback and saw that Minmatar and Caldari needed a serious buff. Shield tanking, selectable damage types and kiting are underpowered and everybody just flies laser and hybrid armour tanks in PVP.

How could the situation be rescued?

1) Introduce a module that renders weapon systems with fixed damage types useless was an obvious fix, so they made the Armor Adaptive Hardener.

2) Kiting is an underused tactic, and nano ships a rare sight. To promote this style of combat, they decided to add Light Web Drones to make sure that slower ships with short range weapons can't catch the weak nano ships. Drone ships should not receive bonuses to web strength of these drones, actually we should make a drone damage module that can't be fitted on any drone boats to humiliate drone pilots some more.

3) Active shield tankers had problems fitting full tackle with shield and cap boosters, so why not combine them into a single module? This way it's possible to fill lows slots with damage mods and get full tackle with active shield tank. This was also in line with decision to scrap the plans to fix armor rigs.

Afraid that changes to Tracking Disruptors would negate the upcoming Drake buff, they decided to postpone TD changes in a bid to make the Drake popular again.

And just in time before the launch, some clever dev realized that the Micro Jump Drive could make Gallente battleships usable, and they managed to stop development before any damage was done.

I personally don't think that these buffs are not nearly enough.Heavy Missile dps and range seriously needs to be increased, and the Tengu needs more powergrid so that it doesn't need to use rig slots for ANCs.

Unrelated to balancing matters, CCP should also look into overpopulation of lowsec, and make sure that new module BPCs drop only from hisec exploration sites.

Yeah don't take the 3batteries to heart that i know wont happen, that was just to test the stacking. But the question is with 1 battery and its effects. And knowing that a battery will increase cap and also protect you from neuts and nos will make it a viable module to counter it.

Question lies if its in the lines, I had issues running only the neuts with his battery fitted, now real combat will look different.
The Large battery has 25% reflect on the nos and 12.5% on the neuts. And having 4neuts or 5 on a curse depends how you fly will get you about 62% neut back at you.

This will make in my opinion a viable module to consider when fitting ships.

My initial feeling is that this will move cap closer to other kinds of “HP” (to use that term broadly): do you “active-tank” your cap using a booster, which will work against known drains such as your own module use or against single opponents, or do you “buffer-tank” it to protect against more concerted attacks such as Nos/Neuts?

While those batteries certainly let you run cap-heavy modules for longer, they won't offer the same flexibility as a standard injected setup when you want to run your MWD and cap-heavy guns for extended periods.

Very much agreed.

I do wish that along with this they would take another look at NOS, as I believe they were a little overly nerfed before (although I believe they are actually far more useful than people give them credit for on certain cap use heavy setups).

Hand and hand with this I believe that the Pilgrim needs to be very carefully handled as the overall rebalancing of ships for roles (instead of Tiers) begins in ernest.

That war cost equation seems overly complex. This

cost = 5900000 * ( N - 60 )^.5

Gives almost the same curve and is much simpler.