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I'd be interested in knowing what your proposed fix to the Inferno wardec system was actually Alekseyev. If you had your way what would be done?

This is merely the point of the ally system in general.

There is nothing heroic about doing virtually no effort (paying nothing, committing nothing) to sign up with a giant unorganized blob to fight the big aggressor alliance. It's just ePeen waving and forming irrelevant blobs in hisec. Sorry, calling it like it is (and it is incidentally why my alliance isn't signing up as an ally of SF in this war).

It's been proposed to make the wardec cost be based on the absolute of the difference in numbers between the parties involved. I'm pretty sure that proposal was ignored somewhere along the line.

Simply make it that anyone that holds Sov can't declare war (but can be targets). Would concord really want large spaceholding entities fighting their 0.0 political wars in concord space?

Alternatively you can support my proposal and we'll both get what we appear to want.
A bigger and better forever war.

Both these ideas where brought up by players, oh... the day after fan fest. Then they got brought up again the day the first Dev blog came out introducing the scaling price according to defender size and where repetitively brought up every few post (on the original Dev thread) right up until CCP released inferno. CCP knows of these ideas, they just have rejected (well mostly ignored) them from the get go.

Why have they rejected these types of proposals? I honestly can't say. CCP has addressed a few of these ideas occasionally, but mostly with hilariously bad or conflicting reasons. I think a lot of the problem is that since day 1, other than limiting the ability to shed a war dec, there really never was a coherent framework given for the goals of the new war dec system. So now at this point there are so many problems we all can't even agree on what those are.

I'd prefer to see scaling based on the ratio of the bigger to the smaller entiy. Thus a wardec between two 10-member corps would attract roughly similar wardec fees to a wardec between two 1000-member corps. The number should be modified by activity level, so that a 100-member corp who has 10 members active at any time is only slightly more expensive to wardec than a 10 member corp who is "always" active.

The cost of adding allies to the defending side should be minimal up until the aggregate size of the defender approaches that of the attacker. After that, the fees should scale as if the defender was wardeccing the attacking corp. After all, we want to encourage a merc market: what market will there be for mercs if simply adding them to the defensive side costs too much ISK?

Of course, most of this discussion about wardecs is based on the premise that there is a way to make wardecs a vehicle for encouraging hisec care bears to engage in combat. Someone is forgetting that you can't solve social problems through technical or legislative means. The way to encourage hisec care bears to engage in combat is to encourage hisec care bears to engage in combat. Don't add fancy new mechanisms which will simply be gamed by all and sundry. Get out there, "face to face" with the people you'd like to draw further into the game, take them on low sec roams, help them get some kills.

Some hisec care bears play EVE Online as a simple game, like civilisation or Reach For The Stars. They may not necessarily be interested in flying spaceships around. They love the spreadsheets or the ore collecting or simply flying courier missions and enjoying the scenery. Wardeccing those people just so you can enjoy seeing them never log in again is counter-productive to the community as a whole. Providing them some incentive to engage in combat when wardecced might be productive.

To provide incentives for combat, bring in a goal based wardec system. "The goal of this wardec is to remove the POS from Brapelille IV Moon 5." Once that goal is accomplished (by blowing up the POS, or by the defender taking it down), the war is over.

"The goal of this wardec is to suppress X alliance activity in Y constellation for one week." CONCORD takes a fee from the instigator, and gives the instigator a week to achieve their goal. Thus if X alliance doesn't log in for two days, the instigator gets their ISK back. If X alliance stays active for that entire week in that constellation, the instigator loses their ISK (and X alliance claims that ISK as a reward). Activity might be determined as "units of ore mined" or "NPC bounties collected" for example.

At the simplest level, the goal of the wardec might be "inflict 1B ISK damages". Every ISK value of the target's ships lost counts for the instigator, every ISK value of instigator's ships lost counts against them. Again, the instigator would pay CONCORD a fee. If the wardec conditions are failed (by the end of the week you have not inflicted 1B ISK damages) the target gets the reward.

The important thing here is that the target has an incentive to participate: "Hah hah! Johnny Rotten and his three friends want to stop us mining Veldspar in Wyllequet. If we mine more than 1M units in a week, we win 100M ISK!" (Johnny Rotten's wardec fees in this case were 200M ISK: 100M for the wardec, 100M for the objectives security).

But while purposeless wardecs are on the table, the fees should simply scale by square of the ratio of larger to smaller entity. No caps. If a 9000 member alliance wants to wardec a 30 member alliance, they will be paying 90,000 times more than a 30 member alliance wardeccing that same alliance. If a 3 neckbeard alliance wants to wardec a 30 member alliance, they can pay 100 times as much as if they were 30-strong. Still gameable (just roll more alts to add to your wardeccing corporation as required), but more likely to result in wars that actually involve combat.

Alternatively, I approve CCP Soundwave's overall direction for the game. I want mercenaries like Noir. Mercenary Group to get paid what they are worth. Our whole venture into highsec with these wardecs has been to build up a realistic bounty hunter profession, but unlike CCP's crappy ingame bounty system, ours actually works. Your massive boohoo fest was just a result of us testing things.

This all looks good to me.

The sad thing is that when you end up jumping down on emergent gameplay and imaginative uses of the wardec ally system to allow a massively outnumbered target to turn the tables on a big fat aggressor because "eve isn't supposed to be fair" it does kinda leave you wondering what the point of the wardec system is as the poster above asks.

Is it just a pay-to-grief (with zero consequences on the attacker) tool after all?

Its not working for merc corps ... Alekseyev Karrde the CSM rep who knows more about empire wars and merc fighting than the rest of the CSM put together says this 1.1 change was the only option all the CSM agreed wouldn't help at all!

So whats the wardec change for if its NOT to boost or improve the merc profession?

It sure doesn't help defenders fight back against bigger attackers.
It doesn't help help little corps whose wars get jumped on by big fish.
It doesn't add any structure or goal to the system.

The ONLY thing it does is add increased advantage and defense to large alliances who wish to engage in wardecs without risking escalation by the defender.

See, now, that's good dialogue. Thank you, Alek. Most informative. Hopefully our hopes can be higher in the future.

Edit: Oh, and yes, I still think the rest of this patch looks great. :)