Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Here's an idea related to war decs:

Why not link the cost of surrender to the cost of maintaining a war and allow the attacker to choose the rate from a range of options (or be totally free to set any value). In the event of surrender, the defender pays the same price for a week of peace that the attacker paid for a week of war. The attacker is refunded their fee for that week and receives the payment from the defender. In the event that surrenders happens in week 1, the attacker then doubles their money, if week 2 they break even and from week 3 onward it starts to be a loss.

The advantages of this are that it takes into account size of corp in terms of available isk rather than number of players.

If for example the attacker's aim is to get a ransom, they must set the rate high enough to get the most they can but not too high or the defender will hire help, hide or fight rather than surrender and the isk will be lost. The greater the reward aimed for, the greater the risk because a higher war dec fee will be charged.

If the attacker's aim is war, they must set the rate high enough to discourage surrender, but must in turn pay the price in higher war dec fees for those higher surrender terms.

War rates could range from as low as zero to as high as a billion or more for really large organisations.


More advantages:

• Surrender terms are transparent from the start of the war.
• For mutual wars and wars against inactive corps (think offline POS removal) the attacker can set a fee of zero. This means that is these cases the war costs them nothing but it costs the defender nothing to surrender (if they want to and are online).
• Huge alliances can be wardecced by tiny 1 man corps. Sure the alliance could easily surrender as the 1 man corp could only afford a small fee, but if lots and lots of small corps wardecced the alliance, it would all add up.
• The defender can maintain perpetual peace by continually paying off any would be attackers the amount the attacker would be willing to pay for war.

What do you think?

-Minna-

Thanks for the comments.

Could you explain in more detail how this promotes extortion more than the current system?

In the current system the attacker effectively sets the surrender price to whatever they like and pays a fixed 50mill per week for the war. I'm just suggesting linking these figures for the reasons outlined.

The war dec system has recently been changed so if you're not familiar with it, you can read up here:

http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=28542

EDIT: also this link: http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Wars

-Minna-

War decs are essentially a high sec only method. There are legalized PvP in high sec without any penalty aside from the ISK sink they represent. Any form of high sec legalized PvP that allows for someone to be essentially reimbursed is a bad idea. Simply, as the other poster above me pointed out, it could theoretically print money buy having one corp pay the fee but then get it back from the defender and double it?

It might encourage mega alliances to simply war dec almost everyone and anyone and tell them up fron 'pay me and I leave you alone' and they could literally extort money.

But you didn't answer my question - how is this different from the current system?

I feel like the concerns you are expressing are concerns about the current war dec system and not concerns about the idea to modify it that I'm putting forward. I think if you look at the current system, and then look at what I'm proposing you'll see that whilst yes, war decs will still encourage extortion as they already do under the current system, they will do so in a more balanced and sensible way that doesn't favor large alliances unfairly over smaller corps, allows for mutual war decs more easily and allows for removal of ancient POSes from corps that no longer play without a fee.

What I'm proposing puts a limit on the amount the attacker can require; in the current system they can already say "pay me and I leave you alone" and name their price.

Minna

Thanks - glad you like it.

Having a fixed surrender fee would also help with the problem of getting stuck in a mutual war where the enemy will not accept surrender no matter how much you offer. For mutual wars where you get decced back, the attacker would then have to pay whatever the original fee they set in order to surrender.

-Minna-