Player Features and Ideas Discussion

The recent announcement that GM's will no longer police "dec shields" and "corp flipping" has led to speculation that a rework of war dec mechanics is being considered. Following is a suggestion along those lines.

1) Every corporation and alliance is assigned a new attribute, prestige, which represents its influence or notoriety in the EVE universe. Newly created corporations or alliances begin with prestige at zero, and gain prestige over time as they recruit members. NPC corporations are fixed at zero prestige. This provides an incentive not to take "corp flipping" lightly, since the prestige stays with the old corporation and must be rebuilt if the corporation is re-created under another name.

2) The primary value of prestige is that it grants members access to valuable sources of ISK in high sec, including agent missions, incursions, manufacturing and research slots and ore/ice refining facilities. Therefore, prestige will be sought after even by purely industrial or PvE missioning corporations. This also provides a strong incentive not to keep characters in NPC corporations indefinitely, where the NPC corp's zero prestige will limit the character's earning power.

3) Prestige is required to declare war, rather than ISK. Both the aggressor and the defender must have prestige greater than zero in order for the war declaration to be valid. A nominal ISK bribe to CONCORD may still be required, but ISK is no longer the determining factor in whether war can be declared. The increase in war dec costs with number of declarations can be removed.

4) War declarations put the participants' prestige at stake. If the defender surrenders or the aggressor retracts the war declaration, they are penalized as the losing side and their prestige is reduced, at most to a minimum of zero. If an entity's prestige falls to zero, all other wars in which it is involved are immediately canceled with no further effect to prestige. Conversely, the winning entity gains prestige when their opponent retracts or surrenders.

5) The defender can surrender after 1 week of hostilities, ending the war at any time, since that defender accepts a substantial prestige penalty.

6) The size of the prestige penalty or bonus depends on the relative prestige of the two corporations. If the winner has much higher prestige than the loser to begin with, the bonus and penalty are greatly reduced. The greatest prestige change occurs when the combatants have roughly the same starting prestige, or when an "underdog" corp with low prestige manages to defeat one with high prestige.

This prestige system attempts to address many of the complaints leveled against the current war dec system. War would be "about something", namely prestige. A character's ability to earn ISK in high sec would require taking some risk of PvP attack, as hiding in an NPC corporation would limit their earning capacity. War decs against the newest corporations would be forbidden, yet those new corporations have an incentive to develop their capacity to fight war, so that they may join the ranks of higher prestige and gain access to more lucrative game content. Hopefully it would lead to more interesting and challenging high sec wars for all.

Prestige builds as you recruit more members, and keep them in the corp over time. This automatic prestige growth is relatively slow. If you want to build prestige faster than that, you would have to declare war on other corporations of comparable prestige to yours .. or goad them into declaring war on you ;)

I was looking for slightly more specificity. For example, does my corp get 1 prestige point per member? Or is it X number of prestige points per Y time unit for Z members? Do I lose prestige in any other way than the one mentioned?

As with everything in EVE, the potential for abuse has to be taken into account. I see two possible abuses. Jerk Corp actively recruits noobs and piles on the prestige, then kicks them from corp, keeping the prestige and leaving the noob unable to take advantage of the benefits of prestige. Or, Smartass corp is composed of 50 long time friends, the corp builds up its prestige, then the members leave a holder in the ceo slot and form Smartass 2 corp, repeating the process. Then when wardecced, the members move to the undecced corp. Rinse. Repeat.

It also introduces another obstacle in the learning/experience curve for noobs, since time would now be a factor.

I like the general underlying concept of using access to content as a reward for risking pvp entanglements (as opposed to the typical risk vs reward structure). I like that it seems to address my most common complaint that those who don't want to pvp cant be forced into pvp. However, this structure seems too attached to corp identity. Players who want to move on to something different don't get to take their contributions with them when they leave. Still, its got potential.

How, exactly, do you determine who wins a war anyway?

Good point. Perhaps a corp member should gradually get the benefit of their corp's prestige, not immediately, so that if they quit and re-join they are penalized, at least for a time. The same would apply to a corp quitting an alliance, then re-joining it.

If the aggressor retracts the war dec, then the defender is the winner. If the defender surrenders, then the aggressor is the winner. Maybe there should also be a "mutual peace" option where neither side wins or loses, if both sides agree.

I like this idea, as long as access to the best stuff still requires both high personal prestige and high corp/alliance prestige.

i can already see ppl making tons of alts and puttin them in the corp just for the numbers. then gain the rewards. corp member activity would have to be takin into consideration. i.e. no reward gain for some 1 not active in the last month vs some 1 whos actively loggin in and doin something with the corp.

so theres none of the " hey i got 59 ppl in my corp but only 3 of them are active and i still come out on top." lookin at it from the side of war dec'ing, this would be a real plus in terms of ppl having to fight to keep wat they have. instead of just the " we got war dec'ed every 1 stay docked and dont fight." we all know the dec'ed corp is goin to lose some ****** hauler and/or miner to the war leading to a loss on thier side. also if they decied to surrender to still lose out. could lead to some awsome fights.

the mechanic def needs work but they could be on to something.

There's also a counter to that. In doing it like this than it's allowing players to be even more "safe" than already are. While this is good for people like me who just want to pve, it's also good for those corps that simple like griefing.
In other words, they could fly around baiting and killing everyone they wanted to, and no one would be able to wardec them because they would imidiately surrender, or would have prestige turned off so they couldn't be war decced in the first place, thus taking away from actions have concequences



Again, this would suggest to most pve corps not to allow their prestige to get too high.

It would also mean yet more isk faucet in high sec (which most low/null/wh players dont' like)

It also means that the alliances would be able to come into high sec and make more profit than they could in low sec with much less risk, simply by having a ton of players that stick around for long periods of time.

So high sec would be much more profitable for the alliances than anyone. So they would have control over the high profits of null sec, they would have control over the high profit capability of high sec, which means they would build bridges through low sec, so they would have that too.

Instead of the alliances owning null sec, they'd eventually just claim everything.

They wouldn't fight each other in high sec, because there would be no purpose. Not territory to gain or anything.

They would simply allow the legions of members sticking around for a while to increase their prestige.

So it would probably lead to high sec becoming more carebearish than it already is.

Who's gonna risk their prestige in a war they might lose if they can just get prestige from having several players stick around.

The only players that will fight are the griefer and pirate corps, but they're not there to gain prestige, they're simply doing it to take away your prestige.

Honestly, I feel this won't change the war dec mechanic in a possitive way. It would actually become less possitive because everyone would come back to high sec cause it has the potential to be more profitable at less risk.

What i meant individuals.