Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Bounty changes:

Any time an corp/alliance declares war on another corp/alliance, the cost of that wardec is placed as a bounty on the deccing corp/alliance with a limit of 10 bil.

the primary benefit of this change is to encourage decs for all entities. by adding the ability for all wardec costs to be at minimum made back should the deccing corp kill enough isk during the war. This will take away much of the necessity for other players to pay for content through contracts. Also, the current need for large alliances with the ability to pay the upfront dec costs is lessened.

The hard cap of 10 bil isk is to dissuade dog piling on the corp with the highest bounty while still giving a large potential return on successful wars. The upper limit also means that at it would take 400 minimum cost deccs to reach the cap or 20 maximum cost deccs. This will mean large wardec alliances will have to risk the attention of the entire wardec community if they choose to dec corps/alliances much smaller than themselves as their bounty will go up much faster.

Since the cost of the dec is added as a bounty to the deccing corp, the entities with the highest bounties will inevitably be wardec corps. meaning that the juiciest targets will be other wardeccers rather than corps that lose the most ships. This removes what some see as the griefing mechanic of the current system where corps that lose ships are decced by every wardec corp looking to get in on good kills. while this system disincentivizes deccing weak or “bad” corps/alliances it does not remove it as an option. also, it will mean that a corp that chooses to do this can still do so even better than before as they will always be able to make the dec cost back at minimum.

Another complaint from the carebears is that the wardec players that currently participate use extremely blingy ships along with neutral logi, links, and eyes that give them an extremely unbalanced advantage against their opponents. Given that wardec corps will quickly acquire bounties, any corp or alliances that is being harassed by bling wielding wardeccers will have an incentive to fight back in the form of monetary gain. While I understand that this will not be enough of an incentive for many highsec corps to fight back, I don’t think they should be given any special treatment for essentially being unwilling combatants and i think i can say that the majority of “bad” highsec corps that don’t participate in PVP don’t participate because they absolutely don’t want to rather than because of some skewed reward mechanic. If baiting and blobbing a blinged out ship for not only a high bounty payout but for the chance to “win” the war and have some fun is not enough of an incentive than i doubt anything will shake that mindset. At the very least, this change will put more eyes on the wardeccers with large bounties so the highsec corps and alliances will be more likely to go unnoticed.

Since this system will bring attention to the bounty system, players looking to pay for wardec services can simply place a bounty on the corp they wish to have decced. Wardeccers constantly looking for juicy targets will see an corp that is not another wardec corp with a bounty they can extract. All they need to do is put up the initial wardec cost and they can potentially make back more than they paid in without having to be paid by other players directly through negotiations.

This makes sense right?

Why isn't it already like that? Am I missing something?

I think it was because it was though around the fact that deccing larger corps gave you a larger target selection thus was worth more money than deccing smaller corps.

Not saying I agree with that train of though but I think that's where it came from.

As for the OP's idea, I'm not sure the bounty being put on the deccers will really push other to declare on them. Will people really go after season vet just for a little more ISK when they know the ships they would kill right now are bling fit anyway thus kill can alraedy be profitable? Will PoH for example be more tempted to declare war on marmitte because of a bounty?

i never expect marmite PoH or forsaken to ever really dec each other, nor do i think these changes will do that.

what im hoping is that the changes in dec cost will make smaller groups more efficient than the large groups we have now. after the playing field has more small groups who can pay for their own content through wars i would expect to see a few groups who "specialize" in going after other wardec groups.

in the end, it is my primary goal to make wardecs more sustainable as a "profession" without having to join one of the major groups. even if after these changes those big dec alliances stay exactly the same, it will not mean a failure of the system. after all i think they have more than earned their titles and size

Honestly in the time that i spent declaring wars, i would say around 15% actually roll corp.

If the target you dec rolls corp to avoid your dec, that means you didn't do your research. it should be very obvious beforehand the kind of resources and effort that goes into maintaining the target corp and if they can roll then they aren't worth deccing anyway.

Wardec is said to be a hard topic because it is underused. From CCP to people with real points, not personal views, all say that the problem of wardec is that it is not used for what it is made.

There is one simple thing that is in the way of any rule about how the wardec is paid, the way wardec is conducted.

So the simplest way to circumvent wardecs is to make a new corp anytime you receive one. That prevents a cost effective >0 price for a wardec. And that would be easy to solve, by putting deserter "debuff" in people. that would solve a problem but create another, as people would simply refrain from making the corp instead. Reason being, corp gives you advantages, but no way to avoid war makes it a hard gamble. Better make up alts and avoid it altogether.

The more intrincate way to avoid wars is to make a docked corporation and leave all flying chars out of them or ready to leave. So you place alts on strategic points and use contracts to allow to conduct the same business you would with all of them in a corp. Still, it can be prevented by more restriction on what someone can do for you, but still, another change that will not change people's mindset, just make them stop using the feature altogether.

If from all of that, you start taxing people more to stay in NPC corps and prevent hoping or shielding, those who dont just stop playing, will endure the taxes and reflect it in the prices of what they do. Not sure if many will actually just try to earn more.

So, after all that sorted out and made so wardec has any effect on savvy small corps, you are faced then with the problem of prices and systems to make it viable to live off of war mongering.

But I can asure you, as the player base shape up as it did with can flipping and jettisoning, there will be little to no room for people using wardecs as a system of extortion. As of today wardec only affects corps with no mobility. In the future, those may not even exist anymore.

All you get left with is wars among people who will fight, not pay.

thats funny considering if my idea works as intended the carebears would be much safer than they are now since killing them would have no chance for isk making.

unlike Zhaceera Armerarram my way allows the carebears to be safer by being low priority targets rather than forcing them to play the game like I do.

i get targets that fight and earn me isk, they get to afk farm and do boring things all day. everyone wins.

if it works of course.

Get better at selecting your targets.
As long as you have the right to war dec whoever you want, whenever you want and for whatever reason you want CCP needs to provide those you war dec with options to get out of the dec. If for no other reason than as a way of protecting their subscriber base.

So, here's the difficult part - in the Game of Alts, you can't hard-code differentiation between somebody who's making isk for your enemies and somebody who's just flying a freighter in their spare real-world time. What this means is that any control executed in the attempt to protect people who want to play Spreadsheets Online for a couple hours every few days will also inherently restrict a warlike entity's ability to kneecap their opponents' resource lines.

My suggestion - don't change anything related to the costs of doing war. Until you get up to a couple hundred million per war mark, the costs are trivial and we all know it. Instead, add a contract-like mechanic for conflict where a party can accept joining/creating a fight in exchange for XYZ per isk value &/or quantity of kills &/or type of kills. Example: Some guy declares war on me but I just don't feel like fighting that week. So, I create a private, "conflict," contract for some mercenary group to go shoot the guys who don't like me because I'm ugly or whatever. The contract stipulates that they get X up front, they get Y for each kill (defined by either count, by total value, or by specific type of kills possibly as specific as being in a certain solar system), and they get Z after the conclusion of the agreed period of time if a quantity of Y rewards are awarded during the conflict. Whether they're added to the war as allies or whether they're part of a war at all wouldn't be relevant for this kind of contract, so the flexibility it creates in the approach of the mercenaries would be pretty wide. The same system could also be implemented as a form of assassination agreement against a particular individual who just needs to die while flying something worth at least X isk.

Expand the contract system to enable indy-types to feel that anyone they hire will actually be fighting for them while giving the mercenaries peace of mind that they'll be paid under this kind of agreement. It'll make random wardeccers add another consideration to their strategy since they know people with fat wallets and thin hulls might still give them a challenge.

High sec wardec corps are just using the system to get easy kills. its not about about doing war, its all about getting that t1 industrials or that 1 month noob who dont know any better.
In fact, faced with any resistance, in my experience, all high sec wardec corps dock up, thats why they are mostly in dock range of the stations they are camping.
If there was something that should be changed, it's upping the price of wardecs, so that the potential isk gains be equal to the potential war costs.
Asking for lower costs while hiding in high sec, with no restrictions at all with the possibility to avoid all combat is madness.