Crime & Punishment

First I want to say.. yes.. I got the bitter vet syndrome.

But as a feeble attempt I want to reach out to you guys in C&P.
Especially to the fellow Highsec mercs and their employers.

As the leader of Devils I've been around for 5-6 years operating as a highsec merc.
In this time I've seen the merc community in HS in a downward spiral, degenerating year after year.
More Mercs have started to mass dec, it now seem like its more or less local thugs hanging around on street corners harassing people passing by. (yes, bad reference, but I'll get back to this one)

CCP has always spoken highly of content creators who make emergent gameplay in Eve, and the Merc community is one of them.
It's a profession that in fact was promoted "Be a mercenary" by CCP in the past (just before the Crimewatch change I believe) but when released they brought us a broken bounty system and killrights. Then quickly changed the promo to "Be a bounty hunter".
I would actually love to see CCP giving the mercenary community abit more tools instead of taking them away.

Devils have always had a relatively low wardec count and offered a more focused service.
This has unfortunately burned out alot of guys over the years as old school hunting takes alot of effort. With the low wardec count my guys could not sit and wait in hubs for them to show up,
They actually had to add all wartargets to watchlist, run locates, scout and then move to the targets location to get a kill. Even if it ment flying to the other side of highsec.

Now with the recent "buddylist" change CCP have removed what I think is a crucial tool to actually be able to play this emergent gameplay
At the moment we are chasing ghosts... Running locates and sending alts to their location is not viable option anymore. (If you think it is.. I dont think you know how the current locator mechanics work.)
Most of the time my guys are now playing with people who are not even online.

Now back to my point and the bad reference.

As an Employer would you go for something like this:
"Yeah, I'll take your money and just hang in populated areas.. waiting for one of your targets to stumble into our turf"
Or would you like your Merc say something in the lines of this:
"Yeah, I'll take the contract, we will add them to watchlist and hunt when online, We will kill them when they least expect it"

I do have to say that I'm just focused on one of the services provided by merc community... but its a crucial one.
I'm suprised that so few of us (mercs) are actually bitching about this change, It speaks volumes in my opinion..
But then again... As an employer looking for hub/pipe denial or structure bashing you will still have plenty options to choose from.
Only thing is that its easy to avoid hubs and pipes.. and carebear in peace on the outskirts of empire even under multiple wardecs.
Is this what the Merc commity in highsec have boiled down to? Turf wars and picking low hanging fruit?

With the current state of eve I cant with good conscience take on a contract except for structure bashing and there is more obvious choices then hiring a small merc group for that.
I know this sound kinda like tears and rants from a bitter vet, maybe it is?
As of this moment Devils are closing down the merc business until we are sure we actually can provide the service asked of us.
We will still be around tho..

Good luck o/

agreed, we will not become hub humping degenerates .

Locator agents not running on offline players would do it for me. id be happily back to work just with that

With potentially several hundred WT's you really do need the locator to actually return a fail result for an offline player... otherwise you're back to wasting a couple million per hour chasing ghosts.

Sorry to see you guys go, seems you're one of the last merc groups out there with some integrity.

I understand your point regarding the watch list.

but with multiple wars changing each week just keeping up with adding them did my nut in, especially having your alt add them too.

There are a few ways I hunt them down when im at war. ( this isnt being cocky but just what I do)

1. Most corporations have a central point or if there from null and low sec a central point of entry into high sec.
most chars very rarely change there path even at war so that dude you saw in that blingy ship even at war will carry on the same way.

2. ZZkill and the other one when its working are a good source of previous places of where wt have been and possibly will be.

3. Main missions hubs IE the sister have always pulled chars in no matter if there at war or not. However the clever ones evac from there and go to a mission system in the middle of nowhere. catching them on the move if your tracking them prior to war helps.

I do understand that the offline online thing is a bit of a **** but at the end of the day mercs get paid to either do hub denial or hunt the feckers down and make them cry a lil. I dont mind flying alts around trying to find war targets as sometimes you might get more that you bargained for.

Typical point I decd a corp that was already at war flying a nightmare. However after setting them red my alt was flying around and found a mack pilot who was using a orca in a diff corp. So i dec the orca corp too. I kill the mack then go back there the next day and kill the orca then the nightmare.

I would rather be flying all around eve than sitting in a station banging out locators. i myself am in a small corp and in wars its easy for people to see me online, however not any more so it does benefit me alot

Its a shame to see you go though. Fly safe to all of your alliance in what ever you do next

This has the same issue as the pre-Retribution bounty system; claim it with an alt. (Unless you're keeping the percentage of kill value, in which case it's just as broken as the current system).

Sad to see another corp folding up. But I can hardly say I didn't see it happening. You hit it pretty spot on.

I've pretty vocal about it very last couple years. Unfortunately it's just that. Yelling into a void.

We said that you're okay with watchlist changes, as long as locate agents are buffed to help, and it's deaf ears.

I've been saying that with every nerf to emergent gameplay, Highsec get staler and staler every patch.

I've been saying Wardec Mechanics need to change to allow for more diverse gameplay

Every time CCP ignores it and treks along with its pacification of Highsec and ignores the some of the people who brought them to the top.

In the current era, the guiding hand social club wouldn't have happened, Villains such as Kane and Monk, can no longer be there. These along with a numerous of other stories brought be to EVE. And the Removal of these things are taking me away from EVE.

I don't awox, I don't steal. I don't spy. But the possibility of it is incredibly intriguing and makes EVE a better place. However it's seems CCP would rather push profits and get more and more people in the name of . It feels like they no longer care.

Are wardeccers, Mercenaries and AWOXers a niche part of EVE? Yeah. But that doesn't mean we should be stomped out because B-Tac-R.

It's utterly and annoyingly, aggravating, frustrating, compoundly idiotic and has pretty much forced my entire group in an inactive state, or shoved off the null/low sec, because Highsec Content as dried up to the point it's becoming ash.

Mercs specialised on hunting won't do that. Plex runners won't do it either because taht would mean handing their income to the mercs.

These kind of things already happens, but often means gate camping and catch on their way to lowsec.

Espionage is already quite rampant in FW, and Watchlist is dead, remember?

Deccing FW corps/alliances and camping their Hisec staging systems (such as they are, often trade hubs) is already done by most mercs that don't sit exclusively on trade hubs/pipes. We do get some content, though FW is mostly about frigates, so that is limited. But doable. But it is still camping, mostly.