EVE General Discussion

If you hate that one man so much...

It adds up, and we'll drop to NPC corps. You're not warring with us unless we want you to.

This discussion should be made with the largest mercenaries in highsec and all others should stay silent. CCP... go to the source and don't pretend that apples should be speaking on behalf of oranges.

War needs a focus. Even in a sandbox, you need to have a sense of traction.

Humans are a skittish bunch. When we are uncertain about outcomes, we usually hang back unless we have no choice. Occasionally, wars are just a means to feel out the strength of outsiders. New Eden is an environment will self-contained consequences though, so it makes sense that we should test one another often and with general enthusiasm.

Conflict with other players should have economic as well as political dimensions. We have structures in high security space as well as elsewhere, so it makes sense to leverage them as much as possible. Things that can't be logged make for an excellent locus for our fleeting attention spans.

At the present state of mechanics, war declarations serve as little more than an obstacle to travel, and frankly a self-limited one at that. It's a mechanic with a fairly limited scope. Something meatier is needed to create a sense of boundaries for players. Boundaries are a good because you can push at them, and they feel like something tangible, something real that can be engaged.

Wars should be about pushing other groups around, and particularly about pushing their investments around. As turf wars between gangs, assuming Concord's perspective, they should have a certain finitude to them, with their own constraints. Once again, this seems to suggest a focus on structures, and on owning and operating them profitably. This could be storage, repair services, refining services, construction services.. everything should be opened up and place within the profitable purview of private corporate interests.

My suggestion boils down to doubling down on the utility of structures, of broadening the profitability of all station services, and in seeking out ways to make them more central to economic activity in New Eden. Wars should be territoriality limited at any given point in time, and should largely exist between actors with physical, tangible interests that are in competition with one another. No structure should mean no basis for a sanctioned war. If the sandbox truly requires that fly-by-night outfits with no physically vested interests also have a place at the table, then they should have their own scaling mechanics that define the boundaries of what both parties can accomplish.

There should always be plenty of room for criminal or extralegal acts. In fact, I would encourage the development of more avenues to tweak the noses of other players. There's also no reason we can't accommodate all the minority interests like mutual wars by preserving the fundamentals of existing war mechanics.

Sand in the sandbox is also a language, and without boundary conditions, languages don't work either. A sandbox without boundaries is just an empty space.

If you valued content and story, over graphics, and actually let good story-tellers shine, you'd still be on a MUSH. (Edit: Assuming there were that many left with any players. There are not) But, ooh, the pretty pictures!

It's nice to see I was right. I said this when Meridian 59 started stealing players. You'll be sorry. They were, and so are their kids, but their kids never even knew what a MU* was. You have bots, and coded systems, in charge of you now. You have pretty pictures, and no content, and no reason to even war, save one. Bragging rights.

Is it fun?

That is like putting a band aid of a huge gaping wound, it does nothing at all, to be brutal most wars are just for keyboard padding or to give enough targets for gate and hub or even mission campers to have targets to shoot, if you spend any time looking at hisec war decs you will find that the majority of kills are on null sec and low sec alliances that go through the pipes and visit the market hubs. The point of the war is that and that is where the problem lies.

Most of hisec is made up of small entities who avoid, so as such the only thing that will change this is a change in the makeup of hisec entities and taht is not going to happen.

So you want to take 1% of all Goon revenue based on blapping a few idiots flying through hisec and then say we won, silly idea.

EDIT: Take my alliance, I have absolutely nothing in space which can be attacked, no POS, no Citadel, no ES, it is a holding corp to keep my own alliance going while I am in an 0.0 alliance. I have this toon which is a combat toon, but the rest do low level indy, what is the point in war decking my alliance, none, and yet some people do, their target selection is utterly moronic because it does not take into account what they do.

When my mains were in here it was still moronic because I know how to play and the only thing that could have affected me was a targeted campaign by very focused play which I would have had fun testing myself against , but no one does it and if it had been a small one or two man corp I would have had some fun by killing them.

It is broke because hisec is broke, CCP wanted people in null sec etc., they screwed over hisec and now it is a wasteland apart from market hubs and that shows by the wars that occur.

Everything true, but it's not the point. Why most players stay in HS? Because it gives them false sense of protection. They don't want to fight in wars, if they do they'll just move to more dangerous areas.

At some point, in hisec war, I asked corpies that maybe we should fight the attackers. "Absolutely not! if they smell blood and loot, war will be prolonged.". Eve is leaking of it's player base that way.

I heard it's because of the gate camps.....

Very well said. I can argue with some small points here but overall i can agree with Your POV.

But all what was said here just proves my point: You (and groups like yours) do not want 'proper' WarDec system. Current half-assed and mostly-broken system serves well to Your desires presented here. That's what Vitalia Serine does not understand talking that 'only biggest mercs groups should talk about WarDec system' (look at the first quote).

I'm not completely happy about the status quo either, to be honest.
Last year's disembowelment of the watchlist veritably destroyed the value of locator agents for use in warfare.
It didn't quite completely render my line of work obsolete, but very close... it now takes a great deal more time and effort to try and find a single war target online. Sometimes you have to rely on dumb luck and hope that a scout spots on while flying around between locator pings. Hours and millions wasted chasing ghosts and hoping for a lottery win as you fly through areas that your targets have been spotted in in the past.
Saddening to me, as I really do enjoy being the monster under the bed for hire.
Defenders have never been safer than they are now.

I can't vouch for the bigger merc crews, as they operate differently from us for the most part.