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Regarding the ally system, would it not be better to allow people to take a contract for a set period rather than the duration of a wardec. My thinking behind this is that a whole corp could play with RvB for a set period rather than forever as the war is mutual.

The other thing is, could we have an ally contract that isn't related to a wardec so a merc corp/alliance can formally negotiate a contract for a set period for other things like attacking a target in 0.0, defending a pos, etc?

Yay, apparently CCP just figured they got too many saitisfied customers already and is about time to fukk off them.

There are a couple issues that I have with the current design of the war dec system. There are some areas which it does reasonably well, and falls short in others.

First and foremost, there is no direct motivation for defender to undock/fight back. The devblog hints that "(or docking for a week)" is part of the design. I (personally) am against this because any mechanic that encourages people to basically not play for a week is bad in the long-term

My proposed solution to this is for the aggressor, in addition to the Concord fees, to place a sizeable sum of ISK into an escrow account that goes to the "winner" of the war. This implies that there will be a way to determine a "winner" of each war, which brings me to my next point

For all wardecs, specify objectives, success/failure criteria and scope. This was hinted at before, but I didn't see much about this in the devblog. Some ideas
- The current standard metric for wars is ISK destroyed. The objective can be to inflict 1b of ISK damage. First side to reach that threshold will "win" the war. This can be extended to ships destroyed, etc. This is essentially "economic warfare"
- One new mechanic could be to destroy a certain strategic asset (eg, POS, Orca, Freighter, etc). This is "strategic warfare"

Now, to make things more interesting, all player-types should have a chance to win a war. The goal of economic warfare is to inflict ISK damage on your enemy. How can a carebear stand a chance vs a dedicated pvp corp to do more ISK damage? Well... why not reward them for doing what they do best? Why can't a corp *mine* or *mission* their way to victory? If they can make 1B ISK while being war decced without losing anything, to me that sounds like a victory. And as a reward for mining/missioning during a wardec, they getim the ISK that the aggressor put up as escrow.

For strategic asset wars, if the defender can successfully defend a POS, that should count for something. This is where the whole merc system can come into play. Lets say the reward for defending a POS is 200m and they can negotiate a merc contract for 150m. The defender and the merc actually have a direct financial incentive to participate in the war

One flaw with the specifics of this is that it is relatively easy to hide across the entire universe to make some ISK in order for the defender to "win" the economic war. How can one fix this? Well, for starters why do war decs have to be universe-wide? Why not limit them to fixed regions/constellations/etc? Or just highsec/lowsec? Or specific systems for strategic objectives

For example, there is a missioning corp that runs level 4s out of one system. A PVP corp war decs them, with the criteria to inflict 1b of economic damage in that one system. They place 500m in escrow. If the missioning corp can sneak in enough missions to make 1b, they will claim the prize AND end the dec early. Of course, the PVP corp will have to make sure that doesn't happen and be forced to actually participate in the war (as opposed to just swinging by once a day to kill something)

So, to summarize this wall of text
- The aggressor has to place a non-trivial amount of ISK into escrow for whoever "wins" the war
- Objectives for war. They can be economic (inflict X ISK damage to win, or for the defender, earn X ISK to win), or strategic (destroy a fixed asset to win, or defend it to win)
- Limit the scope for war to the entire universe/region/constellation/system. Also, options for high-sec/low-sec

This model actually solves a bunch of other problems. My #1 complaint about low-sec is that it is impossible to use small ships due to station guns/gate guns and a full-fledged war dec will also affect high-sec activities. Why not make it really cheap to have low-sec war decs? This will allow use of all ships without GCC in low-sec, while keeping high-sec activities safe

You can also have very interesting new game modes with this. For example, capture the flag in high-sec? That is just a strategic war in a single system, where each team has one fixed asset that they must protect and one that they must attack. All you have to do is have some mechanic for how to "capture" a flag, and bam! CTF in EvE. This can open the door for casual/arena-style PVP in the same vein as RvB


Apologies for the wall of text, but I had a lot to say.

tl;dr
- The aggressor has to place a non-trivial amount of ISK into escrow for whoever "wins" the war
- Objectives for war. They can be economic (inflict X ISK damage to win, or for the defender, earn X ISK to win), or strategic (destroy a fixed asset to win, or defend it to win)
- Limit the scope for war to the entire universe/region/constellation/system. Also, options for high-sec/low-sec.

Generally very welcome, however I'd like to see this

replaced with a formula that takes into account both the size of the target AND aggressor corps. Otherwise you can have a large corp with, say, 5000 members, permanently wardec literally hundreds of small crops at relatively little cost.

If there was a way for indy corps to declare "war" on a merc corp or a nullsec corp that forced them to mine or log off for a week, you know people would be up in arms and the "lul you chose to pvp and I support that, soz u dont want to mine" would never fly.

This is without a doubt an anti indy move and anyone who can't see that is likely going to be shooting miners. I don't see why war decs are needed in the first place, there are plenty of people who want to pvp in low sec and null sec.

That's true too, they can get all the PvP they want in lowsec and nullsec, why do they need to PvP in hisec?

There are many small corps who have a POS in high sec. They are small for standings reasons, so ballooning up will defeat the purpose.

What if you could pay CONCORD 5 million isk per character per day/week/whatever to now allow wars against your corp? Make this only allowed for corps of a certain size or lower. You guys are looking for ISK sinks right? Bill this the same way as SOV.

The other solution may be to allow POS deployment for individuals in NPC corps rather than being launched under the corp banner.

A lot of cottage businesses will go under from griefers with wars that can go on forever. If you pay for surrender other corps will come to the well over and over again in a giant extortion ring.

Of course, the prices/ratios/etc will need to be adjusted for risk vs reward vs opportunity. A universe-wide war should cost more and be harder to win than something much more local. It should also be possible to add new objectives as the war continues.

Another idea is to have public "protection" contracts for mercs. A corp should be able to buy "protection" services from another corp that will automatically drag them into war if the first corp is war-decced. Since war results will show in corp histories, losing such a war will make it difficult for bad merc corps to stay in business. The contracts should be public so that others can see who all is protecting a corp before deccing them. (This will also make it interesting if a merc corp is in 10 protection contracts at the same time and someone decides to dec all of them at the same time....)

I rather like this ^_^
One of the problems with the current system is the agressor generally has very little risk, esp when griefing industry corps. They can end any time they want without penalty and, as others have pointed out, often these corps are alts anyway so they can always go play with their mains if they get bored.

Another possibility would be they have to put a structure up as escrow.. say a POS (total value of modules equal to a certain amount, unable to unanchor modules during wardec, must be in high sec for wardec to be valid in high sec, etc)

The problem with this is that a 10 man corp can be decced by an 8,000 member alliance for 25m, but if the 10 man corp wanted to dec the alliance it would cost over 4b isk. There is no symmetry in this -- you really need to factor in the aggressor size into the formula.