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Nay, CCP is certain that "The White Knights, Inc" is going to help out all the smaller fishes in distress just for fun, assured PvP and out of their golden hearts.

Still loving how nobody is realizing just how badly the "unlimited allies" thing will f-up wars.

Are you saying by this that allies that join a war are NOT locked into that war for the duration? Afterall, the defender has 0.0 influence over the length of the war.



This isn't so much about the defender getting back at him, so please do not try to spin it that way. It is about the defender having control of the wardec under certain circumstances. This gives them the ability to either end the wardec (which most defenders will want to do) or continue it.

Given your responses, can you answer the following questions:

Would you agree that the wardec system (as proposed) continues to be a simple "pay to grief" system, because players can become locked into a playstyle they did not choose and do not enjoy, without a direct way of changing that situation? If you agree, why is this good for Eve and it's players? If you do not agree, why do you not agree with this statement?

Well, of course, because hisec miners roll in money!

It would be nice, hisec miners being forced to bot to pay for defending themselves from wardecs...

Oh, and what about casual players, who run a couple missions a week? And general solo palyers?

What about everyfuckingbody who CHOOSES to stay away from PvP?

Individual pilots dropping a war-decced corp:

Create an individual surrender fee of 500k isk. Aggressor corps can directly recoup their costs and successful defender corps can pile on the pain.

I have no problem with the 10 man corp having to pay the 4b isk to dec the large origanisation. For me the problem is the cost to the large alliance is so small it is irrelevant. A large corp / alliance could effectively perma-dec many smaller 10 man corps for ***** and giggles and not notices the cost.

One of the concerns brought up at fanfest was: How does this system make the agressor commited to the war?

This is a big question. If you have the isk and an alt corp, you can just prolong the war without even fighting. but you can dock some of your people in the area where the defender has his base and pose a constand threat (like afk cloackers do in nullsec with the threat of having a cyno and bringing in a huge force).

This is a problem if you have pvpers and miners which you can not really protect 24/7. This can hurt a PvE or industry corp a lot.

This is one of the main reasons to declare a war: look for easy targets and hide if they start to bring in PvP ships to fight back.

One Idea i came up with to make the agressor commit to the war and bring a fight:

Partys in a war have a "commited" flag. This is set by the following rules:
Agressor is commited.
Defender is not commited, unless he declares the war mutual.
Allys brought into the war are commited.

What does that flag do?
If you are commited and a wartarget is in system, no station manager will allow you to dock. Only exception: you are in a pod.
Your ship will send a locator signal which allows to scan you down with a ship scanner. This gives a warping 50-250km off your positon. If you are cloacked, the distances are reduced (to allow sweeping the space to find the ship). The warpin is some distance off to give the chance to flee, but you will be chased until you can make it into a system without wartargets.

What should that do?
You can not dock and log off in areas where the opponend is based if you are commited. You can not play docking games as a commited party. You can be found easiely as a commited party. It gives the defender the means to control actions of the aggressor (if you hang out in his base systems, he can either stay docked or come to a fight, but not much in between) and come up with defence strategies.

Why are allys commited?
They are brought in to fight, so they will be under the same rules as the agressor. If a pvp corp declares a war, another pvp corp can join on the defender side to get a fight. but then they should bring a fight and not hide. It will also make an ally think about the situation before signing in for a war.

My biggest concern is that the defender can bring in unlimited allies at only the cost of what the allies want. While this works in subset of situations involving mercs, the reality is that a lot of people have actual allies who would join the war for free if possible. Not only that, I would bet that a good number of people (namely griefers and dec corps) would be willing to join these wars for free, so that they get tons of free decs, which has the ability to completely undermine the whole 'merc as a career path' thing.

Furthermore, not limiting the number of allies that a defender can bring in, either by strict limit or financially, makes it so that the aggressor can never make a calculated decision as to whether or not the war is actually worth their money. To address this, I'd like to see two things implemented as caveats of the ally system:

1) In addition to any contract between the defender and the ally (in terms of ISK), the defender must also pay an 'ally fee' equivalent to the dec fee the aggressor paid to bring in an allied entity. This price increases with the appropriate modifier (20m if defender is a corp, 50m if defender is an alliance) for every ally brought in. This has the handy side effect of adding more ISK sinks \o/

2) Put a strict limit on the number of allies a defender can bring into the war. I'm thinking three (3) is a pretty fair number.

In all honesty, I'd be happy if just the first suggestion was implemented, and the second would be cake. That's mostly because the first one implements the second in form of financial restrictions, which is honestly a better solution than a strict number, because it's more 'sandboxy.'

As a side note the idea of allies joining the war in less than 24 hours is pretty terrible. The biggest advantage of the 24-hour timer is that everyone gets a decent notification period that new entities are entering the war. Since you are, in essence, declaring a new war on the aggressor for each of the allies, it is reasonable that they actually have fair warning.

I think this is part of the perception problem that really needs to be taken into account. Casual players tend to have little ISK. Personally I can maybe manage 1-2 missions per week and maybe a few hours of mining. I don't have the cash (or cashflow) for a dickstar and last time I did put up a POS I didn't even know about the wardec before it was blown apart (not everyone can sign on every few hours to get those notifications). Crow, even something as simple as email notification (rather then EvE's internal mail system) would help there....

The current wardec system pretty much stops me from doing POS stuff, and my light schedule keeps me out of 'real' corps which generally require much more of a time commitment then many casual players can handle.

If I was less honest, I would look at botting, since that is the only way I could actually have the resources that people tend to assume I must have....

I am wondering why the "Ally Contract" doesn't have any options for expiration. Won't Merc Corps demand stupidly high prices since they have no way of knowing how long that initial lump sum might obligate them to participate in the war? It could be a week, a month, a year or even forever (assuming there is no limit to how many times the agressor can renew the war).

I guess it does give Merc Corps extra incentive to ruin the aggressors so they end the war quickly but I thought you wanted reputation to serve as that incentive for Mercs?