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After reading about Half of the 20+ pages, then realized it was just about the same 3-4 dudes bantering over & over and not seeing any further Dev updates I wanted to throw my 2 isk in. Here goes:

I was very excited to see CCP Finally look into the War Dec Mechanics.
Kill and War Reports = Win; Making Wars stick with the Decced Corp = Win; Having a proper Surrender & Negotiation via Peace contract = Win; Allowing Mercs to be contracted to Aid = Win!

Then I saw this:


WHAT THE FRAK!!! Inferno quickly went from Inferno of good times PvP to Eve will quickly die in a Fire Inferno and become Cearbear/Eve-Uni Online. Do you really want to replicate the Incarna mistakes. In my four+ years of playing, this is probably the biggest thing that you're tampering with, because it deals with the Very Heart of Eve which is PvP.

The ASSumptions made in this thread are absurd. Everyone seems to think that all High Sec PvPers are Alts and all have a GaBillion ISK to throw around. Much to the same tune that all Industry and Miners are loaded in ISK. Maybe some of you are loaded, congrats, you have the time to spend to build your Isk rolling machine or time to spend to grind missions, whatever... Many of us are casual gamers, i.e. can only play for a couple hours 1-3 times a week. We want to be able to engage in what we enjoy, for us it's spaceship PvP for me and my small 8 man corp. CCP, do you have something against small corps all of a sudden? First the minimum requirement to have a corp forum and now this Royal screw job in our PvP. And before the LOL High sec PvP flames burst out, we enjoy small scale PvP, w/o having to worry about 30 man + gangs blobbing. And a small group of friends that don't want the drama of a large Corp/Alliance prefer to keep it small.  
More to the point, I wouldn't mind an increased base War cost. 2 mil was very cheap. But to go to such an insane dynamic cost of 20 mil + 500k/target member... So our typical 20 man corp we go after is now 30 mil a week! I could validate a War dec being 10 Mil, or have some kind of Fair Corp member count to Corp member count cost ratio. Tbh the only fair thing is to keep a flat fee as it currently is, just up the cost to 10 mil per dec.

I love a few suggestions in this thread that actually tackle the Heart of the problem, which is to give the Defender a goal, or a way to gain control of the war, via end of week Isk damage or to take out an attackers POS or "War" installation. If the defenders stay docked the war can easily continue, but if they fight or hire a merc ally, they have a shot to end the war and force a peace contract.         

As far as Ally's being hired in, the limit should be 1 ally per attacker. The Merc should be locked in per each week until A) war is retracted or succeeded or B) they opt out at the end of the War week.   

Peace contracts should have the flexability to dictate Isk, Items, ships, the amount of peace time (days, months, years, or indefinitely) and how soon the War can end (i.e. 24 hr cooldown or Immediately).   

Bottom line is, you have to provide a middle ground on this... It's a PvP based game... The changes you have proposed really lean towards the "Big Corp/Alliances", it's just Blatantly obvious... And the cost hike is leaned to the Carebears and the larger entities once again and wiping out the small guys in all realms. This won't be the Sandox that it has always been. Wars will decrease dramatically... Means less destruction, which means less demand for everything, which means costs plummet and there goes Eve down the preverbial drain. All the bad that the Carebears whine about is the very source of what drives there income. It's just beyond Ironic, it's idiodic if this War cost stays so high.
Please don't create another Incarna disaster... This will be far worse.

Any word from CCP on this?

Optimist? :D

As long as the costs across the board end up in the 100M low-end and 1B ISK upper-end (for the really big corps or disparate sizes), I'll be content.

I feel that if you want to wage war in hi-sec, you should be prepared to pony up some ISK for it and the 3M/50M existing fees are simply too cheap. Raising that to at least 100-200M means that there's a minimum buy-in and you're not just going to wardec for the lulz. With that kind of scratch on the table, you're going to go in with a plan on how to hurt your opponents, not just half-arsed saying "well, the fee is only 3M/50M, so we'll throw stuff at the wall and see if it sticks". A higher buy-in means that your attackers are more likely to show up and fight. If you can't afford 100-200M/wk at the lower end, then you should go with low-cost suicide ganks instead.

On the flip-side, I don't think the fees should go above about 1B ISK unless you are doing multiple outbound decs at the same time. No organization should be able to price itself out of range, and when you get above 1.5-2.0B ISK per week, that's what will happen. Which is why I put forward using the N^1/4 (or quad -root) as a way to still scale the costs, but with diminishing returns as you get more and more members. You could argue that even 1B/wk at the upper end is too much, but it's not hard to come up with 1B ISK in the current economy.

This is based on my core belief that war in hi-sec is an extension of economic warfare. Since there's no territory to be won/lost (other then POS tower anchor points), your goal in a hi-sec war is to either destroy assets (ships, towers) or to deny income (keep mission/incursion runners docked up), or for e-peen / pride / anger / lulz. The first two are thus economic goals so it makes sense that you should have to pony up some money to do so.

Well if you define PvP as fighting PL in nullsec I guess there's not much to say....

And no, you don't make money by griefing carebears (I'm guessing that's your euphemism for hi-sec wars/PvP). What would make you think that's in anyway profitable? 99% of the time you'd be better off doing almost anything else to make iskies. You do hi-sec wars to get small controllable PvP without it turning into blobfests or hotdrops. Not to make money. When I want that, I just do exploration or Incursions.

Well, the little details can be left to what people suggests, but the key note must be that wars must not be enforced if the defender doesn't wants to PvP.

Some (most!) players choose to not involve in PvP. That should be a legit stance and this people should not be bothered.

Enough is enough, if PvP don't have the galls to get their fun in lowsec/nullsec, don't spoil hiseccer's fun to "fix" that!

Better address War Dec'ign Corps picking on high sec only non pvp corps ... if we can no longer escape us smaller corps who have no PVP desires are going to be hounded by the current war-decing corps whose only purpose is to try and bug the little guy!

........If my existing alliance gets locked in to a war'dec war I won't be hanging out... I will be quitting EVE so think hard on this CCP as to the number of us who have no interest in PVP and therefore stick in highsec to avoid such things you have been warned

I agree.

I really don't like the idea that you can have a sov holding alliance being total douchebags out in 0.0 shooting everyone and everything that moves - but when they want to go highsec they want protection from game mechanics that make it more expensive to dec them than it does the average highsec player.. They want their cake, and the want to eat it too.

I think I understand the concern. A one man corp can cause havoc for a big alliance in highsec. But it's only because the big bad 0.0 alliance can't bother with defense in high sec. They want to use high sec like it's Walmart. I think this is bad for the game. No markets in 0.0 stinks. No people in 0.0 stinks.

I have a little experience here. I declared war in my one man corp against a 300 man alliance. I then solo'd 4 of their freighters. You know what it would have taken to save those ships? A single webber, or a single blackbird or griffin. But they can't be bothered. Big bad 0.0 power blocks.

I don't know if the changes are to address the 'problem' described above, but the real solution is for these 0.0 sov holding alliances to behave in highsec like they do in 0.0 - powerfully.

Well the problem I seen recently. War dec corp hugs the station and won't come out to attack unless it's an easy target. If you are attacker, then attack don't just sit there. Last 3 wars I saw the attackers once and I was rarely in station.

How much per member is it going to cost to dec someone? Why SHOULD it cost more?

Couldn't it be argued that there is enough benefit in being a large corp/allaince - that you don't need the added protection of it being ridiculously expensive to wardec a large alliance or corp? There is more risk with deccing a large corp or alliance, so why should the aggressor pay more for more risk?

Player behavior is always modified by CCP rules. All this will do is drive small corps into dummy alliances designed to make war deccing them expensive. Already EVE University is setting up a dec shield by putting as many alts into a dummy corp in Ivy League as they can. They are inviting all former graduates to put alts into this corp, just to increase their alliance size to form a dec shield.

I love EVE U, I'm a huge fan, but what they are doing illustrates the problem with the mechanic as proposed. The idea behind the war changes is to prevent dec shielding. Instead it's actually making dec shielding easier, because now the folks participating in the shield don't have to pay anything for that shield other than the cost of forming a mega alliance. Granted it requires a certain amount of power and prestige to build such an alliance, and some isk at the outset. And maybe CCP wants to create a market for "mega alliance spots for sale" in order to avoid decs, but I doubt that.

The point is - all fees, costs, etc.. have unintended consequences and making it cost prohibitive to wardec a 1000+ member alliance will have the unintended consequence of driving more people into 1000+ member alliances and perhaps resulting in LESS war, not more.

One might even argue that it would make more sense to prevent over-griefing of small corps by making it more expensive to dec a corp much smaller than you. Large corps already have an advantage, as I stated, they shouldn't need the added protection of being expensive to dec. But perhaps smaller corps need such protection.

I'm looking forward to Inferno - I am hoping to see lots of war declaration out there - but I am concerned that CCP is not taking into account those unintended consequences.

Argus

P.S. Found the answer to my question. 500,000 is probably too much. I don't think larger corps/alliances should be more expensive AT ALL. They already have the advantage of being large.

Why should I be able to game the system by keeping inactives and random alts in my corp to drive the price up. Or why should I be able to recruit random corps into a dummy alliance so we can all hide from war decs?

CCP says they want more war (or at least that's what I gathered) - if they want empire wars to be more viable and make it harder for people to dec shield, then this is the wrong way to go.

I think you're sorely mistaken if you believe that giving e-uni a means to make it prohibitively expensive to declare war on e-uni while claiming to have fixed dec shielding is in any way unintended.

CCP don't care about highsec gameplay being good or making sense, they care about making sure there is some mechanic that e-uni can abuse the hell out of to get protection from wars. The consequences for the rest of highsec are secondary to that imperative.