Warfare & Tactics

In order to shield themselves from wars, it seems likely that with current costs of alliance membership (2M/month) that people wanting to avoid war in high sec will use the cost of 500K per member to their advantage. I imagine each person will have their main and one alt in their corp, and that large amounts of corps will ally together to possibly get around 2,000 members (many inactive), making the cost of wardec'ing them over 1Billion isk. If someone shells out that much, unless people are unable to leave the a wardec'ed corp, I imagine they would migrate each member over to a secondary alliance for the duration. Besides, the cost of making a new alliance (1B isk) means that it becomes a war of isk, with the high member super alliance probably being more able to foot the bill. This leaves the aggressor with a wardec that is now against a alliance that just has place holder alts.

Wars cannot be fixed by making it more expensive to war'dec larger numbers of people. Wars should be about territory and resources. Both sides should have a target, within a reasonable amount of jumps, that, if destroyed, ends the war. This would necessitate a structures that can be deployed in most systems that isn't a POS or POCO, whose only purpose is to enable war.

So both side's have to put up one of these structures in order for the war to go active? That will kill wars in Empire space as I can't see a single industrial corp scrambling to anchor one... having thought about this a bit more I acutally can see them putting them up and then nuking them to lose the war and bring it to an end minuets later.

Your idea only has merit in a system of consensual war. The fact that war in eve is not consensual is what makes this game great.

No matter what you do you will never be able to pin your enemy down 100% in this game, there are no corners into which you can back them where they have no option but to fight.

As for the situation of 2000 player alliances this can be easily counterd by the PvP corps forming into thier own 2000+ player alliances to offset the cost of the wardec, and as you mentioned most of the carebear alliance members will be inactive! I'd wager most of the 2000 pvp players alliance will be active.

I can get the reasoning that you should not be going to wars in EVE just for fun (*), but why not for ransoms? That's a concrete goal, and it is about resources (namely getting them out of people who have them)?

(*) Not sure I agree with it, but I understand the argument, at least.

I just happen to think it would be MORE fun if it were over something valuable.

It will be an interesting question from the high-sec industrialist point of view. Making a big alliance will mean you will get decced less often by low-quality ganker types who do not really have the resources to spend a billion or so every couple of weeks, or interest in being outnumbered even by carebears. It means, though, that when you get decced, it will be people who actually want fights with huge numbers of people (instead of just a small corp they can easily overwhelm). So it's either more frequent decs from crappier people, or fewer decs but hotter wars.

Or am I missing something?

Except the bears will hibernate for 24hours while they swap corps to an alt alliance, wasting your 1B isk. You can't lock players into a corp that is wardec'ed. That would make griefing noobs easy, just lure them into a corp, have your alt corp war'dec it (have a few alt corps, rotate as needed) then pop them till they quit. But if you don't have players locked in wardec'ed corps, they will quit corp, causing tearmongers to produce tears. However, the idea below would give tearmongers something to pad their KB with, ie change mechanics such that bears cannot as easily save their POS, POCO, or a proposed new mining base (proposed by me, but probably not original, though I haven't seen any ideas).

I was also thinking about how to abuse the new system last night, and since they haven't mentioned it specifically, the bears will spawn trial accounts, and have the trials (3 dead members) join corp. The trails accounts will remain in corp long after the trial expires. Even making trial accounts not count won't help, a bear has 500M isk to then buy a plex for his trial account, make it a real account, and get a plex in return, which could be sold back on the market. This would cost the bear at most 5-10M, more likely 1-5M. The 3 new members will cost all aggressors 1.5M each time they wardec. Again, this makes it an isk war, and I'm afraid mega bears will win.

You can encourage the bears have structures. Add a mining base which helps mining, either by acting like a orca adding increase laser range and a bay you can dump in, or just flat out increased mining amount, or decreased cycle. I'd also like the rules adjusted such that when a wardec happens that the structures can't be as easily unanchored to avoid the war. Since I've never been involved in putting starbases up, just bashing them, my research hasn't indicated whether a starbase can be unanchored while reinforced. As far as I can tell, no they can't. Anyway, the rules should be you can't unanchor a reinforced starbase, but the process of unanchoring can be completed 24hours after it is out of reinforcement, to give attackers a chance to put it in reinforcement and then to destroy it. Anyone who puts up a POS should have a risk to lose it in a wardec, given that the owners have a fighting chance of ending the war by destroying an attackers structure too.

TLDR
bears will move out of a the mega alliance into the mega alt alliance if wardec'ed. They will spawn members via trial accounts or buddy system. Aggressors left with 10B isk bill, and nothing to shoot

Solution, add war structure for attackers to be bear targets (ie bear bait), and add structures for bears to build, such as high sec POCO's (perhaps make it so there are two spots in some systems, one NPC undestructable, and one POCO), POS's, mining bases, and maybe even mission bases (increase bounty of missions within 2 jumps). Then make sure the structures can be destroyed by attackers. Then wardec costs will be kinda okay, since the mega bear alliance would lose vast amounts of structures, or they would be structureless, and be gaining less isk than a bear corp that has structures.

TLDR of solution, have target for defenders to attack. Encourage bears to build stuff for attackers to shoot, forcing them to lose their 200M mining base, or fight.

This right here is the root problem that needs to be solved.

This is the real problem. Want wars over resources? Its called Null Sec. Most high sec war decs are just people who sit in Jita looking for an easy kill (or have a fleet of neutral reppers in system, lawl). I see little value whatsoever in wardeccing. Resource wars are happeneing all over eve, just not in empire space =P.

Anyway, my bet is that CCP tries to repeatedly bandaid their new puppy. First they might try making the wardec costs be 500K per active member, someone that has logged in within a month, which will result in carebears throwing away their old trials and making new ones every month, resulting in reduced performance with their database. They might try before or after adding a longer "corp changing cooldown" when you get wardec'ed, which will fail and/or be used to grief (see above on locking noobs into a corp to grief them). For example, if it increases you stasis or time between declining roles by any amount over a total of 48hours, it will be used to grief. If it doesn't, it won't have any real affect. If each war adds X amount, again, grief city, and good bye new people. They might even try to patch the buddy system. Some failing suggestions which will hurt the game are removing the plex as a reward, requiring a credit card, or requiring that you pay $15 for the first month. So, after a few months of carebears ruining EVE via trial spams (you know how bad their servers get with the RMT and scammer trial accounts), they might revert wardec's. Depending if they still disable the wardec shedding will determine whether carebears flee en mass to NPC corps.

Fact: EVE is PvP. But EVE is such a good game that people who don't want PvP try to play it anyway, and spend lots of time and resources to avoid PvP. So, either we can really force the PvP'ness of EVE, but then all the terminal carebears flee to NPC corps. Conceivably we could really force them to PvP by having a SP maximum for NPC corps, but if you really force someone to do something they don't want to, they might just give up on EVE in the end.

Besides, if we really want to make EVE pure hardcore PvP, why have empire space in the first place? I guess you could make a one way gate where you start at a place with flowers and butterflies and no bad evil people to grief you, but no good gear either, and you can cross the one way portal and end up in low or null and can't go back.

CCP is planning a change to the wardec system that is a response to a few dozen people who like to camp Jita 4-4 and wardec big alliances for easy kills. The proposed "fix" is going to make the mercenary profession dwindle even more and result in more noob bashing as griefers are driven to go after more affordable war targets.

But I guess that's okay because the big alliances can now move through empire space safely.