Warfare & Tactics

Sounds like high sec war deccers crying?!?! Omg let me mine your tears and tell you the same thing you tell industry corps that complain about being wardecced...

DEAL WITH IT OR GROW BALLS AND MOVE TO 0.0


.....or go back to WoW

The stick I propose for getting people out of NPC corps is making NPC corps act more like player corps: introduce shifting passive hostility between them, ranging from increased taxes to denial of docking privileges. If you can thrive in an NPC corp where you might find Jita 4-4 inaccessible for several days on the whim of a fictional Board of Directors, then more power to you. Those who want more control can take the risks that come with that power.

As for getting the bears to fight: There needs to be a tangible purpose for fighting. There's a wardec roundtable thread over in C&P where Psychotic Monk proposed the idea of a POCO-like structure that corps could anchor, creating a point of conflict in wars. I took that idea and turned it into a corporate office, required for the corporation to exist. This would mean that every corporation that is at war has a point that they MUST defend. It's probably not the best solution, but it's something that would take fighting off of gates and stations where aggro mechanics win more fights than real skill.

All talk about changing the game to make industrialists fight ignores the reason most do not want to do PvP combat: they do not get The Rush.

The Rush is a good felling one gets with and after a burst of adrenaline associated with an exciting experience, like PvP combat. Not everyone gets The Rush. Some get no pleasure from adrenaline, and some actually feel bad or sick from it. According to Dr. Drew Pinsky, the difference between these people is genetic. You are born to get The Rush, or you are not. The result is some players will not enjoy PvP and actively seek to avoid it, and no amount of game tweaking will change that, because game tweaking will not change their genes. After all this is a game, people will tend to avoid game activities that make them sick. Instead they do cooperative activities, industry, missions and the like, or just play as solo players.

If you add sufficient disadvantages to staying in NPC corps, those players will just quit. If they quit you cannot shoot their ships, CCP gets less money, fires more people, and we get fewer fixes. If you add advantages to being in a corp, advantages that would be war targets, industrial corps will either work around them or ignore them. But most will not fight for them.

Honestly, I fancy myself a industrialist/mission runner. I agree, 0.0 is great fun. I was there for a very short time, and I wasn't prepared well enough for what was expected of me. Many times in 0.0 it is blob vs blob. Sometimes it is small gang. Anyway I digress, the point I want to make about PvP in general for games, is that people love close matches. Nothing gets people talking more about a PvP experience than getting close to dying but pulling it off, or gets them craving more than a close match. Many computer games try to even the playing field by enforcing organized matches, and then making sure the sides have roughly the same number of players, with a similar experience level. No such mechanics exist in EVE except for the alliance tournament. What essentially adds up to a level 3 mage (merlin) in EVE could have to face a level 100 fallen paladin (bhaalgorn) in PvP.

I don't like high sec PvP right now because, as floppietheclown said, it is more around managing game mechanics around stations and gates. Suppose I have one hostile with a buffer tanked proteus camping a station (35K armor, 260K EHP). I can get ECM or neut and break the tackle, move to another station where I have stuff to refit, then snipe him, which then just makes him dock, and refit a sniper, or just dock until something more manageable comes around. Wasn't that PvP experience fun? Maybe I can bait him to a belt or somewhere else where he can't dock. Maybe my corp can muster 10 BS with sniper fits and we can pick him off, once we bait him with a tasty cruiser, and hope that we can pull off the 260k damage in under 1 minute.

Hisec wardecs are fun if you can win the intel war (generally via having scads of alts) or the neutral RR war (generally by having scads of alts).

While Floppie's critique of nullsec has some points, particularly with the adherence to doctrines, he is a sissy carebear who obviously can't translate "I put a spai into my WT's corp a month ago" to being equivalent to "I put an alt in a cloaky a jump behind us in the pipe to avoid getting rickrolled by a 90 man sniper blob". Your criticism is based on your inability to adjust your tactics properly - including being prepared for a titan bridging a pile of ships onto your head.

The same for lowsec; the problem Skunkworks will have in lowsec is that anyone can shoot them, meaning there are manifold entities over which they have no control. Oddly enough, this is also exactly how warfare works in nullsec, where spies are a constant companion, much like fleas or benign intestinal worms.

There are plenty of nullsec entities who cannot fight once you remove their spy from your corp, alliance or fleet. The same will be true for plenty of highsec griefers and super-prosuf wardec experts.

What hisec has over anywhere else is a combination of stations anyone can dock at (unlike nullsec, w-space), a paucity of POSs that people can refuge at (eg; nullsec, w-space), a clear set of people you can shoot and people you can't (unlike anywhere else) which creates the whole neutral RR hassle (try bringing neutral RR to a w-space fight).

I'm not saying any security domain is better than the other; lowsec pirates have their skillset (eg; camping Rancer), nullsec people have their skillsets (drama llamas, greedy alliance XO's, sov gringing is fun) and w-space dwellers have their skillsets (FIGJAM, awesomeness, no local), and hisec people have their skillsets (alts, alts, alts, Locates R Us, more alts). Each to their own.

The problem of cost for wars...well, maybe it would result in a 2.5 bloc EVE eventually. Certainly nullsec, barring another DRF-style meltdown, is coalescing into at most 5 major powers at the moment, and they will soon easily coalesce into 2. This will flow on into hisec, in an ideal world, with a perfect flow of infomation and infinite, instantaneous diplomacy.

The reality is that, due to the low barriers to entry and exit and the minuscule cost of dummy spits and table flips, corps and alliances come and go and join and leave rapidly - much more rapidly than IRL entities. This means that the potential for mega-alliances in hisec forming and ossifying is minuscule. They'll get big, but all it takes is one bad war, handled badly by a self-important asocial numbskull alliance head or CEO (dummy spit), and people will leave the organisation (table flips), dropping its numbers and precipitating failcascade.

I mean, this happens in nullsec at a rapid rate where people have to jump stuff in and out, creating logistical headaches and causing inertia. In hisec, you can buy whatever you want, whenever you want, and nothing gets lost.

Then, there's the issue of imperfect information and diplomacy. The OP's doomsday scenario assumes a static population of players; EVE has plenty of fresh blood as the active player base churns in and out. These people start the game often with no contacts, no diplomatic skills (and often pick none up) and no information. Without this, they may form a corp, attract 5-15 members, and never realise that they can talk to other CEO's in a polite manner without becoming self-important douchenozzles, thereby preventing themselves from ever joining a mega alliance.

In reality, the propensity of EVE players to be drama llama douches will stop everyone getting into the same mega-alliance together. So, why worry that a 4 man corp can't afford to dec goons?

Highsec PVP is just lame pvp. Being able to hide with concord is just lame you know.

They should allow cynos to be lit in highsec where only covert ops jumping and titan bridge jumping will work with it.

This oughta spice up pvp in highsec, keep them guessing.

Highsec PVP is way to easy and predictable, having hotdrops will make things interesting and force players to take risks like they

do in lowsec and nullsec.

I don't know what CCP's goal is, besides 'sandbox', and multiple ways to make isk and hurt people, and lots of subscriptions. Do they want mega alliance? Do they want lots of small corps? What is the purpose of wardec'ing? Frankly, I doubt they know either, and that they are making changes to fix a problem that they cannot identify (wardec'ing doesn't work) because they don't know what the thing they have is supposed to do (ie, what is the purpose of wardec'ing?), probably because of some philosophy of "let the players decide how to use the tools we give them." With this philosophy, you'll see people trying to use the tools for all sorts of purposes, like people using a screwdriver to pound something in, or for in game analogy, using the friend invite system to create corp members to increase the cost of wardec'ing.

As for logistics in the superalliance, you are right in that it will reach a critical mass and not be able to grow. They will probably supplement the inability to move people by spamming trials into their alliance/altallaince/altaltaltalliances. I know I would. Sure, they could make rules to combat this, or even discourage large corps to begin with (200K/month per member charged to corp wallet). The question CCP needs to ask of themselves, "What is wardec used for? Do we want small corps to be viable? Who are we favoring with changes?" They can't make changes to a competitive system without favoring one side. They also can't revamp a system without making certain tactics unusable.

TL,DR:
You can't call something "not working as intended" if there is no intentional use.

Key problem of eve. There is no real reason for war, except for the lulz.

Non-aggression pacts and non-invasion pacts are as much about the alliance XO's having a couple of months to play the game without boring as old people sex sov grinding as it is about some horrible conspiracy to turn the game into ratting, botting ISK-printing Online.

As long as you have someone to roam, who really wants interminable siege timers for 6 months on end?

Wrong.

You are looking at war from a griefing pov, and not someone who truly loves to pvp. If war was consensual, wouldn't you get a lot more epic battles because both sides wanted to fight?

War in high sec is not about resources; it's about making high sec bearable. War in low sec/null is about resources (moons, stations, etc.).

This game would be a whole lot better if limited resources in high sec essentially forced both interested parties to go to war with each other, and keep fighting until one side decides it isn't worth it any longer.