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From my understanding with the proposed system I could do the following:

1. Sneak a corp thief (or thieves) into a bunch of carebear corps and steal their stuff.
2. Join my new corp called Team Punching Bag with all of those corp thieves.
3. Wait for the wardecs from the carebear corps for revenge
4. When they come call on my allies (all in griefer corps)
5. Mutual every war

From my understanding the carebear corporations will have to effectively disband to avoid being hunted down in HS forever by my allies for free. I have no real incentive to accept a surrender because we're getting to beat up on some bears indefinitely for no cost. Their only choice is to disband which makes the victory even sweeter.

The proposed system seems like a terrible mistake waiting to happen for a corporation to use that has a PvE/PvP split because if they dec another they could pay for it for their rest of their corp's life.

Without a time frame the risks of being an ally (without personal interest, e.g. a mercenary rather than a friendly corp/alliance) prevent any realistic pricing, as the defending corporation could effectively hold the ally in the war dec forever.

Say corp A declares a war on friendly corp B, makes it mutual. Then corp B enlists some ally corp C, suckered in by the tantalising prospect of usable mercenary mechanics, for which corp B pays X. Then corp B proceeds to afk/jump ship to A/remote-rep A and both grief poor corp C, unless they pay ALL THE MONEY to end the war.

Or they could disband their corp, which is increasingly looking to be the response CCP are aiming for.

The scale of these changes are far too large to be rushed in, a mercenary market and new war mechanics are HUGE features and deserve to be given the amount of care they need to work well (alternatively give up the massive patch approach so there's less resentment and butthurt when you can't deliver what's promised/implied).

Awww look at the whittle gankers and griefers now scared that they actually will be on the receiving end of a blob for once. This is almost as good as the pirate whines when CCP boosted concord to stop the completely free ganks that were happening beforehand.

CCP you are doing the right thing. I do agree that the mutual issue needs to be addressed but their other whines are just because they are scared that they cant game the system for free ganks and the joy of causing people to remain logged off anymore.

Lots of good ideas and some even good opinions being posted.
My initial take on the allies and costs would have to be:
"the defender didn't WarDec anyone and should never have to pay for any allies to join in."
Well, except of course if they are hiring the ally but, that's paid to the ally and not CONCORD.

Please don't change your gameplay. It's just fine and I am sure there will be a fair number of very small corps being WarDec'd by big alliances that would be glad to have you as an Ally. You'll still get to shoot big alliances ... but for free!

Stupid phone, I made a reply about this yesterday and it didn't go through. So anyways...

One complaint I saw is that if Corp A is wardecced by Corp B, Corp A then calls in Corp C as a defender, but Corp C is working for Corp B, just to get Corp A's ISK for accepting the contract.

So why not have an OPTIONAL bounty system setup, these guys are mercs, make them earn their money!

Here is an example I had in mind.

Corp A sets up a contract for an ally to protect them. Reward for accepting the contract is 1m, followed by 200m in ship kill bounties offered. Corp A then can set the bounty for specific ship classes, such as 5k for a frigate, 500k for a battleship, 5m for a logistics, 8m for a HAC, etc. All this will be visible by the merc corps applying. Corp A could also set a minimum threshold of bounty rewards before the total is paid off to the merc corp to ensure that they do fight or no pay, but have the option to pay them regardless.

Once the bounty rewards are used up, the contract ends with an option to renew by Corp A. By having Corp A set the bounty prices, if they do it right, they can avoid insurance fraud, or at least profitable fraud. And like I said, it can be an optional addition.

I realize that CCP wants it simple to begin with, but might be good for future improvements.

You do have a point, but you have to keep in mind, it cuts both ways.

On one hand, CCP is trying to deploy a framework with the expectation of fixing things and expanding to take care of buildup by the half-expansion patch, and that's good. Getting things into the wild sooner rather than later can be important, otherwise there will be major deployment problems and nobody wants that.

On the other hand... the players have a lot of concerns. CCP shares many of these concerns and is aware of these problems, but they need to both be given the opportunity to answer concerns from the playerbase then actually take this opportunity to be vocal, letting the player know what their longer term plan is in more detail in the first place. It's still hard for them because they have to give the right amount of information, without being too verbose and ruining the future of the game for people or causing needless conjecture on ideas that are not finished.

It's really something both sides need to work on.

great idea, and hope you do this soon, and you do it could be the same system thats used for bounty and bounty hunting!!!! 2 systems fixed 1 system

Unfortunately I can't see this change resulting in anything other than a complete stiffling of the mercenary market as it is currently, and a general de-valueing of what existing corporations have built in the absence of CCP's presence here (Merc Contracts). An increase in price is justified on size comparison, but the ally system is going to change the landscape entirely, and instead of making difficult for griefers, they have made it easier.

When you consider the defender can bring in allies at no cost to get involved, this may be beneficial for the industrial corporation that is decced by a griefing corp, they can bring in their own griefers or mercenaries. But on the flipside, large 0.0 alliances now have several additional defences against alliances aiming to disrupt them - the cost of the wardec is now prohibative, they can bring in a large number of 'defenders' for free, and why would you hire mercs when Grief corps A-T who simply want as many targets as possible, will help for next to nothing.

It's this that will essentially suffocate the current Mercenary market - 'Mercs rely on the income and goodwill of customers, yet lose almost any kind of offensive capability - they have to pay through their ears for larger corps, fight a lot of unwanted extra targets and generally have a harder time doing the job they were hired to do(you may even agree this is fair), but it would be so much easier financially to be hired as a defender then - only then mercenary corps become second fiddle to large alliances duking it out, and can't compete financially with corps that do it for free. Suddenly, what's the point? Why pay top dollar for one very good corp, when you can hire 10 average ones for less.

It does not help either that the neutral RR mechanics remain as they are in addition to this, that way the afforementioned grief corps can sit on trade pipes with almosty risk free engagement, thats another impediment to combat. It's not Red vs Blue. It's Red vs Blue and lots of friends, helped by more friends who you can't engage to start with. I cannot see anything other than the complete forced overhaul of mercenary work with that, a change that it seems hasn't been thought through, discussed with the CSM (particularly its small gang/merc members), and will cause many Merc corps to scale back/stop high sec opperations alltogether.

I do think wardecs need the rebalance. However this swings too heavily the other way, and seems rushed (Which we've seen can do wonders for EVE right, the door anyone?), and it devalues the Mercenary way of life really.

I would suggest the change is shelved before damage is done. I can personally think of a few changes for this that might help balance things, not limited to:

♦ Ally fees should be hard-calculated based on the number of members of the defending corporation. To assist a 2000 man alliance, you need to be paying about half the cost of the initial war dec or thereabouts.
♦ Limit the number of allies you can have, to one.
♦ Limit the number of corporations you can ally to, to two.
♦ Neutral RR - fix it

In this, aggressive mercenary corporations can still declare, but the scope for the contract escalating is now limited. Defensive mercenary corporations can now get a half price wardec and exclusivity, which creates competition. And defending corporations can no longer bring in legions of allies to help - they can choose the griefer/merc option, and arrange payment before the system so fees are negotiable. And fixing neutral RR makes everyone happy.

It should be this easy. :psyduck:


- S

+1 to Reppyk from NMG.

The idea that a merc corp being tied up as an Ally is a very big deal, Soniclover/CCP.

Not having the ability to set a time-limit on the Ally agreement is unacceptable from a mercenary point of view. We have multiple jobs coming in all the time, and we schedule them as best we can - a neverending ally war that prevents us from easily moving to the next job is unacceptable because we cannot schedule jobs. Thus, this feature shuts us out rather than including us - the exact opposite of what you intended.


The other problem with the Ally system is that griefer corps can very easily exploit it. They want kills and to make other's lives a pain, that's fine, no worries, but now they can Ally up for nothing and have wars all over. At least under the old system, if a merc decc'd a corp, the corp could get griefer help, but then the griefers would have to at least pay the wardec costs, which may be a turnoff. These changes are major incentives for mercs to avoid taking hi-sec jobs. We would need charge substantially more to mitigate the risk of having tons of griefers with their neutral RR side up for almost nothing to fight us.


You want to fight? Drop a dec, pay the fees, allies too, the Ally system is great for finding people and negotiating a fee to help. However, the Allies should have to pay wardec fees (which can again be negotiated as payment through the ally system).

On a related but separate thought: The new fee structure is different, but not horrible. It does make it more difficult for people who want to just fight wars to fight wars, and hurts smaller groups more due to funding. If there was an easier way to scale it based on both the decing corp and the defender, that would be something to look into.

Edit: Clarity is good.