Crime & Punishment

With personal reasons/attacks aside. Aesheera has valid point that affects everybody that had an eye for creating a merc corp.

I wanted to create mine and actually had a good thing going. My small 3/4 corp was getting more and more work because we delivered. We might not have been able to go head to head with larger entitties but that did not stop us from harassing their operations.This system completely nullifies me and other mercs to provide such a service to anybody, since now they would rather have unlimited allies then pay somebody to actually get the job done.

Since 99% of allies are your average Trade HUB campers, the people they are supposed to support still gets killed en mass while they stay in Trade Hubs. A limit on allies as I mentioned will force people to relook at who they are getting, and I can promise you this. The Merc market will be revived instantly.

Another point not yet touched on, and perhaps this is worthy of a different thread, is how bad the new wars UI is. For those not involved in wars, let me summarize what you see when you click "our wars"

-Non sortable
-Previously included info such as "can fight" has been removed (see below)
-You must scroll through the list of all allies to find your corp and see when it goes live
-As you enter new wars, the order of the wars listed changes
-The new wars do not appear at the top or bottom of the list, or alphabetically, it's madness.
-There is no way to "collapse" the allies in a war, or "hide other allies"
-So, if you have say 10 wars, each with 20 allies, to scroll down to the 2nd war, you'd have to wheel down the first 20 allies before you can even look at the 2nd war to see when it goes live.
-Did I mention no sort, filter, or other tools. Just a wall of text, like this post.
-The UI is further rendered useless by the spam of mails you get from concord about "An ally has joined the war" orly? Oh, thank heavens, another 1-man corp has joined our cause, the enemy is hating life now.

Of course this is a thread about you and your corp and your playstyle, and tbh all your changes you want to the wardec system is just changes that are pro mercs, which inst surprising I guess (check last few lines of OP). If you had made more neutral changes instead it would have looked much better even for us that isnt mercs or griefers.

Id say let the defender get up to 3 allies for free, this way they have to be picky about who to get/hire, additional allies costs lets say X isk but also allows the agressor to put an extra ally in for x*2 isk. Why the high cost for the agressor? Simply cause its their choice to declare war. Had you proposed something like this instead and not been so blatantly pro merc in your post I might even had agreed with it, though on one side I do. The wardec system isnt just for mercs and griefers ya know.

This thread is awesome. Merc tears about wardecs. Way too much stuff to touch on all at once, but I will take this one part of the topic.



You are placing blame in the wrong place on this one. The problem isn't that defenders get to pick ally's for free. It's that too many corps are willing to give them services for free. For mercs this would be akin to the industrialists complaint about he "minerals I mine are free" mentality.

Making defenders have to pay for ally's doesn't fix your problem. Charging defenders won't make the corps willing to join for free go away. If anything you should be looking at making an ally pay some sort of fee, if your goal is to help out mercs. Fewer corps would be willing to join a defender for free if it actually cost them isk to join.

Maybe what all the mercs should do (those going under due to lack of contracts) is band together and collectively wardec the other corps who are willing to give away their ally services when they should obviously be charging for it. Force them to see the error of their ways.

A few ideas for changes to the ally system. They're mix-and-match, take whatever is necessary for good balance.

• A cumulative Concord fee, paid by the defender, for each ally that enters the war. This could also be based on the size of the ally, similar to the cost of starting a wardec in the first place. The point is to make it increasingly expensive to pile on allies, regardless of their fees.
• When requesting aid, the defender must name a price they are offering for aid. Mercenaries could then make an offer, allowing the defender to accept or decline the contract. This would create a real marketplace where mercenaries are able to "shop" for jobs.
• Rather than the "dogpile the attacker" approach, how about a system that encourages escalation? The defender can bring on two allies, and then the attacker can bring in one of their own. This 2/1/2/1 escalation can go on indefinitely, but at any point one side can halt the expansion of the war by simply not bringing on new allies. This will force defenders to be more selective about their allies, and lead to larger wars rather than simply allowing defenders to swarm the attackers.

Totally down for that. ♥

Wow powerful statement, this is a good topic brought up.

No, this entire thing is about mercenaries, plain and simple. This is not about how high-sec wars are bad for everyone, it is simply about how it "ruined" the mercenary line of work. Each post you have made has touched on "how" to make empire wars profitable again for mercenaries, and the entire time you completely ignore the fact that people looking for fights - legitimate fights - are having fun. Inferno gave us something we had wanted: lots of fights, not as much going to find them.

You have been harping on and claiming that mercenary outfits feel disenfranchised. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. You claim to have "talked" (probably extensively) with the "older" mercenary outfits. Let me tell you, no one cares. Noir. is still doing it's thing. The 0rphanage is still doing it's thing. Rebirth. is still doing it's thing. The ones who complain publicly are the ones who don't have that history behind them.

You do not have that history behind you. You attempted to play off what Malum Crusis used to be. Some success, some failure there.

I told you before, the motto will need to be "Adapt and Overcome". You didn't listen to me then, you won't listen to me now. I know you won't.

At the end of the day, this will be categorized as thread #17836202345 from some "disenfranchised mercenary" looking ot get their "cash cow" back. You claim you wanted fights. You didn't. You wanted the easy kills and ganks.

You have been in a grand total of six wars in your alliance, four of them as an ally. I would suggest you get a bit more under your belt before coming to the forums - again - and making a "I'm Aesheera, I'm going to make a post to sound like I know what I'm talking about" that echoes five-hundred other posts that came before you.

Thanks for the sensible answer. One thing I did not think about until after breakfast is If I dec the corp you did, it doesnt translate to the allies the victim picked up. So I would not be at war with the coalition just the first corp.

Thanks though because the new system seems better for people looking for targets, but appears to have broken traditional war dec tactics.

This thread is Pro Mercs as the expansion was supposed to be Pro Merc and Pro FW. So only makes sense that a system that was targeted against Mercs mainly would have Mercs complaining if it is broke.

The issue is you take a contract against an alliance. Then now they have 20 allies in 2 days and you can't move 2 jumps without running into some gate camper that has 2 Neutral Logi. Personally the changes wouldnt have been as bad if CrimeWatch would have came out and made Neutral Logi pointless. As it is now its the griefers that are benefitting from this change.

They hop onto as many decs as they can for free and camp a trade hub or a main pipe with their few combat ships and 10 neutral logistics. Times that by 10 and its impossible to do your job as a mercs.

Now you could say we could just take defense contracts but as of now no ISK in that and we want good fights and not ganks. Sure we do gank people during contracts but most the time it is because they won't fight or they present a target.

Merc work isnt about being honorable and yes lets fight at 1100 in a fair 10vs10. Its about fullfilling your contractors objectives; be it killing a POS, shutting down mining operations, or defending the contractor. Sometimes you get some really good fights and maybe not always from who you are hired to attack but the defender they hire. Othertimes its about the thrill of the hunt to find that dude that thinks he is clever and keeps bouncing around and finally finding him and killing him.

That is my 2 cents and it saddens me the current way the system has went.