EVE General Discussion

The point they were making was a vast majority of war decs is one side simply staying docked. As said in the minutes "Paying some people to stay docked." They are right that when players are hit with a war dec, they seek ways to evade it. That is either by leaving the corp, going to space where the war dec is irrelevant or simply staying docked and or logging off.

Aside from a high sec POS and POCO's (hopefully soon) there is no incentive to undock and fight if you don't think you will mop the floor with the opposition. It is the equivelant of a roaming gang in null that passes through some blocks systems. Everyone safes up and waits it out or they form ultra blob to engage the roaming gang. At which point the roaming gang runs off.

It all boils down to easy access to too much information on enemy intel and little to no incentive to undock and deal with the opposing war party. I am not saying war decs should be removed completely, but honestly the vast majority of the war decs is by some small group of players who target industrial corps to feel like they are brave. The moment the defender is able to put up a fight, the so called elite PvPers who originally war dec'd them want nothing to do with the fight and will dock up themselves.

Mechanics that end with ships choosing to dock up instead of fight a majority of the time need a rework.

I don't disagree that corps just docking up and waiting it out as being a generally poor result, but a couple of people from CCP/the CSM seemed to have the wrong response to that, rather than asking "how can we encourage a fight or some form of standing up to the aggressor" they were asking "how can we make it possible to just avoid it entirely". I think the ally system was a decent attempt at answering the first question, so it's a shame to see it slipping the other way.

The previous iterations of wardecs (including the laughably broken Dec Shield episode) illustrated one thing: you cannot force people to fight, even in an all-PvP game.

The only situations in which a hisec wardec makes sense is when there is some goal to be achieved: blow up this POS, or stop these people mining in those systems being the obvious goals. This is something that was brought up years ago, but has not been acted upon: having goal-oriented wardecs for such goals as "cause X B ISK damage" or "remove the POS at System Y Moon X".

There is the rare wardec or two where a solo wardeccer will end up blowing up some foolish miners or mission runners.

In all, the current wardec system is probably the least broken option: goal-oriented wardecs will require complex coding and as such will present a swathe of new ways to break the game for everyone.

I think the current wardec system, like Democracy, is not perfect, but at least it's less broken than the other options that have been tried from time to time.

Two step asked the team if they felt they’d accomplished all that they had set out to accomplish in overhauling the wardec system, as it appeared to him there appeared to be just as much random wardeccing and grief wardeccing as there was before the overhaul. Solomon joked that it would be so much easier to just remove the wardec system completely, to much laughter of the CSM. Then, more seriously, Solomon explained that the designers had been back and forth discussing this question, and that the general idea has always been to develop a toolset where two entities could participate in mutual combat even in highsec space.

Trebor: There is the important word you just said – mutual conflict. Just as you can have a mutual engagement between two players, you should be able to have a mutual engagement between twogroups. But the current system, it’s a cursed mechanic, because most of the people who get involved want absolutely nothing to do with it.

Solomon noted that they were looking specifically into cases where one corp wardecced another corp, and no losses occurred. Usually this means that a larger more powerful entity has wardecced a smaller entity that wants nothing to do with the conflict and therefore does everything in its power to avoid being caught or killed. Solomon wagered that this was the case in 70-80% of wars.

Solomon: The strong prey on the weak, but the weak aren’t responding, and nobody’s getting particularly fun or nourishing gameplay out of this. Is that a failure?

Alek countered that this more often happened in the reverse – a smaller, say 5-man corp, will wardec a larger 50-man entity, who will just dock up and refuse to fight. Alek pointed out this has little to do with strength or capability, but simply willingness to engage in PvP.

Alek: As Stoffer [Soundwave] said earlier, you should not be able to play EVE in your own little world and not be affected by other players.

Alek explained that he has no problem with such a small group paying the price to be able to fight a larger group, and if the larger group refuses to participate, that’s a decision they make for themselves. Meissa countered that Solomon was correct, most high-sec wardecs simply weren’t being fought out. Meissa likened this to simply paying other players to stay docked up.

Fozzie: A wardec where only one side wants to be in it isn't any less legitimate than a bounty that only one side wants. We're not going to go to anyone and ask them if they'd like to accept the bounty placed on them.

Solomon: But at least with the bounty system, Concord is still there to protect you. In the wardec system, it’s not.

SoniClover: The key thing here is that there is a legitimate reason to have a wardec system and that is to allow people to engage in a lethal fight in highsec. And that is important because it should be that the higher economic impact that you are having, the higher the chance that other people will be interacting with what you are doing. You should never be able to have a huge economic impact on the game and become completely immune by the game mechanics, to be completely safe from others.

SoniClover: And it seems that some are clamoring a lot for the game system to protect them. And we're trying to minimize that as much as possible. EVE is never going to give you complete game system security. And we're never going to go that route.

Reading the minutes, I'm astonished to see so many people in favour of completely removing non-consensual pvp from highsec.

Reading the minutes, I'm astonished to see so many people in favour of completely removing non-consensual pvp from highsec. Claiming that wardecs are unfair, grief-play, claiming that there's no "risk" to the aggressor (how can they bemoan the lack of risk, then suggest removing all risk from highsec as a solution?), that they should only be mutual, etc...