EVE General Discussion

With the 2012 summer Inferno expansion we got:

Mercenary marketplace for corporations and alliances to hire themselves out for mercenary jobs in a more official manner.

Inferno’s Mercenary Marketplace makes revenge easier.

The world of EVE Online is fraught with deception, betrayal, coups and revenge. That’s why the Mercenary Marketplace makes it easier to hire a merc crew to do your dirty work, and to forge a relationship with crews that you want to work with again.

Can someone explain me how to use this mechanic please ?

The mercenary market place name is wrong though as we don't have a system in which mercs can sell their talents and be rated or reviewed by potential customers. This was implied in term 'mercenary market place'. Correct me if I am wrong or just haven't noticed where it is in the neo com.

Only Merc Market I know of is C&P.

War assistance is not Mercenary work. Mercenaries can choose to opt out.

::effort::

Sins of a Solar Empire had a good "mercenary" function. Where players bid / place bounties on enemy empires and the pirates attack the empire with the highest bounty until the bounty is depleted (or until another bid is higher than the current one).

The EVE bounty system works similar, but bounties can only be placed on pilots with negative security status. I think a good mercenary system in EVE would be being able to place bounties on corporations and alliances.

Then run something similar to faction warfare where corporations and pilots can join the mercenary system which allows them to accept corporation / alliance bounty contracts and start earning a % of the isk they kill from the pot put towards that corp / alliance.

So what’s in store post-Inferno? While Team Super Friends is not going to do a whole-release worth of iteration on the ally system, there are a few things in the pipeline.

Setting a fixed contract length to ally contracts is one thing we want to do. While the current implementation is fine for the most part, there are a few edge cases where the eternal ally bond can become an issue. It should also make negotiations smoother, when the knowledge of the exact length of the contract is known beforehand.

Another thing we’re looking into is to exclude the ally system from mutual wars – if a war has been made mutual, then no allies can be involved and existing ally contracts are cancelled. This mitigates a little the fact that now when a war is made mutual the only way for it to end is by surrender. We’ll monitor the early experience with the system post-Inferno and make a decision whether this change is needed/wanted.

There are several improvements for the ally marketplace that we want to look into. Most notably, giving defenders the ability to enter more information when looking for allies, such as by allowing them to enter location, price range, etc. In a similar vein, allowing mercenaries to advertise their services is something we’re looking into, where they could filter by preferred area of operation, their strength, etc.

Another area we might iterate on a bit is the war report - we want to show more clearly the contribution of each ally in the war - how much loss they've inflicted and received as portion of the total. This is in addition to other additions we want to make to the war report that are not just ally related, such as introduce timelines and battle reports.

Finally, we want to expand a lot on the information spreading of wars and their state. We want to show information about active wars, their war reports and how wars concluded in EVE Gate. This can include several kinds of leaderboards, such as ranking war loss inflicted vs. war loss received, rank the effectiveness of allies (i.e. how much loss do they inflict of the total, etc.) and similar rank lists. One thing we want to be very careful about here is what data to count and what data is presented. For instance, wars against entities that actively fight back will count more for these rank lists, to encourage people to fight those willing to fight. Getting this information on EVE Gate would give players a better understanding of the military strength of corporations and alliances, with a special focus on mercenary corps. Naturally, it can also act as a nice status symbol for those interested in this kind of activity, with entities competing for the ‘Hall of Fame’

As far as I am aware "Another thing we’re looking into is to exclude the ally system from mutual wars" is the only thing that happened. A sad truth, but CCP rarely pays out on their promises. Not much has really changed in that department since you left I am afraid.