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Does the FF setting in any way affect actions that make you a suspect, such as taking loot from a wreck made by a corp member? (My guess is No, but I might as well check.)

About free for alls: Another way to do it is have an alt drop a can and everyone steals from it. You may have to deal with the locals, but if its a quiet system, and you are at a safe spot, most likely not.

Why are you so sure being in an NPC corp is worse than being in a corp run by a scammer who does nothing to teach new players while collecting a 75% tax rate?

Or that good corps ard not recruiting new players right now before the changes? Take a look at corp advertisements - there are dozens of corps clamoring for new players.

More new players are going to be sucked up by terrible highsec corps spamming invites in starter systems stabilized by this change, and even less new blood will end up in good corps in low-, null- and highsec.

As to your last question, no there is not. In fact the reason it was made a changable flag rather than just off all the time was exactly so groups that regularly have free-for-alls (RvB) and corp training events can take still do this.

Is it not just as cowardice to stab someone in the back?
The tools to face someone openly have been there from the beginning and (hopefully) will never be removed.

We are not talking about spying, it is all about AWOXing, which is why this change affects. Simply put AWOXing is a cowards act.

waitwaitwaitwait.

A CEO or director can Enable/Disable friendly fire

technically you can still safari/awox if you have the roles for it.

not bad, this actually adds some more incentive to get roles.

Not being stabbed in the back by a corp mate losing your ship sounds more appealing to me. Or am I missing something?

Okay, so now we can talk about this without the thread getting locked?

For quick reference, here are the current forms of ship to ship PVP (meta PVP isn't relevant to this topic) possible in highsec:

• Dueling (consensual)
• Suspect baiting (consensual)
• Mutual war (consensual)
• War (non-consensual, provides ample notice, costs aggressor, easily opted out of by most defenders)
• Suicide ganking (non-consensual, costs the aggressors the full value of their ships and fittings, very strict time limits, security penalty, killrights given)
• Engaging criminals and suspects (non-consensual). Note that I mean suspects who aren't baiting here, e.g. because of killright activation or looting a wreck for profit.
• Practice fights using the intracorporation pvp rule (consensual)
• Joining a corporation for a safari or betraying your existing corporation (non-consensual)
• Recruiting players to your own corporation, a reverse safari (non-consensual)

(I have left some extremely rare forms out that would require too much explanation or qualification.)

Notice that there are only five non-consensual items on that list. One requires the pilot to become globally flagged and is thus trivially avoided by a risk averse player. One requires successfully recruiting a player to your own corporation, which is a very high barrier. Another gives a full day of notice to the corporation, and you are in this thread announcing the effective removal of one of the remaining two options, leaving only suicide ganking (with its myriad problems usually not acknowledged by victims nor practitioners, for different reasons) for surprise attacks.

A lot of players absolutely never leave highsec because of fear instilled by either early experiences before understanding basic game mechanics and/or fearmongering by veterans who have spent their entire EVE careers doing PVE in highsec. The most effective way to change their outlook on security zones is by killing them in space that they consider to be "safe". After this, many players become bolder, leaving highsec or engaging in highsec pvp of their own will. The fear of non-consensual pvp is less paralysing after actually being on the receiving end.

At this point I'd like to note that awoxers were explicitly referred to on the o7 show as "griefers". It's one thing when some players call a whole playstyle griefplay, but when CCP does it that is very concerning. Non-consensual PVP is absolutely core to EVE. Trust and the abuse of trust are core to EVE, weakening this directly reduces the unique appeal of EVE in addition to the indirect effects on the ecosystem.

The excuse that this is "unintuitive" was mentioned in the minutes, but highsec should not be intuitive. If you want a simple life where you don't have to think about engagement rules before shooting, live in lowsec. Highsec is the home of codified pvp, and offers a unique experience because of this. The people who don't know that corpmates are legal targets also don't know about limited engagements, the consequences of being criminal and having low security status, the lengths of any timers, wardec details etc. In other words they are completely ignorant of the very laws that keep them ridiculously safe. Antimatter is the best educational tool.

I don't want to say much on the subject of roleplaying since I think it should always be a secondary concern at best, but internally policed corporations are very fitting for dystopic SF.

Now I'd like to talk about the elephant in the room. The actual reason that day old alts can be unstoppable killing machines, making recruiting new players risky: unflagged neutral logistics.

First I'm going to note that this is easy to change, and I can say this with confidence despite having not seen any of the code in question. How can I say that? Because logi are already flagged suspect for repping awoxers if the corporation is in any wars. This is probably unintended behaviour, but it is absolutely desirable behaviour. Just make this code path the default and everything is fine.

The main issue with awoxing gameplay is that there are very few stories of the corporation successfully defending its members and killing the awoxer. An awoxer backed by unflagged neutral logi is just too hard to kill, the best you can normally do is jam him, which is a very unsatisfying outcome for everyone. Some people will say that if the logi are flagged they'll just magically produce a T3 (because we all have T3s on standby everywhere we pvp in the whole galaxy, right?) and start killing them when engaged, but this is actually only a tactic employed when the logi is in the first place intended as bait, not to keep a combat ship alive. Of course sometimes the logi would indeed have a combat ship at hand, but that only means that the fight just got more interesting, and ultimately the corporation would still fundamentally have the upper hand as they are many while the awoxer is alone and any logi who reshipped are globally flagged so they can get any outside assistance they can muster.

Without unflagged neutral logistics, I can say that many more awoxers would awox on their mains rather than low SP alts. Logistics would still be prevalent, but buffer and local reps would become more common, and more awoxers will die, giving the corporation a morale boost.

Please don't go ahead with this plan. I know it's too late to ask for that and you've made your decision, but you weren't listening to any feedback before now, which to me says that you do honestly know it's wrong. This won't fix retention in the way you're hoping, it'll just make EVE a more boring game. Fix awoxing, don't remove it.

This is the first time I have ever posted on the forums. I have seen many changes come to EVE that I didn't agree with, but this time it really hits hard because I believe it goes against what EVE is meant to stand for. I think "be the villain" was a tagline for some promotional material a while back.

I give some credit to CCP because they have a business to run and they want members. Player retention is very important, I agree, but this is not the way to do it.

A major point that comes up in almost every discussion I've seen on the topic of awoxing is that it causes new players to stay in the NPC corp or makes them quit the game. In my experience, this has not been the case, and it doesn't make much sense to me that this is the assumption.

Awoxers generally have one goal in mind: blow up shiny ships. Every awoxer I have met has been extremely helpful and happy to spend the time to make a new player understand more about the game and how to have fun with EVE. In fact, a very well-known awoxer, Psychotic Monk, spent many hours writing on his blog, providing support in-game, and even doing training sessions with young players to teach them more about his profession.

Of course, there are instances when new players might get blown up and feel like this isn't the game for them. Maybe they even stay in the NPC corp and quit EVE because they don't want to get awoxed. However, this has to be rare considering the goal of an awox and the generosity I have seen among the dozens of awoxers I have met.

High security in EVE is changing. Most of the time for the worse. CCP makes changes to other parts of space, eg w-space and null, with "creating content" or "encouraging fights," but for some reason, high sec has to get closer and closer to perfect safety. I wish we could get some changes that encourage new players to experiment with pvp in high sec or to be exposed to what EVE is really about.

Stop crippling your new players by changing mechanics. Stop giving new players a false sense of security that makes them risk-averse and unwilling to experience the entire game. Start making changes with things like missions and mining that will increase player retention because those activities are what kills the fun for many EVE players.

This is the wrong way to try and improve player retention. It will not work the way you expect.

I don't agree with this.

Risk vs reward anyone? All corps should have concord tax for enabling this. at least 5% but not over 11%

Also screw CCP destroying core gameplay mechanics and sandbox.