Jita Park Speakers Corner

I can shoot newbs in rookie systems. Until CCP stops me. Damn them for nerfing my playstyle.

That doesn't sound like a bad idea.

If you make it "impossible" to wardec corps who don't have a POS around a moon or a POCO.

Now, wardecs are, imo, just to get easy kills from people who don't shoot back. Freezing whole corps/alliances for the duration of the war (they don't want to undock) it's bad for the players experience.
Getting wardecced because they see you in a freighter happens.. And moving all freighter pilots to NPC corps, well, isn't that the oposite from what we are trying to do with the Friendly Fire option comming with the new expansion?


If you only can wardec people who have a POS at a moon/POCO in highsec (wardecs aren't used in low and null anyway) there probably are more people who will join non NPC corps.

In my experience, when you got wardecced, alot of people leave the corp, some come back, some don't. They start a new corp, that gets wardecced too after a while, running from wardecs, good mechanic?


edit:
if, in case of RvB, 2 corps/alliances, want to be at war with each other, give them the chance to be at war with each other (acceptance from both sides). That will make some people happy :)

War decs have no place in this game imho.

I prefer ganking or being ganked over war decs.

It takes more emotional and financial commitment to gank an opponent then simple war dec them.

A war declaration (war dec) is a formal state of war between two player corporations or alliances.
When corporations or alliances are at war the pilots belonging to them become legal targets for each other in all security levels of empire space.

War decs gives a warning that you are a target, but being ganked or ganking another adds a surprise effect to the game with risks and rewards

It's a shame CCPgames, perhaps due to laziness, only allows driving competition of the grid (PI, POCO's, POS, Belts) through an easy war deccing system to gain Territorial Control.

If war decs are removed in favor of ganking, then another way of stopping Concord involvement has to be put in place, maybe Bribing Concord ?!

Steve's question is a good one: What do we want wardecs to achieve?

Most of the replies in this thread have attempted to answer a different, duller and less useful question: How should wardecs work?

Asking "what" instead of "how" is actually asking what kind of game should EVE be.

But the root issue with wardecs is that they're non-consensual PvP; Party A decides to initiate hostilities with Party B whether Party B wants to or not. A moment's thought will make it obvious that there is no way that this can possibly be acceptable to the "Party B" type organisations in the game short of being able to give a "Party A wants to have a war with you, do you accept? Y/N" type response. Obviously Party A isn't going to attack unless it thinks victory is likely. Obviously Party B isn't likely to want to participate if Party A thinks it has an advantage.

Underlying that, we have an even more primitive question here: should groups be subject to the same "any time, any place" conditions of aggression that individual players are? At the moment, we have a worst-possible situation where it's trivial to initiate aggression if you know what you're doing, and equally trivial to avoid it if you know what you're doing. There is virtually no chance of a genuinely satisfying conflict outside of a pre-arranged custom-built RvB style scenario.

I'm not smart enough to come up with a satisfactory solution to perfectly reconcile the desires of people who want to shoot at people who don't want to be shot at with the desires of those they wish to shoot at. But it does occur to me that the 'sandboxiest' resolution - the one most in keeping with the spirit of EVE - is to offer a spectrum of choices. Rather than a simple binary [Join Corp = Be subject to wardecs from anyone], allow some means of gradiated choices. And gradiated opportunity costs.

One idea I had - and I want to stress that I'm not proposing this as an actual mechanic to implement, but as an exampe to illustrate the kind of concept I'm talking about here - was the "War Bond". Allow corps or alliances to post a bond with CONCORD. Anyone who wants to wardec that group has to match the bond. Whichever side surrenders [and there all kinds of subtle ways to define surrender here - membership reduced to less than 20% of the number when war was declared, no undocks for a week, formal admission, etc etc) forfeits their bond to the other party. Both parties have to put something at risk. If the Party B only posts a 1M bond, then it can be dec'd by anyone for 1M ISK. If they post a 100B bond, then only rich groups can dec them, but they stand to gain - or lose - 100B. With 100B at stake, it's worth hiring mercs, fightin on despite losses, and so on.

The point being that the 'Party B' type organisations would gain at least some agency over their situation. Rather than simply waiting for the next wardec, unable to have any influence over who declares or for what reason, then can at least choose to make a statement: either

"We care incredibly little about this corp - it's only worth 1 million ISK to ISK. Dec us and we'll all just leave"

"We care a lot about this corp - you'll have to put 100 billion ISK on the table if you want to take a swing at us"

At the moment the potential target has no choices to make to alter their situation. Any change from the current "enforced total passivity" will naturally favour the defender, because naturally they'll prefer to make choices that favour them, a privilege current wholly reserved for the potential attacker. I don't see any good argument for the current situation where Party A gets to make all the decisions and Party B gets to make none.

Equally, it's bullshit that Party A can spend ISK on a wardec and be essentially legally cheated out of having any effect whatsoever.

But if we're going to have a situation where Party B can't just costlessly step aside when they're wardecced, then we must also have a situation where Party A can't just spam out a wardec for lols and also costlessly trololol off if it turns out that eg: Party B is actually willing and able to effectively shoot back. Both sides will have to have skin in the game.

Allowing Party B to post a war bond size of their choice means that they get a say in determining the initial condifitons of the conflict. Many hi-sec corps are little more than a private chat channel - or not even that, if they're 1-man tax avoidance corps.

NB: I should have made it explicit: the bond would replace the wardec fee. So if a very rich Party B (let's call them SwoonGarm) post a 100 billion ISK bond in an effort to deter Party A (let's call them The Trivet Peers) for deccing them, that's all very well, but The Trivet Peers being able to raise that bond means that they'll get a permanent wardec vs SwoonGarm unless and until the war is surrendered. And there are all kinds of ways that a sum that size can be raised in an economy as large and mature as EVE's.


EDIT: To answer your question, no it's qualitatively different from the Dec Shield effect because if your win, you get your ISK back. Unlike the Dec Shield,, which sank the ISK irretrievably.

The side that surrenders forfeits the bond.



Well either it's a "big giant prize" or a "dec shield". Which argument am I defending vs?

It's supposed to work as an example of how the current system requires no commitment and zero or negative incentive to actually fight.

Let's just get rid of highsec and force everyone to claw their way up through an onslaught of bored bittervets.

That is the effective result of nerfing NPC corp incomes. Force the carebears and newbs out to play clay pigeons whilst those who generate their income in null or lowsec or via station trading can continue to use NPC corps to shield their logistics and scouts from aggression.

This will result in people with no interest in player corps being forced into them with an even greater proliferation of mismanaged highsec newbie corps. Essentially, an influx of easy targets for the highsec pvp crowd. Wardec spam will turn hubs into FW systems while bittervet scout, logi, and booster alts not affected by tax rates will retain CONCORD protection. And you will kill the game by trying to make people who don't treat this like a second job play your way if they want to undock.

In short, more player corps is not an inherently good thing. If the majority of those are founded and populated by people whose only interest is the tax benefit and who are woefully unprepared to exist in a combat environment, then I would say it is a negative.
We've got enough of those already. My god, where do you think James gets his blog content?

Unless your idea of fun is hunting mining barges in a proteus. Is that your idea of fun kaarous?

And there it is, ladies and gentlemen.

The attitude that is holding EVE hostage.