Player Features and Ideas Discussion

nope, one wouldn't cut it.

if it cost a real amount to war dec a corporation, or make the costs escalate the more war decs you have active, past say the 3 war mark... we would see real change in the dynamic of highsec mercenary work... real risk vs. reward, etc.


you're operating under the assumption that high sec wars en masse have any validity, which is a false assumption.

The big problems with wardecs:
1: Small groups are better off staying NPCs and keeping a chat channel. A pos is pointlessly expensive to run if you aren't running a lot of research and/or industry out of one.
2: Wardeccers have exactly zero reasons to keep a pos, thanks to a friendly local trade hub. Can't threaten what an opponent doesn't own.

Did you just not read my entire post?
Escalating wardecs won't solve anything. Time and time again, cost has been a very bad way to balance things (look at titans). All that increasing the cost would do is force people into even bigger and bigger alliances, which in return makes it even harder and harder for people to fight back.

The second this game turns into a themepark, it's dead.

While I agree that structures can play a role, however alone they will solve nothing.
Structure HP plays a role, what is easy for a 100 player corp to take down becomes a virtual impossibility for a 5 man corp. And yet if the HP is so low that a 5 man corp has a reasonable chance of taking it down the structure itself becomes irrelevant because it is to easy for the bigger group. So simply basing wars on a structure would only continue to drive the larger groups attacking the smaller groups so how do we use them. The entosis system has been suggested and yet that has some serious problems. Make the time required short enough that a small group of players from a single time zone can manage it, and it becomes a game of time zones instead of a game between players. Make it long enough so the time zone thing is not an issue and again it goes back to favoring, or even requiring larger groups so they have the members to run it for the duration.

And that brings us to corp sizes. In another topic I related how on another character of mine and the corp it is in we wanted to fight the war dec, however every time we undocked we faced at least 2 to 1 odds and at times as high as 10 to 1 odds so in the end we could do nothing but stay docked until they went away. So how do we address the size issue that is very real and has a very real affect on players decisions to fight back?

One thought is to only allow you to declare war on a corp / alliance the has the same or more members than you do. But even this idea has some serious problems that would have to be overcome. Like people joining the attacking corp once the dec was filed and the obvious problems associated with current allies system that heavily favors the defenders. I do have some thoughts on that as well.
So how to handle the small corp files dec and then adds members making them larger than the defenders? My proposal would be tied to the attackers themselves, if through adding member or hiring mercs they become larger the war dec ends. If they get larger because players drop out of the defending corp / alliance then the war continues.
And we have the whole allies problem that favors the defenders to deal with this we turn the situation 180 degrees and base it on the defenders member count. If they add member count by any way the game allows then the attackers can add subject to the limits above.

In the end this is a game and it is about having fun and in the current high sec wars ssytem at least half of the players are not having fun. If you want those indy toons you war dec to fight back then you will have to find a way to make it fun for THEM as well. And I can guarantee you that adding new ways to fight is not going to make it fun for them.

but there is no incentive to fight back, so no matter how much harder it would get to fight back, people would continue to drop corporations to npc corps until the wars are over and simply rejoin, or just not login, and neither of which is productive or promotes healthy growth of the EVE universe.

War decs offer NOTHING to the majority of the eve population, and they need to stop being a detriment to many players, or need to be rewarding in some way shape or form... other than sating violent peoples violent needs.

otherwise they're just a small ISK sink, and major aggravation to paying subscribers.

this game wouldn't die if highsec became a safer place, if you mean that because you would quit if highsec was a genuinely safe place, then good riddance... oh gee, all of CODE quit too, what a tragic loss...

Corps should be able to have as many wardecs as they want. But the price for each extra simultanious wardec should go up. 50m for the first, 60m for the second, 80m for the third, 110m for the fourth, etc. No limit. So if you want to have 100 wardecs you can, but that 100th one is going to cost you well over 2 billion. Things will smooth out from there.

Counter-points:

Pros -
1. According to CCP's research, this is blatantly false.
2. If you and your friends weren't risk averse, you could undock in something cheap, chase the just slightly less risk averse wartarget away, or else actually create some content instead of being little better than an NPC.
3. Carebears will never be happy. Even if they succeed in removing all non-consentual PvP from highsec, they will still find something to whine about.
4. Considering your entire premise is based on faulty logic, your fourth "Pro" is also faulty.

Cons -
1. Mercs will adapt, and wars will continue regardless of your bad idea.
2. Large merc corps spend billions a week in wardec fees, each. Combined, this is not a small amount of ISK.

Fortunately previous iterations of the war system actually had hard limits and prohibitive costs associated with large numbers of simultaneous wars so we don't have to speculate, we already know exactly what these groups will do if faced with with these kinds of limitations, because they already dealt with those limitations in the past.

What they'll do is declare war on a comparatively small number of very large nullsec entities and camp trade hubs in instalocking alpha ships.

What you currently see with them declaring war on very large numbers of smaller highsec entities actually represents better target selection than was previously viable for these kinds of entity, the targets are more present and more invested in highsec gameplay than the nullsec targets they previously targeted.

The actual "problem" here is that this kind emergent use of the war declaration system is clearly satisfying a player need that isn't catered for by any other game feature. The solution is to identify what that need is exactly and to design a feature that satisfies it.

Ah, the simpleminded dichotomy of the carebear.