EVE General Discussion

Everybody will say the system has flaws so "fix it" is the answer. The issue is, everyone also has their version of "what's wrong with wardecs" and you'd have a hard time even getting a majority to agree on the same points.

I confess to being a low sec player, so I might be off mark here, but I believe there is a clear attempt by the 'I want watch lists back' crowd to hijack this thread for their own agenda. I think there are more than a few other issues in play here that people aren't saying.

1. Nowadays skill injectors make it trivilally easy for veteran players, to roll a fresh new (unknown) character with a perfect set of ganking skills and then go off on a high sec ganking/war deccing tour without:
. Tarnishing their main's reputation or 'space honor'.
. Having to buy back their sec status.
. Ruining their perfect -10 sec status which a lot of pirates rate highly.
. Having to explain to their null sec overlords what they are doing in high sec.
. Having to explain to their CEO their losses (see 2).

2. zKillboard is now the default goto Killboard and unlike previous default goto Killboards (BattleClinic and EveKill) it shows losses caused by NPCs (particularly CONCORDE). Hence there is more incentive to roll a throwaway alt and again skillpoint injectors make that easier. Such an alt will then reside permanently in high sec (possibly combining the roles of both marketing and ganking alts) and be used more often than dragging or clone jumping a main from low or null sec each time.

3. The second and third slots of an account are becoming more likely to have a character with some serious SP as a result of the main topping off his required skills, Skill Injectors and Dual training. Players are less attached to these characters and likely to use them in a more cavalier manner.

4. Players as well as the game change. Their attitudes, their experiences and most of all their wallets. When I first started PvPing, I didn't use to rig my T1 frigates, too expensive. But nowadays I wouldn't consider undocking in an unrigged ship and I'm increasingly seeing T2 rigged T1 hulls, even frigates. The cost of a wardec nowadays is relatively less expensive than the same cost two or three years ago.

5. The stagnation in null has pushed a lot of null citizens to roll a high sec alt to participate in high sec shenagans.

So I think this topic is a lot more complicated than simply 'no watchlists, we told you so'.

I also take issue with the oft quoted:

"CCP told us at fanfest last year that new players that lose a ship in a war are more likely to stay with the game than those where nothing interesting happens during those first weeks in the game."

Whenever I resub I immediately cancel my subscription to cancel the recurring subscription fee. Each time I am asked why am I leaving Eve and one of the options is because of 'ganking'.

Now I'm no psychiatrist, but I can't imagine that many people would pick 'ganking' and admit to being a woosie. Most would choose 'Poor documentation', 'Poor Tutorials' 'Lack of Content' or some other non descriptive option rather than admit they sank 2 plexes and 3 hours into setting up a perfect PvE boat and it got blown up 20 seconds after undocking cause they didn't understand some rule of engagement or how lethal the environment really was. So if CCP based that statement on what people picked on that feedback form, I could imagine it would be well off target.

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that ganking (be it by wardec or suicide) in high sec nowadays is far more common than it was when I started playing. It is also absolutely ridiculous to suggest that a hauler, miner, freighter pilot or a corp dedicated to those activities has a chance against a dedicated high sec PvP corp or that the latter is looking for a proper 'fight'. I live in low sec and I hate travelling into high sec because it is pure luck whether you meet some f*ggot with more Isk than PvP skill, who knows how to hide behind the protection of Concorde until conditions are just right to gank you.

Yes players need to adapt to changes, but CCP also has to adapt to changing players attitudes, experiences, Skill Point sets and fattening wallets. When CCP said that Eve was designed to be a harsh place where anything goes, they had in mind some sort of imaginative, content driving, sophisticated evil play, not playground mugging and bullying. Well you reap what you sow, if you can't see how you are damaging the game and want to act like a bunch of 5 year olds thugs, then ever more restrictive rules have to be imposed. We are one more step closer to consensual PvP only in high sec.

You're fundamentally wrong and your ignorance of the basics invalidates everything else you might say.

But what are the design goals of a war Dec? Is it only a legal way to allow capsules to attack each other and corporation/alliance assets in hi sec without drawing concord? Or is there more to the design goal? Obviously you need some mechanic in place to allow people to attack things like POSes and POCOs. Without that, once anchored the structure would never be taken which is no fun. You lose a content driver. If RvB could not have lost our POCOs, Break would not have gained them, and in turn if Break ever dwindles, the next group could not take them. And if you are fighting over structures, having the ability to attack an enemy fleet with more than structure defenses is a must.

So there is one design goal. Then you have things like RvB where two groups just want to fight each other with out the hassles of low, nul, or WH mechanics. Here is another design goal.

Then there are other design goals, such as not wanting a reoccurance of space herpies or whatever you want to call it when war decs could be passed from corp to corp with ease. Those were interesting times when pretty much all of new Eden was at war because of a broken mechanic. CCP obviously did not like that or else they would not have fixed it.

But then you get into the gray areas of the mechanic where we don't fully know what the design mechanic was suppose to be. Did CCP intend for the cost to be the limiting factor and didn't realise groups would Dec everyone if they had the isk? Did they expect it to be so easy to slip out on a Dec by dropping corp and reforming? Did they expect a situation where a merc group decs someone only to have that someone turtle up in station or move to low/nul/WH for the duration leading to merc wasting their money on war that produces no targets? None of this we know unless CCP spells it out for us. And until that point, all people can and will do is speculate and demand change to something they will never fully grasp because it has not been fully defined.

So perhaps the push should be for CCP to define the mechanic and bounds they want, So any future ideas know all the bounds they should cover.

So in this sandbox game, you are saying we need some sort of big stick to force people to play a certain way?

It's funny the mental gymnastics people can go through when they just don't want to believe something.

If you actually watched that presentation, you will see that while CCP Rise did say that less than 1% of players cite ship loss as why they are quitting, most of that data he discussed is based on the observation of player behaviour, not surveys. The specific observation was that in the large data set of tens of thousands of players, players that experience legal, or illegal ship loss during the first 30 days have a higher chance of staying with the game than those where nothing happens during that time.

Now that is just a correlation and can be interpreted several ways, but it is definitely has nothing to do with players being ashamed to admit why they are are not subscribing to the game.

Wasn't deciding anything - we don't give a hoot and we didn't pay the bill. So there's that.
I merely asked, and I take it you can't think of anything either huh?

If everybody including war deccers can see that there's a problem with wardecs maybe that's something CCP should prioritise. There's a load of fundamental problems with wardecs that have led them to spiral to the point they are at now. Carebears have pushed for nerfs and it would seem highsec PvPers haven't pushed back as hard as needed. CCP needs to work on a solution that would work for both sides and then take it to the players for them to look at. It's impossible for any of us to design a fair system as we're all biased one way or another about what highsec pvp means.

I think the new structures will be a good start, corporations in highsec might start wanting to deploy structures and thereby put targets in space for deccers to use to force fights. This might even lead to highsec corps becoming better organised although that is unlikely. Likewise agressing corps could require a structure to allow them to communicate with concord that effectively allows them to declare wars, if that structure is destroyed then they lose their current wars and are unable to declare more until it is replaced.

The whole problem with wars currently is the best option for a defender is to logoff or otherwise not provide the deccers content, if corps require more structures in space for their regular activities then wars could actually have targets.

The "we do wardecs because we want to shoot people in HS" game is also dead if your war need a definitive objective.

You must be that tall to dec.
Your target must be that tall to be decced.

This will be gamed to hell and back then back to hell and back.

Yes new players are as valid a war target because this is eve online where pvp [or should have] has no limit.

Boxing analogies do not count, sorry.