Player Features and Ideas Discussion

The only way I see tying anything into a structure being an ok approach, is to provide advantage in having a Citadel/other structure.

Most commonly, as in this thread, it's always a stick approach designed to require more in order to do what can be done now. Why would the wardeccer side of the equation be happy about that?

Instead it should be a carrot approach. If you want wardeccers to have a structure in space, give it a war related use. Give them some benefit from having it that aids their activities; and not just something that encourages larger and larger wardec entities. There should be play for small groups, even encouragement for them.

Same on the defender side. Options to refit a Citadel in a war that provides them some benefit to their activities.

Make the play engaging, not just a road block with no real war related purpose other than wardec groups become bigger and declare war on smaller groups.

Then, leave victory conditions out of it. Objectives in declaring war can vary widely. That's not something the game should really track. Players can handle that fine.

I think it's a great ideal, having real assets tied to a war would definitely create content as people defend their assets and have real consequence for idle war dec's over trivial matters, would make the merc buisness a lot more viable.

ok so ye say "whooo , something in space i can target wheeeee"

fine, in principal thats understandable given how much neutral alt-play comes with mercing these days.
i get that i do.

what vimsy and i been trying to point out is that the best way to defend these things will invariably be to plant a blob on them, or have one on stand by.

if you cant field the sort of blob required you will not be inclined to try and rub shoulders with the sorts of lads that can
because the will beat the ever living **** out of you.
so
you dont bother signing up for a ploughing from the estabelished lads at all, you join an alliance that has this setup already,
or
you grow to avoid getting battered,
to sustain interest for your increased numbers you need to get more content (more wars),
go to choke points and catch the through traffic.
without some seriously tight knit and extremely patient and dedicated guys you have to do this because of the colossal level of work required to actively track and hunt .
(and why were we having this conversation again?)

to be clear,
a lot of us dont like the current state of affairs either,
we have stopped soliciting business till this gets un-F***ed,


im not against balancing the mechanics here at all, but i can see this happening as clearly as i saw that we would end up here 8 months ago

vimsy's penny drops
my own shortly there after
believe us, we have been following this one closely the whole time and been proven right repeatedly.
on the surface this looks like a great idea but its not actually going to help alleviate the problem without other balance changes in the way wars work.

"Or is this just a thing for wardeccers only"

yes, why, that old adage If you start something, war deccing has been an almost one way street with the eggressor's having free reign to bully folks forever, to choose the engagements, what this does is give a reason to seek alliance's, the war deccing Corp gets what it wants, full on PVP as people join sides to partake in a meaningful war, where killing the structure of another's opponents is the prize.

People go to Vegas for one reason (mostly), to gamble, the thrill of winning or losing, gambling is it's own addiction and our brains are configured to like this reward, if you throw dice you may win or lose, that's the attraction, to risk nothing and to pretty much know the outcome (when people war Dec weak corps), cheapens the thrill and turns the game into a cheap carnival ride that once done 100 times there is no real enjoyment just rinse and repeat.

No, what this does is encourage mercs to close ranks further and lock down these damn things,
Those that can't will not last, those that can will effectively become siege engines.
Hell we already see this happening with vmg and atype now.

Alpha clones in their T1 ships and modules vs T3 fleets with boosts.

Yeah, getting stomped on the head is the reason so many people whine about wardecs already and fail to take responsibility themselves.

If players can't manage when they have all the resources of the game at their disposal, they aren't going to manage when they have less resources available.

Alphas aren't a solution to that.

Disincentizizing larger blocks is a pipe dream no matter what you do.

More pilots = more security

Period. Full stop. It's the inevitability of player choice coupled with an entropic ingame economic model.

There is literally no solution whatsoever that is going to change that. The current hisec blobbing you see going on today is simply an extension of the inevitable endgame of any open PvP environment. One or two sides, in the interests of personal security, will eventually hoover up anything of operational value. At some point one side will be all that's left. That side will crow about its victories until it gets bored because there's nobody left to fight, break up, and watch that cycle start over again.

Tying free or even costly structures in to wardec mechanics does not change this. It does not change the decision making process of people who declare wars for whatever reason. People dec entities because they want to hurt them. That's the only reason. You think the one guy that wants to dec a known blob gang is going to be less inclined to pay up because he has to spend five minutes finding a place for a free command tower? He's not. You think the people that can afford to blanket dec are going revise their target lists because there might be a slight inconvenience in the form of having to defend a structure at some point? They aren't. They didn't become wardec blobs to not prove a point with military force.

The only thing that having a free, ungunned structure tied to wardeccing changes is that it allows any given defender to actually theoretically force any given attacker to stop attacking them. Again, that is the basic goal of pretty much anyone defending a wardec.

Changes to watchlists didn't create the current wardec situation. Boredom, greed, and risk aversion did. Just like the same things created BoB, gave rise to the CFC after it, and gave rise to NCPL now. It was always only a matter of time before that inevitability made its way to hisec. The only thing that has prevented it up to this point was simply lack of interest in hisec.

Now that everyone and their mother can drop citadels wherever they damn well please, there's ample content in hisec, and this, interest in hisec.

At some point people have to stop railing against the phantom of blob warfare. Blob warfare is what EVE is specifically designed to enable at a very basic level.

It's why all of the hot EVE news stories and all of the EVE trailers feature massive fleet battles with tales of massive amounts of ISK loss.

Anyone who thinks there's going to be some golden age of small actors is seriously deluding themselves. As a guy in charge of a small nobody corp I can confidently say that the only reason I get to do anything is literally because I'm not sitting on anything anybody bigger than me wants.

I don't have a problem with that. I'm not going to delude myself in to thinking there's some sovereign right to freedom or doing wtf I want, or that there's some mythical area of space where the rules are different.

Choosing to stay a small entity means choosing to live in the cracks between bigger ones, and knowing where you stand in the greater scheme of things. It means being okay with being less successful because you value your playstyle more than your security or wallet.

No change to wardecs is going to reverse the hisec blob war problem because it's not a problem in the first place.

I'm talking about a systemic failing of the dec system used by everyone here, not alterations to deccing to break up blobs and make it better for the little guy. It's not ever going to be better for the little guy unless he becomes the big guy himself, or EVE somehow becomes a completely different game.

Yes they very much did.
And I'm done having this conversation with people who just want to have their way with it.
Illsave my energy,time and patience.
o7

It's been an interesting conversation nonetheless o7

Your entire comments seem to be based on this premise and it is false.
There is NOTHING the defenders can do to end the war. Even if you undock a fleet and curb stomp your aggressors at every meeting the war still does not end until the aggressors want it to end.

You state that wars are fought over POCO's Pos etc and I am sure that there are the extremely rare cases out there where that is actually true, yet the vast majority of the decs filed are about nothing more than lazy people war deccing god only knows how many corps and then sitting on gates and undocks looking for simple easy targets to shoot.

Moving on to a more general response.
I have always found it impossible to understand, on the one hand you war dec players want more war (read that as shooting each other) in your wars and yet every single idea that is put forth that might accomplish this is resoundingly beaten down as game breaking and worthless. If you want more war in your war decs, and you want those you war dec to undock and fight then you need to give them something they can actually fight and you need to give them something to actually fight for and the current system offers neither of these.

Perhaps we need to address and answer a simple question before we get into how to change war decs.
And that simple questions is what do you as war dec players actually want?
Some of you want a system that promotes fights between aggressor and defender by changing the system to give both sides clear objectives to fight for. Others want to retain the existing system which is quite literally the right to buy kill rights for an entire corp full of players.