Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Wall of text incoming. Tl;dr at the bottom.


Premise: There's something iffy with the war system in Eve, we all know this. People on both sides are complaining about it (be it for different reasons) and are crying out for a fix.
The main issue is that from one side, the indy corporations are faced with relatively large mercenary groups blanket deccing hundreds of corps.
On the other hand, this is in part, caused by the fact that it is relatively hard to actively search for targets. Furthermore, dec evasion is hilariously easy.

Who am I? I'm a highsec wardeccer (griefer to some, content generator to others), but I'm not part of the "blanket dec hub camping" group. I have a small corp with around 5 members at the moment, and we usually only have 1 single war going at the same time. However, we hunt our targets down throughout Eve, old school style, using a combination of spies, neutral alts and locator agents.


What I think wars in highsec should be like: Wars should be fights between groups of indy corporations over resources and/or priviliged positions and installations.
This can be done via either direct war between 2 indy corporations, or via proxy, using a smaller group of highly skilled mercenaries (the fight of the few vs the many).
In fact, this type of conflict, of a smaller group fighting against a much larger entity, is something we should encourage.
We should also move to encourage younger players to engage in combat, even in highsec. We need to lower the barrier of entry.

Furthermore, having small groups wardec larger entities will allow the larger entities to overwhelm the small wardeccers, given proper organisation, and actually give them a chance at attaining victory.




How to do this.
There's several ways. First off, wardec cost scaling should be adjusted, in the sense that it will become far, far cheaper for a small group to fight an organization that is much larger than itself.
In effect, the lowest possible fee should be around pre-nerf levels (say, 5 million, for instance). However, this is only in certain cases.
Note, I'll be pulling numbers out of my rear orifice here, just to give people an idea.
To give an example, my 5-man corp decides to wardec a 50-man group. We pay 5 million isk per week for the war.
If, however, the 50-man group were to want to wardec my personal corp, it would cost them 100 million per week.

Now, the price also scales depending on the size of your own corporation. Meaning the bigger your own corp, the more expensive your baseline will be.
So for instance, I have a 50-man corp, and I want to wardec a 500-man target. The ratios are still the same, but because my corp is bigger, I'll be paying 100 million per week.
Same works in reverse, the 500-man group wardeccing my 50-man group will cost them up to a billion.

These numbers need some work, naturally, but it's just to give you an idea.
The main purpose of this is to give younger people in smaller groups a chance to start wardeccing people, and to encourage people to fly in smaller groups to keep costs low.
Naturally, the larger the groups, the higher the cost.

To prevent corp switching shenanigans, a measure could also be implemented that if someone joins your corp while you have declared war, the war bill doubles, and you need to pay it within 24 hours or the war is cancelled.
Or at least implement a system that prevents these types of shenanigans in order to circumvent high war costs.



Of course, this alone wouldn't stop the large entities from blanket deccing. For this, we'd need to implement a hard limit on how many wars you can declare.
I know, putting up a hard limit is not something anyone really wants, but I don't see any other option (if you know of one, I'm all ears).

For corporations, the old limit of 3 should be reinstated, while alliances should be limited to around 10.
Keep in mind, wars in which you are allied to someone should ALSO count towards this limit.

This change is aimed at making people go out there and hunt for targets instead of simply waiting at a hub or pipe until something comes flying past.




In order to enable this, naturally, locator agents should show the online status of someone when you run the locate.
I could also argue that locators should be able to be accessed remotely, but that might be too OP.




Now, this is all fine and dandy, but if there's no reason for industrial and PvE groups to fight, then why would they?
We need to give them a reason to fight.

My personal suggestion?
The new structures (citadels, Engineering complexes, etc...) are a step in the good direction. We can continue to build on this by giving corporations and alliances the option of establishing an HQ.
This structure would be limited to 1 single HQ per corporation or alliance, and it would provide a bonus to, for instance, mission payouts, reprocessing rates, taxes, etc..., I'm just theorycrafting here.
This bonus would apply to the entire constellation that the HQ is in. Outside that constellation however, your profits are reduced (around 80% of base, with the fully bonused profits are 115%), again, just theorycrafting.

Now, the kicker is, that there can only be so many of these HQ's per constellation. It could be 1 or 2 per system, with anywhere between 4 and 8 systems per constellation.
Naturally, this means that the constellations that are the most valuable (think for instance, the ones with the SoE mission hubs in them, or valuable PI planets) will become highly contested.

There is a lot there, but +1 to many of the general ideas. Making wars accessible, meaningful, and have a purpose should be design goals when CCP gets around to redoing wars next. New Eden, especially highsec, has lacked real conflict drivers (and CCP seems to keep removing them with the latest one being moon real estate) which already makes people rightly ask what are wars for? Pretty much the only reason to attack another corp is direct piracy (which is near zero now with asset safety), the love of the hunt/kill (which was nerfed into tedium by the watchlist removal) or a personal grudge. Making structures provide valuable, yet unique bonuses that players can fight over and that incentivize players to stay with and defend a corp is a exactly what the game needs to encourage players to generate content and attack one another.

A system where closing and remaking a corp costs a twentieth of just the cost to attack it and where corporations have no lasting or persistent bonuses that distinguish it from any other corporation is not one that is going to generate balanced or consistent content. It is one that favour evasion of an attack over standing your ground almost every single time and thus inherently broken. Structures are the only way to force a fight which is an improvement over POSes, but there is still no reason to attack one aside from perhaps the Market Module, and now perhaps Industry Indexes. We need more of that so players can earn benefits by attacking one another and choose to spend resources on being the aggressor and generating content.

The fix isn't simple though, but I hope CCP considers some of your ideas when they look at fixing how wars work.

Wardecs were a good way to start out doing pvp and learning the game and its mechanics. Being wardecced was a good way to test your corp and see how well you worked together.

Citadels go a long way to removing docking games. OA's should solve watch lists. The main things i think we can (almost) all agree on is that decs should be cheaper, corps should be more expensive and corp switching should come with restrictions.

To reply seriously, I agree with this https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=6630762 100%. The only change is I think it should return the same message when someone is offline that it does when they are in a wormhole.

I only add that last part because in WHs watchlists were how you know the scout and/or fleet that logged off in your home WH are online again. I like the added danger of not knowing that, so I don't want to be able to use an alt in HS to ping locator agents to see when that cloaky scout is back online.

That's what this proposition is aimed towards. To return wardecs to being something anyone can do, ESPECIALLY the young players.

Furthermore, to encourage small groups of players actively hunting throughout highsec, and not playing stationgames in hubs (I hate that ****).

But I got the t-shirt in a contract worth 10 bil that I got for free. I have to show it off.

And my hair is fabulous.

Except all that will happen with mini sov lite is that PL/Goons/etc will establish the HQ's, and rent out highsec space as well. Lets be serious about the meta here, not stupid pie in the sky dreamers.

The reversing of war dec costs is the good part of this idea, your costs should be based on how many attackers you are giving 'content' to. Not how many defenders then try to deny content. Adding people to a corp at war should just cost whatever extra it would have cost initially to have them in corp and then declare war. There doesn't need to be any kind of special punitive fee involved.

If you want meaningful high sec wars over resources, look at corps & structures. Not at the war mechanics. High sec structures need the same bonuses as null structures, and you then need to remove most stations from high sec (Easy to do, "Concerns over capsuleer combat in the docking regions have prompted corporations to close most of their stations to independent capsuleers, a few have remained open with corporate agents consolidating to these available stations").
Then you have a reason for Citadels/EC's/etc in highsec, and a reason to form a larger corp. And larger corps that form naturally will then fight a lot more for their own territory, rather than just becoming renter empires.

Please, no.

A look at the mechanics won't hurt. What we have now is some blobb-muppets praying on the weak. A war should be mutual, not forced upon you because you just finished the tutorial.

What Red vs Blue did is a good thing for everyone and anyone joining them will be informed about it, they run classes, teach you stuff and have this infinite mutual war going.

Most entities don't even know why they got a war declaration in the first place, don't know that this new red-star-blinky tag in local means - if they even have the local chat open to begin with - and get blown up, not knowing what's going on.

Then they either log off for a week - if they know it is a week - or never log back on again.

Removing highsec stations will just force mega-blobbs.

New Eden has 3 designated war-zones for a reason.

I never said anything against that.