Crime & Punishment

Simple questions to the Mercs of New Eden...

Under today's eve mechanics, what is the minimum number of wars you feel a merc Corp or alliance needs to declare in order to find adequate targets? What is the maxim you feel you need (yes unlimited is a fine answer if you feel you need that many)?

Do you feel that of locator agents also stated whether a target was online or off line when used, would this change the above numbwrs?

During the days of the active watch list, before it became a friends list, what was the minimum and maximum number needed?

A question in general discussion had me wondering about war decs and if there was a limit, what that limit should be?

No limit. Ccp falcon has already said players in eve should be able to dec anyone at any time for any reason. In answer to your question it does depend on who you are going after.

In terms of the actual practicality of how many wars you need to actually provide content, it's basically 1 war for each active member of the mercenary corporation.

Not that quantity of wars is actually a useful measurement for anything, since, as anyone who has ever actually declared a war would know, you routinely end up with dozens of wars as a result of corporations dropping from alliances and often find yourself having to declare twenty wars to target the membership and assets of a single group like Hogs Collective because said members and assets are distributed between 150+ different corporations most of which are interchangeable in function. Not to mention that when someone allies into a war if the aggressor wants help they must have each of their allies declare wars on each individual group that allied in on the side of the defender, yielding 10 wars that is actually one war.

Regardless of how many wars you actually declare, you almost always end up with more and often single conflicts require the declaration of multiple wars.

When hard limits existed the gameplay the functionality of the actual war declaration mechanics was absolutely abysmal and often intensely frustrating and was one of the factors that resulted in things like structures in highsec being literally invulnerable, corporations being stuck in wars they didn't declare forever with no way to get out and a bunch of other crap.

Re-adding hard limits would reintroduce the kind of atrocious, janky crap that removing the limits fixed. You'd be undoing the only positive change introduced in Inferno.

I'm still in favor of escalating costs for successive war decs (assists included in the count). If deccing 3 or 4 very large corps for target numbers and 3 or 4 more as paying contracts can't get it done for you - you're probably one of the lazy undock player farmers giving HS mercs and HS pvp in general a bad reputation.

With escalating costs carrying 10 decs on average would curb player farming and put some meaning back in HS conflict. Who knows 2 player corps with a disagreement might actually be able to engage each other without 2/3 of the HS hooligans hopping in and ruining the grudge.

I would add 2 things to this. 1 - extend war decs to 2 weeks to allow smaller less isk intensive groups double mileage on their war dec iskies. 2 - a 'cancel dec now' button that starts a 12 hour cool down button to allow larger HS pvp groups the ability to efficiently manage the number of active decs (sorry ladies, but the war dec will stay on your balance sheet until the 12 hour cool down is over). So double war dec duration and halve the cool down if a war is cancelled.

I agree that anyone should be able to dec anyone for any reason at any time. I think the problem is that this has morphed into anyone can pretty much dec everyone all of the time. Escalating dec fees with a reasonable ramp would go a long way to turn the current player farming meta more toward meaningful combat and merc contracting.

To be clear - the first 3 or 4 decs should be relatively cheap and anything over dec number 10 should require a lot of hurt feelings, isk and commitment.

I had forgotten about war decs when you drop alliance. That would mess up counts anyways so i doubt a skilled limit would work. Thanks all for the insight!

I am curious... How many wars did some of the larger groups have when that strange space war dec herpies was going around. I know RvB had a ton to the point we had trouble keeping up with who we added as -10 Corp contacts for ease of identification on the overview.

The other problem with scaling war dec fees is the potential for abuse. If you dec my alliance of say 10 corps, I could ask each Corp to make 2 dummy corps and gave those join the alliance. I could then kick them all and because of the mechanics your corp has 21 active wars. How the cost for renewing these or starting a new dec would have to be planned well to prevent aggressors from facing high costs from people doing this. It's the same problem if CCP were to limit war decs to a set number.

As for cost per member... It works but only marginally. Take a group like RvB. I love my old home Corp but well... We never kicked people for going inactive. We easily hit the max cost limit and yet don't have some 2000 active members. In essence the numbers became a shield against war decs. Given that the corp limit has been raised to 12000 I thought, maybe the cost index should be changed.

Perhaps, cost could be based on activity... Similar to the indices currently used in nul sov. The more active a Corp is for mining, ratting, work in trading and PI too maybe, and the cost increases. I doubt it would work but it could be an interesting change. Maybe the those indicies to some bonus for the defender like a higher ratting index leads to slightly better payouts. They could turtle up for a war dec but would lose the bonus. Maybe even let PvP kills and losses improve or maintain the index. This way a merc could dec my mission Corp. I have the choice of turtling up and losing the bonus, trying to mission while decced to keep the bonus up, or go fight with win or lose keeping the bonus up because hey, at least I tried and gave content.

It's not just not the answer, it's outright idiotic.

It's the very definition of trying to solve a problem by addressing a symptom while entirely ignoring the myriad of problems causing it, which would all still be present and still be crippling war related gameplay.

The only utility the idea has is as an example of the least intelligent way to approach problem solving that is humanly possible.

"Po-ta-to", "po-tah-o".

"not the answer", "worst idea humanly possible".

It's all good. It's aaaaaaall good.

Posting to confirm this post that states too many posts

I'm not seeing DecShield as a problem. The cost escalation would only be applied to war decs / assists that you initiate. If you're the 300th corp/alliance to drop a dec on NorthernCoalition - that matters not. Piling on is fine - it would just be that you can't pile on everyone at the same time.

As far as alliance bombing. I would keep decs active on corps fleeing alliance for the war duration, but not count it against the aggressor. Here's the line of logic behind it:

AceMercServices dec's UltimateNullConglomerate (12,000 members and 69 corps). AMS has 2 weeks to slaughter them. AMS paid off CONCORD to shoot the members of that alliance. That stands for the dec period if the corp stays in the alliance or if they leave. Think of the war declaration as being against 70 entities - UNC as a whole and the 69 corps. As the war progresses, leaving UNC isn't a get out of jail free card - you can separate from the alliance, but you can't separate from CONCORD sanction war activities. Instead of seeing UNC as 1 entity - it would see it as 70 entities. On the other hand, joining UNC during an active war dec would add you to both the UNC roster and as entity 71 for the duration of the war. The net effect would be that leaving an alliance under war dec doesn't change anything as far as the war dec goes.

It would be a code change as to how war decs are seen by the game, not just a roll back to the old broken ways. There would be more, such as a corp joining an alliance while under war dec. That would have to be looked at carefully - it would be funny if (as a war dec infected corp) you could join/drop alliance memberships and spread the joy, but would have to be coded in some way as to not allow 'spread the joy' abuse.

Many of us know this is a complex issue that requires multiple changes on several mechanics fronts. Escallating dec fees would only be part of the package. Only an idiot would assume 1 simple change would fix such a complex problem. So, for those that wear those types of shoes, if you read closely my original post on this says I am in favor of escalating dec fees. What it does not say is that changing ONLY this facet will cure the mechanics quagmire that HS warfare is currently in.

At the end of the day I'm more interested that HS warfare is fun, challenging and continuously pulls more folks into the PVP aspect of the game and less interested in the actual way we get from the current mind numbing player farming mass dec garbage to that ideal. I just want HS warfare to be fun again.