Crime & Punishment

I've been on Slack harassing the people in the #CSM channel for a while now, trying to figure out what solutions would be accepted by the almighty eve-famous people. After fighting with the local trolls and know-it-alls for a while....
This is what I've come up with:

With whatchlist removed back in March, there's been some playstyles that benefited by the change, but it hit some small community's in eve hard.
I want to suggest a few small changes that imho will fix a lot of the problems and still make it work for everyone without being OP.

First allowing watchlist to work IF a wardec was active.
This will help defenders have a tool to see if their aggressors is online or not, and in effect if it’s safe to undock.
It will also give back the possibility to be able to do "focused wars" and limit the amount of wardecs needed.

Then introduce a new structure for corp and alliances, a defensive one*.
This would be a rather expensive structure you have to anchor in space, visible on scan and not be anchored within 1000km of anything.
The structure would have the same ehp and reinforce timers as a poco. Its area of effect would cover just the system it’s anchored in and online it would take 24h.
Having this structure anchored and online while at war will "shield" you from being visible on watchlist and locates within its area of effect.

* Alternatively have different sizes of defensive structure. Small for system protection, medium include surrounding systems and large for constellations that would only be able to anchored in 0.0 systems. The structures can't be anchored within another structures area of effect. (cant overlap)

And finally make locators work on people in wh's and give online status when delivering the location. This will give a minimum 10 minute delay on the online status.

With these suggested changes in place it would open up the possibility to hunt larger groups in highsec and give Mercs and wardeccers an option to hunt rather than being forced to use not commonly known workarounds or hubcamp/gatecamp tactics hoping the target comes to them. And also give defender side a tool to keep safe and be able to play if no aggressors is online. To solve WL being to overpowered the structure would work as a counter and opening up new objectives and a "reason to fight" other than isk.

What do you guys in C&P think?

Btw... Devils are starting up mercenary services again November 1th, still in highsec and relying on workarounds for now
Our old thread should pop up as soon as I can get a hold of a friendly ISD willing to unlock it.

Interesting ideas, I support this. Hopefully something will be done by CCP. Eventually.

I am glad to see you come back, good luck guys.

o7

Literally the only good "war related structures" post ever made.

I don't think your suggested changes to locator agents go far enough, though. Locator agents are so weak in terms of usefulness right now for any purpose, not just wars (I run locators on people I'm not actually at war with for other reasons) that they could use improvement in terms of return time and repeat time.

I also think that maybe access to them being dependent on agent standing might not be the right way for them to work. Perhaps it would be better if everyone could use any locator agent at some inflated cost and cost be decreased through agent standing.

I've never liked the idea that one player could instantly know that another player had just come online in his own room - or worse, warp back into space after a logoff - from the other side of the galaxy.

Sorry, but that is to me just as nonsensical as the ability to basically "ping" space with a DSCAN. It's the equivalent of sitting in orbit around the moon, and instantly getting a radar image of everything all way to Uranus, instantly, as in the "radar" working faster then light speed, faster then warp speed.

On that note, those things needs to be possible in a mechanics functioning way to simply make the game "work as intended", so I would be in favor of the OP to have additional mechanics put in, ones that make "more game sense", to allow hunting of targets.

It's already been suggested that Locator Agents could be kept on active duty so that they could report back by themselves, much like a real agent would do, so maybe it should also be possible to similar things on stations as tripwires that go off when a target docks up/undocks.

After all, the Jump Gates and stations know who has passed through, as the ships would have to give an ID to use them, so why not use those mechanics instead? A player that bribes or pays various agents in systems should be basically setting up an intelligence network of sorts. It should not be anywhere as powerful as one based purely on actual players, but it should still be usable enough to facilitate the OP type of game play.

I dont know how many times I've explained that infiltrating is not a solution... How can you put an alt in a corp, if its not recruiting? We have made it work with workarounds, but imho unfair for the targets that dont know about it.

Bah.. I'm not gonna repeat myself over and over..
Thanks for the bump.

Locator agents could work within limits. Many have been previously mentioned but still remain the most viable fixes imho.

Examples
Long cool-downs between locates
Regional effectiveness (the old game of "hotter/colder") where you get a general idea of where a target is/was.
Online/offline status only
Delayed status notifications
Standings requirements for agents
Fee requirements for agents
Limits on locates of character/corp
Notification to target that they have been located via agent
Counter-bribery to locate agents to give false information

The idea I think was to get rid of the instant passive notifications of the watchlist. Not kill active locating completely.

Redirected from GD out of curiosity.

Sad to hear a legit profession and content area of the game is suffering and reduced to the result of trade hub camping and mass WDing. (Which is essentially mere piracy, not mercenary work).

I dont have any options to suggest or the knowhow to evaluate suggestions, but the issue seems real enough.

Mercs fulfill the three core qualities in my PVP vs PVE diagram in my sig, and introduce PVP outwards to affect all the peripheral PVE activities in fulfillment of their contracts.

As basically "Corps for Hire", they should be considered central content creators that embody aggressive capitalist values of EVE, especially for non-combat corps to hire to explode/impair the operations of their competing corps when they dont have the expertise/firepower to do so themselves, to protect their own operations, or ofc just for good old settling of vendettas.

GL, hopefully CCP will consider this in future.

(PS: Yes im posting from relative safety of NPC corp, which can be considered ironic.)

Liked em both and updated my previous post to more specifically articulate why Merc Corps should get more consideration from CCP as content providers.

Ill update the diagram in my sig to specifically include/represent Mercs central role.

If I ever have need of Merc services or come across someone who does, Ill be sure to prefer and recommend yours first.

If there is anything else I can do to help, Ill be glad to as I see this issue as worthy.

GL in your crusade and efforts to bring CCPs attention to this.
o7

And note I am fully aware that my "simple solution" could easily take a year or more of coding to create a working prototype.