Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Why are you so sure of this? Data presented by CCP Quant and Rise suggest the opposite - that isolating people from the players from the sandbox decreases retention rates and the average time players spend in the game. Making it so new players can get trapped in clueless highsec new player corps that never interact with anyone else seems more likely to put players on a path to quitting then to stay with the game long term.

I am sure that people have quit the game after being wardecced and told to stay logged out. Either reflects the fact that they don't really want to be playing a PvP game, which is therefore a good thing as the wouldn't be likely to stick around that long anyway and can do something else with their time, or that their corp has terrible leadership and we lost a potential long-term Eve player which is a shame. The solution isn't however is to let these terrible corps operate with impunity by nerfing wardecs into irrelevance.

There are probably changes to the mechanic to promote more balance on each side as well as give some space for a purely social corp to exist. That is where you should focus your energies if you truly want to make the game better. Don't propose to remove large parts of the competitive aspect of the game because you don't want to, or are unable to, compete. Competition is the heart of this game.

-1 to your proposal then.

Ken, all that is is some numbers. On its own the amount of wars a corp has is not an indicator of anyone having fun or not. It is entirely possible that every one of those wars to have plenty of activity and even fights where the defenders have fun. Thats why, along some other reasons, im against just putting a limit to the amount of decs a corp/alliance can make.

The reason we expect those decs to be crappy blanket decs has a lot to do with different features to dec limit. And a lot of the people arguing against the op here are actually not happy with the status quo either. I'm not. Ralph especially isn't fond of blanket deccing.

Kara Hawke is someone who thinks nerfing wardecs into the ground will make the game a fun and safe place to play and subs will go up. She thinks players will enter into pvp later if they are allowed to grow. Problem with that is, it's not meant to be a safe place to play and players rarely enter pvp later. Instead the opposite of what she thinks happens, they just 'level up their raven and quit'. Where as those who get shot at, stay with the game. When wardecs were cheaper, more frequent, less biased towards the defender and hunters could see the moment you logged on, the game subscriptions grew every year. It WAS new players that were deccing other corps and learning to hunt and pvp. And more of these players stuck around.

So yeah, every time someone says 'war decs are mean -something something, think of the children-. Nerfing them will make the game better'. Im gonna pile on. The 'children' used to love the wardec mechanic.

My 'Teeth cutting' into PVP was also war decs. I started in one of those corps being founded and ran by a nub, who knew nothing and lost stupid crap all over the place. We ended up being constantly at war, until we got tired of it, broke off, formed our own corp, and became the guys war deccing others.

But those war decs weren't part of a 70+ War dec everything that comes through the Perimeter gate campaign. They were small, localized affairs designed at finding an active group in an area and war deccing them. This meant sometimes we moved around a bit. Not huge moves I've become used to since joining Suddenly, but moving a region or two one way or another. This meant spending 3-4 days sometimes sitting in traffic areas watching people, checking KB's, member counts, etc, looking for someone we thought would be active and big enough to try to fight, but that we still had a reasonable chance of beating.


Yes this sometimes meant station games. Yes, we hit towers from time to time. And yes, we occasionally had targets move across new eden. And we followed.


That's what war decs should be aiming to achieve. And if the game has changed so much that they cannot do that function anymore, then they need taken apart completely and rebuilt from the ground up. Continuously clinging to a dead and gone system because it's what you've always done is as anti-eve as you can get. How's Black Legion doing these days anyway?


You're telling me that is all just some numbers?

Well no. That's one example of a blanket war dec system being in place. Occasionally there are a few peeps that roam around, but they're the exception. We've been one of those 96 active war decs for closing on a month. Why? Because someone flew an alliance JF into Jita, and someone else forgot about the war, and flew another one into Perimeter before seeing the war targets and jumping back out. There was no scouting out our local activity, looking at our pilots depth and ability, looking for any of our vulnerable industry corps, or seizing on an opportunity like an onlining citadel. It was just because someone flew an in alliance JF through Jita. It doesn't bother me, I gave into game of Alts years ago so can still do all my stuff just fine. You'd have to figure out how to war dec a couple NPC corps and war dec a few alt corps all at the same time to start bothering me with war decs. But that doesn't mean I can't look at the system and see it's very much broken and why.


But the status quo is preferable to any progress being made on fixing the system, short of CCP giving into a bunch of salt and giving high seccers more special protections/rules and letting them have agents that tell you literally the one single most important piece of information and biggest violation of privacy a game can give you in the context of the game, whether someone is online or not.

Lemme know if you wanna actually talk about the problems. Until then I'm done here.


In response to OP, I'm for limiting war decs, as part of one of many changes that need made to the war dec system to restore war decs to what they need to be. Not because high sec needs to be safer, but because war decs need more of a purpose than just sitting in Jita and war deccing everything that comes through. +1

Why do we need further nerfs to resolve a situation that is the direct result of multiple nerfs in the first place?

I think you are confusing mercenary and mercenary work with 'player farming'. There is a difference. Mercing was great and good for the game. Player farming sux and isn't good for the game. The continual onslaught of recommended changes (spanning awesome, good, bad to downright horrible) have a lot to do with current war dec mechanics. Currently the only smart move in HS pvp is to mass dec and farm players. That's what the current mechanics dictate and that's what current HS pvp folks do. This is not rocket science. Bad mechanics need to become good ones. The game (specifically HS pvp in this case) needs to be challenging, fun and interesting. Currently HS pvp isn't a healthy combination of these attributes. It could be and should be more.

If anyone is claiming that deccing the 6 largest player groups and 4 additional groups doesn't provide enough targets, then they are lazy and sux at eve. Carrying 100+ decs coupled with player assists in its current form HAS reduced HS pvp to player farming. It sux.


If you can't see and understand the difference between mercing and player farming, you're really not worth the time to argue with.

This game was growing and did fine when there was alot more PvP in HS than there is now. So you are just wrong on that count.

And look, learn to PvP means you have to get out there and....lose ships. Get your corp into low cost T1 ships and go at it. Expect to lose ships and if you kill some of them, then it is a bonus. Things to help you:

Voice comms
Develop a combat doctrine, don't do kitchen sink fleets
Focus fire--i.e. the fleet commander designates a target that everyone shoots.
Read up on and understand how various timers work, for example with gates and/or docking.
Learn which stations have big docking rings and which one's don't.
Set up insta-dock and undock bookmarks so when you warp to or away from a station you can improve your chances of surviving.

If you insist on being puny, weak, and incompetent you are going to pretty much be food for everyone else.

Don't like wardecs? Drop back into an NPC corp and forget about them.

The wardec system is broken, on both sides of the equation, nobody is denying that; blanket wardecs are a symptom, they're not the disease.

Sure, mass wardeccing is what the lazy did to get content. However, the removal of the watchlist basically killed off the focused wardec. So now about the only way for war dec corps and alliances to get content--i.e. things to shoot--is to camp trade hubs and the routes connecting the hubs and war dec anything and everything they see.

As a result small and large wardec corps/alliances were done when it came to focused war decs. That game play was essentially over. Supers were more safe, but HS also became more safe except for the camping of trade hubs.

Yes, the increase in wardec costs drove smaller corps into alliances so that they could spread the costs. Yet another dumb idea from CCP...probably a Grey-I'm a flaming Idiot-scale idea.

The idea it is a bed that wardec corps have made for themselves however is just complete errant nonsense.

Basically, the current state is more a result of CCP's changes to the games mechanics. Those changes engendered behavioral changes on the part of those who use wardecs to get where we are now.

Edit: Disregard the last two paragraphs....I jerked my knee too fast.

Thanks, you are correct...I edited my post.

I agree with the OP to some extent.

To me, the problem is that a new-ish industry corp is extremely underpowered compared to combat corps both new, old, large, and small.

A combat corp will wipe the floor against players who have most of there SP in mining and spend most of their time lasering rocks.
The newer corp, already struggling to make a profit in industry PvP, is now either forced to hire mercs with ISK they haven't been able to make or spin their ships in station, all while PvPing vs their warring corp and every industry player in all of their operating regions.

Sure they could just stay in an NPC corp but then the corp/guild mechanic, a social mechanic found and expected in every game, isn't used for the social aspect of the game which is arguably the core of an industry corp.

IMO, these corps should have a little bit of assistance in this area. Combat characters are kind of a requirement for all corps, and an unnecessary one at that.

TLDR;
A newish combat corp does not require miners.
A newish mining corp should not require fighters.