EVE General Discussion

Hmm? Every war I've had declared on me, has been from stuff I said on this forum. They mailed me and said so. Fine. In game? Not really, no. My response?

Watch the video. He says it pretty well, and a lot more I'd like to say to a lot of you.

I'm afraid of what you call reprisals. I've handled it. The war-dec is within one hour of me leaving my alt's corp.

I still maintain that you cannot "fix" war decs. On one side you have people who want to PvP, on the other you have people who do not want to PvP at all. No change will make the latter group want to PvP and any change that satisfies the latter group will simple cost the former group content.

Any attempt to "fix war decs" is like trying to find something in the intersection of two disjoint sets. In set A you have the war dec corps and alliances. In set B the alliances and corporations they are deccing. The intersection of A and B is the null set.

I must hairsplit again. Cant help myself:
1) Players assets when they leave the game, are not technically "lost".
2) Tippia has nothing to do with this. By all means, call it the "Pedro Effect", if you wish.
3) I dont think wealth contributes to boredom in any significant way. There are **** poor players losing tons of ships, and ultra-rich losing none.
4) Safety has two inverse, arguably equal, effects on content. More safety allows for more PvE content. Less safety allows for more PvP content. Finding a balance there is key, and one of the ways EVE attempts that, is with sector mechanics.

Im not so certain this primarily, or even in majority, is a HS problem.
Its a universal problem (except for j-space, I would argue, which strikes a very good balance)
Imo, Player Sov also, is too safe (arguably more so than HS)
LS, has an arguably fairly good safety/risk/quotient, but is crippled by its narrow geography, and that it can be bypassed.
Faction War LS has the kind of content and opportunity I myself would hope would separate NS from HS all the way around Empire space.

Further complicating the issue, is many players exploiting the situation with both HS and NS alts, symbiotically.
That can be argued to be content creation and creative use of game mechanics, but it is also contributing to a greater margin of safety of action in both HS and NS.

One example of this being Nullbears running mining/ratting in deep blue systems almost afk, whilst simultaneously running suicide ganking or trade/hauling alts in HS.

When I talk about the unceasing flow of material from NS to HS and back, that means along the entire trade chain.
Its not HS specific, its an attempt to indicate that the entire chain is too safe.

Aside from sector mechanics, it might be time to start consider nerfing the means of avoiding PvP, by changing mechanics involving cloaking, instawarping, gate cloaks, docking time, cyno jumping etc.

This kind of claim is an empty EVE cliche: "Once there once a good outcome from some game feature or player behavior, therefore it's always a good thing".

That one wardec that entertains you does not justify all the others that induced uninterested players to "wait out" frivolous wardecs by not playing at all for a while because they don't have the interest, skill, or resources to fight back.

BTW "sometimes we enjoy the process" or "sometimes there's some opposition" are typical fun-vampire arguments. It's a good indicator for the absence of empathy that separates the vampires from everyone else.

And by way of addressing the usual response ... this is EVE, and even newish players don't object to PVP. The bad outcome for the victims of frivolous wardecs, isn't the destroyed ships or the risk of ship destruction that concerns - it's the potential for induced boredom. You try to force them into a mode of play that, at the particular time and place, isn't what they want from the sandbox. Of course they don't switch to an unwanted mode of play - not playing is (hopefully) a negative outcome for them, but at least it doesn't consume RL time. The natural choice is to do something outside of EVE. No single case of that is likely to "stop someone playing the game", but it contributes to the real time/fun calculation that every gamer makes about every game they play.

Discouraging new players from actually playing is stupid. And "putting lipstick on the pig" doesn't change that.

One of the fundamental problems with war decs is the existence of alts/multiple accounts. You can't get around that regardless of whatever 'fixes' to the actual war dec mechanic you make. Any version of war decs assumes your target is a single entity and your war dec can affect them- but just using an alt hauler, out of corp cyno or scout, etc- derails that concept immediately. It's the nature of Eve being a game that hamstrings war decs.

Since I only use one acct and one character, the war dec works pretty much as intended against me personally. High Sec is dangerous, I can't just run to Jita to buy stuff, and staying in null sec (where I can be killed on sight anyway) is actually much safer. But how many people actually restrict themselves to one character?
This is exactly the same problem that the Security Status mechanic has. It's easily dodged because Eve is just a game and you can be more than one, totally unrelated people in it.

Consider that- how different would war decs be if you couldn't just log in an out-of-corp alt to utterly ignore the entire war dec mechanic? What change offered already would affect war decs more than that one thing? Obviously that isn't going to change, but it's exactly that issue I believe kills the war dec mechanic in it's cradle just like security status.

A chief reason new/low level corps are affected to such a large degree (compared to large/vertically integrated groups) is because they just haven't established the infrastructure (and gaggle of alts) to avoid war decs entirely. Once you have a couple dudes with well skilled alts, the war dec mechanic is basically non-existent.


The last time a war dec affected me was literally in my first few months in the game, in a newbie high sec start up corp. No one had gotten to the point of rolling alts yet, or even really understanding how to use them to manipulate the game to dodge unwanted consequences for your actions. Our CEO was little more than a newb himself and didn't have the handful of accounts that any serious null sec alliance leader operates. So war decs sucked. I felt the same frustration that you see expressed all the time here. Mostly that it amounts to griefing new players.
Once I joined an established null alliance with that huge infrastructure of out-of-alliance alts, war decs were at best a mild annoyance.

I would say that the NPE is one area that is hard for veteran players to abuse. I'm not saying it couldn't turn out that way. Have it start handing out lots of goodies and some veterans might start exploiting that.



That is my view. I do not make stuff because I like making stuff. I make stuff so I can sell it and make ISK so I can afford to go spend that ISK on ships and shoot people and get shot by people. It is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. Now maybe some people do love building up a giant pile of minerals and then turning it into modules or ships and looking at that giant pile of stuff. If that is you, knock yourself out. But stop trying to change the game. You can play that way. But you cannot avoid contact with other players. That has been a central feature of EVE from the beginning. You can seek to minimize those interactions, especially the hostile ones, but to ask CCP to limit them or even eliminate them...that is slowly chipping away at the game. Snip, can flipping is gone. Snip, targeted war decs are gone. Snip, ganking in battleships is gone. Snip, hulkaggedon is gone. And yes, some of it changes. When insurance changed and CONCORD response times decreased dedicated ganking organizations appeared. With yet more cries for another nerf. That magical nerf that will make it all okay.

And why am I able to still make stuff and sell it at a profit? Because lots of stuff gets blown up. There is no depreciation in this game, no wear and tear. As such unless an item explodes due to NPCs or other players it will exist in game so long as the servers are running. So without destruction many of the people out there mining, making stuff and so forth...they'd soon find that there is less return on such activities.



You can say "take it to NS" but the question is will merely saying it be enough? No, probably not. You'd have to force it. And why is that any different than forcing HS mission runners into LS? Or WH guys out of their holes and into some other part of the game?

And have people stopped to consider why HS is where you find the trade hubs? It is neutral ground guys. Nobody in game controls Jita 4-4. I can go in there and buy from my arch-enemy in game. Why would we do this? Because it is to our advantage. I want the stuff he is selling he wants my ISK or vice-a-versa. Yeah, we may do it through alts and cut-out corporations, but so what. Further, getting your stuff into HS offers safety. A HS station cannot be taken and dead-zoned. And no region, when it comes to moon-goo is totally self-sufficient. And then there is the market size. I can sell to anyone who comes to Jita 4-4. But I can't do that very well down in say Catch, or up in Branch.

Businesses and capitalists do not like too much risk. And they loathe uncertainty. The latter is particularly problematic for capitalists in that they can't really mitigate it. Risk you can try and mitigate. Uncertainty, in the sense of Frank Knight, is unmeasurable, impossible to calculate. To the extent that NS represents greater uncertainty it is going to limit economic activity going on there.

Might more industry move to NS? Maybe. But it is hard to obtain a specific outcome in a sandbox game. Players often have this annoying tendency to find a work around to your Awesome Solution™.

And until it does move to NS, yes war decs are needed. They are needed to create risk and uncertainty in the game. Remove that and it becomes a pretty damn boring game. Yes, I might be able to amass the largest pile of mexallon, but seriously, without competition in the game who gives a ****?

You are so easily triggered.

Tippia, a high profile Eve player (at least on the forums), left the game for the reason that she felt CCP had failed to deliver a game where meaningful conflict could take place. Excess safety bored her out of the the game. I therefore will use her as an example of one archetype of player who leave the game because safety has been continually ratcheted up by CCP leading to a paucity of content and lack of meaning.

But you are right, other than being Eve famous who quit out of boredom induced by the development direction CCP was taking, she has nothing to do with this. Your past with her has no relevance, and your self-indulgent rant about your exchanges with her has no bearing on the topic at hand which is wardecs.

It does though kinda make me want to work Tippia's name into more of my forum posts just to see what effects her ghost has on other players she wrangled with over the years.

Wars very much can be used to force a non-consensual fight. And even more so now that the POS-take-down hole is about to be plugged and industrialists who want to benefit from an EC, or more generally players who want to benefit from a structure, are forced to defend their structures.

I would suggest that CCP move all the rewards of being in a player corp into structures, and then make non-structure owning corps immune to wars. It's true as you say that if a corp doesn't own structures, you cannot force them to undock and fight, so we might as well formalize that and make that the rule. But for this to work, structures have to have real rewards for players to take on the risk and responsibility to defend, and the holes have to be plugged for players to benefit from the structures without being at risk of attack using alt corps, corp hopping and other mechanisms.

AFAIK almost no one uses wars for consensual fights. I mean, Eve Uni does and of course RvB, but that is essentially just fighting for fun or practice and is not really part of the competitive battle for economic dominance of New Eden.

If the defending side could field a fleet good enough to take on their attackers, they would be already.

They aren't going to turn up, thinking already that they are going to lose, just for their opponents to receive a nice ISK payout for killing them.

On top of that, how are you determining what time in the last day the final battle takes place? Not everyone plays the game at the same time.