Player Features and Ideas Discussion

It's been a while since I tossed a bad idea out there to feed the forum piranhas. He's some fresh meat!

If I had my way, war-decs would be more about a fight over resources than all-out-wars to boost stats and collect tears. To that end, I proposed "scalable" war-decs. First off, I'll toss out some numbers, but since I don't know what ISK totals would provide for a "balance", I'll just talk instead about "units of ISK".

Central premise- tie war-dec costs to locations & entities. The larger the location or entity, the greater the war-dec fee. If you want a war-dec to apply to just one system, it would cost only one (1) unit of ISK. To tie it to a constellation, it would cost five (5) units of ISK. To a region, perhaps ten (10) units of ISK. To cover two regions, it would cost twenty (20) units of ISK, etc. This cost would be multiplied by the size of the entity that you wish to declare war against. It would be times one (1x) against a corp. Against an alliance, it would be times five (5x) or some other arbitrary number. Additionally, the size of your own entity is factored in- if you are declaring as a corp, times one (1x). If you are declaring as an alliance, times five (5x). NOTE- this would allow individual corps within an alliance to declare war against other individual corps (whether they are in an alliance or not).

How it would work- if a member of the target corp/alliance enters your space (system, constellation, etc), you are granted full kill rights against them. These kill-rights extend for 15 minutes after your opponents leave your space. This would give you the option to pursue them. Similar to faction warfare, you would be given notification that they are in your space.

What this would allow a corp or alliance to do is defend an area of space that they lay "claim" to. For instance, your corp/alliance desires ice-mining exclusiveness in a system. You could declare war fairly cheaply against any and all corps/alliances that try to mine your ice. If they feel strong enough in their urge to fight for it, they could declare it "mutual" and a no-holds-barred fight for it could ensue in that area.

Other notes- war-decs would not wait 24 hrs. I would recommend no more than one (1) hour of notification before the war-dec begins. Additionally, there is only one way to avoid this war-dec- leave the targeted system(s). This means, if you have a POS, you better be able to defend it. At the same time, I would recommend halving the standings requirements for POSes. Basically, what a corp/alliance would be able to do is pay CONCORD for the priviledge of claiming resource rights in an area of space.

One final note- Faction Warfare. Corps (and perhaps soon, Alliances) that are official participants in Faction Warfare can not be the target of a war-dec within their own Empire's space. This would mean that their POSes are also untouchable, except by members of the opposing Faction (who would have to be Faction Warfare participants as well). This would grant a benefit to Faction Warfare participants in that they would be immune to the regular war-dec system. Besides, they are continually at war as it is.

Ok, thoughts? Again, if this system was adopted, the current dec-shedding/dec-shielding process would be non-existent.

The word "limited" throws it in the face of the sandbox. It isn't too bad of an idea...but like the previous guy said...could be exploitable. Still...I have no better of an idea. So I won't knock it.

Perhaps I should have said "scalable", lending to the idea that you could make the war-dec as small or as big as you wanted to it to be (and had the ISK to support). Theoretically, with this idea, a corp could war-dec someone through-out of all of high-sec, assuming they were willing to shell out the ISK. In that case, it'd be more of a war of revenge or to try to crush that corp. Of course, that is the case now, but it doesn't seem appropriate that for *only* 2 mill a week you can just go on an endless killing spree in high-sec. Again, the idea is a war over resources. Other than religion, all wars nowadays are fought over resources anyways (in RL, of course).

I completely agree. There's plenty of "for teh lolz" killing done through suicide ganking and low-sec/null-sec piracy. I would definitely like to see war with a purpose. I'm of a mind that all-out-war should be ultra-expensive. Because basically, a corp right now can turn high-sec into null-sec against another corp for just 2 mill a week. It skips low-sec altogether, because you don't even need to worry about security status loss. And to the aggressor, the current war-dec system is basically risk-free (unless someone smarter and stronger than them declares war in return). I also immensely dislike how a tiny corp can set-up and maintain a POS in high-sec, and basically be invulnerable through the dec-shedding option. The space that a POS occupies is effectively a resource, and one that should have to be defended at all times.

I think the major possible means for exploitation of my above proposed war-dec system is that large groups could dominate an area of space by declaring a multitude of cheap wars against any and all corps/alliances that wish to use that system. Of course, folks could just avoid that system/constellation and be just fine. Or, they would simply leave their corp as they do now and jump back into an NPC corp. Or, corps could team up against a common enemy and wage a massive high-sec war. I would think one side effect of this system is that we'd see more participation in militias due to their invulnerability to war-decs. Empire spaces would effectively be SOV-type spaces in regards to POSes. However, I haven't quite worked out how a militia would remove a POS set-up by a non-militia corp. Perhaps 0.8 space and up would only have Faction Warfare POSes, with other corps able to fight over 0.5 to 0.7 space.

Thank you for the constructive criticism regarding how my proposal is too complicated. I'll try to think of something more simplified. And I do think your ideas have a great deal of merit. I also do feel that if we choose to simply modify the current system that adding the option for terms of surrender, simplification of the war-dec process and an increase in the war-dec costs as you mentioned would do wonders towards improving the current state of things. However, I do also still feel that the nature of wars need to change from one of "just kill stuff" to a fight over resources. For that to change, a drastic alteration to the war-dec system will need to take place. As a side note, I had looked up your background before as I had appreciated a few of the posts that you had made in other forums topics, and I can fairly reasonably infer that your playing style has a vested interest in how the current war-dec system is set up. As such, your history dimishes the impact of your character attack.