Crime & Punishment

Stream :
http://fanfest.eveonline.com/en/stream/free

A better feed than mine's, but it's GD
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=85673&find=unread
Comments on GD
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=85670&find=unread


It has begun.

EDIT1
"Player corps should be able to choose if they can get at war, with greater rewards".

EDIT2
A line about mercs. I think that's the first time I'm seeing CCP talking about wardecs AND mercs.

EDIT3
EVEuni warshield will no longer work.

EDIT4
A corp leaving an alliance will have an independant wardec on it. Bye bye, invulnerable POS.

EDIT5
20m minimum for wardeccing a corp, increased by the size. :(

EDIT6
"we want wardecs to be a bigger isk sink"
CEO vote is not longer mandatory, yay/

EDIT7
Impossible to retract a war.

EDIT8
Surrending is now an "offer" (looks like a 24h contract).

EDIT9
After a surrending, you can't wardec them again for a week.

EDIT10
Battlereport available, with kms and some blabla. Looks pretty.

EDIT11
Public war history.

EDIT12
Corp-hoping. CCP will do nothing but let this "taint" on your history.

EDIT13 (edited further)
The wardecced entity can call multiple allies. The agressor cannot.
You can be an ally multiple times at the same moment.

EDIT14
"Mercenary marketplace" wtf
New kind of contract to look for an "ally".

20M + 500k/member is a broken system. It weights it too heavily on the side of the large corps. (Price is calculated as 20M + 500k/member in the target corp to declare.) That means a 50-person corp would cost 45M, a 500-person corp would cost 270M/wk, and a 2500-member corp would be 1270M/wk.

It needs to scale in a diminishing returns fashion.

Something like:

50M * cuberoot(member_count)

Which would put the base cost at around 50M/wk. Rough costs for larger target corp sizes would then be 10=107M, 100=232M/wk, 500=397M, 1000=500M, 1500=572M, 3000=721M, 6000=908M.

So to wardec a 100 person corp, you're only paying about 2x the cost to declare a 10 person corp. And as you go up in corp size, the increase in cost doesn't scale anywhere near as fast.

Alternately:

20M base + (40M * cuberoot(member_count))

Which scales out as being more expensive at the lower end, but the N=6000 cost ends up at 747M/wk.

Confirming The Orphanage (Or Moar Tears) don't have enough money to pay 4.145B/Week for a few industrial kills from GSF on the Jita undock.

Ahah.

My first comments :

Scrapyard Bob, you're right.
A linear cost is NOT a good idea.
Atm, it would cost 4b2 a week to wardec GSF (but the cost will not be increased by other wardecs). Well, a bit less with the non-active members, but it's still expensive.



Also, the ideas were almost all good, BUT not doing anything about corp hoping.
People will leave their corp for 2mn, flying the freighter around, and get back soon after.
Agressors will still corp-jump to supriz-buttsekz the defenders.

I would say that :
-a character leaving a war will have a 24h timer on it.
- people joining a corp at war must have a 24h delay on it, and the other side gets a mail about it "omggriefer345 is joining the war in 24h !".

Some very good changes overall. They didn't address a number of smaller issues that will continue to get used all the time though.

- Corp-hopping while in space next to a wartarget - this should be impossible, not an exploit
- When a corp you're decced against gets accepted to an alliance it should tell you that in 24hrs you'll be at war with the alliance
- Are wardec costs the same against corps as they are against alliances?
- Are surrender options something that can be done remotely, rather than the current restricting conditions that make it so rare
- If corp A and B dec C. Then do defenders have to join both wars to defend C? Or just pick one of them and it covers all incoming wardecs?
- How do they plan to counter 1-man corp wardecs holding wars and just swapping characters into the corp to kill things then switch out. The "blemish system" sounds about as shaming as being -10 sec status - completely pointless
- Needs more info on how wardec costs will scale with members (a player had a good question about active accounts vs trial buffering)

20m base for a corp, 50m base for an alliance. Scaling the same way.

He said it was like a contract (well it was a contract) so I guess so.

Not ideal .. could be exploited by making a new kind of "dec shield", adding alts to the corp roster instead of phony war decs, to drive up dec costs. Then again, this will happen with any mechanism that scales dec cost with some characteristic of the target corp. Whatever metric is used to scale the dec cost, defenders will artificially inflate that metric to shield themselves. If it's based on character activity, those alt characters will just be logged on multibox and autopilot around the universe all day.

The only scaling mechanism I can imagine working is one that couples a corp or alliance's earning potential to its war dec vulnerability. Then if a corp has safety from war as its highest priority, they will have fewer opportunities to earn ISK ... the fundamental risk/reward tradeoff that is the basis of EVE.

Just off the top of my head something like this, a corp safety level set by the CEO:

* Super Safe Corp: cannot be war dec'ed, cannot anchor POS's or POCO's, 75% CONCORD tax on all bounties and rewards.

* Semi-Safe Corp: war dec cost 100m/week (250m/week for alliance), cost does not scale with size, can anchor small & medium POS only (no large), cannot anchor POCO's, 35% CONCORD tax.

* Unsafe Corp: war dec cost 20m/week (50m/week for alliance), cost does not scale with size, can anchor any POS or POCO, no CONCORD tax.

NPC corps would be in the super-safe category.

The so-called "safe" corp that cannot be dec'ed already exists, i.e. the NPC corporations, so allowing player-created safe corps is not really a big change. If anything, the proposed change will make ISK generation harder for the most risk averse high sec characters, since they'll suffer harsher penalties for staying in an NPC corp. Of course, if one is using NPC corp alts to fund high sec PvP activities, this could be a bit inconvenient

There is also plenty of PvP that the war-proof corp status will not stop (suicide ganks, suspect/criminal flags, and anything outside high sec)

Mining is not lucrative; it's more a social activity than a real ISK generator. Anyway, suicide ganks are still a major risk for miners, regardless of war decs.

Courier mission rewards may be taxed, including player courier missions.

Good point about industry in NPC stations, which could also be tied to safety level. Say that a set of new assembly lines open up which are much faster and more material-efficient than the ones in NPC stations. Access to those assembly lines could be a reward of accepting war risk for your corp/alliance. Also, note that an industrialist with a couple neutral hauler alts is already invulnerable to war decs. He just sits in station, queues jobs, buys minerals and posts products for sale.

As for the level 4 mission blitz, again players under a war dec can already jump to an NPC corp for a day or two and mission all they want with no risk, only a minor tax penalty. Hopping to a player-created dummy corp will even bypass the tax, and it can't be dec'ed for 48 hours from the moment the war aggressor discovers what dummy corp has been used.

Also, the new system needs to penalize those who want to dec all of EVE, which is what I think CCP is trying to accomplish with the wardec costs scaling in a linear fashion.

Otherwise, we'll end up with Privateers take 3(?), where they had wardec'd a few dozen different alliances, for cheap. (Which was an interesting business model, but was a bit over the top.)

So, will CCP use a "3 outbound wardecs per corp/alliance" rule? Will they scale the costs up for each new wardec based on how many active outbound, non-mutual, wardecs?

Not quite. You missed one rather important part of the presentation....

"There are no restrictions to the number of allies a corp can have." - Word for word from the presentation, in writing, as a bullet point on the overhead projector.

This means the war target can pull in UNLIMITED number of allies. Now imagine you are a bored PvP corp that just wants to kill everything you come across. Do you start declaring wars? Or do you just offer your "merc services" for free as an ally to anyone that asks? If you are a small "griefer" corp who does war decs you are screwed. If you are a corp with a legitimate beef and good reason to start a war, you are also screwed. Suffice to say, wars themselves are screwed. And legitimate mercs are screwed as well cuz you got people offering their services for free.

I thought this change was supposed to fix wars....