EVE Information Portal

Thank you for showing that not even technetium miners can afford to have as many allies as the new wardec system provides for (yes, I'm aware that they are large alliances which wouldn't need allies if some hisec immensely space-rich person wanted to burn 500M ISK/week wardeccing people who don't care about wardecs). The design has not been thought through. The consequences of these design decisions have not been considered.

I would like to see a statement of the goals for the system, beyond just "enabling the mercenary market". I don't give a damn about the mercenary market: they've done well enough for themselves so far, and there's no reason for CCP to stick their fingers in that pie. If the wardec system happens to be useful to them, well and good. But the wardec system should not be designed with only the goal of enabling mercenaries in mind.

I have posted elsewhere about sensible ideas for the future of wardecs, beyond simply being a licence to grief smaller groups of players out of the game: make wardecs objective based (the main one I can think of is "remove this POS", another could be, "cause X ISK damage while taking less than Y ISK damage", or "prevent this corp mining in this constellation"). Then put some money as a wager on the outcome of this wardec.

So rather than simply paying a bribe to CONCORD, the aggressor is also making a challenge to the victim: defend your POS, win 1B ISK. If you want fights, you'll pay for them.

Wardecs will still be viable as a griefing mechanism: you can even motivate your targets to log in and get blown up by challenging them to blow up more than Y ISK worth of your ships with a nice kitty on the table.

I read most posts on this thread and I still don't understand CCPs logic of charging by the ally.

If I've understood correctly, the reasons for the changes are to boost the Merc profession and cap the number of corps that can sign up to ally with a decced corp.

How does charging corps extra to add allies help the Merc profession? Don't you need to limit the supply of allies to adjust the value of an ally (economics 101)?

There is a huge diversity of Alliances, Corps, and play styles in Eve, and this change seems to focus protecting a narrow (yet powerful) section of the player base. This change doesn't do anything to improve the game of Eve. I would have thought it would be better to boost the smaller alliances and corps to create more variety in the Eve Universe.

1) There should be risks and consequences to declaring war on someone.
2) Defenders should be able to call for allies from across New Eden. Make the market determine the availability of suitable allies
3) Allying yourself with a defender should confer it's own risk and reward, thereby limiting the number of potential allies.

Actually I passed.

Limiting the number of ally slots reduces the elasticity of demand, this stifles the Merc market.

take all my likes, this makes up for a lot of avocado spoiled burgers

Not even Eve online balancing discussions are worth skipping a nights sleep and a nice breakfast for.

Well I couldn't leave a nice lady alone with all those shocking goons now could I?

It's sad to see the Dev posts reduced to facetious comments. As a player, I always expect a forum thread with Dev posts to contain something interesting or useful.

As far as I can gather, Inferno is all about 'war' and making Mercenaries a valid profession in Eve. Why? It's a sandbox. If the game needs them, they will be available.

From a personal point of view it would be better to make the mechanics of Mercenary/Employer easier to use. Mercenaries need prospective Employers to post objectives and durations of contract on a suitable War Board. Employers need to be able to pick and choose Mercenary groups by looking at their accomplishments on the same board. Then just let them get on with it.

The 'dogpiling' of Allies sounded wonderful fun - just what the game needed to spice up highsec and make anyone declaring war think twice before pressing the button. Not everything Jade says is rubbish!

One good merc corp is better then 100 random free corps. If defending corps wanted a good merc corp, they will pay for it. People will only pay for a merc corp if they have something to defend that they themselves would be unable to. That doesn't change because they are limited to a small handful of ally slots.

The real issue with the mercenary profession is that there is no gameplay reason to include them in defensive wars in the current state of the game and wardec mechanic - there is literally nothing that a merc can do to help you end an incoming war that cannot be accomplished without paying a penny (and this is even before Inferno 1.0).

If you get wardecced you move your logistics out of corp/alliance (as the goon posters here have boasted they do) - you limit your exposure, and you wait for the attacker to run out of money/patience or just prep for the occassional gank.

Prior to inferno my own alliance went through an intensely frustrating 15 month period of seeking a "good" hisec war but the same happened time after time, - logistics disappear, people move-away - use blueball tactics and general bore the attacker senseless.

What Inferno 1.0 delivered was not a "merc marketplace" (basically the wardec team delivered nothing in terms of adding value and consequence to wars) it was simply a "mayhem marketplace" where defenders could invite dogpiling onto attackers as a quid pro quo balancing to the closing of wardec evasion loopholes and increased large alliance wardec defense through size escalation.

So now the issue we have is trying ostensibly to "boost" a merc profession by removing the mayhem marketplace which destroys the balance reached on attack vs defense with Incarna 1.0/.

It doesn't help mercenary corporations in the slightest because nobody has a motivation to hire them. Why pay more than zero for a defensive ally when no defensive ally in the game is capable of bringing a war to a conclusion. The "scarcity" argument conjured up by some is just complete hogwash - an entity might wardec X small target and that target add the 5 largest alliances in the game to their defensive war for a total of 20,000 players and a total cost of 150m isk per 2 weeks. All they achieve is giving the attacker more free targets and ensuring they lose the baseline isk transaction war (50m vs 75m) while doing absolutely nothing to bring the war to a conclusion.

Until CCP is able to engineer a wardec system with stakes and consequences then there will be no purpose to mercs joining defensive wars except to scam/skim ISK payments from the credulous while doing precisely nothing to help "win" unwinnable wars.

If on the other hand Team Superfriends had delivered a stakes system for war (here's something I made up on the back of a beermat last night for example):

Wardec declared ... (Alliance X 5000) people (aliiance Y 1000 people.)
Alliance X pays 200m per week
(alliance Y to X would be 500m)

Default stake (defeat penality) = cost to wardec X vs Y + cost to wardec Y vs X x 10 = 7billion isk.

This stake would be paid out if one alliance gets a 75% isk killed efficiency on the other alliance while scoring at least 7b isk damage done (taken directly from the executor corp wallet or fixed as an automaticly collected "debt" if wallet insufficient. (entities in debt would no longer be able to declare war).

So in one move you'd have wars that risked something for both sides. Whichever alliance first scored 7b isk damage while being at least 75% ahead of the other would be judged to have "won" the war and has the option to take the victory boon,

Alternatively a victorious defender could "double down" perhaps and take over as the attacker for the next sequence while increasing the stake 2x to 14b isk (and skip the war fee thereafter) (rinse and repeat.)

It turns wars into hi stakes gambling and contests where both risk on the outcome.

Now.

Introduce this system and you can bet your ass that mercenary corps will have a role again because hiring them directly increases your chance of winning a hi-stakes empire war and collecting the victory boon. Allow mercs to be paid in hiring fee + futures (split of the victory take) and you suddenly make this an interesting game feature with genuine market.

In my example above I can see Alliance Y definitely wanting the service of a decent merc corp to help it win and collect the pot or reverse and double down as the new attacker.

***

Like I said, this is back of a beer mat proposal for how to make merc corps viable. But it involves actually producing a war system where victory and defeat matters and the participants are actually interested in winning.

But its what you need to make people care about merc corps in defensive wars.

The 1.1 patch just tries to promote mercs by nerfing mayhem and the outcome will just be less war involvement by everyone.

If Team Superfriends have decent metrics they can check in six months time we can revisit this prediction and see who is right and who is wrong on this. If warfare has exploded all over new eden and mercs are the new superstar professionals of eve I'll doubless eat some humble pie on the 1.1 change come christmas.

The way you describe it makes it sound quite a lot like "if we don't like it, then it was worthless feedback to begin with!". I hope your post isn't an accurate portrayel of any sentiments CCP/the csm have.