Jita Park Speakers Corner

- Territorial Control, like removal of POS, POCO to anchor my own or on behalf of someone who wants to
- Psychological Warfare. Freeze the target's actions. Keep them docked/logged off.
- Good fights, be it with opponents or friends (RvB style)
- Revenge
- "That guy just annoys me, I'll dec him"

Wars should be based on anything a person wants it to be.


"Why" anyone does anything is going to be entirely subjective. One player's "pointless gameplay" is another player's "content."

You can't pigeonhole something so abstract into nicely defined categories. Even SOV warfare isn't always about SOV.

I agree with what has been said above me, and that wardecs are not too broken.

BUT. Leaving aside the theoretical PvP driver that wars are, the reality from our BRAVE perspective is that wars are just an annoyance: New people get ganked, vets avoid it with ease, and war deccers always dock-up when we try to mount any form of tangible resistance.

I'm not asking for them to suicide into us, but you have to admit that the system could be improved... Because currently, no good fight comes out of it, just slaughter of the most clueless players in our ranks. Its good for teaching them basic survival in high, its not good to anything else.

Maybe give the war deccer some form of extended weapon timer when attacking a war target, I don't know.
And without a doubt, make the cost of multiple wardecs exponential.

What they are:
1. The perfect mechanic to gank new players, small groups of new players, and those not paying attention (which would be their own fault) without pesky criminal flags.
2. The precise reason to not be in a player corporation with more than a couple of characters if you spend a significant amount of your time in HiSec.
3. The mechanic to move/remove someone else's personal or corporate industrial production (as anyone paying attention would pull down or abandon any towers or POCOs in HiSec at risk).
4. A minor inconvenience to any moderately experienced player.

What they should be:
1. A method that sanctions fights between two roughly equally matched (not size, but capability) parties without NPC intervention.

Based on your track record, Steve, I suspect you are just looking for us to help you to lobby for heavy handed nerfs to the current wardec system. I won't help you there, but I will answer your question.

The short answer is what you should expect in a sandbox game - the purpose of wardecs is whatever the players involved want it to be. Any changes made to the mechanics should be made with this principle in mind. The more that mechanics dictate objectives or limit conditions of war, the less freedom players will have to create their own content.

If you get down to specifics, though, wars are declared for a short list of purposes. A few examples-

1. Kelduum's ideal - goodfights between equally matched organizations without NPC interference. At this, the current mechanics succeed admirably, as we can see from RvB, or fun wars that have been fought between RvB and Ivy, or Marmite vs. PoH, or countless other examples. This is an excellent use of the wardec mechanics as they currently exist.

2. Killing noncombatants for fun and profit. A lot of empire wars boil down to this, although their justifications vary considerably (revenge wars, wars fought in hopes of securing a ransom payment, RP reasons like the Code, pure "grief" wars declared just to be a ****, etc.) There is absolutely nothing wrong with fighting wars for this purpose. The current mechanics support this activity moderately well. The frustrations for the aggressor with this objective are the price of wardec fees, which limits the number of targets that smaller, poorer corps can afford, and the ease with which the defenders can evade the wardec. For the defending side the frustration is that they are usually fighting against more experienced PvPers, but again, that is balanced by evasion mechanics- they can opt out of the war when they choose. Defenders can also have free allies.

3. Asymmetric warfare. Current wardec mechanics offer great opportunities for small aggressions corps to inflict disproportionate damage on a large defending corp. This is the reason why so many people in Brave and Ivy find them so annoying. From the other side though, it's a lot of fun to go up against a group much larger than your own and use guerrilla tactics and your mastery of highsec mechanics to get many and valuable kills. This is a great argument in favor of wardecs. The frustration here is that the current price structure oddly discourages this. It is actually more expensive to wardec larger organizations, when common sense would seem to tell us that the opposite should be the case.

4. Removal of structures. This is straightforward enough. However, there isn't much incentive to actually do this in highsec. POCOs are virtually worthless for non-industrialists and POSes are rarely worth killing in the absence of something like moongoo. This is an area for improvement in the current system. The wars themselves work fine, but we need more and better things to fight over - there should be real advantages to be gained from taking and holding structures or territory. However, wardecs should never be limited to that sort of thing - that's what nullsec and wormholes are for.

So what it comes down to is this- wardecs are pretty good as is. The mechanics could be tweaked, but don't need an overhaul. Better to work on related mechanics like the corporation system or structures if you want to improve the quality of wars - give us the tools and we'll make the content ourselves.

They are fine.

No, really. I feel that from a design standpoint, wardecs are an interesting and unique (read: abusable) mechanic in the pool of interesting and unique mechanics that make up highsec, and part of what makes highsec such a mechanically complex (read: compelling and intriguing) place to fight in.

Does the current wardec system promote use of OOC alts? Sure.
Does the current wardec system promote people playing station games? Sure.
Do I see an issue with the above? No. Abusing game mechanics and alts to your advantage has been part of the game since its inception, and I see absolutely no issue with it. If preparation, investing assets and planning does not give you a decisive homefield advantage, then this wouldn't be EVE. As players, setting up the board in a way that guarantees us victory is what we do.


tl;dr Wardecs are just fine, I see no reason to change anything about them.


Disclaimer, personal opinion, not the opinion of E-UNI, etc.

I think the purpose of wardecs should be to provide stories to scare newbies, but actual instances of joe schmoe tiny insignificant mining corps being 'decced should be relatively uncommon. It's too cheap as is, plenty of folks out there making bank off of wardecs that frequently yield no kills, just because it costs so little to declare.

Also need em for corps that just want to fight, like red vs blue. I assume it's free if the other corp agrees, as it should be.

Wardecs are a silly mechanic used primarily to explode new players who think they're safe because highsec.

New players or people dumb enough to engage in carebear activities while decked get agent located, neutral scouted, and then ganked with overwhelming force by toons specifically designed for highsec WT ganking.

Veterans use NPC corp alts and so wardecs are for them a non-issue.

Wardecs incentivize keeping your highsec carebearing toons in NPC corps, thats really all.

Force people out of NPC corps and highsec just becomes FW space. And a bunch of people quit.

* Profit
* Revenge
* Grieving (for flying a Drake).
* Fun
* Creating market for mercenaries.
* Destroying ships and modules, so the industrials can sell more.
* High-sec denial for alliances (we often get hired by WH alliances to do so).
* Kill the competition (yes, again the evil industrialists who hire us for this).
* For flying a Drake again !
* Denying access to trade hubs (again for the evil industrialists who hire us).
* CCP Isk sink (sell more plex that way)

But in most cases, wars are about making isks, just as the industrials, PvE, Incursion runners, etc etc etc do..

Wars aren't the 'problem', evil industrials who hire us are the 'problem'.

Because I can. I need no other reason, nor should I.