Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Why would anyone declare war if they thought they had something significant to lose? Doesn't seem like a recipe for an exciting PvP game to me.

The purpose of a wardec is not to farm easy kills (although some people use it for that and other things as it is a sandbox game). It is (from a game design perspective) to disrupt the operations of a competitor. If the defenders choose to stop operations and turtle in a station for a week, that sounds like a win for the attackers.

Sure there is room for improvement and there are loopholes that definitely need fixing, but it seems to me that overall purpose of wardecs is served just fine with the current mechanics. Either you fight back or you shut down your ISK-making ventures for the duration of the war.

This game needs less babysitting of structures, not more. If, and that's a huge goddamn if, such a thing needs to exist, a war bond up for grabs if the defender gets kills is a much more appropriate mechanic.

That said, such a thing is in no way necessary so long as the defender retains the ability to dodge the wardec by exploiting the corp creation mechanics.

Oh, and as for "no one wants to be shot at". Too damn bad, you're playing a PvP game, the mere insinuation that you or anyone should be immune to dying is obscene. The game's economy revolves around loss in a very literal way, and each and every ship that explodes helps to stimulate that economy.

They drive a lot of conflict in all areas of space. Moon goo towers might be the game's best conflict drivers.

War structures would be another incentive for defenders to stay in corp, fleet up and fight. It would be a viable way to strongly defend your industrial operations.

My love for conflicts driven by structures aside, the main point to take away is some means for the defender to end the war early through engaging with the attackers. If this can be achieved thoughtfully without structures that is fine.


Are you talking about ISK rewards for killing attackers? Mostly futile. The ISK would have to be enough to make attacking worth while for the defenders while not over-inflating the cost of wardecs. Chances are the defender would be better off dropping corp and running incursions instead.


Which they should not have the ability to do. The ability to flip corps without any repercussion needs to be addressed.

I'd like to see some restrictions on the corp creation mechanic itself but structures that provide industrial boosts can help achieve this too. These structures would accumulate their gains over time. Either raw time or based on industrial activity in the deploying corporation. If you flip your corp you are of course deploying new structures so your gains are back to zero. Combine that with the ability to end a war through some means and flipping corp will occur less often.


I shall assume this is directed elsewhere? If not I think it's clear from my post history that this is nothing close to a position I hold.



edit - Realizing now that there is a balancing problem with the war structure. It would make it difficult to maintain hostilities with large and capable groups that can easily overwhelm the war structures of any attackers. This would also likely apply to any mechanic that lets you end the war early. Groups like RvB and E-Uni would be close to impossible to maintain a dec on. One way to balance it would be to make the war structure / war ending mechanic available only if the defending corp has less players than the attacking corp.

Problem is no matter what CCP does they can be dodged and i would rather people drop corp then drop game

You've just nailed the entire problem with "forcing" defenders to undock ideas right here. I'd be as well as asking for ccp to encourage people to jump into my gate camps

You pretty much nailed it.

again if they are punished for dropping corp people will just drop the game for the duration and that's definetly not the better of two evils



and for those not already in a corp it would just add a much larger risk to joining one keeping more people from leaving npc corps

and what is the risk to a large wardec corp that goes around attacking corps with significantly less combat potential

or for that matter what is the risk to my pilot in a solo corp that just goes around war decing and joining as an ally in other wars

EDIT:


Also CCP didn't say PVE pilots that don't interact are bad for retention rather that retention rates for that group were the lowest


not to mention that the good majority of those PvE pilots are alts used build income for PvP mains

I actually think that the wardec system promotes risk aversion not because it is so easy for someone to skip corps but because it is so easy for a larger group to completely disrupt a new smaller groups game. Nothing puts someone off a game more than being given an abject lesson in just how low skilled or bad at PvP you are.

A proposal for those wardec groups who are bored and want fights would be to actually *help* new small corps. Offer you services as an ally in return for the small group providing them with some goods or other at a discount (but low enough discount for them to still make profit). Thay way the wardec guys get to fight each other, the small corps get an idea of alliances and how better to work in groups.

Data can be read any way you want usually. That could just mean that those same people who died early simply learnt to run and or evade better. It could also mean that they are the non-risk averse players who would have re-subbed anyway. A large number ofthem could also be alts of players who are using them in PvP. Without breaking the data down further it really doesn't show anything.

My point is the same though, it would give people more incentive to maintain corps if they had some kind of backing and that simply isn't available to small startup corps. Targeting them in wardecs is counter-productive.