Player Features and Ideas Discussion

The WHQ’s Themselves
I propose two separate forms of this structure/service module. The first, and smaller of the two, is designed for more casual war deccing corps and to provide a low entry barrier for people wishing to PvP with other corps. It would be cheap to buy and fuel but it would also be quicker to disable and it has a limit to the amount of decs the corp can make, join or make mutual. I suggest putting this limit to about 5 decs and all outgoing, joined and mutual decs count towards this limit. So a corp with a small WHQ could have two outgoing decs, joined as an ally in two other wars and be able to either start or join one other war.

The second would be a large version of the above, with a higher cost to build and fuel and much harder to disable. The other advantage of using a large WHQ, besides it being tougher, would be that war decs are unlimited. This would be the WHQ that would be used by the more professional wardeccing groups and the ONLY WHQ that can be utilised by an alliance (and it must be owned by the executor corp).

The Wardec Costs
War decs should still cost isk to start and should still run on weekly intervals, but I imagine the fuel costs of running these structures/service modules will absorb at least a small amount of that. Say each war dec costs 20mil isk for a week, but the large WHQ itself costs 30 mil of fuel a week to run for a total of 50mil a week.

What this does is reduces the entry barrier for decs (the small WHQ will cost less to run) and reduces the cost per dec with the more decs you initiate (using the example above, starting three decs would cost 60 mil per week, plus the 30mil per week for fuel would make 90mil total per week, or 30mil per dec).

With every dec the corp makes, they take on more risk that someone will attack, or pay to have someone attack, their WHQ. It makes sense to me that this increase in exposure should come with diminishing costs. It is also an answer to the oft made argument ‘if I pay for a week to shoot you I want a week’. This way you pay to start each dec, but you have to keep your ONE WHQ online against ALL your enemies and their allies to make them last a week.

Personally I would prefer if war dec costs did not scale with the number of targets either. By deccing larger entities you are exposing yourself to more enemies and, like above, the increased exposure balances itself.

Allies and joining a dec
Allies would work similar to how they do now but with two major differences. First would be to allow allies to join on both the aggressing and defending sides. Currently the ally mechanic is entirely one sided toward the defender and if the aggressor wants to include allies to match those of the defender, their allies must dec the defender and each of the defender’s allies in order to fully join the dec. By instead allowing both sides to have allies, war decs will be less complicated, less expensive, more open, more organic, more balanced and frankly more in keeping with human history.

The second major change would be the added requirement that the joining corp/alliance also has a WHQ. What I hope to achieve by this is to create the interesting option of knocking your enemy’s allies out of a war by disabling their WHQ.

Mercs and Contracts
One of the major benefits I foresee with using a mechanic like this is that it will enable mercenary contracts. By creating contracts where payment is triggered by the disablement of a WHQ and the ending of a dec, mercenaries will have a way to offer assistance to defenders with a clear objective. The defenders will also be reassured by the fact that money is not transferred to the mercs until the contract is complete and the dec is sure to end.

Such contracts will also enable players to hire mercs to deny other corps to wage war by disabling their WHQ, even pre-emptively if so desired. Likewise, mercs can be hired by aggressors in a dec to remove unwanted allies of the defenders.

Corp duelling
It had occurred to me that the proposed mechanic would mean groups like RvB could be prevented from doing their thing by trolls attacking their WHQ’s. So I suggest a new mechanic be created where the duelling mechanic is adapted to work on a corp/alliance scale.

One corp/alliance can request to duel another. The request costs no isk and does not require a WHQ. The ‘defender’ has 48 hours to answer and if the request is rejected, nothing happens. If the request is accepted the two corps enter a mutual war after a short waiting period (2-6 hours?). Allies can still join in a corp duel on any sides and any participant can decide to leave at any time. (a corp that wishes to leave need only wait for a cool down of an hour, or even a matter of minutes.)

Corp duels last indefinitely or until all the participating corps of one side have left.

TLDR

• Starting or joining wars requires you to anchor a structure (or fit a service module) in hi-sec first.
• The location is public knowledge and the defender can disable this structure by means of entosis link or structure bash to end the dec early.
• Corps that have their structure successfully attacked have their outgoing wars auto-invalidated, are kicked out of wars they have joined and lose the ability to wage or join wars for 7 days.
• Lower war dec costs.
• Allies on both attacking and defending sides.
• Allies can be ‘knocked out’ of wars by losing their structure.
• Mercs can be paid for attacking these structures.
• Corp duels allow groups like RvB to continue.

Why make it have to be scanned down? The exposure is a good thing, so why not have it in the open?

On one hand, this is conceptually this is very sound. As you say, attackers have no exposure. On the other hand, you risk raising the bar too high for War Decs, and possibly making a situation where only very large groups can effectively wardec by having the numbers to both attack and defend simultaneously.

The best fix for wardecs is to invert the cost. A small group wardeccing a larger one should be basically free. A large group wardeccing a smaller one should be expensive.

Think about it.

Smallish PVP corps could perma-dec Imperium, Marmite, PIRAT, etc etc, effectively playing sheriff on their bullying.

Large antagonist consortiums could not wardec every last 4 member corp into oblivion blindly.

Less complicated is better.

variants of this idea have come up a few times and i'v always thought it to be a good way to get ppl off undocks taking pot shots and out fighting

The reason I wanted to include mutual wars in this mechanic is to allow attackers to fight their way out of wars that have been made mutual.

For example, when a defender gets decced, then calls in 50 allies to wtfpwn the aggressors and makes the war mutual, I feel the attackers should have the same opportunity as the defender to fight their way out.

Edit- any war that is consensual or mutual from the start can be satisfied with a Corp-duel.

Space hugs for your idea. It's clear to me that you have totally scared the risk averse loving crap out of a few elite empire mercenary groups. The thought that pvp could be forced off of stations / gates makes me dizzy.

Here's my question. What about wh folks that would like to be involved? Being that our exits are pretty random, how would a small wh based outfit be able to get involved?


If you manage to pry the docking ring elite off the station you will be rewarded with great things (assuming you ensure my fair and balanced cut of the action).

The whole structure / entosis / bash thingy has some potential to help and I like the basics but it also has some potential for serious problems and discussing both at the same time would be confusing so I will separate them.

Entosis
How long do you propose that it should take using this method to force the structure to go offline?
How do you protect the members of a small corp while they are trying to use the entosis system to offline the structure?
Here is just one example of why this concerns me. A large group like Marmite WD a smal 5 player corp. Looking at this from a realistic in game point of view without some form of protections built into the system how much chance does a 5 man corp have?
And if they have no realistic chance of taking your structure offline it essentially becomes worthless and changes nothing.

Bash
Perhaps this offers even more problems to resolve than the entosis portion of your idea.
If the HP is high enough that it takes some effort on the part of a group like Marmite to offline it becomes a virtually impossible task for a smaller corp. Make the HP low enough that the 5 man group has a realistic chance to take it offline and it becomes stupidly easy for a group like Marmite. Do you have any thoughts on balancing this aspect of your idea?
Like the entosis above if your answer is nothing then your idea is about worthless as it changes nothing.

Other thoughts.
Once you set aside those corps that will never fight because the members do not want to participate in these activities and look at the rest. Size differences between the corps are a huge factor in the decision to fight or not and I offer this example from my gaming experiences The last WD I played through (not on this character so do not waste your time looking) we had 9 characters, the aggressor corp had 46. Even though we wanted to fight and even tried in the end there was nothing we could do since we were out numbered in every single encounter by at least 2 to 1. So in the end we just docked up and sat out the dec. I see nothing in your idea that attempts to deal with this aspect of the fight no fight decision.

War decs and how to improve them is a very complex issue and while ideas like the OP can be part of the solution there are even more basic issues like the size differences that need to be addressed as well or it essentially changes nothing.

Let me look into my crystal ball and see the future this would provide.

100 mercs from megacorp swarm the WHQ belonging to my 5 man corp. BOOM it's rfo. Phase 2 of it's destruction is set for tomorrow at noon. As the responsible CEO of the 'helpless' corp I check the readily available list of corps that are also at war with megamercs. WHOA, that's a lot of corps. I split the list among my directors and we power up our bat phones and start canvasing the megamerc provided list of valid defenders. It's up to us to herd the cats to our cause. There are plenty of viable helpers, it'll just take some work on my part to protect my assets. And if megamercs doesn't show up for the timer, the kitchen sink of doom can just roll on over to the megamercs WHQ and start cancelling all their active decs via ammunition.

megamercs get tired of the kitchen sink of 300 random ravens taking a dump on them every time they get near a war targets WHQ. They drop their number of active decs down to 8, so they can manage the kitchen sink of doom. Alas, there are now only 50 ravens to shoot at any given time, so the 3000 active megamercs get bored and begin to jump ship because the risk free turkey shoot they signed up for is over.

Sure I exagerated, but I think this idea is brilliant. It even has self balancing features. Too many wardecs to handle and you get kitchen sink rolled. Not enough active decs and your lack of targets starts the attrition cycle. OMG, it would have to be run like a real alliance where management decisions would have to be made to maintain your business model. Meaningful weight is given to every war dec that is considered.

If I were the leader of megamercs I'd be a lot less worried about some 5 man corps WHQ and a lot more worried about 300 random ravens nixing the 100 wardecs I just paid for by wonking my WHQ.

Everyone that likes actual empire pvp (between 2 fleets that actually have a reason and desire to fight each other) had better gift the living crap out of this guy if this goes through. It's a master stroke!!!

It adds meaning, risk and doesn't nerf anyone or anything. All this by adding 1 structure with 2 timers to the game. CODING BARGAIN

Standard concerns to this proposal apply:

1) How do you determine the vulnerability windows? If they are perma-vulnerable what is stopping my war targets from ending the war/reinforcing my structure while my corp is sleeping? If they have vulnerability timers, what prevents me from setting them to while my target is sleeping?

2) If reinforcing a structure prevents me from declaring/continuing a war, what prevents wardeccers from hopping between alt corps like current war targets do to dodge the intention of this mechanic. If wars are cheap and structures cheap or indestructible, many alt corps could be set up in parallel. If they are expensive, you will further consolidate highsec mercenaries into large alliances to mitigate the increased risk.

3) Why should safety be offered as a reward for a PvP game about conflict? How is it at all beneficial to the economy that large corporations with the manpower to successfully structure bash a solo or small group of aggressors be completely immune to small groups. Large groups should always have the advantage against small groups, but they never should be immune to attack of smaller groups solely based on their size. CCP is trying to remove this problem with the entosis mechanic (and failing it seems based on the ongoing changes to the design of the structures) to eliminate HP walls and the like. This mechanic gives absolute safety as a reward, and thus the ability to harvest resources in near complete safety, to large groups.

I am all for encouraging all players, including mercenaries to use structures but turning wars into a game of "capture the flag" seems a little gimmicky. It would be better to release structures that mercenaries voluntarily use, but if that cannot be engineered, then I would be fine with some sort of structure that needs to be deployed so aggressors have something at risk. However, I don't ever see CCP tying the existence of the war to that structure. CCP wants us to fight. They know how important conflict, loss and absence of safety are to the game's economy. They will not in my estimation offer up safety as a reward to induce players to defend themselves.

Wars are here to stay. They are needed to remove structures in highsec. For citadels this apparently will now take more than 7 days forcing someone who just wants to clear a citadel out of their system to have to renew the war at least once. CCP is not going to make it so that if you manage to shoot my WHQ while I am sleeping at some point during those 8-14 days, your structure is 100% safe.

That is just too much safety, even for today's super-safe highsec.

With the introduction of Citadels there is also the introduction of space magic. I can't really see a need to remove one other than being angry at the owner. There is no loot and now that they aren't tied to moons there's not really a limit on how many can fit in a system. Why even bother removing them?

My personal hope is that eve becomes so littered w/ structures that the lag they generate will start lagging out the servers forcing CCP to do get rid of space magic. Citadels are one of the biggest nerfs to HS pvp to come along in years.

If you're mad enough to remove a dudes XL citadel, then 7 days won't make much difference. All it could possibly do is generate more km during the longer time frame.


As far as corp hopping by war deccers - that's a self healing endeavor. The deccers lose the cost of starting a war w/ every WHQ they lose - I don't think they'll make 5 alt corps and keep all their wars active on all corps just in case they lose a WHQ. Corp hopping now only causes a temporary (but free) loss of corp name. W/ the WHQ you lose the isk for the balance of any outstanding wars still in progress.

I don't see it as a game of capture the flag. I see it being more defending your right (WHQ) to wage war in empire. It would be an interesting change.

Not every aggressor can overpower their target in a straight fight. They often dock up when the defenders bring a fight and wait it out until an easy kill is available.

But my proposal changes nothing for helpless defenders who cannot/will not fight back against their aggressors. They are still free to dock up/log off for a week. All my proposal does is give them the option to end the dec early.

I am not trying to hand freebies to the defenders or make it a massive pain in the arse for aggressors to conduct wars. Just trying to create some balance where aggressors have a soft target that means something to them.