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No that isn't my assumption as I don't even attempt to define other players intentions for declaring war. Warfare is merely a means to an end, and it isn't for me, you, or CCP to define that end for others in a Sandbox game. The second part is working as intended, it's a wardec system not an arena or duel system where only "fair" fights are had. Again this is you trying to define other players goals and misunderstanding what war means. I don't think you really understood what I said in my last post or you wouldn't have said those thing.

Do you all realize that there is absolutely no economic reason to go to war in high sec (or low sec, for that matter)?

Whether you win or lose, you really don't gain anything except for killmails, which have no ISK value. The loot and salvage drops from player wrecks are typically a fraction of the original cost of the ships/modules/rigs. Thus, from a purely economic POV, it makes complete sense for a high sec defender to respond to a wardec by camping in station until the war goes away.

And, most players in high sec seem to be there for economic reasons, ie. ISK making ventures - missioning, mining, exploration, incursions, trade, manufacturing, invention, hauling, etc. When they do choose to engage in PVP, it is usually something that will not affect their ISK making activities - such as a roam in low sec, or joining RvB.

So, perhaps, it should come as no surprise that a high sec wardec system, without an economic reason, is unlikely to work.

You cannot force players to engage in war. There is no game mechanic which can be built to make this happen. Period. Players always have the option of simply not playing the game, and spending their sub money elsewhere.

However, we might be able to incentivize high sec players to respond positively to wardecs, rather than shunning them, if a sufficient economic reason can be provided. Remember that null sec has moon goo and WH space has Sleeper loot.

With this in mind, here is another idea for high-sec wardecs:

o Wardec fees are based on aggressor corp size and member age.
o Wardec fees go into a Concord escrow account.
o Bounties are paid out to the defender for each aggressor kill. Better ships and older players pay out larger bounties.
o The war automatically ends, if the escrow account balance reaches zero.

What does the aggressor get? Nada, or, perhaps a refund of their wardec fees, less the bounties paid, if the defender surrenders. I've noticed that most high sec wardec aggressors don't really need an economic incentive - they always have some other funky reason, which they feel is sufficient for them to shell out the fees and the ships.

So, what do you think? Would you be more willing to try to put up a fight, if you can collect bounties by killing your aggressors?

There is something inherently wrong when it would conceivably be cheaper for me to suicide gank the logistics of a large 0.0 alliance on a regular basis than conduct a legitimate wardec. Lol.

Sorn

Actually it's not for you to decide whether you can arbitrarily grief other people or not. It's for CCP to decide whether it's in their best interests to allow to arbitrarily grief other players. Obviously they are not allowing individual wardecs so they see an issue with that, ie they will never follow your suggestion to allow arbitrary engagements anywhere for anybody vs anybody.

One of the purposes of hisec is it was created as means for new players to safely grow and learn the game in a relatively safe fashion. You cannot differentiate between new and old players (you never know if a new toon is running logistics for an old rich player) so the same rules have to apply to everyone. So.. again.. hisec is hisec, it's a relatively safe place to make some ISK, for either new players who want to get started or for players who are not interested in your style of gameplay (being an unprepared weak target). Obviously you wouldn't wardec someone if you didn't think they were weaker than you in first place, or that you are going to lose. That would just be stupid.

EVE is a bit more complicated than Shadowbane. Takes months to years to learn even the core mechanics, we all know this. I still don't know a ton of stuff about the game. I do agree that highsec rewards are too high for the risk right now. Reducing rewards and increasing risk is not the same thing though. I'd personally be curious to see what happens to EVE if there is no hisec or there is a bunch of small disconnected islands (so that one Jita doesn't make sense). Why is CCP not doing it? Who knows?

Most likely the reason hisec is so big is because CCP looked at the data and decided that since most people prefer to operate in hisec in a relatively risk-free fashion, in order to get the best cluster load balance they'd need to have a big hisec area. Carebears will be carebears (no offense intended), there's nothing you can do about it. You can't force carebears to become 0.0 pros. They just don't want to play in high risk situations, and forcing people to do stuff is just not that great of an idea in general. So CCP needs a lot of carebear space, so hisec is big. So yeah the rewards in NULL are higher, but they still decide to stick with high because it's steady progress and less risk. People need options.

I think CCP is moving in the right direction with the mineral changes at least. They also talked about removing ice from high which would also be a change in the right direction i think. Maybe they should also reduce asteroid sizes in high or something like that. I also think hisec towers should be made less profitable by increasing operating costs (take more starbase charters and/or make them more expensive). Increasing risk is not the same thing as decreasing profits though. It takes years to learn how to be good at PVP in EVE and for some people it's a huge turn-off when they go to lowsec in their shiny new BC and get popped within 5 minutes by someone who then griefs their newbie fit in local. This is not in CCP's interests. CCP clearly recognizes it and even give you a textbox with exclamation marks warning you - are you SURE you want to go to lowsec? It's a dagenrous space. You just spent maybe a month running level 1 missions or mining in a bantam to get that Harb and boom, it's gone in a flash. What to do what to do. Well, screw it, i don't need to play this game, snap. unsub, done, CCP is down, maybe $100, maybe $300 worth of yearly sub cash. This happened a lot i'm sure and it's not in anyone's interests. Some people want to have a safer experience, some people want to have a harsher, more hardcore style gameplay. That's why EVE has highsec and lowsec. Picking your own risk appetite means others cannot impose unexpected risks on you.

At the same time something to consider is that if you make the difference in low to highsec income very large, hisec citizens will not be able to plex their accounts and a lot of them might just quit. That could collapse EVE's critical mass of subs. So it's a fine balance I suspect. Also something to remember is people with lower hisec non-trade income streams have a lower growth rate because the cost of plex is fixed. So if you are making 600m/month in hisec you are netting 100m, but if you are making 1b in 0.0, you are effectively making 5x more of free cash, so that's also notable.

Anyway, back to wardecs.. it's not clear what the purpose is. Currently it is to allow to annoy hisec players in player corps, remove hisec towers and.. nothing else? (what am i missing?) As I said before, removing towers is good. But annoying hisec players in player corps part maybe not so great or useful or at all rationalized.

I actually agree with you on the contract system, thats similar to my proposal to clamp the number of members joined per war cycle.

Otherwise based on this my understanding is that you generally like the changes but you want some changes to the payment scheme. But the fundamental issue is not with the price, the issue is with the binary switch war/no war itself.

What do you think about the fact that if somebody doesn't want to fight you they'll just drop out to NPC corp or not engage? Do you agree that wardeccing individuals for cheap is going too far? You realize why CCP would never do this? This would allow to grief individuals indefinitely in any space making a ton of people quit the game. You can camp somebody outside of station indefinitely with an interceptor until they die and run out of ISK not able to upgrade their clone. A new player comes into game, gets his first cruiser and you repeatedly kill him docking out of station. They quit. I think it's pretty obvious that individual wardecs cannot be allowed to prevent indefinite griefing. There will be people griefing others indefinitely for no particular reason. There will be instalock bots camping outside of stations in maelstroms. It will be possible to grief any single individual out of the game and it will happen. So no, clearly individual wardecs are not OK. There MUST be some safe space for people to play the game to get started, or to recover from any big losses they took while trying higher risk undertakings. The problem is if you allow a (one) mechanism to "PVP" ie to enforce PVP onto someone who doesn't wish so, you instantly mess everybody up.

Then the next logical question is do you agree that it's silly to force people do drop out to NPC corps if they don't want to engage you? What is the rationale for that? Why? That just makes zero sense to me. Why on earth people in player corps should be disadvantaged over players in NPC corps? That's completely arbitrary and makes no sense whatsoever. People will still avoid wars when they want to. I've said this before and say it agani, it is a completely pointless exercise in annoyance.

CCP needs to recognize this fact (they already do) and publically explain it and change wardecs so that only POSes can be engaged and players cannot, until they start defending the POSes.

The problem for CCP is that they are scared shitless (or at least try not to annoy any large groups of people) right now of highly irrational player reactions to what they do. Players had a snappy reaction to NEX store which was completely pointless. There is already golden ammo in the game - go buy some PLEX buy a high SP toon and fly a Vindicator with faction ammo. You will pwn most other people (unless you are outnumbered) because you paid $$ for it. How is that not golden ammo? If they say, players cannot be attacked in a war a large number of people will snap and rage and scream and whine saying uh, oh, I can't kill the carebears and generate loads of noise. Well the newsflash is you can't anyway because you shouldn't be allowed to or it will mess up the game permanently and irreversibly due to the reasons outlined above. I hope CCP has the guts to go ahead and do what makes the most sense and avoid the pointless exercise of pushing the players out of player corps because somebody decided to click a button and inconvenience them.

I think this thread is jumping the shark a bit.

I would like to hear some solid give and take from CCP. Based on what we've said, do you at least acknowledge some of the problems with the price system? What alternatives are you considering at this point? Do you think the arguments against pricing based on size are valid, not valid, etc?

I promise that we (well I won't at least) hold you to what you say, but do you at least see the flaw in the system as it was proposed at Fanfest or do you still feel that is how it should work? How much do you think it should cost to wardec the largest alliances in the game per week? 4 bil? 2 bil? 500 mil?

One of the problems with this thread (and many others) is the mob is left lost without any idea how their ideas are being received. So they are forced into wandering the thread, proposing more ideas until the ideas are so outside of the realm of possibility the original discussion is muddled.

You've been quite good about telling us you are hearing our arguments, but what do you THINK of them?

Argus

That's wrong. People who want higher risks already are taking them.

What can't get through the thickest skulls in EVE, many of them at CCP itself, is that NO AMOUNT OF INCENTIVE WILL FORCE HISEC PLAYERS TO LEAVE HISEC FOR THE REST OF THE GAME.

Most people who are in hisec have a good reason to do so. Push them out of hisec and they will get out of EVE because hisec is where they want to be. They PAY for hisec, not for lowsec or nullsec or WH. And without a reason to pay for hisec, they will simply stop paying.

Good, those people should quit, EVE would be better off in the long term without them.

lolololol

oh, another silly person that assumes eve could exist without the carebears of high sec.

The carebears of high sec are what produce the VAST amount of salvage goods that go into making the ships you like blowing up. They also produce the vast amount of ore that goes into those same ships and modules. Hell, they even produce the vast amount of ships and modules you enjoy blowing up. Hell, they're the only reason there is a competitive market.

If it wasn't for high sec carebears, than the vast majority of what you consider Eve wouldn't be able to exist. The only trade hubs you would know of would be specific to the major alliances they belong to.

No new players would come into eve because they wouldn't be able to exist. There would be no carebears to bait or indy pilots to gank.

So eventually at some point, there would be no Eve.

So we can't exist without you and you can't exist without us, so CCP needs to balance the dec system to cater to both of us instead of using it to protect the major alliance with extremely high dec costs while allowing those small casual corps to be decced at a seemingly meaningless costs.