EVE Information Portal

what this means is a noob corp full of new players who decide to form a corp and help each other learn the game and have fun playing as a group of friends can get griefed forever forcing them to get bored and cancel their subscription to eve.
ccp needs to implement a way for broke noob player corp to end a war .
when a merc corp that has members with 10 milsp - 100 mil sp per member war dec a group of noobs that only have a combined sp of 20 million sp they have a unfair advantage that ccp prides themselves on not letting other players have over you

make the fight fair that both corps need to have a even amount of sp within a certain margin

There is no viable formula for escalating costs.

Consider a 100 man corp. Currently 20mil + 500k per member = 70mil (yes I know you said you're working on a new formula, but bear with me). 70mil is *not* a good figure. For a 100 man corp you're looking at 10-20% actually active during peaktime - that's normal when no wardec is in play, if under war conditions many members will simply take time off and do other things. So for 70mil a week you're looking at being able to shoot 5-10 characters, this isn't something you will find players chomping at the bit to pay up and do.

Now consider an 8,400 man Alliance 50mil +500k per member = 4.2bil (barring any caps once it reaches a certain figure). This means player events such as "Burn Jita" leave the sandbox and become an activity that ordinary high sec dwellers are powerless to prevent. This time round it was at least an option to wardec goons and make an attempt to 'defend' Jita. Some did although they failed to make an impact, next time there won't be an option as no-one in their right mind is going to pay that kind of ISK.

I appreciate you must have some reason for wanting escalating costs, though I am unsure what it is. There's certainly a tremendous amount of effort that has gone into this revamp, a lot of which deserves to be applauded. But I don't think you understand what it is that have caused War Declarations to fall out of favour over the years to end up in the great dumpster that is "grief war decs". I would assume the reasoning behind it is the spurious "grief decs" we're all familiar with, a corp with no more than a handful of members aggressing an entity with far superior numbers. While escalating costs may do well in preventing this, it has the unfortunate side effect of disuading everyone else from using the war dec system as well. I would anticipate in future that it will only be used by those wishing to remove and replace high sec pos's with ones of their own. I do not think this is a good trade off, the people who suffer "grief decs" are invariable large alliances that usually have 0.0 interests and stakes, the real question is 'why do these people need protecting from "grief decs"?' and is it really worth making an already unattractive system unusable for the purpose it is intended? These alliances already have logistical steps to immunise themselves from the effects anyway and frequently use alt corps to do the trips to Jita.

War decs currently only catch the afk, because of the plethora of warnings, helpful hints and information that goes into warning either side of the others presence. It takes minimal effort to skirt around the aggressors and people are naturally drawn to the path of least resistance. Aggressors too are drawn to this path which is why you find 99% of them in or on the route to Jita. If you take the time to look at how Eve wars ended up in this position you will find the reasons behind why war decs aren't currently used as intended. A long time ago, when such things were more popular, fighting could occur all over high sec, as a noob in 2006 I would frequently be flying around in my punisher gasping in awe as fighting errupted at a gate, lasors zapping and missiles zooming everywhere. This was because at the time, being in a war and knowing who and where you enemy was took a certain amount of effort. Both sides had to peruse killboards and build a memberlist of the corp(s) oppossing them and add them to their addressbook. This took time and effort, the reasoning was because back then you didn't see standings or war target symbols in the local list. You literally wouldn't know a war target was in your system unless you show info'd everyone in local, had them in your addressbook or they suddenly appeared on your overview. This made the whole scenario more dangerous and exciting, even when you didn't see the green light of your addressbook warning you then there was still the possibility of one of the corps members lurking in your system that you hadn't found on a killboard and added to your list.

This major element of engaging in high sec war was wiped in one fell swoop with the introduction of standings in local, it did work for the combatants, made it simple and was 100% accurate. It's at this point that things changed, with the ease of identifying opponents and giving ample warning of their approach the driving force behind declaring war became spreading the net across as many targets as possible, the larger the entity dec'd the better in an effort to increase the liklihood of finding a target in space. One relatively unheard of alliance at the time understood this and set in motion events that would kill off the practicality of declaring war as a gamestyle once and for all, they were called 'Privateers'. Armed with standings in local, they could set standings quickly and easy on alts to build a web of information on potential targets and move accordingly, easily evading 'blobs' and bringing fights to almost every system in Eve. Despite favouring the 0.0 alliances for targets, people got upset, fighting in high sec is not the same as Nullsec. Sovereignty holding power blocks basically got their faces stoved in, so changes were brought in to reduce the feasibility of war deccing. These changes shrank the net of potential targets to something that can be relatively easily evaded for a week and led to the Jita hugging we know today. You have to bear in mind these people actually want to shoot stuff, you could avoid Jita and go for days without seeing a war target or you can go to the one place people go to relatively regularly and at least get to fire your guns. (cont...)

why not make it more expensive to war dec small corps/alliances and cheaper to war dec large corps/alliances will keep the griefers from disrupting the casual group carebear players who only log on a few hours every other day and keep the war focus on large corps/alliances such as goons,test and others that pride themselves on being pvp ass kickers with flawless kill boards
as it is it cost 50 million to war dec alliance deduct 2.5 million per corp and a additional 100k for each member in that corp from the 50 million with a min war dec fee being 2 million per week to war dec a large alliance.
make war dec a small corp or alliance with fewer than 20-30 members combined in all corps 100 million per week witch would make griefing less popular and fighting larger groups more productive having more targets
im sure someone with better math skills could work out a better formula for this ideal

Edit- Why not add a feature for cheap mini war dec that last 48 hours for those that want to fight on weekends or holidays then when their lives get back to the bump and grind of regular work schedule players can log on and go about their business of making isk to finance there next big weekend of pvp fun

To all those who do not like escalating costs: Why should I have to pay more to dec two 50 member corps compared to one 100 member corp?

All the arguments against escalating costs seem to be based on two assumptions: Im only going to dec one other corp, and just because an alliance is large its better at defending itself than one that is small. Neither of these is true.

With escalating costs I got the option to spend my money attacking one big entity, or many small ones. Options are good. The Privateers had like 200 wars going at one time.

Big alliance tend to be hard to control. Members go out and do silly things. A small group of pilots who know each other well are much more organized and disciplined. The result is if you dec someone large you will get more to shoot, and as thats worth more, it should cost more. And the cost really is not that much, if you follow the rule large decs large. It does not even have to be that large.

Consider an alliance with 100 members. If each contributes 10 million a week to the war cost, that is sufficient to dec a 2000 member opponent. Surely you can come up with 10 mil a week? If you could come up with 10 mil a day (one L4 mission a day) a 2000 member alliance could dec every corp in high sec all at the same time!

Or at least tell us what you are currently thinking so it can be discussed.

Some of the biggest concerns:

• Survival of RvB (mutual wars)
• Can we Defend Jita the next time around?
• Viability of small corps
• Corp hopping (cooldowns for rejoining corps)

There is barely any time for feedback to have any substantial effect NOW before Inferno goes live. If you hold something back until the last minute, there will be no real chance to help you figure out if there is something wrong.

You know..I've been browsing this thread...and looking back at: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=88487

Which is the discussion thread for what was presented in the devblog and at fanfest.

And what shows up on SiSi? Exactly what was discussed at fanfest.

I am disappointed. (And in need of at least two more accounts to test the limits of this stuff) But we'll see what shakes out before Inferno drops.

But just my two cents:

I provide content. In small scale, easy to digest chunks. That people like to read, that have encouraged people to join. My ability to do this will be severely crippled because of this change if it stays in its current state. Once you announce that you've put up a different formula..I'll go and look. In the meantime I'm figuring out how to best work this.

I've always wondered why CCP never gave out any information on upcoming patches apart from saying we're changing this and adding this without actually explaining what they're going to do.

I guess they don't wanna have to actually have a reason to look at the forums and find valid and good changes to a patch they plan to release.

It's almost like they are just like the high sec gankers and love to **** players off.

Don't forget that whatever system gets released is going to be the system that we have to live with for the next five years, because god knows CCP don't ever iterate on anything they do.

I've tried to enjoy nullsec on two separate occasions, both of which I spent more time docked up due to lack of anything to do than actually partaking in any activities. Currently, I am planning to set up a PoS to make hulks, mackinaws, and such. On my alt, I gank them, as well as other things. I prefer low-sec pvp, though sometimes gateguns cause too much blue balls for what it's worth.

Now, when ferrying goods from hub-hub, I am frequently cargoscanned. I don't mind this, I'm fine with ganking as a game mechanic. What I'm not fine with, is the prospect of having to avoid talking in local, sell hulks/macks on an alt, and such like that, just to avoid being noticed. The game has too much dependency on alts as it is, and I honestly had more fun being a newb flying t1 frigs and destroyers(because everyone else was at the time!).

I think inflation, in many different areas killed some parts of the game. A lot of posters use UO as an example, but I'm not sure how many remember the Age of Shadows expansion that brought in Artifacts, and all the old gear made worthless. These artifacts became 'required' to pvp competitively(people RMT'd before, but this was slightly different). Trammel did not kill UO. People were bored and rich and became more destructive than the game was meant to be.

I think this is the point we're at, we have (had) shiny things for years, some people have stupid amounts of currency and ways to obtain it, and are bored. I do like the idea of a war dec system, it fits in the game. The implementation needs to be looked at, hi-sec warfare isn't exactly what needs fixing. When I was in Null not a week ago, I saw more 'carebears', whiners, and mouthbreathing slugs than most of the posters from null alliances would let on.

Honestly, I'm more curious what CCP is doing to stir up null warfare and changing the maps. A lot of people have mentioned they're merc alliances that wardec null alliances to camp them at hubs/supply routes. This is the kind of thing that should be focused on. Supply interdiction? Stupid FW missions aside, that actually sounds like an objective.

Highsec wars will continue to be griefing/petty competition between industrialists. Inferno? Get null alliances shelling out isk to merc corps to show up at fleet engagements, defense, or PoS takedowns. It's great and all, but this war dec system isn't going to heat things up if there's still no reason to fight beyond "i'm bored, let's shoot stuff."

I'm Pugwa Ikwakin and I'm an alt of an Industrialist/terrible PvPer. Inferno is sounding like a lot of talk and not a lot of action, just my two cents.

You want to make changes to Null Sec! That’s an easy fix also. All you need to do is take local out it, and it’s a whole new ball game. Try to keep your space now, if you’re not active in keeping your space you will lose it. Hunting would never be better, Scanning skills put to the max. Null Sec would have a massive increase in pilots! Looking forward to this change (Like the Big Alliances will ever let that one happen.)