Things I’d Like in a Wardec
Higher Dec Costs: Isk is devalued compared to what it used to be. Let’s let the cost rise with the value of isk.
Refundable Dec Costs: Spend all day station camping people? Dec costs are refunded by CONCORD in increments. Eventually it should start to hit the defending corp’s wallet. This would have killed me by the way. I’d get on right after DT then go to work when I was in the Army. As a member of TRAPS. Wardecs out 24/7. Defenders can turn the tables on attackers and collect on the wardec fees and hit the attackers wallet as well.
Sticky Decs: The dec is on a CORP and its MEMBERS. Members who leave still have the Mark of Cain on them. Corps that join and then leave an alliance will still be decced. As will the Alliance. Corps that leave an alliance will still be decced. You want safe? www.hellokittyonline.com
Dec Shield discouragement: Bounties and payouts for missioning, ratting and incursions reduced by 90%
Ending wars early: If the defender manages to camp out attackers they can start a timer rather than taking money from the attacker. Timer hits 0 war ends. Timer counts down faster on a scale of diminishing returns you have 1 person it goes at 1x, 5 people it goes 3 times as fast etc.
Mercs: A defender can bring in mercenaries. They will inherit the wardec and all attributes and don’t have to sit through the 48 hours of garbage to come in. When the wardec is declared the attackers will set their “default time” like a POCO timer, when mercs come in they will enter the NEXT TIME that timer rolls around. The timer set to go in an hour or so? You might get a nasty shock. An EvE mail will be generated as soon as the mercs declare.
I'm using it every time I can
Posted on February 20, 2012, in PvP. Bookmark the permalink. 27 Comments.
Mad Haberdashers 
Refundable dec costs (which, I guess, ties into ending wars early). Sounds interesting if I knew what it was you were trying to explain. How would it work?
Basically anytime you have people locked up in a station not doing anything and you can camp them; choosing to do so will grant you an isk reward. This wouldn’t be huge although it wouldn’t be bad. Maybe somewhere around the average pull of level 3 missions. Alternately the defenders can count down the timer (or maybe a points system) towards ending the war altogether. Punish people for being inactive.
How does the game recognize this camping situation? What if the corp you’re attacking is spread across several systems? Does camping a couple of them in just one station count, even though there may be another 20 of them 40 systems away?
What about off-hours? Spies in the defending corp sit in station while their pals sit outside the station “camping”?
Sounds interesting. Sounds also rife with implementation problems.
Part of the intent is to discourage people from going afk in systems by punishing their corp for doing it.
Spies suck. Not calling for help when you are camped is a bad idea and taking forever to form a fleet means watching your wallet drain.
One thing I do want to mention is I do not feel that player owned corporations are a right. You can fly in a group with your friends in NPC corps using private chat channels. Forming a corp means accepting the risk of PvP at your own expense. I want that to become MORE important with the wardec revamp, not less.
I like the idea. I’m not sure how the game recognizes these camping/countdown moments. It simply seems like a difficult thing for the game to recognize accurately, which would lead to a whole rash of problems.
I thought more about this timer … because I do like the overall idea.
Here’s a thought. The timers are based on kills. The timer is controlled by either the ATTACKER or the DEFENDER. If the DEFENDER controls the timer, they have the option of toggling it to a CEASE HOSTILITIES status, and the time at that point is 48 hours long. Otherwise, the timer simply returns ISK to whoever is in control of the timer, perhaps at intervals of two hours.
When a war starts, the timer starts at zero andthe DEFENDER has control of the timer.
When the ATTACKER kills a defender, the timer is reset, and the ATTACKER now controls the timer. When a DEFENDER kills an attacker, the timer is reset and the DEFENDER now controls the timer. (The timer is not reset if one side makes a kill and is already in control of the timer.)
This could be workable.
Some people might complain that spies could game the system, by resetting timers from within the ranks of the opposing side. This is okay, because SPIES are a part of EVE gameplay.
Thoughts?
Defender takes two days off, war ends.
Could base it on ships uncloaked within the docking ring of a station while the station is occupied by hostiles. Could base it on attacks on offices of a station (destructible services – player corp offices) if you wanted to be a jerk. The more I think about it the more I like a points system. The defender tallies points towards ending the war with kills, sieges and destruction of POS structures. Attacker reclaims isk with the same tools. Oh and wallets are frozen when the war starts, you can put more in (you fool) but you can’t take out.
“Defender takes two days off, war ends.”
You mean the ATTACKER takes two days off, the war ends. The attacker doesn’t get the option of toggling to timer to the CEASE HOSTILITIES setting, since they started the hostilities in the first place.
What does it matter if the defender takes two days off? The attacker can never get back more ISK than they paid out of the war declaration. No one can profit from this by wardeccing shell corps.
No the defender would just not do anything because they control the timer, two days later the war is over and they’ve won and can go back to carebearing it up.
The attackers could burn holes in space and never get a kill in 48 hours if the defenders just choose not to undock.
Never mind. Heh. I see what you’re saying. Yeah. Loophole there.
So, yeah. Timer idea is flawed. A point system would probably work better.
Still, though. Difficulty of the system recognizing a siege and not burning up server cycles. To have the server constantly checking if a siege is in effect or not.
But I’ve never seen it as a problem if an attacker wardecs somebody and then never shows up. That’s a problem that’s been propagated by the University, because of their strict rules. For any corp/alliance without those rules, an attacker that doesn’t show is no problem at all. It’s a non-issue. They wasted some ISK.
Well I’d attach the siege flag to ships at war, not stations. Yeah there would be some issues but I think they’d only rear in the really busy stations. If you are hanging out in Jita during a war there is a good chance you are a grade a maroon.
Yeah I don’t have a problem with attackers not showing, it is what it is. I’d like defenders to be able to clear it up fast at need, hence a points system.
Anyway been thinking about this and perhaps instead of coming up with all kinds of “cases” for this and that we need to consider what the point of a war dec is? Harrass and grief is one set of reasons, financial gain is another and interdiction (in support of others) could be one more.
In the case of the first two there is a very definite “goal” in mind, so give the option in a war dec to specifiy what the goal is but in a monetary or asset value. This way corporations/alliances can just buy themselves straight out of the war dec and then get immunity from a redeclaration of war for a period of time (I’m thinking 4 weeks as a starting point)
I’d also like to say that bottling up and no undocking is a perfectly valid tactic and it should not be prevented, however might I suggest that we provide an incentive to the defender to not do this. One of the things bottlers do is get 3rd parties to help them, why not hit them with a CONCORD Tax for the duration of the war on ALL forms of income, or freeze the ability to create new contracts, performing trades window results in neutral parties having a 6 hour mark against them that means they are valid targets. Limit the ability for defenders to go about business as usual and let them know that by fighting they will shorten any war.
I think the comments regarding the avoiding of dec’s by leaving corp/alliance is a very good one, corps/alliances cannot drop corp/alliance during a war dec and if you do then you’re marked as a valid target until the next war dec cycle (7days) is over.
Carrot and stick.
But on the flipside the defenders should be able to get incentives for fighting, if they kill an insured ship they should be entittled to a % of the insurance payout (sliding scale depending on the ship type?), they should also be able to hire 3rd parties to help and bring them in .
One woman/)man corps should not be able to war dec and have members join/leave as they will, you’re in or out simple. Neutral RR should immediately result in the neutrals being marked as valid targets for the period of any war, regardless of corporation. Take that a step further and if not a NPC corp the RR was a member of allow the attacker to declare war on them for 75% of the normal cost (a discount based on the fact they were aggressed by a neutral).
“Dec Shield discouragement: Bounties and payouts for missioning, ratting and incursions reduced by 90%”
This strikes me as odd because there are no station games when there are no stations. If someone wants to leave the safety of the dock to earn some isk, I say let them! 🙂
I’m not sure where the idea of limiting the aggressed party’s income comes from. You pay Concord to allow you to attack some one, and Concord then decides to tax them as well? That makes no sense. If anything, it should be the other way around. Either way, I think that is something that is better handled by the corporation itself. If it’s leadership wants its members to fight and not mission/rat/etc during the dec, then they can crank up their tax rates. If the corp doesn’t care if it’s members lose pve ships during the dec, let them. Putting a financial penalty on pve activities kills the ability of the aggressed party to defend themselves. If the aggressor saw someone running missions under that situation, they would basically know it was a trap, right now, maybe its a trap, maybe it is someone being foolish.
Yes but you also have alliances like EvE-uni who wardec themselves with alt corps to protect themselves then run their PVE behind a decshield that makes it impossible to attack them without billions of isk being spent on the dec.
Right, but the dec shield is the problem in that case, and fixing that takes care of that problem. Really simple solution is to make it cost the same to dec a corp or an alliance, but only add the increasing fees for additional war decs to corps, but just do a flat rate for alliances. The only reason the Eve-Uni thing works is because they can bring in other corps then take over their wars and thus boost the cost up at low cost to them.
Higher Dec Costs: I don’t think this is a bad idea at all.
Refundable Dec Costs: I am not entirely opposed to the concept of refundable wardec costs. However, I see no rational, workable mechanic that would allow this to even suggest a plausible possibility. I think your discussion with Poetic showed the issues with your (and his) quite clearly. A) It would create strains on the system trying to monitor the conditions by which this applies (in addition to the logic of the applying conditions being at best very controversial); and B) it would be easily game-able by either side in any given, potentially in many different ways, which I think would serve to render it a sham.
Sticky Decs: Amen.
Dec Shield discouragement: I don’t see this as a discouragement to the dec shield, per se; I see this more as a discouragement to someone even undocking. I tend to agree with Karbox on this account. Need to approach the dec shield problem from a different direction. I would say it would be something tied into your first point … but the problem there is, how do you adjudge the conditions to impose such a penalty? Perhaps escalating costs for each successive issuance of a dec on the same target, and a lengthy cooldown (week?) before the next time you can dec that target? Not sure … but I think there’s a reasonable solution somewhere along those lines.
Ending wars early: Once again, you have the issue of a reasonably workable trigger based upon a very fungible, nebulous condition. You need something more concrete, and I’m not sure where you find it. Or how you keep it from being gamed.
Mercs: I love this. More war is better, and this is more war.
One other note – Much as with your suggestion regarding mercs, I like Normski’s thoughts regarding ‘neutrals.’ Interfere like that with a war, and you should BE at war, yourself. It would be interesting to see how feasible it would be to develop a ‘personal dec’ condition whereby someone in an NPC corp could be personally accountable and flaggable for the entire remaining period of a wardec in which they offered ‘neutral’ assistance of any sort to one or the other side of it. This, along with the mercs suggestion, could potentially create a wonderful, escalating war situation.
Honestly I have a hard time with the concept of “wardecs” period, from a “common sense/storyline” perspective.
Yes, I realize capsuleers are, according to canon, superultramegawowpowerful creatures not even considered human by the normal populace, moar powerful than Chuck Norris, blah blah blah… but then there’s CONCORD, that was specifically designed to regulate them, and who are badder than the love-child of Chuck Norris and Liam Neeson, even though supposedly capsuleers are “above and beyond” regulation.
So basically, even the regulatory agency can be bought-off for the kind of money that can be ground up in a few hours of L3s… I’ve heard of bribing the cops before, but that’s like giving Chief Wiggum a box of Krispy Kremes and he lets you run amok in Springfield in return. Really? No.
Also fairly sure that the empires would have a fairly large problem with capsuleers running around having their own lil private “wars” on their sovereign turf.
Fairly sure CCP has overplayed the “demigod” aspect of capsuleers, especially if ya read the books. Holy shit. Terribad writing.
Anyways back to topic: now of course there’s dirty cops, and they can be bribed to look the other way, but such bribes are EXPENSIVE as fuck, not guaranteed to work, and are a kind of one-time-good-deal — you whack some particular guy, and that’s it.
What we have in place for wardecs is the equivalent of the Bloods and the Crips paying off LAPD/LASD to have open warfare in the streets.
Oh wait, they do that without paying, and they’re not even “nigh-immortal demigods”.
Really, the current wardec system is shit.
All these proposals about “fixing” it, have a couple of points of merit, which are then drowned in a mire of, yep, shit (incursion-style bounty nerf for a wardecced corp? really? What would be the story explanation for such a thing?)…
I’ve been trying for several days to think of a “fix” that isn’t the same way, couple points of merit buried in a steaming heap of shit, so don’t think I’m personally downing you–believe me, I can’t do any better–but yeah. It’s all shit.
Best idea and only really “good” one I’ve had so far is: throw out bad mechanic is bad, unfixably so. Invent new mechanic from scratch. Call it something else. Base a new Expansion on it. ??? –> profit.
Of course I totally forgot about neutral RR. Which is more or less the biggest problem in wardecs these days.
Neutral RR is more of an aggression mechanic thing, not really tied to wardecs themselves.
Well they become a factor in nearly every highsec wardec. I’d actually rank them near the top of the problems list for highsec wardecs.
I’m just saying that it’s a different part of the codebase. The wardec system and the aggression system are quite separate.
I don’t care too much about the codebase, I *do* care about the fact that there is no way to prepare for or mitigate neutral interference in wardecs.
So let’s move it from simple aggression mechanics, then, and tie it to the wardec mechanics! “Neutral” interference begs for non-neutral inclusion, because let’s be honest … such people are NOT neutral. This is and has been an exploitable – and therefore exploited – loophole in those mechanics.
So why not? Widen the war, and do so properly! Get ’em all into the open, and let ’em fight – and risk their ships – for real, full-time.