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[Mizhara]

Not particularly. If anything it just ensures there's no more accountability at all in Eve RP. You can literally be impervious to anything if you so choose now.

[Samira Kernher]

And mutual wars continue even after any structures are destroyed.

So, a bit more interesting, I think, no ?

No. It's as utterly shit as it was the first time it was suggested.

[MakotoPriano]

Sami, Mizhara;

I'm curious. You've both certainly made your dislike of this bandaid clear.

What's your 'perfect world' system? Ideally, I'd love to see something cohesive that looks like it could be polished into a design document, paraded around, and lobbied for in the direction of CCP. At present, my concern is that all we've got is the barest concept of things we want (victory conditions, 'defensive wins,' mutual wars, consequences for misbehavior, etc.), but nothing comprehensive enough to actually debate and work on, or to examine for continuation of existing issues.

We'll also need to acknowledge and ideally address the incentives that currently exist for: wardec groups to hub-camp and pipe-camp, and reduce down to the role of filter feeders for dumb or otherwise unaware carebears; carebears to just log off for weeks on end due to lack of incentive to fight, essentially stripping away the prey population.

Please note that at no point is this advocacy for 'risk-free EVE,' because that's some serious bull, but instead is a question aimed at examining at the structure of incentives in a way that fosters creative, interesting competition.

(edit: and to make sure this isn't a one-sided burden, I'm thinking of things that might be useful in a 'casus belli' sense.)

[Samira Kernher]

Miz posted one on one of the previous threads on the official forums.

https://forums.eveonline.com/t/the-csm-13-winter-summit-minutes-are-out/110726/1007

[MakotoPriano]

An interesting exploration of the war objectives thing! And adding defensive objectives, which could be 'keep doing what we're doing' stuff is also handy. My guess is that CCP's increased data gathering for the activity tracker'd make it a lot easier. I do think any sort of objectives/eligibility stuff would need to be limited to highsec/lowsec, though, to make sure bears don't just go to their rental system, rorqual out a bunch of minerals, and close off the war.

My one worry: how does this address serial wardecs? After all, use of multiple shell corporations or even just successive wardecs would make the objective system sort of useless. "Oh, we won! Oh, wait, new wardec live in 24 hours from the same people."

[Samira Kernher]

That's why I've generally been in support of limited immunities. If you win a war, you should get some kind immunity to wars for X amount of time. The problem there, though, is people fabricating a war with an alt corp in order to make themselves immune to other wars. But if you make it targeted, then people can create a new corporation in order to bypass a targeted immunity. Etc etc.

People love finding loopholes.

[Silas Vitalia]

Yup. Interesting all around.

CCP might be better served by backing way up to high altitude with more global questions about how much and what sorts of danger should players be exposed to at what stages of their subscription, and then iterate from there. 

This all or nothing thing lacks any granularity and is silly no matter how many times they rearrange the deck chairs on the wardec system titanic

[MakotoPriano]

Agreed on limited immunities being a potentially useful mechanic, though finding ways to limit corp-hopping for wardec initiators would be necessary in a targeted system, what with shadow wardecs and shadow corps being the issue they are. If you want to see some hilarity, look at the corp histories for pilots in the Hogs Collective to see how that all shakes out. The question is how we balance cost/difficulty of the wardec to make it more than peanuts, but also to prevent it from being easily (or cheaply) gamed. I wonder if a 'forfeit' or 'deposit' system might be worthwhile? For instance, the attacker has to essentially 'bid' for their victory conditions; if they win, the deposit's largely returned and they've got their killmails, etc; if they lose, a part of the deposit is given to the defender. Wardec costs would then scale with bids, but also put direct incentive to pursue completion of objectives for both sides.

Alternatively, I wonder if limited wardecs might be a thing: region limited, or ship-class-limited, sub-week durations, and so on.

I'll admit, though, that my mixed feelings on the wardec eligibility component still tend toward it being a not-terrible idea. As it stands, there's essentially no barrier at present for a wardec initiator to make highsec extremely dangerous, indefinitely, at little cost. The trick, for me, is that eligibility needs to be more broadly founded. Imagine casus belli functioning sort of like killrights, excepting you get them if, say, the person tries to flip your can, or tries to gank you, or kills you in lowsec, etc. So, PIE'd have plenty of reasons for people to wardec them after lowsec roams, provided the parties then sell those casus belli permissions. Hell, I'd love a pseudo-FW where corps can 'declare allegiance,' thereby opening themselves to wardecs even if they don't go full FW.

Of course, the PIE example does sidestep one thing: it's easy to end up in a war with PIE, even with the bandaid system. Join GalMil or MinMil. This, I think, highlights one element of the philosophies clashing here. In the case of PIE, for instance, "But they're my enemy!" is indeed exactly reasonable, and the game already provides mechanics for it. For that matter, no mechanics are needed to pew with PIE or other lowsec PvP groups in their notional areas of operation.

Honestly, in my view the issue one of the overarching issues is that we need better kiddie pools for introducing new players to pew; highsec wardecs are so mechanically flawed that, between that and ganking, highsec paradoxically ends up being surprisingly dangerous by comparison with some sections of nullsec.

Also, agreed with Silas, essentially.

[Mizhara]

That post I made was a very quick and dirty "off the top of my head" thing. For a design document, it'd obviously require several heads putting in the hours to work it into something actually usable. The specifics of it doesn't really matter much to me though, since it's becoming abundantly clear CCP gives zero fucks what players want and are happy to just throw shitty band-aids at every problem and then ignore it as hard as they can afterwards in the hopes that something new comes along and distracts the playerbase.

Which tends to work. Almost no one's bitching about FW, Incursions and so on and so forth at the moment. Next up on the agenda is more bot bitching followed by some more teleports to Yulai I'd wager. CCP truly is useless when it comes to this stuff. There's obviously a whole bunch of potential solutions, while there's very clearly no actual good data gathered about WHY player retention is so shit. Again, and again, and again I will repeat this: CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION. Blaming wardecs for poor player retention is a very bad idea, especially when you knee-jerk a band-aid into place that might end up being a fuckin' tourniquet that kills the fucking limb instead.

This is one of those situations where CCP really needed to have some fucking patience, use some fucking brains and start gathering some actual proper fucking data. Questionnaires for unsubs and alphas going inactive for instance. More data gathering, questioning what might be behind the poor player retention. THEN working on the solution.

Yes, wardecs definitely needed a re-do but this nonsense is just insultingly shit. It solves exactly fuck all, it makes RP completely pointless and worthless and it does significant damage to Eve's one defining trait that sets it properly apart in the sea of multiplayer bullshit: Everyone vs Everyone. "Harden The Fuck Up" is integral to Eve as a game. The gameplay isn't and frankly never will be good enough to stand on its own, which means the player interaction is vital and key, and if you Hello Pussy it up like this you are basically telling people they might as well fuck off and play something that also has good gameplay.

Consequence, risk, permanence. Without them, you don't have Eve. What's left without them I don't know, but it's sure as fuck not worth playing.

[Silas Vitalia]

Unfortunately, FACWAR was supposed to be just that, right? A perma wardec with gated kiddie pools of ship classes and location-specific tug-of-wars that (as usual) never got iterated past launch into something workable.

It would be really fun to totally reimagine the dec system and faction loyality, I just spend like 5 minutes writing up some ideas and then thought better of it

TLDR it would be nice as a new player to have to make some 'loyalty' choices just like rolling your character, and they could tie this in to early facwar style gameplay and consequences based on where you start out, and you can slowly advance into more risky areas as you get more comfortable with the game, eventually declaring yourself 'independent' or recommitting to faction loyalty at the end of this process and then being open to more 'war dec' style gameplay.

They could easily tie this in with a reworked security status system and various sizes of kiddie pvp pools so players can get used to getting shot at in cheap ships with little risk and then working up to larger things and eventually full risk/reward. 

I think those new deadspace complexs are set for 1v1, 2v2 right? Tune that stuff for new players and integrate it with new player experience levels and you are on a path to success.

[Jev North]

Again, and again, and again I will repeat this: CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION. Blaming wardecs for poor player retention is a very bad idea, especially when you knee-jerk a band-aid into place that might end up being a fuckin' tourniquet that kills the fucking limb instead.

Well, it managed to convince the CSM and CCP have serious monetary stake in getting the statistics right, so I'll trust them over someone who hasn't seen any of the work, and is frankly throwing a tantrum over the changes and looking for a justification.

This is one of those situations where CCP really needed to have some fucking patience, use some fucking brains and start gathering some actual proper fucking data. Questionnaires for unsubs and alphas going inactive for instance. More data gathering, questioning what might be behind the poor player retention. THEN working on the solution.

The CCP marketing research team has been asking questions during the unsubscribe process and sending out exit surveys on a sample basis since at least 2014. My guess is someone finally had the idea to correlate the data with wardec history.

[Mizhara]

That's a lot of guessing there, Jev. The thing is though, you're wrong. They already told us what data they showed the CSM and it's not the exit surveys. The data only showed how many returned after going inactive during wardecs. That is the data that 'convinced the CSM' as if that matters for fuck all. CSM aren't exactly voted in for their damn game design chops now are they, and when exactly has CCP shown even the slightest fucking competence when it comes to reading their own damn data?

Players literally tell them the real issues when they're raised in devblogs and elsewhere, but CCP still decides both when it comes to rebalancing and other things to just go with their completely detached view that comes from looking at detached data that doesn't take the actual damn game into account. So tell me, what questions are in the unsub process that relates to these wardecs, hmm? I've recently deactivated accounts and can tell you right now: Exactly fuck all. Exit surveys that does not gather any data on wardec effects.

Your "guess" is wrong. Go read CCP and CSM's own damn posts to see what data they used, then come tell me I'm "looking for a justification". As for tantrums, go fuck yourself. The fact that I'm angry about this shit does not in any shape, way or form devalue my view on this, especially given that unlike you I actually paid some fucking attention to what CCP and CSM has actually said.

[Samira Kernher]

They haven't exactly been reading the statistics they do have very well, anyway. They've shown a tendency to go by a very surface-level understanding of the stats they've taken, ignoring considerations as to the various reasons why the stats are the way they are.

Either way, it doesn't matter. It could be entirely true that war decs drive people away, in as great degrees as has been said. Has this stopped EVE from being one of the most successful MMORPGs ever made? No. What it has done is establish EVE as a niche game, that you're either prepared to handle or you aren't. The core fundamentals of the game should not be thrown out just to appeal to the hope of gaining a larger playerbase. SWG tried that, and it suffered greatly for it.

War decs needed changes. Literally everyone agreed to that. But the changes it needed was counterplay, not safety.

[The Rook]

[Mizhara]

So exactly what we've been saying, yes. There's nothing in there that shows the wardec itself is the primary problem with player retention, and worse yet even if it did the 'solution' is so hamfisted and knee-jerky it barely even counts as a band-aid.