Fixing Eve – Warfare

There has been a lot of debate among the Eve community regarding the handling of the wardec system. Some people want to abolish it. Some people want to make it more expensive. Some people want to make it easier. And some people just say “real PVP is in null,  you nubs” and dismiss the whole discussion. Personally, I believe the wardec system is underused because the Eve universe doesn’t function the way CCP intended all those years ago when they designed it. Based on the existing mechanics, I can only infer that they wanted a universe where nullsec alliances had strong ties with highsec, using the trade hubs and relative safety to engage in business and industry. In that world, it would make sense for alliances to use actual wardecs to attack each others’ supply lines and disrupt the enemy’s economy while also engaging in battles over territory in nullsec. What’s more, the wardec would allow alliances to guard those all-important lowsec routes without suffering from drops in sec status.

Of course, the game doesn’t play that way. Neutral alts reduce the usefulness of the wardec, and self-sufficiency in nullsec–now a goal of CCP, it seems–removes the vulnerability of supply lines. Wardecs simply have no purpose for the nullsec alliances, making them a matter for those of us who choose to live and fight in highsec. Now, there are a lot of legitimate reasons to have war in highsec. In the ideal Eve world, competition for limited resources like ore and plexes would be a major reason for warfare. What better way to drive out those hulks that are mining the ore you want for yourself? I have personally hired mercenaries in the past in order to prevent an industrial alliance from forming that would have trampled all over my own little corp’s abilities to operate in our chosen area. It worked remarkably well: 100 million isk prevented the alliance and devastated the corporation that was at the center of the effort. It may not sound like much to you bittervets and PVP addicts, but it was more in the spirit of Eve than most of what goes on.

Obviously the wardecs I see in Skunkworks are rarely for those “legitimate” reasons. We’re looking for fights and/or ransom. I could invent reasons for every war we’ve fought. We could lie and say we were hired by anonymous enemies of our victims. But the truth of the matter is it’s a combination of piracy and thrill-seeking…which are, in my mind, legitimate reasons in themselves. I’ve gone on at length before about why I like highsec combat, so I won’t drag you through all of that reasoning again.

To sum up all of the above, I think having a system for highsec warfare is good for Eve. The problem isn’t that it exists, it’s that it isn’t well-implemented. So I want to point out some problems I see, and recommend some changes.

• Neutral logistics. This is an old discussion that just seems so stupidly easy to fix that I’m appalled CCP has ignored it for this long. There was a time when neutral logis were untouchable, so the ability to shoot them when they give aid to your enemy is certainly an improvement. The problem is that they are largely still risk-free as they can assist an actively hostile ship without inheriting the aggression that would prevent them from docking or jumping through a gate. It’s an easy fix to pass on any active timers to any supporting ships, forcing logi pilots and alts to think twice before rendering aid that could leave them cooling down a timer under fire.
• Neutral fleet boosters. This is something I don’t see discussed often that I think should be addressed. A good fleet booster can confer massive advantages to a fleet; it can easily be the deciding factor in a battle. I don’t want all aggression timers transferred to boosters, that would make it too easy to gank PVE boosters by can flipping on engaging Concord to shoot them. However, I would like to see boosters for at-war fleetmates inherit the war aggression. This way it would be possible to hunt down and destroy a fleet booster that is giving your enemy a significant bonus on the battlefield. Just include a warning that says “Hey, boosting Warmonger McGank with your orca will cause you to be vulnerable to his wartargets” so that friendly boosters like those orcas who share fleet bonuses in ice systems don’t get unwarned aggression.
• Dec scraping. As it stands right now it’s considered a legitimate strategy to join an alliance and immediately leave it should you attract an unwanted wardec, transferring that wardec to the alliance. I have two issues with this being considered acceptable: first, it allows the targeted corporation to simply throw away the wardec fees paid by their would-be enemies, and second it’s allowing people to simply refuse PVP, which is supposedly the core of everything in Eve. A lot of people have suggested preventing alliance changes or longer cooldowns during war or dec fee refunds. I think those are patchwork fixes that don’t address the real problem. Instead, wardecs should remain with the declared target: if I declare war on a corporation and they join an alliance, the war should EXTEND to the alliance rather than transfer. If the corp should then leave or be kicked from the alliance, the war would go with them. Taking this one step farther, I want the ability to wardec a corporation even while it is a part of an alliance. If my objective is to destroy a certain POS, the alliance shouldn’t be able to eject one corp in order to protect its POS.
• Neutral characters in general.One of the major problems with accomplishing war objectives in highsec is that it’s easy to put characters in NPC corps and protect them from war. Whole mining fleets and mission/incursion/transport accounts can be kept in NPC corps, paying minimal taxes in exchange for total immunity to all aggression beyond suicide ganks. There’s not an easy solution here, because characters do need somewhere to go when they quit or are kicked from a corporation. I’ve had a number of ideas and will list them all here, hoping some combination of ideas might be effective:
  • Use role-playing in NPC corps to make it inconvenient to be in them for long periods of time. Player corps change relationships on a regular basis. Nullsec alliances can go from having unfettered access to  each others’ space to all-out war in a matter of hours. Why should highsec’s NPC corporations be any different? The empires have rivalries, the corporations have loyalties and competitors. All this should affect the ability of NPC corp players to dock, gain access to agents and services, and the amount of taxes they pay. Imagine NPC corps where one day the members can access L4 mission agents of a rival corp, and the next day they can’t due to an accusation of corporate espionage. This would make it quite inconvenient to remain in NPC corps.
  • Create a new corporate status of Freelancer, an individual that is not enlisted in any corporation. Freelancers can be the target of wardecs, but cannot declare war on their own. Should they join a corporation, their war will be transferred to the corp. This way once a player has left NPC corp employment, they can never return.
  • Increase NPC corp taxes based on the age of a character so that the longer they play, the less profitable it is to remain a member of the corp. Extend those increased costs to station services so that it becomes cost-prohibitive to perform most activities after a character has been in the game for several months.

  As I said, there’s no easy solution here. I don’t feel like any of these would do the job quite as well as I’d like, but I do believe that the ability for a player to live in an NPC corp for years is a detriment to Eve’s philosophy of player-driven content.

• New player protection. This is a touchy subject, and I understand that not everyone will agree with me on the subject. What’s more, I don’t have a good solution for this issue right now. However, it’s an important matter to me. When I started playing Eve, it was with a group of friends who were all new to Eve. We set up our own corporation (as do a lot of small groups who start the game together) and found ourselves the targets of several corporations who apparently think the height of Eve play is shooting inexperienced pilots in poorly-fit T1 ships. As I said, I’m all for being able to wardec corps for the sake of fighting, but these guys were looking for fish in a barrel, NOT for fights. And we were too new for it to be profitable. What I’m saying is that the intangible “something” should be done to help young players not fall victim to a long string of no-risk PVPers taking advantage of them. It most certainly impacts subscription numbers and discourages new players from staying in the game.
• The New Player Experience. Eve is notorious for its high learning curve. I’m not advocating making the game easier, but I do strongly suggest that CCP make it easier to understand and greatly improve their documentation. New players complete the tutorials with no understanding of wars, aggression, grids, or basic fitting theory. Let’s separate the difficulty of the game from the difficulty of getting good information on the game. Teach players how to do more than run missions and fly ships.

I feel like this list is incomplete and it will certainly meet with some disagreement, but this is my take on the war system as it exists from the perspective of an carebear-turned-PVP griefer who is new enough to the game to remember being a rookie. Bittervets and PVP-averse players need not bother arguing, I’m trying to strike a balance here rather than cater to your particular whims.