This time of year, I leave for work just as the sun rises. As I stepped out the door two days ago, I saw the neighbor’s cat lying down in the road. Curious what she was up to, I quietly moved a little closer and realized she was facing a bird about ten feet away. I stood watching as this cat stared at the bird, motionless. Every time the bird would move, the cat crept a few inches closer. Even with the bird still, she moved one foot at a time to close the distance on her prey. I watched this suburban Discovery Channel for at least five minutes. By then the cat was within two feet of the bird. She coiled up her hind legs and sprang on the bird, neatly snatching it out of the air with her claw. This cat’s tremendous patience and perfect technique rewarded her with what had to be a most satisfying meal.
The more I think about it, the more I realize how much that scene relates to PVP in Eve Online. After five months in The Skunkworks, I’ve learned that the hunt is a large part of what makes Eve combat satisfying. It’s the setup, the long game of drawing an enemy into a trap, the thrill of chasing down and catching a fleeing target, the tension of creeping up under cloak until you are in the perfect position to pounce. This is why the “real PVP” people claim to practice in lowsec and nullsec has little appeal to me; most of those kills are either between large blob fleets that encountered each other on a gate, or the result of a PVP gang waiting at a gate for unsuspecting victims. Then there are their polar opposites, the highsec station game experts who won’t get more than 500 meters from a station, and never travel without their neutral RR that guarantee their no-risk PVP lifestyle. These people are passing on the adrenaline rush of being in fights where every pilot’s skill matters.
A lot of people approach Eve looking for the instant gratification they can get from a first-person shooter. They want to log in and immediately stumble into fights. As a Team Fortress 2 player I can certainly appreciate the appeal, but Eve is different. Eve gives us the flexibility of a sandbox universe where people have more choices than any other PVP-oriented game. People routinely try to shoe-horn Eve into the philosophies of other games, seeking the safety afforded by WoW or the constant conflict of Battlefield. These people don’t appreciate the unique nature of Eve, and the opportunity it gives for developing the skill and patience of truly hunting your fellow players.
Not much has happened lately on the Skunkworks front. We’ve done some fighting, but nothing special. The most notable thing of late is that we have teamed up with Brick Squad and Lead Farmers, a wormhole group, to close out highsec incursions quickly. The past two weekends have seen very little time for active incursion running. For example, they shut down the incursions Friday night. When new ones sprang up yesterday, they were closed half a day later. The moaning going on in the forums and incursion chat channels has been incredible. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to be a part of the mothership-killing fleets, as they have been operating before I go online in the evening.
So, I’ve had a lot of time to think about ways to make Eve a more consistent, balanced universe. I’ve tried to think through changes that would enhance gameplay, balance various mechanics, and make sense in respect to existing lore. As we have continued to make incursions the hot topic on the forums, I figure I’ll cover that first.
I’ve never been “into” incursions. I was interested when they first came out, but never had a fleet of friends to run them and never wanted to play the “LFAF” pickup game. So my first real exposure to them was after I joined Skunkworks; that whole story is well documented and I’ll spare you even a summary of how it started. Early on, I started trying to think of ways to fix the issue of highsec vanguard farming without breaking incursions.
It needs to be said that I do not object to incursions. I’m all for cooperative content. After all, I got my start playing cooperatively with some friends. Had incursions existed when we were actively playing together, we probably would have been involved in them as soon as we possibly could. The problem is that high sec incursions, specifically their vanguard sites, create a bottomless well of isk. It’s like missions, only the payout has been reported to be twice as high. As an avid explorer, I have a problem with CCP creating something that pays just as well per hour as wormhole life, but more consistently and without the risk.
My first solution was obvious: reduce vanguard payments, and balance that change by increasing the payouts of the larger sites which require larger and more coordinated fleets. It’s an obvious solution, and perhaps too simple. Taking it a step further, I suggested a lore-based solution: Concord would become frustrated with capsuleers farming incursions when they are being paid to stop the Sansha attacks. As a result, after a certain amount of time (or a certain amount of PvE activity), rewards for incursions would be reduced over a period of time to about 50%. It would then become more profitable to end the incursion so that a new one could spawn than to continue farming the same one.
Recently, I had this idea: have Sansha adapt their strategies. If Vanguard sites are being swarmed, reduce the number of vanguards and spawn more of the other sites. What’s more, they could react to the fleet composition of the defenders, fielding more e-war or more DPS depending on what kind of resistance they were facing. It makes sense that a force capable of overwhelming Concord would be clever enough to not press a failed strategy over and over again.
These three solutions are not exclusive; they can all work together. Rebalance payouts, create a steady decline in rewards in order to make a compelling reason to go after the mothership, and make the Sanshas smarter on a macro level. Do that and you’ll have much more interesting and balanced PvE content without enraging most of the incursion community.
November 8: Skill training for the Orca finished this morning. I snuck my Orca alt into the wormhole a few days ago, and last night another member of Skunkworks brought his Orca alt into the wormhole in a shuttle. At the same time I placed my scanning alt in the hole so that no matter what got stuck in that particular hole, I could scan it out when it was convenient. That means I’m planning on filling three Orcas full of loot, ore, and ships. In my last check of the hangars there was only one T3 ship and no Nighthawk, but at this point I can’t afford to wait for everything to show up. I have no idea whether some of those will ever be back in the hangar and waiting could cost me the entire haul. Two Orcas, 2-3 hulks, and a pile of T2 ships is enough. The rest is just bonus.
A final take on the plan: I start by putting my scanning alt to work verifying we have a highsec path out. This is critical. I pull out an orca and load it with the most valuable ships, mods, and ore. I fly that out to my friend who boards it and logs off (to keep the orca off the scanners as much as possible). I then take the other orca and fly it to my orca alt and trade ships, then log off the alt. Then I take my own empty orca and load it up, and decide whether there is enough left to warrant a round trip with one orca. If there is, one orca makes the run out, and then returns empty and swaps ship with my infiltrator in order to pick up the rest. That should finish it off at that point, leaving us able to make a run for it, or simply log off and come back later.
Now I just have to wait about 12 hours to actually be able to do this.
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January 4: I haven’t looked at these posts in forever. When I logged in to actually commit the theft, several of the most expensive ships were gone, including both the T3s that had been in hangar, and one of the Orcas. Also missing were the most valuable faction mods. After much internal debate and discussion with the corpmate who was going to assist me by providing a third Orca pilot, I decided to stall for a day and see if things came back. The next day was even worse: the ship hangar was being emptied and people were leaving the wormhole. There was still an Orca and a couple of T2 ships, but I’m not even sure I would have made a billion isk and I didn’t want to risk burning that alt as a corp thief for that amount.
In a fitting end to all this I didn’t have as much Eve time after my vacation and shift change and I went mostly inactive with that alt. The CEO of the corp confronted me about it one day and proceeded to lecture me about how I have responsibilities to the corp and other such nonsense. He acted as if I were being ungrateful for my membership in the corp, and generally sounded like a typical real-world middle manager. I finally snapped and told him how idiotic he sounded, so he threatened to e-stalk me by telling every future CEO of mine just how I felt about teamwork and employers and so on. I quit on the spot and have left that alt in my own holding corp for a few weeks to see if he keeps his word. So far, no warning. If I do get one on my CEO, he’ll likely get a wardec from The Skunkworks.
At the end of all this, I’ve learned a few things: first, have your skills ready if you’re going to conduct a proper theft. Weeks training to fly an orca can cost you the haul. I’ve solved that problem now, and my alt can fly the Orca plus any T1 battleship I find, meaning that the only ships I’d have to leave behind would be marauders, black ops, and capital ships…and for those I’m sure we could figure something out.
Second, even I have a threshold for tolerance. Having so recently been a carebear, I do better than most Skunks in dealing with them and talking to them in a believably carebear way. I know how to push their buttons and gain their trust. But when you sound like some schmuck in a cornflower blue tie who thinks he’s arrived because his cubicle is a little bigger and his desk chair has padded arms on it, when your real life is so engrossed in corporate doubletalk that you use it in Eve as well, when you treat your corpmates the same way you treat your minimum wage burger flippers as you assist managing at the local Wendy’s, I can’t take much of you. Guys like that represent everything that’s wrong with our society. Even that little bit of power coupled with that little intelligence is a dangerous thing. And we do it every day in the real world. But that’s a whole other rant, for a whole other blog. Which I don’t write.
November 1: After living in the wormhole for a while and familiarizing myself with their routines and with the operations of a POS, I settled into a bit of a routine myself. I’d chat with the guys in the wormhole channel, do a little scanning, and check out the contents of the hangars. A few days after I got in, I found something glorious: an Orca had been stored in the hangar.
That cemented my plan. The easiest way to get that Orca out was to fly it, full of ships, out of the shield. As there were a lot of ships, part two of the plan was to bring in my own orca and trade in space, loading them both up. I needed about two weeks of training on my infiltrator, and a couple of skillbooks. Getting out of the wormhole in an area where I could find the books wasn’t easy, but I had a few days of training before I needed them. I made it out and back in with 12 hours to spare.
I’m now under seven days away from being able to fly that Orca, and now I have even more good news: there’s another Orca in the hangar. When I counted this morning, I found three hulks, seven T2 frigates, three T2 cruisers, and a nighthawk command ship. There’s also a Rokh, several Drakes, and more battleships that I won’t be able to get out as they can’t be repackaged in the POS. Unless things change as the time draws near, my plan is to put my orca alt into the wormhole in his pod and deliver a loaded orca to him, then pod back and load the other. If things go really well I’ll be able to get a highsec exit and make a couple of trips, moving ships and stolen goods out until the hole collapses, leaving an orca or two in the wormhole until I can scan a new exit.
I think for a bit there one member got suspicious of me; he started asking why I hadn’t been in on any ops. I’ve made a bit of a thing about how I’ve had trouble getting a combat ship in via lowsec and have been telling a story of a close call with a gate camp that forced me back to high to sell the drake and come back in a shuttle. To put some of the fears to rest, I’ve started taking it upon myself to make sure our bookmarks and online spreadsheet of signatures are all well-maintained, under the pretense that don’t really need the cash so much as I need to learn how to conduct operations like this because it’s all new to me. I was talking on TeamSpeak this morning with some of them about how much I’d learned doing this.
I have learned quite a bit already. Just not what they think I’ve learned.
Two months ago, I set out to commit a corp theft. The next three posts are what I wrote during that process. I made references to this scheme at the time, but never published these drafts that I had sitting around. I’m not editing them now (except for one last proof-reading) because this blog is about the process and the experience of learning new things. You can guess it didn’t go as planned; read on for the details.
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October 22: There’s an alt I’ve never mentioned here. I will only ever name that character here if it becomes publicly connected to me directly and is no longer viable for infiltration operations. An unspecified amount of time ago that alt joined an alliance to scout them as a war target and theft victim. They are highly organized to the point of being overmanaged, and after seeing their response to another wardec I decided they wouldn’t produce the fights we look for in Skunkworks. Instead, I joined their wormhole operation, thinking we had two options:
- I scan members of Skunkworks into the wormhole when no one else is around, and we spend a few days wrecking things and getting kills in the wormhole.
- I steal their stuff.
The two goals are not mutually exclusive. It would be entirely possible for us to enter the wormhole, rob them blind, and then stick around and shoot them until either they leave or we get bored.
It took me three tries to get into the wormhole. On the first two attempts someone already inside told me where the entrance was, but it collapsed before I could make the 20+ jump run. Last night, after 27 jumps across two empires and a jump into lowsec, I finally arrived. The person who directed me to the hole had logged off while I was in transit, so I didn’t know where the POS was, so I just logged off in space and called it a night.
This morning I logged in and found several people in the wormhole. They guided me to two POS: a small placeholder POS that was used for staging and is scheduled to be taken down, and a large POS that is still in the process of having its defenses set up. Under the pretense of never having worked with POS before (that part is true, my old corp never had a POS) I “explored” and checked out all the hangars and made a show of poking my head everywhere I could.
Can I have your stuff? Yes, I think I can.
There is also a corporate hangar array that is already stocked with ore and T2 modules and faction ammunition. I didn’t bother with screenshots as it would have been tedious and largely useless. What interests me most is Hangar 1, where they store all the Sleeper loot produced by the wormhole dwellers. The way it works is you send the guy running the operation a list of what you put in there and who it belongs to and when he runs all those goods to highsec and sells it off, you get a cut. This means that everyone is putting their salvage into one pot, and it could quickly turn into a quite a bit of isk should he wait a while between paydays. The problem is, I don’t have access to this hangar. My first order of business is to figure out how to get in there.
I recently trained up to fly a Falcon with one particular purpose in mind. A few days ago we actually had someone declare war on us, something that doesn’t happen often. It turns out it was a group of guys (or one guy with alts) that like to play no-risk station games with multiple Dominix and Guardians. Here’s a video of these winners in action:
As I’d recently completed my Falcon training, I decided to pick one up and fit it out for jamming those guardians. As usual, I missed all the fights with these guys. It was mostly an exercise in frustation, though: as that video demonstrates, some people don’t want to fight, they want to pad their killboards with unsuspecting enemies. When a few of the guys demonstrated that we were more than capable of overcoming their “strategy” and killed one Domi, the wardec was promptly dropped. People who declare war and then run when they actually get that war…I don’t know whether to laugh, cry, or vomit a little in my mouth.
Still, there was other action to be had. We had two other wars going at the same time, and one was showing promise. Last night I logged on to find my fellow Skunks hunting an enemy fleet of three Drakes and a few smaller ships. We finally caught up with them in Poinen, their home system. They engaged at a stargate while I was checking planets in my cloaked Falcon. When I arrived, the fight was just getting started.
The Falcon is an annoying enemy. They can take multiple ships out of the fight, and they do so from a range at which they are difficult to catch. I’d already fitted out my ship with four Caldari-specific jammers, and when I landed I proceeded to shut down all three Drakes. The remaining fleet that could range on me locked me up, and when one of the Drakes got lucky enough to stay unjammed long enough to get a lock, I had to warp out at 50% armor.
I didn’t stay gone long. I landed back, decloaked, and started laying jams on everything I could. After months of not being on killmails, I took advantage of this new role and spread the love before going back to shutting down the Drakes again. The enemy fleet began to fall apart, I got primaried again, and warped out with 90% structure. When I returned, we were mopping up. I can’t say for certain what blew up when in the course of that narrative, so here’s a list of the kills from the battle, in the order that they happened:
Armageddon
Hyperion
Coercer
Drake
Drake
Drake
Maller
Armageddon (same pilot as the first ‘Geddon)
One of our new prospective members did lose a Hawk in that fight. He immediately returned in a Slicer, which turned out to be a boon for us when I noticed that my scanning alt, which I left sitting cloaked near the sun, had just watched an enemy capsule warp in. I warped to 10 km from the sun under cloak to verify his location and then called for that Slicer to come attempt to lock him. He succeeded, we realized we had hold of their CEO, and decided it was a good time to renegotiate terms.
While we were trying to talk him into paying a ransom to end the war, an enemy Brutix–flown by the pilot of the recently-obliterated Hyperion–landed on grid with us. We quickly killed the pod and engaged the Brutix. A Slicer and a Falcon can actually make a Brutix quite miserable, it turns out. He was active tanked and we couldn’t break him, but we did hold him in place while some big guns were brought to bear. The Brutix didn’t last long against them.
Just when you’d think we’d broken their will, a new member of their crew shows up and starts smack talking. He undocked in a Punisher and started playing safe spot games with us, warping in and out of the station grid at extreme ranges. I popped out some probes, caught him in one of his off-grid safes, and got my Falcon in position. I called for the Slicer to come in again and we successfully pointed and destroyed a pitifully-fitted Punisher that I assume they never expected to actually have to fight.
So last night let me do all the things I’ve quite enjoyed: Being a cloaky bastard, surprising people who think they’re safe, and utterly disrupting the enemy’s ability to fight. And this time I even got on the majority of the kills I helped make happen! Nights like that remind me why I love playing Eve.
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As fun as all that was, I’m not sure the Falcon is going to be a long-term thing for me. I’ll keep it in the arsenal and will use it if necessary, but it’s a little too soft for my tastes. I don’t like having to run in and out of fights that much, and jamming seems a little too passive an activity for my personality. Even neuting with the Legion seems more aggressive, probably because its tank lets me get in close and stay on the field. I’m hoping to get some amusing killmails with the Falcon during Hulkageddon–whenever that happens–but aside from that it will probably only be brought out when an FC directly requests it. That is, once I get motivated enough to put it away.
And now, back to training for my cloaky Proteus.
So we’re at war with TEST. It hasn’t been as interesting as I’d hoped, but we did get one good fight out of them while I was around. As an added bonus, CSM alt and Crime and Punishment forum hero Darius III joined one of his alts to the corp and was along for the fight. This happened just before Christmas, and I’m only now getting around to writing about it.
Several of us were running around in Slicers and found several of them in a system. After locating a pair of them sitting on the undock of a station, I undocked as the others warped in and we engaged their Thrashers. All was going well, until my Slicer got hung on an invisible piece of station and lost its transversal. It promptly exploded. We set about changing out ships as they were fielding at least one Hurricane and multiple Thrashers. The other guys grabbed battlecruisers, and I went back for my cloaky Legion. The waiting game began as more TESTies streamed into the system and they set about building a fleet while we got in position. Monk was in place behind the station in a Tornado, Odemis and Darius were on the undock in a Harbinger and Hurricane respectively, and I was sitting just off the undock path cloaked, abut 8 km away from the station.
Finally, they undocked. There were two hurricanes, a blackbird, an osprey, a Maller, and at least two frigates. They immediately engaged Odemis’ Harbinger. Sixth was on standby in the next system in a Rokh and immediately jumped into the system and started warping in. Odemis had to dock up after a short fight, and I took that is my cue to decloak. The Legion completely surprised them and was immediately made primary. I targeted as many of them as I could and fought to prevent a hurricane from bumping me off station, but didn’t actually aggress any of them. While they slowly worked through 170,000 hitpoints of armor, the rest of our fleet took down the Osprey and the Blackbird, as well as the pod of the Blackbird pilot. I was finally forced to dock up after absorbing all their firepower for more than a minute.
I quickly repaired and undocked as the guys destroyed one Hurricane, and then the other. I was only able to apply any kind of aggression to one ship, the Maller that was the last to be destroyed as the frigates fled the field. So while my killboard doesn’t reflect my full contribution to the fight, that battle confirms for me that I’m on the right track in how I choose to contribute to our small fleets. Surprise is a powerful weapon and can completely cripple an enemy.
…You’re still here. Yes, it’s been a while since I posted. I changed schedules at work, and things got incredibly boring in Eve. After a rather uneventful war where my Pilgrim loss was the most interesting thing to happen, we really struggled to get any kind of action. Dec scraping, alliance hopping, and station hugging war targets made for tedious Eve time. We spent far more time playing Minecraft than we did Eve, and we had a blast. Don’t worry all you Minecraft carebears, that’s our own stuff we’re blowing up.
After a few weeks of nothing happening, we finally got an eventful war with ESS alliance. These guys have given us some good fights and lost a lot of ships. I’ve mostly been scouting and spotting and missed getting onto several killmails due to my being the eyes of the operation, but I was there and did my part. I did get a zero-damage listing on a Raven we killed, and I was determined to do that because that kill could not have happened had I not scanned him down. There was also a Rook on grid, but he was moving and I couldn’t get my cloaky Legion in range to grab and hold him. When the DPS ships landed the Rook bailed out and the Raven melted quickly.
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I’m presently training Caldari Cruiser 5 so that I can fly a Falcon in a few weeks. Why this sudden jump to Caldari, when I have no intention of using them on a regular basis? Hulkageddon. My plan is to spend HAG cloaking near ice or asteroid belts watching for a gank to start, then jamming out the criminal and getting a kill, courtesy of concord. I expect some amusing ganker tears.
After that training is done, it’s on to a new plan. Cloaky ships are definitely my thing. Finding wartargets who think they’re safe and arranging a nasty surprise for them is a lot of fun. As a result I miss out on a lot of killmails and am bottom of the damage list on many more, but I’m comfortable with that because the corp knows what I do and I’m having a lot of fun with it. Still, there are some ‘mail whores out there who will likely give me a hard time over that record.
In any case, my cloaky Legion is an awesome heavy tackler, but it is unable to deal any kind of damage. So, I’m branching out. I’m going to train for a Proteus with the intention of being able to solo most of the lone targets I’ll be scanning down. It’s a long-term plan–Gallente cruiser 5, all Gallente subsystems to 5, and medium blaster specialization 4 will take just over 64 days.
When I do something, I often do it in a big way. Last post I finally gave up my 100% efficiency losing a Purifier in Tribute. This morning, I lost a Pilgrim to some new war targets. I fell for a bait ‘Geddon and just couldn’t tank the bait ship and the Hurricane that joined him long enough to get through the gate after deaggressing. It didn’t help that my tracking disruptors cycled so absurdly slow that I was aggressed for a good 10 seconds after I started shutting down modules. Also, I wasn’t on my best game and forget to hit the cap booster to keep my reps going when I ran dry. I’m not sure if I could have survived that engagement or not, but I certainly could have done better.
To round the morning out, I decided to bring in my OTHER Purifier from Tribute and got caught on the lowsec gate by a lone ship who got lucky and bumped me while I was burning to the gate away from a drag bubble.
I’ve been distracted by Minecraft lately (it’s all Monk’s fault) and I’m about to endure a schedule change at my job that will rearrange my gaming times substantially. Hopefully this new war will continue to provide action and give me something to do in Eve again.
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Rant time:
Drag bubbles are a silly game mechanic. I can see that I’ve got a clear shot to a gate, i warp to the gate….and past it, into a bubble 30 km on the other side. I’m not sure if this is by design of CCP or if it’s a flawed mechanic that CCP gave up fixing and declared it Working As Intended ™, but it’s counterintuitive and particularly unfriendly to people who don’t know what they’re looking at. And yes, I’m admitting to being one of those people.
It’s easy to learn about warp bubbles. You warp toward something, hit a bubble, and you’re dropped out of warp. Anyone who spends more than an hour in nullsec or w-space will learn about these things. What they WON’T learn is how drag bubbles work, how to properly use them, and how to avoid them. There’s zero documentation by CCP on how they pull you dozens of kilometers away from your intended warp-to point or under exactly what circumstances this happens. They aren’t in your path, their visible field of influence doesn’t extend to your path, yet they’re able to trap you. To me, this gives a clear advantage to the people who work with drag bubbles all the time at the expense of anyone who hasn’t been able to get good information on them.
I’m not saying drag bubbles shouldn’t exist. I’m saying that their effect should be apparent to someone who bothers to look before they leap. I don’t think that’s too much to ask. As it stands, the only solutions I can find to avoiding drag bubbles is “warp to an offgrid bookmark for the gate and blah blah blah” which…well, do I really need to explain it?
So one of our newer members who has a history with Greywolf wanted to have a go at them, and we ended up at war with Dee Alliance again. Then with Greywolf after they bailed out of that alliance. Then with Forceful Entry, their new nullsec alliance. That makes three alliances that Greywolf has carried our wars into.
I missed most of the fun while away on vacation. Greywolf started packing up to abandon highsec (presumably for good, according to one intel source) and the guys successfully stole their POS when it unanchored. They’ve now run to the Tribute region to hide behind their new friends’ blob. It seems people still operate under the assumption that people who prefer highsec will not leave highsec.
So we’re living in Tribute for a little while. Nullsec isn’t really our idea of fun, but sometimes you have to go where the fight is. I logged in last night just in time to listen as the crew set up a bombing run on a mining fleet. The orca alone valued over a billion isk. There were also two hulks lost, while we lost a single bomber.
After that, the enemy grouped up into a 20 man fleet and began that old standby of the nullsec PVP gang, the Gate Camp. We watched their gang roam back and forth a bit, marveled at their nullsec PVP skills as they set up bubbles on gates, and I got some Minecraft lessons from Monk. As they were heading home, I dropped a bomb on their fleet on one side of a gate, killing a Slicer. I lost my bomber and my pod in the process, but the rest of the crew picked off several more of their small ships on the other side of the gate. It was about time I lost my 100% efficiency on the Skunkworks killboards. I’m going to miss it, though.
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I said before I wanted to get back to the original intent of this blog, that being the exploration of the Eve universe from the perspective of a “bad guy”. In my forays into nullsec, I’m fast learning something that I’ve heard from nearly every member of The Skunkworks: nullsec PVP isn’t what its proponents make it out to be. Most kills are gained by sitting on gates and attacking every vulnerable ship that comes through, while avoiding engaging more dangerous ships and fleets. Fleet battles are really a contest between fleet commanders, with the individual members contributing to the outcome mostly through their ability to follow orders quickly. Neither scenario represents significant individual skill, and one can attain an impressive killboard history in nullsec just by doing what the FC says.
Highsec warfare isn’t perfect. In fact it’s quite broken, as CCP doesn’t think it’s important for corporations to actually be able to fight in any meaningful way in highsec right now. That said, with a few fixes to aggression mechanics and wardec exploits, highsec warfare can be a much more challenging and nuanced game than the blob combat of null.
I’d like to see CCP fix these issues:
- Wardecs should be “sticky”. If we wardec a corporation and they join an alliance, the war shouldn’t transfer to the alliance, but be extended to it. If the corp then drops alliance, the war should continue to follow it.
- We should be able to wardec a specific corp inside an alliance. One of the goals may be to get the corp kicked out of the alliance, or the target might be the POS that belongs to a holding corp that can drop alliance and easily avoid the wardec. Either way, it should be harder to simply avoid a war.
- Wars should cost more. Eve needs more isk sinks, and I’m not going to exclude my lifestyle from that. It’s too easy to wardec every potentially vulnerable corp you see. I’d suggest a high cost to declaring war, with a lower upkeep fee. This should come ONLY after 1 and 2 have already gone into effect.
- Neutral logistics that repair a target that has aggression should inherit that aggression so that they are prevented from docking for 60 seconds. These inherited timers are not directly passed on to other logis: if Logi A has an aggression timer and ceases repairing the aggressing ship, others logis will not get an aggression timer for supporting it. This is to prevent two logis from getting locked in a cycle of refreshing aggression when no hostile acts have been committed recently.
I know I sound like a broken record on these points, but I really, really want to see Eve become a better, more consistent game universe.
