CCP Soundwave wrote:
I think the biggest issue here is that we're trying to solve different issues. I'm trying to bring the merc trade back into EVE and you're trying to add some measure of fairness into wars, which Isn't really a design philosophy in EVE.
Why would I want to balance a fight? That's never really been the goal in EVE and the war dec system wasn't built for that either. I understand that it's annoying when a big alliance war decs you, but that's hardly new to EVE. Big alliances get annoyed with bigger coalitions outnumber them and so on. That's a fact of life in EVE and we're not likely to change that direction anytime soon. The other thing is that war dec prices are determined by the value you get from them. If you want to go to war with someone, a higher number of potential targets should be more expensive. If you're a smaller alliance, this makes you a less attractive target, unless you've made someone angry in which case you're responsible for any social repercussions you've created.
Sorry mate but you are missing a trick here - its not about forcing fairness through mechanics, its about not PREVENTING the defender from evening the odds itself. Its absolutely in keeping with the Eve sandbox philosophy that the outcome of a war is down to player actions, metagaming (i.e. finding the right allies, paying them, etc) rather than incredibly restrictive mechanics that FORCE the defender to fight vastly outnumbered or stump up enormous amounts of cash.
You arent introducing forced fairness by implementing Jade's proposals, you are giving the players the tools needed to ensure fairness or unfairness as they see fit. Most, maybe even all empire corporations wont have the allies or isk to buy them necessary to match, say, Goonswarm's numbers man for man - there aren't many situations where this will make things "fair" but what it will do is stop actively forcing them to accept the unfair position (i.e. that they cant bring in more allies or have their friends wardec back because the mechanics make it prohibitively expensive to do so).
Basically the way you are proposing it means a large alliance can wardec whichever small entities they want and are protected from being wardecced back or from allies joining the fight. The numbers restrictions only hurt the defending side!
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Letting attackers add allies conflicts with the notion that attacking someone is risky. If you decide you want to go to war with someone, the consequence is that he could punch harder than you anticipated. If this is just about stacking up allies, the power of that choice fades away a little bit.
There isn't really any real risk for a 5000 man alliance wardeccing a 50 man corp. Even if they punch 10x harder than expected this is still a drop in the ocean to the 5000 man alliance. Meanwhile the 50 man corp can neither bring in significant numbers of allies (unless it just invites in one super-massive ally), nor can it get its friends to wardec the 5000 man alliance withou incurring what will be a prohibitively high cost for most small entities.