Foolish Bob
The Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
In Tea We Trust
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Posted - 2012.06.14 10:30:00 -
[1] - Quote
At work so can't read the whole thread (so requisite apologies if I'm repeating someone) but given I find myself in the strange position of mostly agreeing with Jade about something, I thought I'd continue this world of bizarre strangeness by trying to write a cogent post on the ally changes.
First though:
To tinfoil hatters. Enough, please. Yes this change is massively advantageous to GF, but testing and change control cycles virtually guarantee that this change was planned and proposed long before GF declared war on SF, so unless you have evidence that they bypassed this, cut them some slack.
To devs: T20. Yes it was years ago. No it's not fair that people still wonder about such things, but remember you're arguing with people on the internet. It makes us all crazy people.
Now the meat of the issue.
I'm not going to repost Jade's proposal. Go look it up for yourselves, I'm at work. What I did find interesting about the thread, though, was Soundwave's comment; namely that war should not necessarily be fair. In context, he very clearly meant that war should not be guaranteed to be fair to the defender, and everyone I think agrees with this. Left unsaid, however, is this. Why should war be fair to the attacker? An analogy was made in defence of the Soundwave's position in the same thread by comparing a fleet engagement in nullsec and posing the question as to whether or not a larger fleet should wait for its target to find allies before stomping on them. This analogy I think is perfect. Should, in contrast, a larger fleet be allowed to stop the smaller fleet from batphoning for support? Is it not part and parcel to engagements that the aggressor should always be allowed to bite off more than he can chew, and pay the price for it?
If we accept this design philosophy, then we can look again at how this applies to the war system. Consider a large alliance A that declares war against small entity B. In nullsec if B has friends C to Q, that give some numerical parity to the action, then A would pause before considering agression, because there would be actual consequences to the action. In hisec, however, the opposite is true. A can engage without any real risk of reprisal for the following reasons
- It is economically more difficult for B to declare war on A
- If A would beat B easily B would need C to Q and that would be even more economically non-viable
- If B engages C to Q in aid, A simply stops paying the war costs and withdraws from the conflict
- if B makes the war mutual, all other parties are locked out of the war, allowing A to kill B at its leisure
There is simply no mechanism by which alliance A can ever face serious consequences for biting off more than they can chew. Are we really saying that aggressors should get to dictate all the terms of a war? Surely when a CEO (or director) presses the button to release the hounds, then at the back of their mind, there should always lurk the possibility that their action could lead to the destruction of all they hold dear, and the mechanic as is manifestly fails to provide that.
On the other hand there is the issue that the mechanic IS targeting - namely that of "dogpiling" being a contributing factor in the lack of a vibrant mercenary marketplace. Honestly I'm not in a position to judge whether this is the case or not, but I can see how it could be. In any case I think we can agree that it's axiomatic that once a merc is in a contract they shouldn't be locked into it for all time because they fight voluntarily. In the spirit of the above, however, there should be some recognition of mercs that cry off their contracts before the term expires. That's a whole can of worms I'm not going into now though. In the meantime, however, Jade proposal does address a lot of these issues? Is it perfect? Far from it - the issue of how you deal with this situation for instance
Hypothetically wrote:
Alliance A has 200 Dudes
Alliance B has 100 Dudes
A decs B
B batphones C who has 3000 dudes
is poorly defined and needs consideration, but some mechanism whereby the defender CAN tip the odds in his favour by calling 2000 of his good friends (even if they're not his closest) I think is sorely needed.
Now I have to go fix an issue I introduced to UAT because I was thinking about this...  |