Snabbik Shigen
Hedion University
Amarr Empire
4
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Posted - 2011.10.18 06:31:00 -
[1] - Quote
Current costs are way too little for the privilege of waging war against someone that doesn't want you attacking them in hi-sec. Even the 50M/week alliance base cost is chump change these days with Incursions letting hi-sec players make 50M/hour. Then there's the fake distinction between a corp and alliance (which was probably done because it was easy to code).
Wars need to get more expensive. Higher wardec costs will result in fewer, but higher quality wars. It won't be something that you do for the lulz because you were drunk and it only cost you a few million ISK. Instead, you're going to have to HTFU and decide whether you really want to spend that few hundred million ISK to go pick on Carebear #232 Corporation. If you're a merc corp, then pass that cost along to your clients, who can decide just how much they want to pay to ruin someone else's day. Pirate corps will have to be more discriminating in which corps/alliances they target and will have to resort to suicide ganks for the rest.
The base cost for even a 1v1 war needs to be somewhere up around 200M ISK (about 1/2 of a PLEX). (If you want cheap wars, then convince the other side to make it mutual, otherwise HTFU.)
Scaling needs to be added instead of relying on corp/alliance flag. It needs to include the total number of pilots that will be involved, maybe scaling as a sqrt() of the total number of pilots on both sides of the wardec. Scaling by pilots would eliminate entirely the need to base costs off of whether the target is an alliance or a corporation.
The primary exploit with pilot tracking is when the aggressor tries to game the system in order to reduce the fee that they have to pay for the total number of pilots involved (the defender generally won't resort to these tricks). This will probably be done by having a 1-person alliance which wardec's the target, then a few corps with the real members (dozens/hundreds) will be accepted into the alliance. So instead of the aggressor paying the full scaling fee, they get the war on the cheap.
Possible solution to that would be that aggressor alliances who have wardec'd other parties cannot accept new corporations into the alliance until all outbound wardecs are cancelled. Corporations with active outbound wardecs should not be allowed to join alliances (the corp should have to drop the wardec, join alliance, re-declare after the 24h cooldown). Alternately, in order for a corporation to join an aggressor alliance, they should have to match the outbound wardecs before joining (so if the alliance has wardecs against A B & C, the corporation will have to also wardec A B & C before joining). Another possible solution would be that in order for the corp to join the alliance, they must pay the fee differential plus a 25M handling fee.
A secondary exploit could by done by the defender corporation who create a lot of trial accounts, and then have them join the corporation/alliance to drive up membership numbers. The answer to this is that only pilots who are on actively paid accounts (not trial, not lapsed) should count.
Whichever way the scaling fee is calculated, it must also have an upper-bound so that once you get up above about 2500 pilots in the corp/alliance, the scaling no longer applies. If the fee is calculated as 10 * Sqrt(pilots), then that "pilots affected" fee would top out around 500M ISK for a really large alliance. For a smaller alliance of say 100 pilots, the scaling portion of the fee would be 100M.
In order to stop the issue where 1 alliance decides to wardec all of EVE every outbound wardec that you have should increase the base fee by 20% per active wardec in an exponential growth fashion. So the base fee for war #1 would be 200M, then 240M for the 2nd war declared while the first is still active. Then 288M, 345M, 415M, 498M, 597M, 717M, etc.
Base Fee = (1.2 ^ (# of active non-mutual wardecs)) * 200M ISK
Scale = Sqrt(# of active paid pilots on both sides) * 10M ISK
Cheapest war (1v1) = 214M ISK
Small war (20v10) = 255M ISK
Modest sized war (20 v 200) = 348M ISK
Larger war (200 v 1000) = 546M ISK
Massive war (200 v 5000) = 700M ISK (note the 2500 pilot limit taking effect)
Solo alliances (100 pilots) vs (5) 100-pilot alliances =
200M + 141M for first war
240M + 141M for 2nd wardec
288M + 141M for 3rd
345M + 141M for 4th
415M + 141M for 5th
Total: 2193M ISK for the first week, going up to 2780M ISK for the 2nd week (since there would be 5 active wardecs when it comes time to renew).
For the Orphanage example of 20 wardecs, it would not be affordable if the base fee scales by (1.2^N). The upper limit would probably be around 10 wardecs (base fee for each wardec would be 1238M/week plus however many pilots are in each target's organization). So maybe CCP decides to scale it by 1.1 or 1.15 instead. |