Haedonism Bot
Glorious Revolutionary Armed Forces of Highsec
CODE.
1635
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Posted - 2015.01.30 01:23:00 -
[1] - Quote
Based on your track record, Steve, I suspect you are just looking for us to help you to lobby for heavy handed nerfs to the current wardec system. I won't help you there, but I will answer your question.
The short answer is what you should expect in a sandbox game - the purpose of wardecs is whatever the players involved want it to be. Any changes made to the mechanics should be made with this principle in mind. The more that mechanics dictate objectives or limit conditions of war, the less freedom players will have to create their own content.
If you get down to specifics, though, wars are declared for a short list of purposes. A few examples-
1. Kelduum's ideal - goodfights between equally matched organizations without NPC interference. At this, the current mechanics succeed admirably, as we can see from RvB, or fun wars that have been fought between RvB and Ivy, or Marmite vs. PoH, or countless other examples. This is an excellent use of the wardec mechanics as they currently exist.
2. Killing noncombatants for fun and profit. A lot of empire wars boil down to this, although their justifications vary considerably (revenge wars, wars fought in hopes of securing a ransom payment, RP reasons like the Code, pure "grief" wars declared just to be a ****, etc.) There is absolutely nothing wrong with fighting wars for this purpose. The current mechanics support this activity moderately well. The frustrations for the aggressor with this objective are the price of wardec fees, which limits the number of targets that smaller, poorer corps can afford, and the ease with which the defenders can evade the wardec. For the defending side the frustration is that they are usually fighting against more experienced PvPers, but again, that is balanced by evasion mechanics- they can opt out of the war when they choose. Defenders can also have free allies.
3. Asymmetric warfare. Current wardec mechanics offer great opportunities for small aggressions corps to inflict disproportionate damage on a large defending corp. This is the reason why so many people in Brave and Ivy find them so annoying. From the other side though, it's a lot of fun to go up against a group much larger than your own and use guerrilla tactics and your mastery of highsec mechanics to get many and valuable kills. This is a great argument in favor of wardecs. The frustration here is that the current price structure oddly discourages this. It is actually more expensive to wardec larger organizations, when common sense would seem to tell us that the opposite should be the case.
4. Removal of structures. This is straightforward enough. However, there isn't much incentive to actually do this in highsec. POCOs are virtually worthless for non-industrialists and POSes are rarely worth killing in the absence of something like moongoo. This is an area for improvement in the current system. The wars themselves work fine, but we need more and better things to fight over - there should be real advantages to be gained from taking and holding structures or territory. However, wardecs should never be limited to that sort of thing - that's what nullsec and wormholes are for.
So what it comes down to is this- wardecs are pretty good as is. The mechanics could be tweaked, but don't need an overhaul. Better to work on related mechanics like the corporation system or structures if you want to improve the quality of wars - give us the tools and we'll make the content ourselves.
CODE. is recruiting highsec PvPers for wardecs
www.everevolutioanryfront.blogspot.com
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