Bronson Hughes wrote:Re: escalating wardec fees, I favor them in principle. Deccing smaller corps should cost less than deccing larger ones (you are paying for less after all), and adding your first wardec should cost less than adding your twentieth (bureaucracy ain't cheap).
In practice however, every method of implementing these scaling fees that I've seen or thought of is subject to abuse that would make legitimate wardeccing prohibitively expensive very quickly. People would just pay to keep alt corp wardecs going, fill their ranks with dummy alts to inflate corp size, etc.
Wardec mechanics could use some love, but I don't think that scaling wardec fees is the answer.
I'm not seeing DecShield as a problem. The cost escalation would only be applied to war decs / assists that you initiate. If you're the 300th corp/alliance to drop a dec on NorthernCoalition - that matters not. Piling on is fine - it would just be that you can't pile on everyone at the same time.
As far as alliance bombing. I would keep decs active on corps fleeing alliance for the war duration, but not count it against the aggressor. Here's the line of logic behind it:
AceMercServices dec's UltimateNullConglomerate (12,000 members and 69 corps). AMS has 2 weeks to slaughter them. AMS paid off CONCORD to shoot the members of that alliance. That stands for the dec period if the corp stays in the alliance or if they leave. Think of the war declaration as being against 70 entities - UNC as a whole and the 69 corps. As the war progresses, leaving UNC isn't a get out of jail free card - you can separate from the alliance, but you can't separate from CONCORD sanction war activities. Instead of seeing UNC as 1 entity - it would see it as 70 entities. On the other hand, joining UNC during an active war dec would add you to both the UNC roster and as entity 71 for the duration of the war. The net effect would be that leaving an alliance under war dec doesn't change anything as far as the war dec goes.
It would be a code change as to how war decs are seen by the game, not just a roll back to the old broken ways. There would be more, such as a corp joining an alliance while under war dec. That would have to be looked at carefully - it would be funny if (as a war dec infected corp) you could join/drop alliance memberships and spread the joy, but would have to be coded in some way as to not allow 'spread the joy' abuse.
Many of us know this is a complex issue that requires multiple changes on several mechanics fronts. Escallating dec fees would only be part of the package. Only an idiot would assume 1 simple change would fix such a complex problem. So, for those that wear those types of shoes, if you read closely my original post on this says I am in favor of escalating dec fees. What it does not say is that changing ONLY this facet will cure the mechanics quagmire that HS warfare is currently in.
At the end of the day I'm more interested that HS warfare is fun, challenging and continuously pulls more folks into the PVP aspect of the game and less interested in the actual way we get from the current mind numbing player farming mass dec garbage to that ideal. I just want HS warfare to be fun again.