Omar Alharazaad wrote:It gets better than that.
If you're actively hunting a corp for example, I dunno, because you've been paid to... the costs go up.
Say your target corp has 100 members.
Also, lets suppose that the wardeccing corp has 10 active members at any given time... generous, i know... but let's go there.
Hunting corp wants to find people. Watchlist is gone.
Hunting corp uses locator agents. Each of their ten people online uses two characters twice an hour to locate from two different agents each.
That's 250k per use. So, speaking of course completely hypothetical... or maybe from direct experience, each player is burning 2 million isk per hour trying to find someone who is not docked in a station.... because you don't know if they are online or not, so docked tells you jack. They're madly rolling the dice in hopes of finding someone who is in space.
Now that 2 million isk only gets you the lowdown on 8 people, for that hour (or within five minutes).
....
Methinks your hunting skills need improvement if you require total reliance on locator agents to do your work for you. Finding out what sort of corporation you're dealing with, which systems they inhabit, and the activity levels of their membership is quite simple. All it requires is some zkillboard and statistics research on the corporation and it's members. Which should narrow your search to a selection of regions and likely systems.
With the additional use of some cargo scanning at major tradehubs to determine cargo types, and following said cargo ships back to their home system. Then putting some cloaking eyes on grid and in system it should be very easy to learn their movements and habits. Where they mine, and what sort of operations they run, and what assets they have. Follow this up with putting a spy in their corporation for best resutls in the weeks prior... If you aren't putting this level of effort into your reconnisance then your wardecs wont achieve the desired results.
I think you need to think less like a "PvP'er" and more like a war-fighter - and the basic fundamental of war is that intelligence is king. You can't shoot what you can't see. Futhermore, the lack of information, during war, can kill you.