Omar Alharazaad wrote:The full on deep legwork approach to war is a great idea in my opinion when it comes to a planned out long-term conflict with perhaps a rival corp that's making life unpleasant for you. This is exactly how you deal with matters on your own terms.
As far as merc work it just doesn't work.
Raz hit on an important point there when it comes down to the payment of hunters.
Analogy, years ago my father (who you may recall from the semi-infamous squirrel post) was running a T-shirt graphics design business. He took great pride in the quality of his work, which to be fair was superb. Unfortunately he was using vinyl transfers for ALL of his shirts. Now, to process a proper vinyl transfer requires a patient individual who is willing to take a razor sharp knife and excise everything that is not part of the design from the transfer plate. This was time consuming, to the tune of nearly an hour per transfer. Eventually I had to ask, after spending many hours hunched over and picking away with my little knife, 'hey... dad? How much do you charge per shirt on these?'. His response was that of a very reasonable price when it came to such shirts.
I blinked.
I braced myself.
I spoke.
'Dad, you do realize that what you charge for one of these shirts is less than what a menial laborer would expect as compensation for the time it took them to finish the job?'
He just looked at me.
Then comprehension set in.
There was literally no way for him to turn a profit this way unless he either did the job himself or conscripted family to perform the labor for free.
Fortunately, I had previous experience on the matter and explained the concept of screen printing to him... but I digress.
Folks talk about opportunity cost when referring to mining. This whole notion that the time you spend gathering those minerals is EXACTLY what makes them not actually free. The same can be applied when it comes to wardec costs. Eventually the labor costs to properly prosecute an effective war become so high that the consumer will no longer be able to afford it.
Omar, what that tells me is that a hunter killer group like DWA should be part of a larger less focused group such as VMG, where your more time expensive and difficult work would be supported by their blanket war decs and you would add value by the sheer fear factor that this large merc group does actually hunt instead of saying that they do and never in fact hunt except if it is a JF. There are such things as loss leaders that give value to the overall brand.
When I first started playing I was not aware of how much data was just handed to people on a plate, I was in NPC null and I was ratting, I thought well I need to hide my activity, so I blew up my wrecks, a week later while checking the map for kills I noticed that there was data on the number of NPC kills in system, I was pretty annoyed because it was just free intel enabling people to zero in on targets and I realised that this game was not quite what I thought it was, so at that point I monitored that map so that my kill rate of rats looked less attractive as compared to other systems.
It then becomes a matter of prespective in terms of what you are used to within the games mechanics. If the watch list had never existed in the prior format would you have developed into a hunter killer?