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| Keep At Range |
Being -10 for the past eight years (give or take) the War Dec mechanics of Eve never bothered or interested me all that much. High-sec has always been a place to tolerate on the brief dashes my alts make for supplies, or the mad dashes Rixx often makes to get from one place to another. The Po Po yell at me and if I linger they tend to explode my ship. I'm not exactly welcome there.
And normally, War Decs have been times for those in our Alliance to hunker down and attend to other things for a short period of time. At least that was the routine for years. War Decs were always annoying, but they could be dealt with if you were smart and paid attention. And then the trend changed from an annoyance to a constant, never-ending drumroll. At some unknown point in the recent past the War Dec came home to roost. For over a year now our Alliance has been constantly under a War Dec.
And while being under constant War Decs still doesn't directly impact me directly (and thanks to all the extremely perceptive commenters who constantly point this out to me) it does impact those in our Alliance. Not only High-Sec industrialists but our Wormhole operations and our supply chains. And no matter how careful you are, sometimes it impacts our killboard. Not that we care all that much about statistics, but losses are negative financial impacts that do affect our pilots. Some much more than others.
And yes, we tried fighting back. Obviously, when a significant portion of your pilots are negative sec status, this can pose issues. But even so, we mounted several operations aimed at pushing back against those that made the mistake of War Deccing us. What we quickly discovered was that the mechanics of Eve Online don't make such operations feasible. Not only would our War Deccers change their War HQ regularly, but they would also self-inflict timers on their own War HQ so that it would be impossible for us to do so. On top of which, structure timers being what they are - it was impossible to put one into an explosion within the time-frame of a normal war. If we got that far, all the War Deccer had to do was let the current War lapse. Then start all over. (This timer issue was apparently fixed in the latest patch)
Faced with these realities, as well as the utter failure of my diplomacy efforts, we had to make a different choice. And so I issued the orders last week that resulted in all of our Corporations moving all structures into holding Corps. This was not an easy decision to make because it impacted everyone differently. We lost a Corp because of it. And yesterday we had to defend a structure (which we did successfully) from an attacker, who I suppose thought the change in ownership was a weakness they could exploit. I hope the rather large fleet we dropped on them helped to dissuade them from that idea.
Today our Alliance is no longer War eligible.
In a perfect world I would welcome the chance to be allowed to fight back should anyone decide to declare War on me. But, as we all know, Eve is not perfect. In so many ways my hands are tied and the game actively works against allowing us a chance to fight back. Faced with that reality we had no choice but to step outside the mechanics.
I suspect we are not alone and that this approach is rapidly becoming Standard Operating Procedure around New Eden.
The good news is that, now that this is done, it better positions our Alliance for the future. Being ineligible will allow our pilots the freedom to pursue industry, missions, and supply chain efforts under normal conditions. So this is a good change for us.
I'm just not convinced it is a good change for Eve Online.