Greedy Goblin

Saturday, November 1, 2014

Weekend minipost: awox

You could read in the minutes (relevant parts collected by James315), that CCP plans to ban highsec awoxing, but not limiting highsec wardecs. This is what The Mittani wanted and you can read Goon CSMs supporting it strongly.

I already wrote why it's a horrible idea and an evil plan by the Goons to stop influx of new players to pirate groups that are dangerous to them, so here is just a summary:

A competent, PvE oriented highsec group has much more to fear from wardecs than awoxes. If they are wardecced, they can't make profit. Also, they have value to be taken, so wardeccers seek them. To avoid such destruction, competent PvE players stay in NPC corps or 1-man corps (Red Frog uses out-of-corp alts for driving freighters, so it applies to them too). While all corps can be wardecced, there won't be competent PvE corps, only PvP corps and failcorps.

Awoxing threatens failcorps that are unworthy of wardeccing. You can't really wardec a "mining corp", they just stay docked during the war. It doesn't break their income, because it was horrible before the war. But you can awox them for their tears. While such griefers are despicable, they do an important service: destroy these horrible corps that teach players bad habits and make them believe that EVE is about grinding for horrible ISK/hour.

So in the current system a player who wants to be in a corp will sooner or later ends up in a PvP corp (most likely EVE Uni, RvB or BRAVE) and learns to play above the level of an AFK miner, so poses a threat to the status quo. The Goons want to prevent this by letting failcorps to linger and collect the new players, who will either quit or turn into yet another Raven leveler, harmless both cases.

CCP should either allow good PvE corps to exist (by removing wardecs against corps that have no structures and no alliance membership) or let awoxers continue to destroy horrible corps.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

This change does not prevent corp theft. What it does is close a hoop hole to an intended mechanic that Concord punishes criminal aggression. It's the same as RR cordokken and can flipping. If you are rob a corp of the majority of its assets, then in all likelihood a "horrible corp" will fold.

Ael said...

This change is great for me.
It may allow me to rejoin my old corp and share missions with corp mates.

Gevlon said...

Most horrible corps have no assets to steal. They just mission and mine together.

maxim said...

In order for AWOXing to be an important force for good change in Eve, it needs to be constant and widespread, with dozens of instances of it happening on a daily basis.

Something tells me there really is not THAT much AWOXing going on and it is more of an Eve-space legend, perpetuated by actions of very few toxic people.

I feel that removing that avenue of toxicity, even at the cost of (marginally) slowing down the growth of endgame competition, is a worthwhile game design choice.

Anonymous said...

@ Ael: You can always mine and mission together, just create a public channel and invite your friends. find a TS server and use it...

@ Gevlon: horrible corps can of course have valuable assets...
a pos with bpo's, ships and expensive modules... i.e.

The problem is not the game mechanics, but the stupidity of players.
DO NOT JOIN A CORP! Unless you MUST! (Nulsec, Alliance).
Mining is not a taxable activity.
If you missionrun, create your own corp (1-Man or with a Noctis alt).
As long as there are no structures that are exclusively accessible to Corp members, no Corp membership is needed!

The reason why people join corporations is that they know guilds and clans from other mmos... And falsely assume that they will benefit in eve too...

jstk said...

You are missing the point Goblin. This change is not to protect newbies from getting awoxed. It's a way to make a large number of high sec corps (including several decent ones) actually accept new players (which need guidance and a social environment to become engaged in the game).

This does very little to lolcorps, as they will probably continue afk mining and running missions under wardecs.

Remember, the most optimal way to play the game in Highsec right now is to actually NOT join a corp because it's more of a liability than an advantage.

Anonymous said...

its story time. once upon a time, when i was only 2 weeks into playing eve, i joined a failcorp. there was no security whatsoever, and the focus was hisec mining. i had my procurer, and we had a guy with a half-dozen accounts running an orca boost.

so, one day the Awoxing starts. now, half the corp is offline anyhow, but the founder ragequit when an Awoxer killed his Tengu. think about this for a moment- this was not the first awox, and not the last. but he ragequit and left the corp, and later i noticed he was selling his character. his buddy with the orca was the next CEO, and left as soon as he found out what happened. the third CEO tried, but there was a wardec, the CEO was offline all week, and the director who actually did anything quit as soon as the wardec hit. the corp closed a week later when the CEO logged back in and realized he was along with people who would never log back on.

thats what a failcorp looks like. the awoxers put 'i shoot blues' in their bio after the fact. the only 'content' was the corp getting cheap ore from gullible miners, and PvPers ganking defenseless barges in hisec without needing to lose their ships.

now, preventing that crap from happening? it would mean the corp would last until wardec, with less drama. but the corp will still fail hard. it means it takes longer to fail, and the problem members are less obvious and thus can cause more long-term harm.

overall, i think the removal of awox wont change anything at all, except the type and duration of drama a corp will have.

Anonymous said...

the biggest issue is just you cant prevent any corp from awoxing. even the best highsec corp can not.

it has nothing to do with failcorps or anything else. this design is just stupid.

how you can identify if the new recruit will awox? sure you can do security API checks and killboard checks, but nothing more.

You can also not fit your PvE ships for so much anti-gank tank, because if you are scrammed, you are dead.
And once you got an awoxer in your corp, the trust of the members is broken.

You should start to think about social aspects on your argument. Not everything is just professional gaming. It is playing for fun with others.

Anonymous said...

I agree with Ael. This is great. It makes incursioning corps much more viable. Not so much missioning corps - EVE would have to remove wardecs to do that - but it is definitely a step in the right direction.