All-Out Guide to Wardecs

by Mussah Yacoub

Introduction

Like all corps, All-Out gets wardecced from time to time. Since we are primarily a wormhole corp, this doesn’t affect us as heavily as it would affect, say, a highsec mining corp. We do recruit brand new players often, though, and it’s important that they know how their activity in highsec will be affected by a wardec.

Overview

Definition

Any corp or alliance in Eve can pay an ISK fee to “declare war” on any other corp or alliance. When the wardec comes into effect, it gives both groups the right to attack each other in highsec for one week without any response from CONCORD. If a corp is in an alliance, to wardec the corp you must wardec their whole alliance. The wardec fee starts at 50m and scales up to 500m according to number of players being attacked, and can be paid again every week to keep the war going indefinitely.

Reasons

Almost none of the wardecs in Eve are a result of a group sincerely wanting to fight another group. The vast majority of wardecs are declared by one of these two mercenary alliances: The Marmite Collective and P I R A T. They don’t need a reason to wardec anyone; they just wardec random corps on a weekly basis to get more targets to shoot.

If you actually manage to get us wardecced by shitposting at people in local hard enough to make them platinum mad - good on you and keep it up, it’s worth it.

Consequences

  • Trade hubs and the shortest routes will be camped.
  • Shortest routes between trade hubs will be camped.
  • Buying and moving slow-aligning and slow-warping ships (i.e., anything larger than a destroyer) will be harder.
  • Moving goods into / out of our wormhole is going to be harder. This includes:
    • Hauling tower fuel
    • Hauling sleeper salvage
    • Hauling wormhole gas / ore
    • Hauling planetary interaction goods
    • Hauling manufacturing goods

What Should I Do?

  • Learn what an instant undock bookmark is and use them whenever you leave a trade hub. We have some in corp bookmarks; make more as you see fit.
  • Learn the Cloak-MWD trick and use it every time you take a gate in known space
  • Travel fit your ships. Some ideas:
    • Fill your low slots with stabs or carry a mobile depot and enough stabs to fill your lows
    • If applicable, fit an MJD. It is disabled by scrams but not by points - attempt to kill scrams, jump away and warp off
    • Fit as much tank as you can (more to avoid suicide ganks and less helpful for wardecs)
    • Ask in Slack for a good travel fit given your ship, planned route, and level of ability
  • Don’t haul valuable things yourself - ask in Slack for help from someone with a neutral hauler. Tip them nicely. Sometime I’ll set up a list of these people and guidelines on fair rates.

Fighting

If we can hurt them badly enough, won’t they go away?

No, for a few reasons:

Risk Adverse

If we set up a situation where we pose a legitimate threat to them, they will not engage. If necessary they will dock up. They don’t want fights; they want kills.

The only way to get a fight with them is to bait them into attacking what appears to be an easy target and then have that target survive and hold tackle on them long enough for reinforcements to arrive (up to and including log-off traps). If you manage to do this, see the next point:

Neutral Logi

“Neutral alts” (characters not involved in the war but controlled by the aggressors) are a constant in highsec PVP. They will fly repair ships and rep the people you’re fighting. We can’t shoot them until after they start repping, which means they will have already pulled range and started their cap chain, etc. That they’re neutral also makes it hard to predict what kind of numbers you can expect to show up.

ISK Efficiency

Wardeccers are likely to be flying very bling ships because they are never supposed to lose them. If you kill enough of them while keeping your own isk losses minimal, you might discourage the deccers from renewing the war. There are two ways to approach this:

  • It is conceivable, with enough pilots and enough preparation, to throw small cheap suicide ships at the war targets until you kill some of them. Their losses will probably outweigh yours. You need a lot of pilots all flying at the same time to do this, which we don’t ususally have. It also helps to be near a system where you have plenty of assets to reship from, which given that we live in a wormhole, we don’t usually have.
  • It is also conceivable, with the correct fleet composition (some heavier but still cheap dps like battlecruisers and a few ECM ships) and good piloting to win a fight with minimal losses. Far more likely is that the fight will never take place (see “Risk Adverse” above) or that something will go wrong and we will lose the fight.

If the wardeccers engage us, they think they can win. No offense to All-Out members, but people who habitually kill people in highsec are probably a better judge of what they can kill than we are. We are likely to lose any fight that we do not bait their engagment and close quickly.

Any kills we do give them are motivation for them to renew the war at the end of the week in an attempt to get more. The less kills we provide, the sooner the war is over. There is plenty to be done outside of highsec; you are encouraged to do those things until the war is over.