War Decs n' Neuts

     Yes, that kind of war dec and no, not that kind of neut.

     Our "welcome to the alliance war" is not going well, IMO.  Quite likely in a lot of people's opinions too.  The corp that dec'd us has swollen in number to more than double what it originally was.  Lots of accounts coming out of the woodwork, quite likely, I think, by design.  They seem quite adept at their method of war which is station games and neutral reps.  The neutral reppers have all the time in the world to set up shop, target everyone they need to, get their cap chain(s) going, and then, when it looks like the DPS boat is starting to hurt a little, they nail it with about 100,000,000 HP of repping power and they're fresh as a daisy.  Try to drive off the neutral reppers after they go flashy, and more show up.  No doubt each member of their corp each has a logi ship in the neutral alt corp.  Even though the newly implemented feature, that disrupts neutral repping, kicks their reppers off after about 30 seconds, they have had the time to bring the target ship back to like-new.  At that point, the neutral-now flashy logi has the option of sticking around for a couple more reps, or docking up.  if the logi starts taking some major damage, they just dock up.

     Our response, in a number of variations, has been ineffective.  It's non-conventional fighting we're doing, so non-conventional fits are required.  They have exceedingly large amounts of RR - we have next to nothing.  They have concentrated DPS, we don't.  They have seen that we bring one or two ECM boats, so they have ECCM fitted theirs and added cap boosters.  We know - they've been scanned.  They bring an insanely tanked Scorpion with dual cap boosters, we have nothing even close.  We bring a rag-tag response to a well rehearsed, well coordinated combination of pure DPS and pure RR.  It can't be beat by what we're doing, and hasn't been beat by what we're doing.  Not even close.  Part of the problem, but not all of it, is the neutral repping exploit.

     Neutral repping should generate an aggression timer.  I can see the up-sides and down-sides of a 60 second timer, and in the bigger picture, if you don't have the DPS to bring down a BS or below ship in a minute, you've got bigger problems than just the timer length.  So, if the neutral repper gets a 60 sec timer like any other combat ship, I think that would go a long way to fixing things.  But there's more.  Part of the problem is that they have time to set everything up FIRST, before anyone gets to agress them.

     If there is some spontaneous or unanticipated aggression, then a 15 minute timer is sufficient for the neutral repper - like for can flipping.  If however, just like in a real war, if a neutral party aids either side of the war, they are now in the war.  If a neutral repper helps either side, they are now in the war for the duration of the war.  Definitely that specific character is now a real war target, but I haven't worked out all the permutations on whether it would/could/should be viable to include their corp as well.  If the corp was included, a simple fix would be for the player to put their toon in an NPC corp first.  But anyway, the neutral rep things blows.  I think we need a ton more DPS and TDs than we are fielding if we hope to deal with 5 to 8 Guardians.

     By the time this posts, hopefully, the war dec will have come and gone.  Word/rumour was that the corp was paid by a dude who lost a couple billion isk in a freighter because a few days earlier he had ganked a corp member of mine.  The corpy patiently waited to exercise his kill rights, and then, along came the fatty, so he popped it.  Less than happy, the dude apparently then hired this corp to war dec us.  Hopefully that is nothing more than a great story to tell our great great grand kids, and these dudes get tired of us throwing ships at them to 'splode, they let the war dec expire, no one pays for a renewal, and we get back to business.

The Point?  I guess, go big, or stay on the porch where the big dogs have a couple wheels up on the curb, that won't let their elevator go all the way to the top floor with a couple cards short of a full deck in it.  Savy?