I was recently forwarded a mail that was sent to a corporation shortly after SKNK. declared war on it. Here’s part of it:

So as you guys have probably seen, we got war-dec’d again last night. I know this sucks, and that having to change corps is stupid, but it protects you guys from having to deal with getting your ships blapped by these guys. And unfortunately, the way the war mechanics work, we don’t really have any way to win these wars. So we’re going to keep dodging these guys until they get bored and leave, then we’ll get back to the business of growing our corp and heading toward Null Sec as we planned. For now, just be patient and let’s keep ahead of these guys. These little corp jumping exercises are annoying, but it’s better than being trapped for another week unable to do what we want to do.

I could say quite about about the defeatist attitude here and how it’s poisoning the minds of new players who look to this leadership, but that’s for another rambling post. Today I want to talk about corp-hopping.

Should they be doing this?

They’re using existing game mechanics to their advantage. They want to keep operating their mining fleets and doing their level 4 missions, and they take the steps necessary to do that. I can’t fault my targets for being able to do this. They didn’t make the game.

I’m writing about this because the mechanic itself is broken. CCP has invested a lot of effort into overhauling the wardec system over the years; they clearly consider it a mechanic worth investing resources in. Yet they’ve left this gaping hole that a smart corp can use to effectively negate the entire system. Why would you ever need to fight a war if you can simply make a new corp and move before the war even starts?

So how do we fix it?

I’ve said for years that the long-term fix for this is to make corp membership meaningful in highsec. There need to be stronger drawbacks to NPC corp membership and benefits to long-term corp membership. Corp hopping to avoid wardecs should have consequences.

There are so many good ideas for this I couldn’t do justice to them all. This post isn’t about laying out one good solution, but to remind the larger Eve community that this still exists and that CCP doesn’t seem to be paying attention to it.