Archive:DecShield

This page's intent is to provide information on the the history of EVE University. The information on this page is no longer current.

A War Declaration Shield (DecShield or Dec Shield), was a game mechanic that EVE University used to discourage casual War Declarations by making them more expensive to the potential aggressor. Together with the old Wartime Standard Operating Procedures, DecShield was aimed at preventing war and shortening war duration so that members could focus on learning about different aspect of the game mechanics in a controlled environment.

Basics

Prior to Inferno the cost to the declaring corporation or alliance was based both on the number of wars that they had in process and the number of wars the target corporation or alliance had, as this equation shows:

cost = B * (N+1) * (W+1)

Where B was the base price, N was the number of wars the aggressing entity had, and W was the number of wars the target entity had. As you can see, these are multiplicitive factors. The target entity, could not influence B or N, but they could increase W by having 'friendly' corporations declare wars on them.

This was done by creating a series of 'shell corporations' with alts and having them declare war against the corporation, thereby upping the cost. It was considered very likely to be an exploit and/or breach of the EULA to use trial accounts for this purpose, and as such EVE University utilized alts on active accounts of members and alumni, which were checked daily for their status.

Changes in Retribution Expansion

In Retribution Expansion, CCP implemented several major changes that essentially disintegrated the mechanic of DecShield. Here is a forum thread on the subject [1].