As it is now more or less public knowledge what the war bug is I am going to give you a full report on what is going on.
There is an issue with the corporation permission system that determines who can drop structures in space and who can’t. How the system works is that players with two different roles are able either to anchor citadel structures or POCOs and POS structures. Without having these rules you are unable to anchor any structures. As having a structure in your corporation determines if you are eligible for war or not it is rather important to limit these roles to the players you can trust if you want to stay out of high sec wars.
However there is once particular structure that partly ignore these roles. Any player in any corporation without ANY roles or titles given to them is able to launch a POCO gantry into space. They are only able to launch the gantry without the roles so they can’t anchor it nor can they upgrade it into a POCO. All they can do is kick the item out of their cargo hold and drop it in space. And having this gantry randomly floating in space is enough to change the war eligibility status of a corporation or alliance for as long as the structure remains in space.
So a hostile entity that wants to declare a war on any corporation simply needs to get one toon into the said corporation. Once the toon is in they go to a random system that has at least one planet without a POCO and drop the gantry in a random point in space. As long as there is one free planet without a POCO you can drop the gantry. If all planets are taken you are unable to launch the gantry into space.
Once the gantry is in space the corporation becomes eligible for wars. When this happens the hostile entity declares war on the target corporation. Once the war is declared the spy scoops back the gantry. Corporation status now instantly changes back to not eligible for wars.
While the war has been declared but the war has not yet started it will be marked to end 24 hours from its start. For this reason most of the wars declared by this method only last 24 hours.
This is the basic mechanism how it works, however it does not end here. Since this is not a legit way of declaring a war as the game quite doesn’t understand if you now actually had a structure in space or not a lot of side bugs may happen:
- Wars may start instantly without any 24h spin up period. This means that in theory while you are hauling in your freighter in a corp that is not eligible for wars and has no wars on it within the next 30 seconds you might be in a war. Im yet not quite sure how this is done but it has happened to our corporation as well as other corporations. Most likely it’s a random result of declaring the war via the gantry bug.
- You can force wars to last only a few minutes. If your corporation is in an alliance that is wardeced with this bug and you boot your corporation out of the alliance the war duration bugs out. The war will only last as many minutes it took you to boot the corporation out compared to when the war was declared. So if you boot your corporations within 5 minutes once the war is declared your war will go live in 24 hours and last exactly 5 minutes until it ends. Completely missing the cool down period that you should have.
- War starting times change around and may show incorrect timers in the war information window. First war duration is most often something like 48 hours, then it suddenly changes to 24 hours unless it decides to instantly start or if you used booting your corp out from the alliance. In our cases wars have stated to end 24 hours before the war starts so it can even show the timers upside down. Makes it a bit hard to understand when the war actually starts or ends.
- A minor bug but your corporation or alliance name won’t show up on the small active war icon on the top left corner. There simply is an empty space where your corporations name should be.
- ESI is not pulling the war status correctly so things like zkill war report may be messed up showing no losses or not calculating total losses
- You are unable to offer assist for pending wars as these corporations are not eligible for war after scooping the gantry.
- You can offer assist for wars in effect by this bug. Assist wars may start immediately without 4h spin up.
- Assist wars do not require always to be accepted by the defender (instant accept and start after offering). No clue if asking for money has an effect on this or if the game would allow you to rob someone from their corp money against their will by offering assist with a huge fee. I dare not to try this one out on TQ
- You won’t receive any notifications about the wars ending and you have to rely on the information provided by the war info window
- Wars can be continued even when they are marked as ending. No clue if this requires the attacker to pay the new war bill or not but most likely not. This way a corporation can never know when the war really ends as the hostile can abuse the bug and simply extend wars that are marked to be ending. All that the hostile entity needs to do is drop and scoop the gantry and this will automatically reset your war ending timer to 24 hours without a new war starting.
Multiple tickets has been created to CCP and multiple conversations had with their representatives by several of our members. However they have not given any statements yet whatever this is an exploit of a bug or just clever use of game mechanisms. Looking at the list of the known bugs we have found so far I don’t know how much you can stretch a clever use of game mechanism until the whole game breaks and CCP is just fine with it.
We do understand that it is taking CCP quite long to reply to the tickets and we have been told by unofficial sources that CCP is aware of the bug and is working on it. However this is all the information we have.
So until we finally get an official reply from CCP all you can do is wait and fight. We have organized a lot of corporations who have fallen the victim of wer4 war dec to shoot at their structures but in the end this does not prevent them from repeating the war decs on corporations forever until it is fixed.
The most important thing for you is to understand why this is happening and why your corporation can’t do anything to prevent it. Try to find some enjoyment in the pvp fleets that are happening during this era of war dec bugs and not to burn out.
If you have left SiCO during these war times you are always more than welcome to return back to us once this bug is dealt with. We will be informing you on our homepage and on our discord once this happens.
