The thing is there has to be an ISK answer to the "why" of the Capsuleer putting up the contract. An Eve pilot isn't going to sink money into Dust corps fighting over districts out of the goodness of his heart.

Even if both corps are paid 25 mill for a 24v24 match the match is still bad when you add in vehicle/gear costs. Just using the planet being worth 2 bill a month makes district worth about 175 mill a month in isk. At that rate if the owner is attacked and forced to defend 7 times in a month there goes all the value of the district.

its not really about which corp its about any corp

YES! I think this may be addressed in that corporations can be allowed to take a district FOR you, but not own the district at the end of the battle.

I expect us to be very busy soon (and hopefully with no TM).

Also, having randoms being part of the FW fights means the Player Owned Districts (POD from now on) can't be tied to FW as i, and many other people i talked with, suspect.

You bring up something that has been really hard for us to figure out. There are so many factors that go into it and finding other examples to base ideas off is really hard because almost no one has done this before.

That something is how much will districts change hands once corporations can own them?

Why have a market place for districts? Why not a mercenary market place where you can pay people to defend or attack districts?

I don't want to wind up in a situation where 24 man corp winds up owning 100 planets because of anti-zerging mechanics and the defending smaller group wins by default by not showing up to any of the fights. Now defending a single planet or two I can see more feasible to hold for a 1 fielder team.

Now to avoid nap fests going on too long you can limit the amount of resources that can be derived from a given district by gradually reducing the amount of it available until you hit a minimum baseline. This would result in a weakness that others can exploit, particularly if you link resource consumption to battles. The more fights in your district, even if you win, will result in repairs needing to be made and disruption to production. This could allow small corps or even individuals into Sovereign wars as they could be used for hit and run tactics, smash and grabs, and espionage to test out or even create instability into the system.

Also resource reduction will result in these static corps moving onto greener pastures. Once this district has changed hands the new corp could use new "methods" to gradually increase production to where it was before it gradually declines again.

Within district attacks you could even reduce it to attacking specific building e.g the building where the corp stores some or a lot of their tanks which could then be destroyed or even stolen, though more likely to steal dropsuits, weapons , modules or even the resource being produced.

Having ongoing contracts paid out per battle could work, and it would help reduce the need for a longer delay to have the corps make a deal for a contract.

However, here is the problem that might be minor to some, or major to others. You want your corp's success to be based on your corp as a whole, not 3 dudes from your corp + 5 dudes from another +8 from the contracting corp.

One of the best ways to tell if a corp is worth contracting will be their wins/losses, how will that work in a mixed corp situation? Would the corp get a win or loss for EVERY member participating in the battle? Or just one? To really show the skills of the corp fairly, i would think it would have to be 1 for every member, so the more members a corp has involved, the more it sways their standing. Losing a match where you had 1 corp member in it shouldnt ding your corp the same as one where you had 16.