Have been absent for years, trying to catch up. Would like to understand certain implications of upcoming transition to Upwell structures.
I’m running PI production plants in HS occasionally, for some quick semi-afk isk. AFAIK, most profitable planetary commodities are those used in producing fuels and components used for POSes and similar structures. So the said transition may negatively affect my little isk farm, unless CCP deliberately thought out the whole thing, making sure economy will stay unchanged. Is it the case, or should I put my production lines on hold for now? Will those citadels need the same amount of materials to be built? Will this market maintain a similar volume, i.e. whether or not those new structures be needed by a lot of people as before? Will they still need the same amount of fuels made from PI goods?
How exactly this transition will happen? Will every POS owner get a Citadel for free, or they still will have to buy one (so it must be produced first, providing my plants more job), perhaps after getting reimbursement from CCP?
This is a different thing that worries me. You can anchor citadels in HS, and basically it behaves like a full-featured player-owned station. I also believe owner can control taxes and broker’s fees used on its market. In such case this gives an excellent opportunity to seize regional market by controlling who is allowed to place orders inside it (if I got it right, you can set those permissions individually, so you prevent others from setting orders, while still allowing customers to buy stuff you set for sale yourself, cheaper than your competition can in a NPC-owned station, due to the fact you can cut taxes). If I understand situation correctly, even if you are allowed to put orders in it atm, there is no guarantee that when, say, your huge buy order is filled, owner won’t suddenly withdraw your docking rights, thus freezing your goods in it; possibly requesting a huge ransom, or just inflicting you financial losses. I guess in such case you won’t be able to retrieve your goods in any way? Aside perhaps from contracting it to a hauler which still has dock access.
If all those my assumptions from item 3) are true, why I still can see that traditional trade hubs are operating [seemingly] successfully? Can it be because citadels can’t be anchored in those systems? Or because that the folk who want things stay as in old days (some rich market players and industry cartels) managed to sort this new threat out somehow, removing everybody who try to cut their profits? I heard something about wars in caldari space involving destruction of some citadels.
1: Citadels use the same fuel as POS’s, actually, any citadel can use any fuel. In terms of comsumption im not sure, it doesnt cost any fuel to simply have the citadel online, but im pretty sure they cost a bit more to be running the same modules (You can offline modules that you arent using to save fuel).
2: When POS’s are fully removed from the game, you will be reimbursed with ISK, how this is exactly gonna happen hasnt been stated.
3: This is kinda true, which is partly why Jita still exists as the major citadel markets in Perimeter hasnt attracted as much business even with 0% tax.
4: Citadels cant be anchored in the 4 main hub systems.
Asset safety allows goods retrieval in any situation. It may cost you more depending on circumstance but you can recover from anywhere except wormholes.
Ok, guys, thanks for clarifications. It’s a bit more clear to me now. And assets safety seems like thing that prevents too much abuse of the new features.
Aside from that, it’s a feature that totally nukes almost any incentive to attack them in Kspace!! We wouldn’t want to get too much content from a new feature like this, now would we?!?
Well, unfortunately it’s not that easy problem… Okay, let’s suppose you are allowed to blam the citadel and grab everything inside it, what includes random player’s stuff, what can be… a lot of stuff, especially in huge trade hubs and mission running spots. It will also give such incentive to the citadel’s owner himself, if he can assume somehow that his structure accumulated enough wealth in its bowels. So citadels quickly will become associated with scams and huge risk, and nobody will be actually using them for any serious stashes of anything, except perhaps their owners. What undermines the original idea a bit, of a players-owned station, alternative to npc-owned ones.
If you’ll allow only owner’s stuff to be dropped, they will just start using some alts to store their stuff at citadel, so you’ll need additional limitations in place which will force them to keep at least part of their stuff under the owner’s corporation’s name, thus making it susceptible to be dropped. Which in turn may be undermined by clever workarounds, perhaps. But at least it makes some sense and won’t scare away most of potential its users.
what if citadels also acted like a type of the surveillance system in null, you do activity in the system and it logs it and accrues a pay out which can have a % drop on destruction and the rest is destroyed?
If it’s at Perimeter, they won’t need to pay to retrieve it, AFAIK. If there are NPC stations in the same system where citadel was, you can retrieve your goods at them for free (still with at least 5 days delay). You only pay if there are no other citadels or stations and you need to retrieve it in some other solar system.
Huge pain to clear out, and very little actual reward. At best in K-space you cost the owner the price of the Citadel, at worst you just annoy them and spend time destroying it you could have used making actual profit elsewhere.
And thats just HS.
In NS its even worse, where Citadels can, and are, used to fortify the hell out of a system so as to bore an invader to death and cause them more loss in isk revenue from opportunity cost for time spent structure bashing, than the structure is worth.
I dont even want to think about how many Goon Citadels are in Fortress Delve.
Thats not “grr goons”, just observing that wresting Delve away from Goons will take probably years of continuous siege.
I didn’t say it was. I said it is a serious problem that is currently having a corrosive impact on gameplay. It needs fixed, now, easy or not.
There are solutions that give people incentives to attack citadels, without endangering the incintives to use them. There will be an ocean’s worth of carebear tears shed from Delve to The Forge. No getting around it. The sooner we slog through that salt marsh to get to sane, balanced citadel gameplay on the other side, the better off we’ll be.
Traditional trade hubs will be around for a long time to come.
People want 1 stop shopping and will pay a premium to get it. Citadel markets are too fragmented for customers and comparatively high risk for merchants. A couple of the citadel markets in Perimeter are establishing themselves as the place to go for specialty items like PLEX and skill injectors but it remains to be seen if they can expand beyond that into general merchandise.
A successful market is essentially painting a target on its back - competitors will want it gone. Merchants need to worry about destruction of the structure, lockout if the owner doesn’t like them or the structure going offline if it runs out of fuel. Not easy to come up with a case for moving your business to a citadel market which is why most merchants, including me, continue to work from NPC trade hubs.
I wouldn’t worry about a reduction in demand for fuel blocks when POS are removed from the game. For starters, it will likely be another year before it happens - CCP need to achieve feature parity by releasing player build stargates that will replace jump bridges first and they haven’t started talking about those officially yet. In theory, people migrating from POS can rent space in public structures instead of building their own but Eve is a game - a lot of people prefer to own their own infrastructure even if it would be less expensive to use someone elses.
Citadels 2.0 is coming this winter and unfueled structures will be a lot easier to kill. Not sure if this will increase demand for fuel blocks but it can’t hurt!
There won’t be such thing as those pesky carebears will again spoil you all fun by starting ignoring your shiny citadels and keeping their stuff inside NPC stations. End of story. This will only result in Citadels being less useful for anybody.
wait… so you’re saying the cluster won’t be littered with citadel trash in untidy swathes extending from every stargate as far as the eye can see? OH NOs!
This is another positive result in my opinion.
Who knows? The world lore trending the way it is, maybe the empires themselves will collapse? Maybe there will be no empire stations someday? Ah well, a boy can dream.
I say that piece of game mechanics in which tons of developers’ time were invested, will be fairly used, what is not very wise development strategy. You need to correctly define problems, then you’ll find appropriate solutions. If your problem is that there are too much citadels because they are too hard and costy to remove, then their removal must by made easier if undefended. No need to drop any loot that belongs to random dudes from them which will just make them useless as, you know, stations they were designed to be.
