EVE is a game where many different players can do many different things.
Some enjoy blowing up ships, and others enjoy building them.
I personally belong to the second group.
Long ago, I personally built citadels and freighters (and would have built capitals if they were allowed in hisec).
I did my own moon mining and made my own PI to fund my builds, and even did my own reactions in lowsec.
(I also ran vanguard incursions for fun, but that’s not related to this topic)
As a bonus, for a period of a few years back then if you bought a T1 ship module in Jita/Forge/Lonetrek there is a very high chance you were probably buying something I personally made.
Then beginning a few years ago, CCP decided the nullsec blocks were building too much and began a war against the manufacturing economy, starting with changes to rorquals, then removing moon mining, then changes to citadels, and more.
Clearly in the present it is now obvious that CCP’s self imposed recession has worked and CCP was successful, as you no longer see azbels/sotiyos/tataras in hisec/lowsec anymore, and the few raitarus that are left are rare and have taxes greater than or equal to NPC station taxes, and even the huge TTQ/ICY refineries/sotiyos next to jita are being taken down now.
Not too long after, my corp/alliance became pretty inactive and I personally stopped playing EVE for years, and have been playing other games that are far less of a grind.
A year after I left, CCP made a change removing citadel asset safety, and I actually had to log back into EVE to move all my stuff to stations for the now unlikely event that I would return to EVE.
Some people like @Seviron_Aldari weren’t so lucky and had all their stuff deleted without notice and now want to delete their accounts: Allow account deletion feature
Personally, I feel like removing the asset safety system would at the very minimum would require sending an email out to every player who had any asset in a structure at risk, but that didn’t happen and a lot more people probably had pretty severe losses and will never return.
Currently, the asset safety in citadel completely stops functioning if the structure owner removes the fuel blocks after a week.
For people who play religiously every day or for people that know nothing about manufacturing or never have to start large jobs, this isn’t too big of an issue.
For everyone else, like people who have jobs and need to be away (people like me) or want to take 2 week vacations, this becomes a gamebreaking issue.
For people like me who are manufacturing huge items that cost over 2 billion isk just to start the job and take literally over a month to complete, this is a huge issue, including the fact that the BPOs to build a citadel cost billions, and every single item in that structure is at risk, which is in fact an unacceptable level of risk.
Even back then, starting large jobs was a huge risk, and I have already lost that “billions of isk fee to begin the job” a few times, for example an azbel owner containing one of my jobs got a wardec, panicked, then offlined all services, killing my job.
In fact, I recently returned to EVE this week to reevaluate the viability of this game, and quite literally within one week I was proven correct by the new scam of “set up citadel, wait, close docking, remove fuel blocks, destroy” in quite literally the first week of returning.
As correctly predicted by @Nevyn_Auscent in 2020:
I also fully agree with @Mkikaden_Tiragen:
This entire issue could easily be fixed with a simple change of having normally functioning asset safety, or if CCP deems that a not good enough solution it can be limited to normally functioning asset safety in hisec/lowsec only instead.
As a returning manufacturing player, what reasons do I have to stay when PLEX now costs double/triple what it used to, being limited to alpha skills, being prevented from training alpha skills as an alpha pilot, when taxes now cost 5 times more than what they used to and exceeding any profits made in solo manufacturing in stations only with no manufacturing bonuses, with all my market slots locked away? What does your game offer that other games don’t?
Some PVP only users may say things like “I fly ships only and never do manufacturing, why should I care?”.
Those people can ask themselves two very simple questions in response: “Who builds the ships that I fly? What happens to my wallet when all those people go away and the laws of supply and demand make the ships I fly much more expensive as a direct result?”
It seems the real consequence of CCP’s actions is that they have actually accidentally benefited the large nullsec alliances more than anyone else instead, as now they and only they can take advantage of the manufacturing bonuses given by citadels that only they are able to defend.
For the rest of us, the old saying for unacceptable levels of risk rings true: “Never undock anything you can not afford to lose.”
Until a change is made the only winning strategy is to not play.
