Yeah, then CCP would have to follow through on releasing something POS-comparable like they originally said they were going to but now are saying they were lying.
And that’s my position on citadels. They are both too pricey AND too cheap. Too pricey and heavy duty for light POS duty, too cheap for what they are. Cits as we have them are too full of bribes to get players to use them because devs are terrified of the idea that they’ll make something and players would decide they’d rather have nothing to do with it. Resume padding and so forth.
Their proliferation doesnt really hurt the game, it just makes other existing and future Cits less valuable.
As I said earlier, Citadel proliferation is largely driving competition between them towards an eventual nigh zero. But that isnt CCPs fault.
NS fortification, however, may have impact as a factor of whether people want to commit so much time/effort to take out each one just to take a system.
Without delving deep in this early hour of day what they did or did not, on undock i wanna puke my guts out looking at this syphilis stage 2(Do your self a favor and don’t google it.) CCP allowed to happen to perfectly normal space game.
Personally, I have no problem with citadel proliferation, they consume massive quantities of minerals, PI and salvage to build which has been good for the New Eden economy. They do need to be easier to kill - especially if unfueled, but that change is coming in a few weeks and I have no doubt CCP will continue to iterate until they find a reasonable balance.
It’s easy to remove them from your overview if you don’t want to see them. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were still as many POS in the game as citadels - we don’t notice because they don’t show up in the overview unless you’re on grid with them.
I think we’re still in the early phases of a long term plan that will, eventually see NPC stations removed - or perhaps converted to NPC faction citadels so players can remove them if we so choose!
The original plan for market fees was to encourage the move to citadel markets by increasing the NPC brokerage fee to 5%-6%. CCP backed off from that but warned us that it was coming eventually and I suspect eventually will arrive shortly after POS are removed from the game.
You can remove them from overview but if your corp/alliance use them then you need to have them showing. I think if they went and removed all NPC stations then people would either:
Leave game because of asset safety.
reduce what they stock down to bare bones so that if the citadel gets taken out they won’t have to spend masses in getting it back.
If your corp/alliance uses citadels you can use bookmarks - same as you did with POS. In nullsec, you aren’t going to find (m)any public citadels - odds are the only ones visible to you will be owned by your corp/alliance. If there are too many - put them on their own overview tab!
CCP has a lot of incentive to use the citadel codebase for stations and retire the old legacy code - which probably predates the POS code they are currently trying to get rid of! NPC citadels can be defended by faction navies and/or CONCORD.
However, the 3rd largest market in New Eden is a citadel market in Delve so I think people can adapt - it isn’t about absolute risk but risk/reward balance. Every time you get into an automobile, there is a chance you won’t make it to your destination but we all accept that risk - most of us accept it several times a day.
it would have made the game a tad more intresting if you couldn’t anchor a citadel in the same system as a station, Or Restrict 1 citadel per system, or 1 of each type per region