You get to set the exit time, so if you set it to when your small group doesn’t play that’s your own damn fault.
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@CCP_Swift in the article you posted, the only mention about combat anomalies talk about "of a new, harder combat anomaly for the Pirate Detection Array upgrade. Furthermore, all sites detected by this array will now have a chance to escalate, with some having the possibility of capital or even officer escalations. "
While on the stream today, my attention only catched something about lower tier combat anomalies for newer players. So which is it? And if low tier, will they be like pirated Hideaway/Refuge like we see right away on probe window, or will they be the DED 1/10 to 4/10 that are either scanned or escalation from Hideaway/Refuge (and/or Hideout, Lookout, Watch, Vigil also some possibilities?) RNG being a pain to start with, hopefully the combat anomalies would be straight DED sites.
The one way it could shake things is when the grace period ends and SOV structure replacement is finished. Then system holders realize they own “meh” system because of the planet and sun types preventing them from certain upgrades for the new Sovhub. Then they may research The Agency for better options and plan for takeovers. Some systems may turn out to have below optimal configuration for any feasible Sovhub operation in the long term.
From the data provided so far it is already possible to do such analysis with rough approximation of possible system configuration and plan ahead.
Some smaller alliances may decide to join forces to be more effective and the aggregation of null blocs may occur. Painting the SovMap in less colors.
Wishful thinking when nullsec is effectively 2 groups. They wont go to war for it. And what do you mean with joining forces? You mean joining FRT or Goons? 
I won’t deny I am an ignorant in regard of null bloc politics and diplomacy. I just see more than two colors on the SovMaps…
Alliances
Coalitions
And what I tried to say is the number of colors may get even smaller 
It all depend on how shitty some Sov systems may turn out after the Equinox transformation is over.
And New Eden capsuleer are known from squeezing every bit from whatever they do to make it maximally profitable - otherwise it drives them nuts
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I mean unless entire regions get the stick and others the carrot, nothing will change as every block has the numbers to average out.
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The level of combat anomaly will be decided by the upgrade. Catering to newer players may dictate that you want some easier spawns, more veteran players may want the harder ones which can escalate. But they are anomalies, not the signatures (which are DED sites).
Additional conflict drivers with different rewards, for different sized groups. Similarly, Ansiblex jump gates require sov upgrades, which require resources. It may not be possible to maintain a large network while also upgrading systems ratting/mining.
Hey all, we hope you enjoyed the broadcast. You can catch the recording here
We did try to get to as many questions as we found, but if you have any, feel free to ask here, and we’ll do our best to get to them. The teams are off tomorrow for an Icelandic holiday, but we’ll hop back on Friday.
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Will it be possible to remove and move undesired Sov Hub upgrades? Or will the current mechanic be retained, where you had “better be sure.”
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There will be the same ones, and they have one or more new harder ones more balanced towards marauders and caps from today’s stream.
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I doubt you will be able to move them from one hub to another. But you should be able to activate only the ones you want. And not let the ones you do not need to eat resources.
I am curious in a few things:
- Since Skyhooks are tied to the hub in system - can only SoV hub owner alliance place skyhooks in that system? What will happen to Skyhooks if the hub is flipped/destroyed.
- Will the hubs retain the existing toasting mechanic to be contested?
- Since reagents are the ‘fuel’ of the new hub, will it have a drop chance in case the hub is destroyed?
- will the new SoV hubs be dockable?
I believe you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation.
The entire point of the response fleet being unreasonably large is to disincentivize others from attacking in the first place. It is intentionally set up to be a curb stomp to prevent others from getting any ideas about touching their structures or ratters, and also kill any ideas of getting a “good fight” from them. Most Null groups are very clear on their stances of “fight our roam fleets for a good fight, but cause a problem for our isk faucets and we hurt you twice over to send a message”
There are potential ways to work around the singular large response fleet – the response fleet can generally only really be in one place at one time, and there are ways to attack multiple things at the same time such that one of the objctives will get taken within the time frame…but CCP’s track history on this is to capitulate to the Nullsec complainers and push things back to the status quo where the single unassailablely large defense fleet can defend everything. We may get a month or so of Fozzie Sov shenanigans, but my expectations are not higher than that based on how much favoring the defenders have been given traditionally with previous SOV mechanic changes.
These “conflict drivers” don’t have options for smaller groups to contest or otherwise gain value from them. These semi-instanced “you need a fleet to sit here for X amount of time, oh, and any approaches of circumventing or disallowing a larger fleet from stomping you aren’t allowed!” additions are not new content drivers. They are more of the same, and will be treated as more of the same by the nullsec groups – and I would expect any methods that allow the smaller group to win the resource will get added to the disallow list after much nullsec complaining.
I would argue that it is the other way around. You are not seeing the very obvious outcomes of these mechanics changes.
We’ve been down this path before, multiple times.
The only meaningful change in this is that mining ships and mining operations are not required to get moon goo value – a noticeable and incredibly good change (imho) for the larger health of the moon goo market and the price of ships across the universe eden, but it still does exactly what I mentioned.
Now, we can expect to see smaller mining groups evicted so that the large nullblock group can drop in a skyhook and automate the moon’s value directly into their wallet, as the pesky requirement of having a player spend the time and effort to mine them is being removed – a notable one that has allowed smaller groups to exist… even if that existence is fighting at scraps left by the big groups which weren’t valuable enough for them to bother with. That’s gone now.
How does that not drastically favor the larger groups at the direct expense of the smaller groups?
And the “content drivers” and such… it’s not. There may be an initial shake up once the math gets done on how much value can be gained for very little effort with the skyhook harvesting moons, but it’s not going to be something where large groups get value, and smaller groups can take advantage of the laziness of the larger groups and also get value but to a lesser extent. I
t’s 100% going to be the larger groups taking over the smaller groups nearby in order to harvest the value that they can get which they generally wouldn’t have been able to take advantage of as they did before, further consolidating the ownership of Nullsec into the hands of the existing larger groups.
Where are the options for smaller groups to claw back value from Nullsec? Fighting timers that are dictated by the large nullblock groups DOES NOT DO THIS.
Once again – and with additional emphasis:
“NEW” SYSTEMS THAT REINFORCE SITTING AROUND FOR A TIMER THAT IS INTENTIONAL SET LONG ENOUGH FOR THE LARGE RESPOSNE FLEET TO DEAL WITH IT DOES NOT GIVE THE SMALLER GROUPS A DAMN THING.
Where are the options for smaller groups to cause disruption AND MAKE NOTABLE AMOUNTS OF ISK, stealing profits from the ones who own the space?
These additions, in their current state, dangle a carrot in front of the small groups with the message “be the fly that the larger nullsec fly swatter can smash into a pile of goo! if you are lucky, you might get some scraps, but you will have fun being their content while the larger nullsec blocs get even wealthier!”
Mobile siphon units in the old system were a perfect example. The only counter was to actually be out in space, and patrol each of the systems you own, and the systems too large to check with a gate-to-gate D-dscan made this ever more challenging. The siphon units weren’t hard to kill, but you had to find them, and unlike the bot-networks of nullsec characters reporting all who enter/leave local in their system… there was no way to avoid the human interaction of having a ship in space and within D-scan range of the moon to know for sure whether you were getting siphoned or not – and then the question of whether to kill the siphon unit immediately, or sit by it cloaked and grab the guy when he comes to collect it, a fantastic bit of emergent gameplay came from those siphon units.
The smaller groups, and especially solo players, had a solid means of taking advantage of the laziness of the larger nullsec groups, and without this bullcrap of being forced to be a fairly easy target for the larger nullsec group to swat to do so.
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If anything, it will lead to the outcome that the “best” upgradeable systems are no longer for rent and taken by the holders themselves, while the “crap” systems that cannot be properly upgraded will be rented out and the renter basically needs to chose betwen good mining or good ratting. Again the big groups will have no disadvantages, the smaller groups will have to take the leftovers. And good systems that are too far out will just be rented for a “premium fee”. 
I wish Vanguards could play a role in this new “Play” at The Theatre Of War stage one day. There is no asymmetric warfare in New Eden atm Except for long cons like worming one’s way into Corp Inner Circle. Correct me if I am wrong on that.
And the promise to aspiring Vanguards is:
“YOUR NEXT SHOT WILL TOPPLE EMPIRES
Although your footprints may be small, your ability to impact the great war taking place among the stars is significant. Take your shot and etch your legacy in the history of the single largest player-driven sci-fi universe.”
Imagine issuing contracts to Vanguards for sowing corruption on null sec planets with Skyhooks on the orbit to impact their output and hamper SovHub performance through forcing to offline certain upgrades due to not enough resources coming from affected planets. Thus making system more crappy and vulnerable.
No its not. You want more efficient, do it yourself. You want less efficient drop a moon drill.
The moon drills are lazy for the large groups.
What is SRP, if it is not a form of free ISK? Do people get their SRP money back if they do not loose a ship?
If the owner of the structure gets nothing, why put the structure up?
Does this mean a system’s combat anomaly selection will be decoupled from system security and ADM? For example, right now a -0.9 truesec system will spawn better quality sites than a -0.2 system (havens and sanctums versus rally points and dens), assuming equal system upgrades. A system with a higher military index seems to spawn more anomalies quantitatively than an equivalent system with low mil index, as well, though my knowledge here might be skewed by the ADM interacting with the system upgrades. It sounds like the proposed SovHub upgrades will be removing these dependencies as it makes NS systems more customisable?
Also are all scanning-related upgrades for combat signatures, wormholes and hacking sites being phased out completely? I haven’t seen any mention of these in any of the material that I’ve read/watched so far, it feels a little ambiguous at this point.
Thank you so much for all the interaction you do here and elsewhere, and all the clear answers! It definitely helps feel like this is an interactive process, and being able to get answers from the horse’s mouth this early in advance (when you have them to give) is amazing as someone trying to figure out what in the world is going on. 
Thank you! This detail was missing, until the broadcast and slides.
I agree that what you say has potential. However, I think it’ll take the full launch of the patch with all the specific numbers of the resource requirements to see whether the ansiblex networks of today still permit stomping small groups. I hope you forgive me if I am pessimistic.
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