“The introduction of these new structures is sure to gain immense attention, including the notice of local pirate forces, so be wary of warping to these structures in undefended haulers! In fact, there’s a chance of facing officer-level NPCs around skyhooks, so be prepared.”
Way to go in making PI even more tedious and troublesome than it is already…awesome stuff
Whats wrong with more excitement
I think it will be the other way around people will spam passive drills until they realise that people are killing them left right and center becuase it would be super easy to keep poking them until people stop forming to defend and then just kill it quickly.
People are going to get burned out from using them and then hardly anyone will end up using them.
“Guys we need to form in 2 hours to defend structure.” is very different to “guys please make space for eve if you can in 3 days at this time to defend this”
Well to be honest as a null dweller i am bit scared of this change since it seems not even the local/chats can be trusted these days, which is pretty much the most basic things of the game, this can go either way when it comes to success, not sure if there will be any sisi tests but i sure hope the CCP team is doing a heck of a lot of testing before pushing it live.
I guess this works both ways though… equally the aggressors have to ‘hang around’ for 2 hours to be able to finish the job. And it does sound like it will still require a reasonably sized fleet to take a drill down… more than just one or two players.
It seems to me that the majority of the new content will only really be accessible by alliance/corp leaders. Yes, Joe Bloggs in a big alliance will benefit form the extra mining site or combat site… but other than that, it seems it is all geared to alliance leadership.
Will I as a rank and file alliance member be able to take resources from a new skyhook and sell it for personal profit? Will I be able to take the resources from a mining drill and sell it for personal profit? Or do these things belong to the alliance/corp and so will not directly benefit the individual players?
They have no damage cap, so can be alphaed with a couple dreads maybe.
That’s not really how system defence ops go, though. In my null experience, neut fleets come through, reinforce a bunch of stuff to try and wrangle up some immediate content, and then go their merry way. The defence fleet is then forced to form up and sit there for however long the repair timers take to do their job, twiddling their thumbs while waiting for an aggressive act that doesn’t show up.
It’s effectively a war of attrition. Keeping structures up under hostile pressure isn’t about “content” and pvp. It’s about how many weeks, or months, your members can stand to respond to near-daily CTAs. I’ve been on both sides of this. My (small) corp’s alliance was wardecced by BLACKFLAG. Some of our guys had a lot of fun staging ABCs in their home system, jumping out 3-4 times a week and just shooting HQ until someone logged on to man the station. The costs in ammo were more than repaid in the amount of salt we mined over the course of the month that they kept the wardec up, and more than one of their members messaged us afterwards to let us know just how irritating it was.
I lived the defence side of the story when we tried our hand at living in the SE last summer. The CTAs to protect reinforced structures, TCUs and IHUBs was daily, sometimes two or three times a day. The aggressors showed up for the reinforcement timer maybe once a week, but we had to get forces on for every single timer just in case that was the one they decided to show up for. We lasted less than a month, and that was with sharing the burden of timer response with several other corps who were banding together to try and make it work.
Short reinforcement timers are going to make using this gear basically impossible for smaller corps who are under hostile pressure. Even if you can field the necessary firepower to defend these new structures, there’s no way you can do that seven days a week without getting burned out fast.
On the plus side, I think it’s amazing that they’re considering returning to POS manual repair. Give the zarm and rodiva a niche where they can really shine.
I’m looking for clarity on skyhooks in null. Will groups be forced to replace All custom offices with skyhooks ?
OR
Will groups be allowed to keep custom offices on some planets and skyhook on others within the same system. For example:
System ABC-123 6 planets
planet 1 - custom office
planet 2 - custom office
planet 3 - skyhook
planet 4 - skyhook
planet 5 - custom office
planet 6 - skyhook
PI can be a long a tedious task if you have a lot of planets. Skyhooks having Pirate blockades and officers if just going the make things less enjoyable. PI shouldn’t have extra risk in null/lowsec unless your going to increase the resources the planets produce.
Note he says sov-null. Skyhooks wont be able to be upgraded in lowsec
Well the skyhooks will produce regeants
In the live stream vod linked earlier, they say that upgrading from a POCO to a skyhook will be a voluntary process, not required. That said, without the skyhooks you can’t produce the new resources. So, as you’ve opined, the extra risk is indeed balanced by an increase (quantitatively) in the resources that planets produced. It has also been stated that the NPCs are going to be on par with belt rats. My guess would be that the new haulers will be able to clear most of these spawns fairly easily.
Why do I get a feeling you will be combat scanning automoons and the new pi structure with your hecate looking for haulers, jeez that would be a nice payday.
In Null belt Rats can be Diamond Rats, that can escalate. Diamond rats are nasty little buggers. They web, disrupt and hit like a ton of bricks. Not to mention that capital rats and offices spawns on skyhooks are also possible. Not much for a simple hauler to defend against. So I hope these new haulers have the tank of a battleship and a align time of a frigate and cheap to build. If the new haulers require any of the special materials like the pirate factions require it’s going to throw the market for a loop.
So what used to be just a simple matter of picking up your PI could become a pain in the ass .
Just have to wait and see what happens. Fingers crossed.
Pirate diamond combat NPCs aren’t random spawns that just pop up in belts for the fun of it. They’re entities that specifically spawn to protect NPC resources. There are two cases in sov-null I’m aware of; the first, what you’re talking about, is when they’re spawning to protect NPC miners/haulers, and the second is when a Sotiyo spawns in system. So unless the NPC haulers are going to start siphoning off your metenox drill or raiding your skybox pantry, I doubt we’re going to see diamond rats spawning on structures. They don’t randomly spawn in belts, they appear when you are threatening the miners. They’re not going to randomly spawn on a skybox unless CCP has lost all sense of balance.
Aside from diamond rats, there are two general classifications for null pirate NPCs. There’s “deadspace”, the easier variant that you find in anomalies, and “asteroid,” a harder variant that you find in belts. My assumption (which I think is reasonable) is that when he says you’ll see rats that are on par with belt rats for difficulty, he’s talking about the “asteroid” variant of belt rats, not diamond rats which magically spawn out of nowhere just for the sake of flipping players the bird.
NPC Capital ships and officers are the reason why I qualified my original statement as “most” spawns.
No need to scan 
Wondering whether killing is possible in one, will try of course. For the (new) haulers one would need a dictor in nullsec, but as I said I don‘t expect much use of the BR and DST if they follow the ORE pricing.
Still won’t address the stagnation problems with super caches until you address asset safety and citadel spam.
You can keep making the game more tedious, but until you make nulsec unsafe again it’ll remain stagnant when your only reward for winning a war is months of structure bashing and your reward for losing a war is getting to take a vacation from sov before undocking your supers from NPC stations to take that space back after the enemy’s minds have been melted by timezone tanked citadels
This is also because people decide to have absolutely massive amount of systems as well, it looks like this will concentrate groups into smaller areas of space which is made viable by the system upgrades.
Less space to defend less space to attack would also mean less citadels on avg. I have a feeling that it would work out pretty good tbh.
I just hope CCP has left them selves enough time to get it out.
That was kind of my point about the aggressors having to “hang around”. I have the same nullsec experience… structures are reinforced to try and trigger a fight, but rarely killed. So I expect moon drills will be reinforced in the same way, go into a timer and then come out of the timer and be fine. It takes a concerted effort and planning to kill a structure as you have to send pings out twice to kill them off, once to reinforce them and again to finish them off… after some initial excitement, I just don’t see alliances bothering to do this for moon drills.
For the moment, and subject the change: