The time has come for us to begin the public testing phase of the Upwell 2.0 changes, which we be part of the next release, scheduled for February 13th 2018. We’re really excited to begin this process with you all, and look forward to receiving your feedback and bug reports as we polish and balance these features. As always, if you wish to help, head onto the public test server Singularity and get involved!
To find out what is coming in this release, please refer to our our recent dev blog: UPWELL 2.0 . We’ll add specific threads soon with more details not included in this blog but for now, please use this thread for any issues you find on the test server!
Significant Known Issues:
T2 Structure Weapons are not yet added.
The updated stats for Structures (in both low and full power mode), structure weapons and fighters, and more may currently be non final or placeholder.
Moon Materials are set to entirely fake testing values for all moons.
Cool… seems a short time span for testing however.
Just one concern based on the dev-blog: Power mode determination should require a target lock to discover (nothing more, nothing less). This free intel is a serious problem for people in WH space if a ship can discover this information without breaking their cloak. Not as great an issue outside of WH space given Local being visible, but even there you should be able to get some form of heads up that your structure is being poked at if you happen to be online and watching things yourself.
I don’t live in WH, nor do I structure bash in WHs so take this as you wish, but honestly, if you’re in a WH and you want to make sure they don’t have a good window to attack, keep it in high power mode?
Honestly, the biggest part about all of this that I see is “we don’t want you to have these floating around devoid of any purpose but a place to tether and dock”. That should be even more the case in a WH where they initially weren’t expecting or intending players to live there.
However, the issue is free intel in the respect that you can freely discover a rather important aspect of a structures vulnerability with the only effort being a mouse hover.
Don’t quote me on this, because I really cannot recall with certainty (happy days when I can say it in this case!!) but could you not visually identify whether the defenses on a POS were on/offline?
Citadels are marketed as the replacements for a POS, so where relevant I would expect the same set of advantages/disadvantages.
It’s a loose argument, not intended to carry much weight. Just throwing it out there.
I think the general verbage of “parity” is overused as an excuse for keeping mechanics to prevent Upwell Structures (shorting to US for ease) from being more flexible than they should be. But since you bring it up:
A POS uses Strontium to determine the reinforcement. Can you however over a POS and determine how much strontium it has? No?
The low power mode determines if certain aspects of reinforcement occur (this is the most significant aspect of low power mode). Hovering a mouse over the US will tell you this.
I agree that 100% parity is not intended or desired. Like I said, a loose argument not intended to carry much weight.
Then again, the idea of hacking the citadel to determine the reinforcement window DOES require a target lock… so there’s not much difference between not knowing how much stront is in the pos versus when the reinforcement window opens.
Actually, to determine how much stront a POS had you must reinforce it. At least you no longer will have to reinforce a US to find out the timers - just hack it. But a US should require a lock on to at least determine the power level.
Call it: increasing levels of commitment.
edit to add:
You can first see if anyone is in the structure - free intel by simply being on grid.
You then have to lock the target to find the power level - next stage of commitment - no danger from the US as it does not have automated defenses and takes forever to lock a target anyways.
You then have to hack it to find out more juicy information - the next stage of commitment and you could still most likely warp off before the structure finished locking the Heron.
I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree. I think the information is of moot value, because you should always have it in full power mode for any structure that is of importance to you.
To me, the best part about all of this is that structures will die faster if they aren’t being actively maintained. The more proliferation of this information, the better.
Edit for your edit:
This intel is useless unless you’re there to shoot the structure. The “first level of intel” to me is in fact the power level, not whether it is manned.
I will weigh on this as well… I live in worms in TQ, so i can see the importance of intel. Some things we have to consider here. With the release of Moon drills, if properly deployed will give industry a large boost. What this is going to mean is there are going to be A lot more structs deployed and a larger demand for them (which is good for me because i like building them). One thing we must keep in mind is that Upwell is FAR FAR from complete. there are still a few things that were only able to be done in POSes that cant be done with Upwell. for example jump bridges, cyno suppression ect, and there is still no mods to improve resistances for Upwell so there is no “DickStar” pos equivalent in upwell.
Now one argument was that people use poorly maintained upwell for tether and docking. which is signifigantly better than the POS equivalent. For a POS one would have to fuel it, optionally anchor a SMA and online it. and keep it fueled. There is no fuel requirement to have a safe at upwell prior to this update… and im pretty sure there still is none. For Poses to get a RF they needed to be fueled and have a stock of Stront i believe. Upwell gets RF for free and also requires no fuel. still. At this point, it seems fair that if a struct were to be deployed just to have a safe, that it were a bit easier to kill… how much easier we will soon find out, and i imagine it will be well worth it.
I would like to draw attention to a very good post regarding the upcoming Upwell 2.0 changes. While I believe that most of them are very good, a few of them could use revision, specifically the order of the fitting phase and the Gravitational Transportation Field Oscillator:
