I’m not convinced that it is going to incentivize bashing abandoned structures - that was going to happen anyway with the Abandoned state by itself. Players like griefing and decorating their killboards. This was already true with Low Powered structures, and whenever players scanned structure fits to see if they were ■■■■-fitted even if they were at full power. “Oh look, here is a unfitted Fortizar” - such structures will be bashed even at full-power; there is no shortage of such killmails on zKill. If CCP introduced a mechanic where you don’t need wardecs to bash abandoned structures, but bashing them would make you suspect, everyone would have jumped in on that, too, since it would cost them little to nothing in Hisec.
(Of course, if that were to happen, CCP may first need to address an edge case in the prohibition of neutral logi where presently you cannot logi someone [without being CONCORDED] who is engaged with a suspect/criminal without other criteria being satisfied. That is to say, if someone fleetmate is in combat with a criminal, that criminality arguably should be sufficient criteria for logi to be legal, but presently this is not the case.)
This I consider to be a disadvantage, and here’s why: CCP has been desperately trying to wean players off of NPC stations and onto Upwell structures. This severely cuts back and possibly reverses the already-too-slow NPC-to-Upwell migration. A not-insignificant block of players now are going to be reluctant to use structures on the off chance that something is going to happen in their lives where they can’t log in even to trigger asset safety. And as players get burned going forward, you’re going to have an increasing number of players be reluctant to use structures. No one is going to be more likely to use structures because they risk losing their assets, but an increasing number of players will be less likely to use them because of that risk - this is not how to encourage NPC-to-Upwell migration.
The fact that asset safety can be triggered remotely within 5 seconds of logging in pretty much illustrates the absurdity of it not automatically triggering prior to destruction. If I can manually remotely trigger asset safety for assets in an Abandoned structure 5 seconds before it is destroyed, why can’t it automatically trigger automatically like it would normally? There is no sensible or realistic reason for this discrepancy. The only way for this discrepancy to be bridged is if asset safety couldn’t be triggered at Abandoned structures at all - and I’m not advocating this!
There’s nothing to contest if the structure is abandoned. If the structure is abandoned, the chances of any force worth mentioning defending it, if any show up at all, are near nonexistent. If the structure was worth defending to begin with then someone would have smuggled in enough fuel in an Astero to trigger a single service module cycle and bring it up to Low Powered for a week - or actually keep it powered.
If a structure can be defended by a formidable defense fleet, then it can be fueled. There’s this other thread going on about this ridiculous idea for an Upwell fuel siphon, and one of the arguments was along the lines of “oh well it’s hard to attack a structure with 200 Munnins defending it and having a fuel siphon bring it down to Abandoned makes it easier”, but if it had that many Munnins defending it then it would have been kept fueled in the first place.
Seriously: what are the chances you will be contested at a structure that a formidable foe cared about to begin with?
Okay, so you might say “well, that’s where the asset drops come in”, and sure, that is 100% valid because then you have a race for the goodies and even the attackers attacking each other to stake claim to the goods, but it still doesn’t address
- the reversal of NPC-to-Upwell migration
- the asset loss for the original owners
- the insult-to-injury of those assets going to other players
- the existence of other ways CCP could have incentivized bashing and make it easier for structures to fall.
There’s no shortage of ways - this did not have to be one of them.
I am at fault here, yes. There are “benefits”, and I was wrong to suggest there aren’t any. I feel that the benefits, however, are outweighed not just by the disadvantages, but by the existence of alternatives that CCP didn’t even consider.