Natural decay was put in specifically to ensure that attackers would need to put skin in the game: if you want sov, you can damned well work a little for it. Without it, it’s too easy to troll and force defenders to have to respond to a hundred timers at once.
They’ve already done that, which was why ratting and mining numbers were dropping off even before the Blackout. Here, take a look at the trend on Bounties from February to June:
Mining, same story. The spike at the end of June is an anomaly resulting from a lot of different factors, and the fact that it tapers, rather than just drops off, shows it wasn’t BO-related.
That said, diamond rats that hit structures in the systems would make for some interesting stuff, but they’re not going to replace all rats with diamond rats. They can’t. It’d basically break missioning top-to-bottom, and the real problem with all of those old legacy systems is that they’re tied together in ways nobody understands. That’s why the POS code broke other parts of the game every time they tried to fix pieces of it.
And because of those connections and unknown ties, they can’t even remove it. POS code isn’t being removed from the game, it’s just being quarantined as best they can, by removing the in-game objects. The code will all still be there, and they can’t do a damned thing about it, because it’s all uncommented stackless python 1.x. It’d probably take them 2 years of working on nothing else just to figure out how it all connects—and that’s not any kind of slam on CCP. It’s arcane, archaic code with no documentation, and the guy who understood how it worked literally got hit by a car.
Because ‘orbit button for 10-60m’ is so boring that the actual pvpers in FW only complete complexes by accident while the bots and farmers run them all day long? It’s boring in FW, and it’s boring in NS.
That said, the entosis link should definitely have more things it can do, but those things should be things you do by interacting, not just ‘press F1 and orbit for 45m’.
No it won’t. The first wave of ships through—with the new limits, brick-tanked force recons, without them, any of a huge number of options—just light a bunch of their own cynos, and people jump to their squad leader.