Good afternoon good people. I need insight from you all as to why Mobile Depots are supported by CCP for the following use case:
A player uses depots in a system to construct ‘art work’ at a gate (about 40 of them)
If I reinforce them, they just return when no one’s around, pick them up and re-deploy
I cannot pick them up myself and ‘steal’ them, nor can I take any further action when reinforced
So there’s no way to forcibly remove this piece of space garbage, because the depots can be retrieved by the player who owns them while in a reinforced state. So the question is, why does CCP allow for them to be retrieved in a reinforced state? (Citadels and POCOs cannot for example).
I tried contacting CCP and they do not care to take action (except to tell me to post here), so I am posting here.
It looks like my original post was not successful in communicating the situation. The person who puts up the 40 Mobile Depot artwork abomination replaces them religiously when they get reinforced, just at off hours. They’ll spend 30 mins or whatever picking them up and replacing them. So finishing the job, which I’d love to do, has not been practicable with the current game mechanics.
I don’t know how much code change is involved changing the flag on the Mobile Depot from ‘allow to be picked up in reinforced mode’ to ‘disallow to be picked up in reinforced mode’ but that is one of the questions yes. Why don’t they fix it.
The other is why people spend crazy time erecting this mobile depot ‘art pieces’ to begin with (and time maintaining them).
They have to repair the shields or else re-deploying does nothing but remove the active reinforcement timer. If they re-deploy and the shields are still at 25% you can shoot them again but this time they won’t be reinforced.
So the person you’re annoying hast to remotely repair every single one of them before re-deploying them, or pick every single one of them up, fly to a station, dock, repackage them (full heal), and undock, and go redeploy each of them.
If it is an art installation, they probably go the not-annoying route: they probably just have a bunch of extra mobile depots in cargo, and are picking up the damaged ones and placing new ones, then flying to station to repackage the damaged ones.
If the art installation is in high sec, you can damage them all, scout the installation, figure out who is maintaining them, and either:
War dec them, if eligible, or
Gank them
If you don’t like those options, complain to CCP about their removal of a bunch of ways to shoot people in High Sec.
Well, to be fair, it is a sandbox. People do lots and lots of irrational and crazy stuff in it.
I have never seen CCP fix obvious, easy stuff. My impression is that only things that are defined by management as key initiatives ever get done. There are lots of things in this game that could be fixed in a day, but there is probably no way for anybody to initiate the change on the CCP developer side.
My suggestion: put down your own depots, mixed with theirs, to mess up their design.
I hate timers so no longer shooting depots. Too much effort for minimal gain.
I think the possible solution could be to apply scarcity to them and increase their cost. Their intented usage is to refit while in space or store loot you pick up later. Not to advertise external websites, corporations (I don’t mind that one if not overused), or “space arts”.
By making the depots much more expensive you put a meaning to their kills and losses. Whoever is putting them for advertisement/art will think twice and we get much more peoples who will shoot them. Peoples who use them for their intended usage will not care about cost as they buy just one not hundred.
I don’t think that removing a possibility to scoop them is a good idea or solves anything in highsec particularly.
I just don’t like seeing them in space. This other person does (to the point they willingly commit 30 minutes every day/other day to replace them all after they’re all reinforced). I was there on one day they didn’t show up and killed every last one of them. Two days later, they were back again.
Since CCP thinks the current mechanic is good, please help me understand why (especially if you are one of these mobile depot artists).
I have over 1k of them destroyed, but nope it wasn’t worth to make a career out of it. The best offer from corp to not shooting them was 20mil a month and that was single corp of them all - was destroying them in noob areas (which some claimed to be evil doing, but lo and behold CCP disallowed to put them there technically a few years later).
So doubt that… neither MTU hunting is ISK worthwhile, I have 2k+ of them killed and it didn’t made me rich at all lol.
