I recently took a break from EVE for a few months. I had 90% of my nullsec assets stuck in a particular Fortizar. Because I was confident in my alliance’s ability to hold our space while I took a break, I left my stuff in this Fort.
While I was gone, someone apparently decided to decommission the Fortizar and replace it with a Keepstar: this triggered asset safety on all my stuff, including freighters, capital ships, and massive piles of raw materials. I didn’t think this would be a problem, since when asset safety made its debut I recalled reading in a devblog that the player is given a choice to transfer their items to an adjacent friendly structure OR have them sent to lowsec where they could be retrieved for a fee.
What I didn’t know is that the player is only given a choice for a couple of weeks, and that following that brief period, the default behavior is to relocate the assets to lowsec. So at the end of the day, I’ve lost almost THREE BILLION ISK and the use of all my big assets for no legitimate reason at all:
No hostile action was involved
My alliance still holds our space
There are a host of acceptable Upwell structures in the nullsec system that assets could’ve been transferred to given a choice
I was not able to choose what happened to my assets
You guys need to change the way this system works. I’ve been playing this game since 2006 and honestly this feels like I’ve been robbed. If you guys are concerned about the amount of ISK in circulation, how about you fix that by adjusting bounty payouts rather than charging gigantic arbitrary fees to veteran players for an asset relocation service that I didn’t need and didn’t want.
Either take the time limit off the asset destination choice or make the asset safety system default to delivering items to adjacent Upwell structures. It’s absolutely ridiculous that players need to either log in every week and a half to check the status of their home structures or risk losing 20% of their net worth for no good reason at all. Change this garbage mechanic.
You left your stuff in a player station for MONTHS while you took a hiatus. Honestly, I’d say you should just be happy you still have all your stuff at all. shrug
Yeah, because I was completely confident in our ability to hold the space. Which we did. The structure was never shot at, it was taken down by the owners in order to replace it with a bigger structure. Not sure how this should warrant a 3b isk penalty.
The whole point of the asset safety system was to make it so that players WOULDN’T have to treat living out of Upwell structures the same as living out of a POS. I don’t want to have to log in every ten days to double-check that nothing’s been transferred to the asset safety system. Why not just do away with the time-limit on deciding what to do with your stuff, so that if you come back in six months and you still own the space you can just deliver your things to an adjacent structure? It would still penalize people for making strategic miscalculations, but it wouldn’t apply a massive f-you tax to people who left their stuff in a safe place. Otherwise you’re basically saying that anyone who needs to step away from the game for more than a week or two at a time has to relocate all their stuff to one of a handful of nullsec NPC stations (if your region even has any) or to lowsec. That’s a completely ridiculous ask.
I suggest you read thru the devblog or Help Center again, it’s clearly stated in them.
“After 5 days a player can choose to have the assets delivered to an NPC station, outpost, or Citadel in the same system the assets were originally located. If the package is not moved manually within 20 days after its creation, it will be automatically moved”
You left your stuff unattended in nullsec for months. Be happy it still exists at all.
Your stuff isn’t gone, it isn’t destroyed, it’s in losec. Big deal. Extract it or sell it in situ and carry on.
You’re in Goonswarm, and you came to the forums to cry over losing your stuff because you didn’t understand game mechanics? The irony of this situation cannot be overstated. You will likely find zero sympathy here.
Wow, really? Thank you for this informative reply! If you read the post you’d know I’m not asking how this system works (because I just found out, believe me): I’m saying the way it works is stupid and should be changed.
Excuse me for not remembering every detail of a four year old Dev blog before I fell victim to your dumb game mechanic. Once again, for those who weren’t paying any attention at all: what I’m saying is that the default outcome of the asset safety system (no user input --> move to lowsec) is poor game design. Change it so the default outcome is, “relocated to another Upwell structure in the same system.” That, or just let the player make the choice themselves indefinitely.
Sorry, I didn’t know you had to belong to a specific alliance to point out bad game design when you see it. I’ll be sure and post on an alt next time.
There’s not even any way to know this is happening to your stuff. If your space gets invaded, you hear about it and can think “oh, I might want to log in and move my stuff.” It’s not like I left my stuff in some contested border region, or the alliance failcascaded, or some spy stole all our stations and dropped our sov. Literally nothing happened that would give the user any hint that anything was wrong: our space was never invaded, no structures were ever threatened, how the hell should I know that all my stuff is about to be teleported to some hell hole and that I’m gonna get charged billions for the privilege?
Unless the goal is just to remove ISK from circulation / incentivize people to pull out their credit cards and buy more plex to pay impound fees, I have no idea how this mechanic is beneficial to anybody.
Taking out the maximum time you can have your items in limbo would make it possible for alliances to create untouchable ship-caches around Eve, which would be easily abused. Also, you don’t have to get everything out of the wrap at once. You can choose what to take out of it and pay only a portion of the amount required. That is an easy way to get enough ISK to get everything out of the wrap.
You stopped playing EVE for an extended period of time and you expected everything to stay the same as when you left, you’ve been playing for many years and should know very well that EVE is a ruthless game where anything can happen and is ever evolving with time (or am I naive to think a veteran don’t understand game mechanics). Sure it’s a painful (expensive) lesson learned but that does not necessarily mean that it needs to be changed.
Asset Safe is a mechanic that keeps the “status quo” in relation between Upwell Structures (Citadel, Engineering Complex and Refinery) and the structures they replaced, namely the Outpost(s), and also being an ISK sink as in the cost to recover item from Asset Safety is 0.5% if moved to station in same system as the assets were or upto 15% if automatically moved or if manually selecting a station 2 or more jumps away, all within the allotted 20 days before automated transfer kicks in.
Curiously, upon closer examination the original devblog doesn’t even discuss things like:
What happens when a structure is taken down, as opposed to being destroyed
The fact that there’s a hard limit on the amount of time granted to decide where assets go
Here is a literal copy-paste quote from CCP’s devblog which you just linked regarding minimum wait times to recover assets and deciding what to do with them: “A choice doesn’t have to be picked after the recovery time has elapsed, players may wait more before picking a recovery option.”
At no point does the blog discuss a time-limit on deciding what to do with the assets, so forgive me for not intuiting that information or absorbing it by osmosis or whatever.
Not that any of this matters: I’m not trying to point out a flaw in CCP’s current documentation (yeah, I can read too)-- I’m trying to tell you that the way asset safety works right now is flawed. Do you understand the difference? If you want to fix the amount of ISK in circulation do it by adjusting ratting or something, not finding clever ways to charge returning players billions of ISK for the crime of not having a weekly Skype checkin with their station managers every time they stop playing EVE for a few months.
Three easy ways you could make this system work in a sensible and fair manner:
Remove time limit on player’s deciding what happens to their stuff
Make the system default to delivering items to the nearest (sufficiently large) Upwell structure if no player action is taken
Adjust the asset safety system to differentiate between destroyed vs unanchored structures (this way you can penalize people for losing structures to hostile action while removing the adverse effects of un-announced administrative actions that a player cannot reasonably be expected to foresee)
At the end of the day, the fact that I took a break from EVE is barely relevant to what happened to me. I could’ve been logging in every day on my PvP characters and still would have had no idea that this citadel was being un-anchored. It just seems like really awful game design to punish people for something they can’t even be aware of. You just log in one day and all your ■■■■ is gone.
And for reference, I just stuck a few low-value items in a citadel in contested space a week or two ago. That citadel is now dead. Literally the only reason I know this is that I manually went to my assets page and pulled up the Safety tab-- no notification of the structure being attacked, no notice that it had died, no notification that assets had entered the safety system. Nothing at all. In this case, I have no friendly structure to deliver to, but even if I did, I wouldn’t have known I needed to push a button in the first place.
Not relevant? It’s the primary cause for this to happen to you.
It is not a poor or stupid game design that lead to this happening to you. The decision to unanchor the Fortizar came from your alliance/corp leaders, and I’m pretty sure it was announced prior to it being done, this has nothing to do with game mechanics as you claim, it’s simply a result of your alliance/corp wanting to upgrade the structure from a Fortizar to a Keepstar (to allow docking of Super Capitals I would assume) and your decision to take a break from the game and not keeping yourself informed (on a semi-regularly basis) on the state and affairs of the alliance/corp, not saying that you should have logged in every single day but once a week would have been more than enough time to have avoided the automated move of your assets, it takes 7 days to unachor a structure and 1 day to anchor the new one, and I assume you were in the corp/alliance that owned the structure you would have gotten a notification of the decommission of the structure.
Notifications of structures being attacked or it’s destruction is only given to the owning Corp and Alliance. I’m not sure if there is given a notification of assets entering into asset safety, if not then this might be a better choice than making changes to the mechanics that will most likely be exploited
EDIT: Asked my fellow ISD and they do confirm that you do receive a notification when assets enter Asset Safety, it’s very likely that you have disabled that notification.
To enable notification of Asset Safety activation; Click the notification box, then click Settings (Cogwheel), then scroll down to Structures category and then tick the boxes for Asset Safety Alert
I don’t know what to tell you, friend. Fortizars are literally a dime a dozen here in Delve, nobody announced that this particular one was being taken down. I’m not a member of the owning corp, and received no in-game or out-of-game (not CCP’s concern, I know) notifications of any kind regarding the structure’s status change.
I dug through my notification settings per your post and you’re correct, there is a notification setting, and it was activated. The relevant notification is in there, but since it’s piled into a backlog of 700 other irrelevant notifications, you’d be hard-pressed to notice one related to asset safety. Thank you (really) for pointing out that the popups are configurable, though-- I didn’t even know the settings pane was there and will now de-select the majority of the notification types so at least the pop ups should only appear when relevant things happen. It still doesn’t address the problem of how you’d be notified if you don’t happen to log in on that particular character, or take a break from the game more generally.
Lastly, regardless of the specifics, the whole reason asset safety was implemented in the first place was to avoid exactly this kind of mandatory, nagging maintenance / surveillance of people’s assets. CCP didn’t want Upwell structures to function like POS, where players were forced to log in every few days to check the status of their structures.
What exactly would be the downside of removing the 20d time limit on deciding what to do with assets? It’s not like it’s particularly exploitable-- for example: if an alliance lost its space, what are the odds that a returning player would be able to successfully install their own Upwell structure in hostile space at a later date in order to retrieve their assets without paying a fee? It just seems incredibly improbable to me-- doubly-so in the case of high value stuff like caps and supercaps (since they’d have to anchor a Keepstar-- hardly something that would go un-noticed). What is the impetus for the 20d time limit? It really doesn’t seem like it serves any purpose at all other than to pull ISK out of people’s wallets.
Maybe @CCP_Fozzie can tell you that (I think he worked on it), or someone else who worked on the mechanic.
Like Outposts where all you assets were completely safe (they could not be destroyed, only conquered), to keep the same features as they had, when Outposts were replaced with Faction Citadels (Fortizar) asset safety were created as a way to keep that “absolute” safefy of your items, and yes it also functions as an ISK sink. “Asset Safety” was not something that was ever available to POSs but has become a feature to the structures replacing them. When you lose/lost a POS you’d lose everything it contained but this is not the case with Upwell Structures which has this added feature (excl. J-space). So even if you have to pay a sum to get your items back it still better than it being lost forever!
I think you should rather be happy that asset safety even exists if this where an older eve you would have lost everything :], a bit closer to true eve.
I know, I remember reading the blogs when they were developing the Upwell structures. I’m also familiar with POS-- I used to run a whole bunch of them. But this is sort of my point-- the reason I closed down my reaction farms (yes, well before they transitioned reacting over to Upwell structures), was precisely because I wanted the flexibility to be able to ignore EVE for a few weeks at a time if I felt like it without losing billions of ISK when my towers ran out of fuel and random passers-by plinked all the POS modules to death.
Asset safety was supposed to relieve players of these concerns despite the fact that the new Upwell structures were destructible. But it’s really not much of an improvement over POS (and a massive downgrade from the legacy stations) if I need to log in all the time to check for asset safety notifications. Yes, it’s better than stuff blowing up entirely, but it’s a lot less-good than the previous system. Even though you stood the risk of your assets becoming inaccessible previously (although it was usually possible to extract assets from un-friendly stations if you were motivated), at least this required an invasion or some massive act of treachery-- either of which would usually be covered in some form of out-of-game media (EVE news sites or player org forums). Decommissioning sending your stuff to lowsec is a real pain, since it can happen any time and (apparently) with little fanfare / no out-of-game indications.
Effectively, if you want to come and go from the game as you please (even over pretty short time periods) without the risk of losing billions of ISK, you’re forced to put all your valuables in NPC stations. I feel like this wasn’t the intent of the devs and was the entire reason for creating asset safety in the first place. I also don’t see how the 20d limit benefits anybody (I would be very curious to get an answer from Fozzie).
Not sure how long you’ve been playing, but this is absolutely not the case: previously stations were indestructible. You might lose docking access to that station if it was taken by hostiles, but your assets were un-touchable. If you were docked in that station when you came back, you could undock with whatever you wanted (you just couldn’t dock again), and even if you weren’t docked there / had no jumpclone, you could still sell those assets remotely, thus recovering their ISK value (even if you couldn’t technically retrieve the assets). Not to mention the possibility of smuggling the stuff out using spies. You definitely had plenty of options under the previous system. At no point did you, “just lose everything.”
