In today’s patch we made an update to the respawn timers on some Invasion sites, and we wanted to add more clarity to that.
This primarily affects the Observatory Flashpoint anomalies in Pochven. These sites are both highly profitable and very hotly contested, leading to a vibrant ecosystem in the region. Since last year, these sites would respawn instantly upon completion such that there would always be 3 Observatory Flashpoint in Pochven, and to encourage growth of this new region remained with the then cooldown effectively being zero.
While we are satisfied with the destruction and engagement that these sites bring, we’re mindful of their impact on New Eden’s economy. During our initial designs, these sites were meant to have more of a throttle in order to prevent a heavy impact on the economy, which is what was fixed today as being a defect and listed under the Defect fixes in the patch notes.
As of todays patch, the respawn timer for the Observatory Flashpoints have been increased from 0 to 90 minutes. We will continue to monitor the Pochven ecosystem and iterate as necessary.
I’m interested to know how you came to the 90 minute term. That’s a pretty drastic change all at once. Perhaps a more measured response would have been more appropriate.
We’ll see if you acutally fixed things with the 90 minutes timer instead of getting rid of the conflict entirely. I agree that it’s too much when they instantly respawn but I think that you just purged the content motor for that region instead of fixing a defect. After all any other site in Pochven is mostly flavour at this point or a way to get standings for the Obs. Flashpoints. Did the people who made this move ever play EVE in a Pochven Fleet?
So many players invested skill training and ships to play the game in pochven and CCP instantly ends that gameplay without notice. What kind of developer does this to their players?
This seems crazily heavy handed going from 0-90 - maybe it was overpowered but this is such a heavy nerf that the existing playstyles become non viable - 90 mins is longer than some fleets. Would have been nice to start with a 5,10,15 minute timer and see what happened rather than going straight to 90. If it does kill pochven like it appears it might, once everyone moves out it’s going to be too little too late if the change gets reverted, and yet another massive piece of content will be underutilised.
I agree that not giving the large blocs an automatic isk faucet is probably a good thing, but a 90 minute timer will kill a lot of content in Pochven. 20 minutes would be more appropriate as a maximum I think.
Pochven and the OBF regulate itself pretty nicely with all the PvP ging on, lowering the payout from 3.5b to 2.5 or even 1.5b would’ve done the trick and would’ve achieved the same outcome.
This cooldown just seems like a way to make sure people go to FW sites which suffers the same issues as the OBFs in the beginning.
If it really was an issue all along i think the nerf should’ve happened 1 year ago and not now when CCP drops the new updates.
Please reconsider this change. Pochven is one of the most active and fun parts of the game and this change will completely kill it.
This nerfs the payments by about 75-80%. We go from a 20-30 min run time on Obs (including discovery and travel), to now 110-120 mins (run time + respawn time). Why wasn’t the payment amount just lowered?
Furthermore, it disincentives groups from forming fleets because there will just be a ton of wait time.
The current active groups in Pochven are a few large null sec alliances, some smaller groups, and a lot of multiboxers. This change further pushes the multiboxer meta, as multiboxers will be okay to wait / stand down while waiting for respawn, and instantly remobilize when a new Obs spawns. Groups of 15 humans will not realistically wait around and cannot reform quickly enough.
