The last positive change to industry was removing the slot limit, as it allowed more players to get involved.
Some will argue that it hurt the markets, and yes it did that, but I think having more gameplay options was worth the cost.
Since then, I’m at a loss to think of an industry change that wasn’t accompanied or followed by multiple nerfs that negated any benefit. One step forward and five backwards.
One of many examples: asset safety, instead of remotely using BPO located in a NPC station / outpost in the same system as the POS. Later asset safety gained an unavoidable 15% cost.
And yet here we are, mired in an economy where production still massively outpaces destruction.
CCP is trying to fix things, but clearly at least some aspects of production/industry are too easy for the current level of demand in this game.
Have you not been paying attention:
CCP has made structure ownership mandatory to participate in wars. That means whatever additional costs/risks are added to structures apply equally to attackers.
Something had to give. Declaring a war has never been costly or riskier so something was needed to provide some incentive for people to take that risk. I’m doubt these tokens are a specific response to try to balance out the additional risk the aggressor has been forced to take in the latest iteration of the war declaration mechanics, but I am also sure CCP will be very happy if thes QCs result in players using the war declaration system more as intended to fight over structures.
Wars are all about structures now. So it kinda is fitting that players put up a “bond” when they decide to enter the structure owning class that other structure owners can challenge them for.
This is again semantics, but they had the same risk as you did - a structure in highsec to lose.
But more to the point I don’t know how you expect CCP to balance this. Of course your 13-man alliance is going to lose to a 400 man group. If you make that many enemies, expect to lose.
Your situation aside, we’ll have to wait and see see if this actually changes anything. I still expect established industrialists like you not to bat an eye at the increased cost, so unless this change unleashes a horde of reavers and you start losing a few structures a month instead of a few a year, it won’t impact anyone’s bottom line significantly.
But I don’t know for sure, so we’ll have to all wait and see.
I only expect that Upwell structures should be able to defend against AFK attacks.
And I didn’t make enemies, rather, they saw an easy target of opportunity.
Are there any hisec wars, aside from RvB, where the attackers are looking for ‘gud fights’? After countless wardecs over the past 11 years, I’ve never known one. They were all overwhelming odds, or dropped the moment there was any resistance. Even when I pit mercs against mercs, the aggressing mercs dropped.
I was i addressed it in the next post. Hardly anyone compressed minerals like that.
Back then most people hauled around uncompressed ore. Even if they refined it, minerals were larger than compressed ore is today. And add on to that orcas with no ore bay, freighters with a smaller capacity than today, DST’s with no fleet hangar and no miasmos’.
Moon ore ain’t THAT hard to move. You kids are just spoiled by today’s shiney new features and ships.
God after 14 years of playing this game. I supported the structure change was well needed, but now it is fully evident that you don’t care about the small groups of people playing the game and most them have played as long as I have as well. This patch makes every small corp group that is able to put up a structure and automatic target. You are purposely driving away players that support your game soon you will only have to large corps/ alliances. I guess this is all you care about and I can say that if this goes active it will be the last straw for myself I will unsub all 4 accounts because it would be the last thing I can take. How bout you leave the structures alone and fix the myriad of other problems. Like why are Player owned stations still not removed from the game? you told us those would be gone the better part of a year ago, well how bout it.
Well yes, this now separates corps into those that deserve to own structures and those that spammed useless space houses just because nobody cared enough to stop them. But I think you’re really overstating the effect of this. The loot for killing your space house isn’t all that great unless you’re so weak and incapable of defending it that one mostly-AFK player can solo it. Put up any defense at all, force the attacker to bring a fleet, and the payout per player is too small to bother with.
Like why are Player owned stations still not removed from the game?
Except then there is the payout for murdering your defending fleet. You keep missing this point, Wardec corps already try and bait defenders to actually show up, the Quantum Core just makes this even more worth doing as it adds a better consolation prize if they don’t show that can be sold to NPC’s to cover costs, so there is no market volatility to try and deal with either.
At some point, one can get lost in the weeds and lose sight of the big picture.
Getting the defenders to actually show up is literally the main purpose of the Quantum Core as stated in the final line of the devblog:
The incentive and reward for attacking structures will be increased and the chance of both sides showing up to fight is also increased.
The basic premise of th exercise is to try to induce both an attacker, and the defender to show up an fight over the structure. Sure, Eve’s PvP is nuanced and subject to feints, baiting, misdirection or just blobbing, but you aren’t going to change that with a small tweak to incentives like this.
It’s not a problem if this changes the calculus some and gets people to commit to a fight, both attackers and defenders, because there is a prize on a table. It is actually the whole point.
Sure, but it doesn’t induce a defender to show up, It induces a defender to not have a structure in the first place. There is no prize for the defender, it’s just additional cost & risk, since it gives the attacker additional incentive to bother.
Which is why I’m saying CCP need to give back on the reward side to induce the defender to turn up. That’s what the defender cares about, the structure bonuses, and the highsec ones are paltry currently.
Actually making structures a force multiplier able to fit things like command boosts & reps would also do wonders for defenders turning up as they would then provide a real force multiplier, not weak DPS which struggles to apply,
It’s suppose to be an ante, put up to show commitment and serve as a prize for a game. Just because you have paid part of the prize in a poker game or at the horse track to play the game does mean you still don’t have something to gain by winning.
Maybe, but that is a related conversation. If this works as CCP intends, then yes, more structure fights will be happening (which requires effort) and more will be lost (which has a cost). I still think there is a bit of Chicken-littling going here on the magnitude of that change, but maybe you are right and some compensatory adjustments will be needed to structures so they are more valuable and people will use them.
Personally, I think structures have been too cheap, too safe, and too beneficial for their modest price since release. You can’t really quantify that opinion though, or at least the best way to try is to see how players use them.
Here is at least a crude way where we can get some basic top-level numbers:
That isn’t a prize though, that’s a lack of penalty. Except simply having to form up is a penalty, as defenders it costs them in time automatically just to show up to defend. So it’s automatically a loss for the defender since after all time isn’t free (Hence why minerals you mine yourself aren’t actually free as people are fond of saying), the question is just how big a loss it is. And if there is more incentive for attackers to come and take the core, then you are going to lose more often.
Note the key there, “PART”. Showing up to defend you have no chance to win anything extra, you only have a chance to not lose your initial stake. You can’t compare it to putting money down on a bet because you aren’t winning anything in a fight.
The first two, eh, I’m not going to debate on those, that’s just a matter of opinion and at the end of the day I don’t really care, the price point is still well within a decent corps reach.
The third, too beneficial? Have you actually done the maths on high sec structures, the volume required for them to even break even is astounding because of how weak the bonuses are, and while T2 rigs exist the costs on those are so huge that break even times are staggering. Statistically, they are not of meaningful benefit in highsec, with the exception of oh wait it’s null owned, the Plex & SP trading tower.
Sure, but it’s on topic for this thread since this thread is about structure changes. So it’s the right place to have that discussion, you might be right though, in 6 months just as many structures might exist, but I seriously doubt it.
P.S. Structure kill numbers probably won’t provide that meaningful an analysis of increased risk, since if people mitigate risk by removing structures, you’ll get a slow down in structure killing from lack of targets even if per structure you have more risk.
You can normalize by structures deployed though. It’s not perfect, and those ESI counts I think are only public structures, but we can get an estimate if per structure, more are being fought over and killed. Also from the number of wars declared and by which groups.
I think the real proof will be self-evident though. The value of structures will be seen in the price the market sets for their services, and the risk will be apparent from the number of structures we see everyday and their life spans. But CCP will have all the data they need to decide if this change achieved what they wanted - getting more attackers and defenders to show up to actually fight over structures.
The proof should already be manifesting itself to CCP at this point, this move on Quantum cores came on the back of many changes that made hisec indy a zero sum game, the structures became more and more vulnerable making it a pain for hisec casual players and now you end up funding the attackers and extortioners with a 100% certain drop. From what I have seen in talking to people this is the final straw for many:
I am speaking to another player at the moment and he said he saw 50 people out of his alliance cancelling subs this month, not plexed accounts but Visa charged Omega accounts, as my two accounts are, which also end this month. This is the player base that is being affected by this.
You may think that is a good thing as they don’t play the game you think they should, but CCP is not going to be able to continue if they lose this important subset.
