Like “Only structures with Quantum Cores inside could activate the new Upwell Structure Skins” 
No, it’s not semantics, dismissing it as such says you aren’t interested in actually addressing the problem, just acting morally superior with tired EVE PvP memes.
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Lol. You are arguing about what the word “prize” means. It’s pedantry and semantics.
Look, we all get it, including CCP. This token system makes it harder for players to use particular strategies that they might have successfully used before. How much harder remains to be seen, but it is very much a change to the incentive structure and risk vs. reward balance of structures that makes it more difficult/challenging/risky for smaller and conflict-averse groups to use Upwell structures as they may have before. It does this everywhere, but yes, this particularly hits highsec structure owners hard as it is the domain of the small group.
You can voice your displeasure with this balance change. That’s what these forums are for. But you were arguing like CCP and everyone else was blind to the outcome of these changes:
Forcing commitment and offering up an incentive to both sides to fight over this is the very intention of this new mechanic, not some problem or side-effect. Increasing the conflict and wars over structures is the goal.
From the looks of those charts, structures in hi sec where in decline before quantum cores. So why bother with cores.
Come on Drac, you are better than that. Playing the “Eve is dying” card will just make you look foolish when you come back and it inevitably never happens. Even if you are right and thousands of highsec industrialists leave, they will just be replaced by a different set of players that enjoy a little more spice in their game and you will look like you are wrong. The churn in this game is such that whatever reasonable change CCP makes, some new cohort of players are going like the new normal and replace those that may have left because of the change.
Players leave and players join and players return. I’ve seen plenty of people leave the game over this change or that change and invariably some new players come along that like the new state and stay, so Eve still keeps going. People can play (or not play) the game as they want, but CCP’s focus should be on being good stewards of a persistent virtual universe, and this game needed some attention as things were/are not sustainable.
Have fun on your break, and when you get back Eve will be mostly the same as ever. Maybe even better if CCP keeps at their current efforts at improving the game.
I am not playing the Eve is dying card. I believe that the hisec casual player is actually one of the most important groups in terms of subscriptions. I am actually perturbed by the amount of negativity and decisions I have seen to cancel subscriptions.
My decision to de-sub due to biased forum moderation was a tipping point moment, the Quantum Core idea has directly blocked what I was intending to do with my friends. The truth was that I can’t find anything to interest me in Eve anymore, just like Eric Shang.
Then I had a conversation with another player who told me about the loss of subscriptions in his alliance and then me and another guy started going through our play options and at the end of it we decided that there was nothing much that we wanted to do. We went through all the game play too. All he has left which is interesting to him is indy!!! But I just looked at it and went, I am going to log, in a game like Eve you have to have an objective, something you wish to strive for, and it has to be difficult and something you can say I did that. My issue and the issue with most of the people I talk to is that it is not something to strive for, but virtually impossible, something that would be a really hard slog.
This idea has made simply doing better indy a impossible hard slog. The only way it could happen is after all the war deckers have given up after losing all their prey, but then they could return again when their prey starts showing signs of life.
A number of people see the need to remove excess, myself included, but if you get the base level game to make people think like this then Houston we have a problem!!
I am glad me and my alliance mate did that exchange on what play we wanted to do, because it clarified to me completely that de-subbing for me at this point is completely the right thing to do.
It is not so much me being better or worse, it is basically realising that a tipping point has arrived. At the end CCP might improve their game, but they are about to lose a large group of hisec prey players who pay real subs, which is not good. Maybe that subset does not matter to CCP, it certainly appears that way, maybe they are less important than I think, I don’t know. But this is the most intense negativity I have ever seen.
Anyway, I have less than a week left, I thought that I might as well use my sub while I had it, but I can’t find anything to do. So take this as my final post on the forums until May 2021 and possibly not at all. I hope it turns out as you expect.
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So, as a tiny single character omega in this vast ocean of stars, I like to do industry. I love it yeh 
Obviously, and certainly by eve standards, it is small scale industry work mostly consisting of tech 2 research and manufacture from those bpc’s. I use local player structures to do this and they are scattered about the region.
After this was origianly posted I sent a polite ingame mail to the owners of the structures I use that I have established good rapport with over the years, asking if they knew about the inbound cores and if so, what they planned to do, I have now had 6 of 9 replies (quite a good result lets be fair) 5 will be unanchoring, one will see how it pans out but is block related and has the cappacity to deffend it. 4 of them expressed concern over another significant round of structure bashing once structures with cores are located and targeted and had zero trust for hiring a merc corp for deffence.
It’s a guess, but lets face it a damn good one, that that will be a pretty common outcome in a lot of other similar regions with perhaps some variation depending on 
factors.
Thats me , quite simply pretty much locked out of that entire branch of content I really really really liked doing.
Am I missing something here?
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What, a bunch of cheap T1 ships with T1 loot? Not much payout there. Even a bunch of T1 fitted Blackbirds can make the ISK payout per person for attacking a structure way below the ISK/hour of doing pretty much anything else in EVE.
{citation needed}
They contribute very little to the game other than their $15/month, and I’m skeptical that the player losses are going to be anywhere near as high as you think. After all, casual players don’t really care if their ISK/hour drops a bit and were perfectly fine using NPC stations before player-built stations existed.
This idea has made simply doing better indy a impossible hard slog.
You know that NPC stations exist, right? Perhaps once the weakest players ragequit and highsec production drops prices will go up sufficiently that even with lower NPC station efficiency you come out ahead of where we are now.
the base level game
Player-built stations are not supposed to be the base level game, they’re supposed to be a collaborative project for higher-level corps. It’s an unfortunate mistake that they were too easy to build and people who shouldn’t have stations built them, but now some of that mistake is being corrected.
NPC stations exist.
CCP could take into account the the difference in numbers as a way to balance the cost of a war. Maybe make wardec costs increase based on the amount you outnumber a war target and cheaper if the you are closer in numbers.
Why encourage what could be seen as big groups bullying smaller ones (or individuals) when CCP could be encouraging what they have always promoted “big wars”, so why not encourage them within the wardec system.
and the difference in time it takes to produce in an NPC station is a little longer and the production costs are a little higher.
It may only be a ‘little’ more but with highsec margins being so close that ‘little’ extra cost is enough to wipe out most of your profit.
Nah.
You can’t balance things this way. If you let being small and/or weak be a viable defensive strategy, then players will make themselves small and weak. Such free protection will be gamed and cheesed by everyone.
The Tranquility Trading Consortium has 11 members in it yet owns dozens of stations that make Trillions of ISK per month in fees, Why should they be harder to wardec than some 50-man newbro mining corp with an Athanor?
The only way this can be balanced is by some sort of risk vs. reward balance, not size or some “strength” metric. Like if you don’t have a station, you are immune to wars but if you deploy one and throw your hat into the ring, you are now a valid target. And maybe if you deploy some more lucrative structure, you are more easy to wardec.
To date CCP has shown no interest in that however. It’s all pretty binary right now, and still gamed completely with alt corps and the like.
Perhaps there should be a lower tier of structure, say with less bonuses and that lack the ability to be made public, but that doesn’t take cores or something to give more granularity to this risk vs. reward choice for the player.
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or from another perspective, if you own a single station you can now declare war on a group that owns dozens of stations and anti up a tiny percentage of risk compared with what they have on the table.
If you take a look at corps that declare a lot of wars, it’s easy to check the numbers and see that with any 200-500 man corp 99% of all their wars they greatly outnumber their opponents.
I like to think that you could balancing the costs so declaring war against similar sized group would encourage fighting and provide content but its not about the ‘pew pew’, it’s about milking ISK from smaller groups & individuals they can beat up on.
If I had more time, I’d write a shorter letter, but here we are. Be warned, the following is something of a rant on what I think is an issue that has progressively stifled Eve’s diversity. It’s related to Quantum Cores, but something of a tangent and stuffing it in the middle of other rants means people will harass me less for it and I can still say I said it later. Anyway, here goes:
I am not sure what Quantum Cores are trying to achieve, and I don’t think that anything meaningful will be achieved by them. Instead, I think they’re the latest ham fisted attempt to fix problems caused by changes like this one. A cycle that has fueled itself, by the look of things. The only positive thing I can think of that may come from this is that people will unanchor their space debris rather than let it go abandoned to recoup some of their investment.
This comes off the heels of the abandoned structure bonanza. A predictable spike in attention on structures that everyone should have known would not be sustained. For better or for worse, CCP used the assets of players not currently playing as the incentive to engage with totally undefended and reinforcement cycle free space debris. Something about this smacks of trying to revive a pale shadow of that activity burst, but most rational people seem to feel it will fall fairly flat.
The primary argument I see that is supposed to hold water is that in incentivizes people to fight over structures. My question is: Incentivize whom? Is there a class of players who will deploy structures, and who would defend them but can’t be arsed to unless they’re twice the price? I realize I’m throwing a very approximate figure out here, but I think it suffices to make the point. Most structures are owned by players who think that fighting A) Provides content to the enemy, incentivizing them to attack again, and B) Increases the total cost of a loss by increasing the amount of equipment lost. The expense of a structure is a consideration when deciding whether to anchor one, or how many, but it is not a consideration for defense. The plan was not to defend it all along.
If there is anything the Eve community expresses more extreme ambivalence to than the ‘gud fite’, then I don’t know what it is. The good fight is like a child. A thing people bring up to defend any idea they can think of. Conceivably, one can reason any change will increase content. All they have to do is ignore human nature and the way people apply common sense to avoid using an idea in any way but the most risk avoidant.
A change that has consistently been implemented due to a purported to increase meaningful conflict is increasing the costs to the attacker or defender in situations of non-consensual combat, but I can’t think of when this has ever been successful. Quantum Cores affect both attackers and defenders. Both sides are going to risk putting a structure out there less. More risk directly translates to more avoidance. More avoidance, less fighting. Carebears clamor for increased costs because it benefits them to stifle content so they can do their work in peace. Here we have the aggressors doing so, but the outcome will be no different. More costs and less content in the long term.
If structures are too annoying to take down, then how about doing away with some of the issues that make them so troublesome? Instead of holding the entire structure for ransom, what about doing away with the ability to set the vulnerability windows for structures if they don’t have a core installed? Or doing away with asset safety? I don’t particularly care about the specifics, but as long as structures are required for war declaration or participation, I can not agree with increasing their cost. I would prefer to scale back their defensibility or utility to be in line with their cost, or grant more of the structure’s inherent value in salvage, modules, or rigs to the aggressors. Whatever works, as long as viable war HQs are cheap.
If you actually want a good fight, you’re going to need people who take poorly calculated risks. The opportunity for this decreases as cost goes up. It encourages people to think harder before taking a chance, and it eliminates people who calculate poorly more quickly. It also increases the minimum size and strength of any group who can meet with success which in turn promotes the belief that any resistance is hopeless. It probably is or the people declaring war wouldn’t be able to afford it.
My fellow carebears will hate my saying so, but I think that any numbnut with two isk to rub together should be able to participate in wars, including the ability to declare their own. What would be a few lone players griefing in any other game is content in Eve. War exists in Highsec because it was meant to be content, not as some kind of strange industrial safeguard while you PvE and mine to support the fun part of the game. You should be able to have fun without doing a lot of that.
Safe industry means everyone else is doing it. If everyone else is, then you probably have to in order to be competitive. Pretty soon everyone is doing what they hate more than what they love because on the surface this is rational. If you want to raise the exciting, rough and rowdy player, the kind of player that will shove and shove back, then what you want is the irrational choice people don’t want to suggest: Cheap aggression. Affordable losses for defenders and attackers so that players can afford to lose more often and think about the consequences of going off half cocked less. In a zero sum game of war, the total never changes. The variable is how many games can we afford to play?
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But wars don’t work that way. They are between groups, not capsuleers so you can just game any system by starting a small group and hopping corps or merging into an alliance, or joining as an ally… etc.
I guess maybe you somehow could, but it would take a complete rework of the system and probably restrictions on switching corps for players. It seems unlikely to happen.
Sounds like “those who take risks and invest in cooperative efforts see better rewards than those who are unwilling to do so”.
“The universe needs more explosions to consume the superfluous resources”
What about consuming double fuel for the next step?
Or paying patent costs for using Upwell Structure Service each time?
Or randomly get a frail status due to the internal error of structure’s control system?
why not choose to make something about decorating the structures and pay ISK/PLEX for a unique look like skins or … … gaming module?
Why do the cores get less expensive the bigger they get?
If the target is to create an incentive to kill a keepstar and the keepstar costs around 200 bill… why only 30 bill for the core?
Athanor, Raitaru are the same price as the current structure and sometimes depending on the market more expensive.
To kill a keepstar you need a fleet of probably 200+ bil so why is CCP not creating that incentive?
Because they are targeting the majority type of stations
So CCP don’t want Null sec alliances to attack Keepstars?