You underestimate what people are willing to do with AFK alts. Typically 3 Oracles.
In my experience, they will AFK an attack, if there is any defense they will call for support and ‘gud fights’, or just to farm killmarks for their hulls.
Example: We lost 6 private Raitaru in a backwater system. My only corpmate didn’t even want to use them, since it was so far away from the markets, and he anchored them!
EDIT: I just checked a killmail of the 6 Raitaru, there were 5 Oracles on that one.
Oooo Cool - I will be 100% safe from war dec’s as they will be too busy blowing up rocks in a T1 frigate and fighting big groups for meaningful pew-pew rather than picking on individuals.
You solved the Quantum Core problem - All the wardeccers are going to go mining and not pick on newbies, individuals & smaller groups .
Nonsense. This is standard perma-victim farmer logic. There are plenty of options for defense, but by declaring victory impossible you have made a self-fulfilling prophecy out of the situation.
…
JFC, why is this so hard to understand? The core has a fixed value: 600 million ISK for an Astrahus, to consider one example. Assuming the defenders fly cheap ships that 600 million ISK is the sole reward for attacking the structure, and it gets divided up between every player involved in the attack.
If you can solo kill the Astrahus you get 600 million ISK in exchange for committing to three sessions of structure bashing, which works out to be a decent reward for your effort.
If you require four other players to kill the Astrahus you each get 120 million ISK, which is probably less than you’d make by spending that time farming level 4 missions but is still a decent bonus for PvP.
If you require ten players to kill the Astrahus you each get 60 million ISK, which is barely worth showing up for.
If your entire 500 man corp shows up you each get 1.2 million ISK, which is less ISK/hour than pretty much any income-generating activity in EVE.
TL;DR: the financial incentive of the core only matters for solo and very small group attacks, exactly the sort of thing that any corp that deserves to own a station should be able to handle.
Yes… sure… https://zkillboard.com/kill/87397295/
I’m seeing a lot of griping in mining that these really were a nerf on nullsec alliances with money to burn to keep them from spamming structures for grid purposes.
If this is true, I’d propose a graduated core cost for sec status, say 80m for high, 800m for low, and 8b for a null station. That way hisec use will remain viable because the Raitarus/athanors/astrahus’s will be within the reach of hisec-type corps, but nulsec abuse will be stymied.
yup, isk sinks under the guise of balance. When are you going to figure out that you can’t achieve balance through the amount of isk it costs. How about you try the real fix and actually change the mechanics.
What about it? 25 players destroyed a station with a loot drop of 900 million ISK, producing 36 million ISK per player in income. This is less than they would have made spending their time farming highsec level 4 missions instead, so clearly this attack was not motivated by profit alone and the presence of the core had little effect on the outcome.
Why should we lower the difficulty to allow even the least-deserving corps to have stations, instead of expecting those corps to learn how to succeed at EVE and earn their stations?
coughs 25.
While it may not have been motivated purely by profit, it certainly increases the likelyhood people will bother attacking stations therefore increasing risk.
Now… don’t get me wrong, increased risk is fine if CCP want to see stations in more danger, but it needs to come alongside increased rewards, not just increased cost by having to defend more often.
I just don’t see it. Yeah, it will increase the incentive for solo players to kill helpless stations, but with such pitiful rewards for fleet attacks I can’t imagine very many people are going to attack a target they weren’t going after already for other reasons. Any increase in significant threats is going to be small at best.
Hmm - true. For an active station and 10 people over two weeks to kill it, that’s all of 30m isk/h or so. Hardly enough to make it worthwhile, unless you’re havresting tears.
It’s not 2 weeks anymore. Armour timer is one day after hull timer.
And the first 2 timers probably only needed 1 or 2 people since most highsec corps aren’t 7 days a week active.
And well… a lot of wardec corps will do it just for tears now and then, with profit as icing on top.
@Merin_Ryskin We could argue over magnitude of increase of risk till the cows come home and not agree I suspect, but nice to see you acknowledge there could be/is an increase in risk at least. Magnitude is very hard to quantify after all so not worth really debating.
Just for interest, what are your thoughts around structures being allowed to fit things like command links, logistics, & join fleets in order to give them extra power to support a defending fleet without directly buffing a solo structure.
There absolutely is an increase in risk, but it is an increase that is almost exclusively applied to corps that don’t deserve to own a station: the ones that can’t even fight off an attack by a single player, and who only own a station because prior to cores being added there was zero incentive for that solo player to come wreck it. The increased risk faced by corps that are capable of mounting even a modest defense of their structures is essentially zero because the small amount of ISK reward is insufficient to motivate anyone to claim it.
Just for interest, what are your thoughts around structures being allowed to fit things like command links, logistics, & join fleets in order to give them extra power to support a defending fleet without directly buffing a solo structure.
Sounds good. Obviously it would require balancing but I have no objection to the basic concept.
And well… a lot of wardec corps will do it just for tears now and then, with profit as icing on top.
So then cores aren’t adding any meaningful increase in risk. The station was already a target and already doomed, and would still be destroyed even if CCP reversed the change entirely.
Mercs? Allies? Been there. Done that. Though mercs were always successful, the cost is prohibitive (paid 4b to 16b for single timers). Allies were never successful, and rarely ever actually participated.
Defending via members was only effective against solo or small-number aggressors. Anything larger results in bat-phones and a rout.
Diplomacy has only worked once, but I think it was more of pity than anything else, as they had already destroyed all the most valuable structures.
Co-operative measures are also out of the question, as system indicies oppose working together. Managing some sort of coalition of industrials that don’t want to PvP is also unlikely to be successful, nor worth the time.
Of course an expectation 100% security is not reasonable, and there is no limitation on the number of wardecs one will have to fend-off.
What options did you have in mind?
Then your station is doomed, core or no core. If your attackers are calling in overwhelming reinforcements then the reward per player provided by the core is negligible and they clearly aren’t concerned with the profitability of destroying your station.
Managing some sort of coalition of industrials that don’t want to PvP is also unlikely to be successful, nor worth the time.
That is a choice they are free to make, but that choice has consequences and CCP should not shield them from those consequences. If industrial players do not want to organize a PvP defense then they can deal with the losses.
What options did you have in mind?
Fit cheap T1 ewar cruisers (loot drop is less than the cost of the ammo used to kill them), lock down the attacking fleet. If they are concerned with profit they will abandon the attack because it is no longer possible to make a meaningful profit from you, as overwhelming your defenses would require calling in too many players to claim a share of your core. If they aren’t concerned with profit you still lose your station, but you were going to lose it anyway regardless of the core mechanic.
It has nothing to do with monetary reward. The pot rarely gets split upon escalation.
For many, content is its own reward. (I was tempted to write ‘pwn’ there.)
Some will go to great lengths just for additional easy killmarks on their hulls.
Then the core is irrelevant and you have no grounds for objecting to the change.
That’s rather one-sided view of the equation.
It may not matter to the aggressors, so the additional cost and increased risk shouldn’t matter to the defenders?
Stations are already way too cheap. Deal with it.
Ah, so you’ve run out of valid arguments.
Okay.
Ah, so any argument you don’t like is suddenly “invalid”.
Okay.