It’s really stupid that everyone in my region can time their citadels to the one day i can’t play so i miss every major fleet op with the boys because fleet pvp is banned for another 6 days.
Every structure timed to the same time is NOT solved by the variable reinforce timer to that day because defenders still fundamentally just blob up on that one day at that one time a week and have a zero percent chance of fighting any other day of the week. It’s even worse than the 7 day reinforce timer because at least the attacker had some degree of control over the exit day.
all fleet pvp happening between two entities happens on a single day within a single timezone in a week. this is fundamentally damaging to any sort of fleet pvp. I could hit 200 astrahuses and every single one would exit between 1600 and 2000 and be defended by a single kta once a week and any more conflict over upwell structures (the only hope of generating a fight at all anymore) would be impossible for another six days.
Please bring back old-school reinforce mechanics where attackers can influence the day and defenders influence the time. If someone times there stuff to 10:00 eve time just to dissuade me from hitting it I should have the opportunity to bash it on a Saturday for a next Sunday exit. Dissuading inter-timezone conflict makes the game more stagnant and a lot more boring.
I don’t like having 1 day a week, 2 if you’re extremely lucky, that a defenders structures will exit. They already control timezone I do not see a reason to buff defenders to the point that they only need to pvp once/twice a week while being safe from any chance of loss the other 5-7.
Letting defenders pick the day when the final citadel timers come out was a huge mistake, not even barely mitigated by the addition of the 4 hour window instead of 15 minutes. CCP had a good idea to begin with by making citadels easier to kill, but they ended up completely flopping on the final stretch by letting people timezone tank even worse than before. Now timezone tanking itself may be a necessary evil, but in many cases you could mitigate this evil by making weekend timers. Hitting poses on thursday/friday to get some weekend content was amazing, now we’re left with creating a bunch of uncontested timers that come out on a single day during a 4 hour window.
CCP made citadels easier to kill, but they added a mechanic that makes it impossible to keep up with citadel spam. Imagine clearing out multiple regions worth of citadels all timed for wednesdays at the same time window. It is simply absurd.
I think (and I may be very wrong) that a lot of eve players have become disconnected from the very nature of what eve was. Nothing should be safe, losing your stuff was just a fact of life. I’m not advocating that you should be able to roll someone out of their space in a weekend, but current mechanics are stifling actual pvp.
No one objected to their supercapital construction poses being vulnerable (even though pos mechanics sucked for the user), and supercapital assembly arrays as well as moon mining poses lead to a lot of amazing fights. Now you have long timers that lets the defender call in every defensive favour they can - and conveniently enough all defensive timers can fall on the same day and same time.
I think eve would benefit from giving defenders a lot less freedom in defensive timers. Citadels are fantastic from a user standpoint, ACLs, reactions, construction, etc is really streamlined and nice. But holy cow it sucks for an attacker. Bring back shorter timers, bring back occasional losses of stagings (we’ve got asset safety anyway), bring back weekend fights.
As the main fc and leader of prestigious lowsec PvP alliance Snuffed Out part of the mighty imperium , +1 to this the old rf mechanics were so much better you could catch people off guard a bit or coast the timer (keep it from being re-stronted but not rfing it) to get a timer inbetween their tz and your tz but theyd still fight cos itd be over a major objective for them and both of us would be able to go.Also picking the day is the most stupid thing ever cos before you could push stuff out to weekends when people can alarm clock or actually play the game but instead everything is set to a monday/wednesday when everyone is working so yea CCP PLZ.
I’m honestly so tired of complaining about how awful this game has gotten in terms of null mechanics. Citadels especially were a giant f*** you to content creators in eve. The entire point of nullsec was the vulnerability of people and the risk/chance of having to fight your way out of a situation. Now we just warp to citadels and sit afk instead and ignore people until they go away.
CCP you’ve got a largely PVP oriented game that no longer promotes PVP.
Stop being averse to making changes and just start rolling the dice and making faster changes, because at this point it really just looks like you have no solution and no plan.
Pretty much all sov fights are now fighter blob vs fighter blob on predetermined days and time zones. Alliances do not even care to defend or attack entosis timers and when they do, they just form up obnoxious fleet comps like intys or svipuls. In the off chance you jump into a fight you don’t want to take anymore, just stop shooting and tether up, zero consequence. Don’t want to risk ur fleet to save a citadel? No problem, just ignore the final timer and drop another one to come out at the same time.
Your hybrid station/pos replacement project aka citadels feels like a massive mistake and after almost two years, all you’ve managed to do is ruin/stagnate the sov/null meta and lose massive chunks of your player base.
Stop trying to make us play fight for systems and give us a reason to just BE in null sec. I can’t even try to explain when the last time was that I was able to find any meaningful skirmish in nullsec while just roaming around.
I literally cannot come up with a single good thing that citadels provided to this game and this latest revision of your defense timers is literally enough to make a good portion of the people i know just give up on nullsec entirely - its like you don’t realize that actual human beings have to play your game. I would literally argue that you should have released a watered down version of keepstars that allowed supers to dock back in 2016 and left literally everything else alone. The citadel spam in systems is just a god damn meme at this point and sov is so useless and annoying at this point that nobody CARES to go anywhere.
It’s almost like you had these player owned stations that people anchored on moons that provided enough passive income to holder that they would just MAGICALLY create content for large groups and small groups alike with almost no script into how the conflict would play out or requirements from either side. Even the defense timer for this arguably fair because you could manage stront amount to try to mind game the attacker. For some reason now we are at the COMPLETE OTHER END of the spectrum where everything is safe and you know a week ahead of time how everything is going to play out and when.
How do you guys honestly come up with this stuff internally? Do you not see how bitter and indifferent a good portion of your long term players have become? At any point did you think that maybe you should try to find a solution that doesn’t polarize half the population and cause this much negative feedback from the community ?
Exactly this! EvE is too complex to have one size fits all lazy solutions. The Upwell system needs a lot more options, and variability in regards of features and mechanics, to be successful longterm.
To be clear I‘m not talking about tweaking some numbers but maybe one year of dev time has to be invested in order to fix this.
But how do you balance that? Do you leave things in a broken state for a year and just say it will be fixed Soon™? Or do you balance through iterative changes, slowly working towards the end goal? It’s not like you can just roll back and get rid of structures without huge problems. So what would you suggest and how would you deal with the fallout?
I’m more about the ripping the bandaid off and getting it over with.
At this point, it really depends on if they care to come up with a more balanced solution to it all. I don’t even recognize what this game has become, now its just a weekly afk intel grind to find that one fight, or that one drop that satisfies you for a little period of time and the people that are providing this content right now aren’t going to want to do it forever.
Logging on and expecting to find anything going on is pretty much gone at this point. There literally regions that are not even sort of empty, but completely empty for entire timezones.
It‘s broken for two years now, we can wait another one, to get something right. May general direction would be to split functionality and mechanics in the following groups:
Living at home
Staging, midway
Factory
Harvesting
Utility
Each designed with individual features and mechanics tailored precisely for the purpose, and depending on space. You can make it so certain groups can‘t be anchored in all spaces, or split the groups in different versions per space.
Functionality aside, I have a way bigger problem with there being 20 free to spam structures in every system that ships can insta tether to than anything else mentioned.
There is no reason for anyone to ever actively defend their space on a day to day basis. Just dock up and wait for a timer to be made, then max form.
I don’t really agree with that.
POS could be exploited with spys, passwords, easier drag/catch bubbles. Things had to be set up correctly, people could accidently bump.
Large and XL Citadels have massive model/tether range and literally nothing to manipulate aside from a player being stupid and detethering, which is rare these days.
The closest thing is bumping caps/supers off smaller citadels. Ratters used to to warp to stations, at least with fights on stations invul was either staying docked or limited on undock. Docking radius varied which made certain systems safer than others. I don’t know the game just felt more exciting - there was less of a safety net for mistakes.