Yeah, I got it from you Sorry I didn’t credit you while typing 
They are. Tether still works. Docking still works. It takes a minimum of 4 days to kill one of these things, and three different opportunities to defend it. That’s not “constant” fleet defense. It’s content.
You could disable to guns on a tower. You can’t do that on a citadel.
I don’t care how they sold it - if what they sold was shitty, I’m not going to oppose them fixing it because they sold it to us a certain way. The Citadel expansion has had the most impact on EVE gameplay of pretty much any expansion I can remember, at least in the last 10 years or so, and I don’t think anybody out there is cheering saying this content is amazing and awesome and change nothing about it.
Sure, you do. If the defender recognizes that the effort is futile and doesn’t want to form, they can’t draw out the inevitable to try to bore their enemy into going away. Weaponized boredom makes for bad game play. As we common say, putting in the work to ref structures is making a deposit so we can withdraw at least the value of a killmail at the end. Making it more boring and more tedious to do with a “what about the children” style argument about small scale gameplay isn’t going to persuade me.
When somebody figures out how to fix that, we’ll all be cheering. But I don’t think it’s fixable.
Of course there’s point in logging in. They are small groups. They have to fight like small groups. Be scrappy. Get kills where you can. Punish the big guys as much as possible. Figure out how to beat the bad guys and not just sit there and complain. Or have fun losing, like we did, until we stopped losing. I am not going to tell the small groups how to play the game - they can figure out how to do what they want to do the same way the big groups have. But making bad design choices just to try to benefit the smaller groups when it has a major impact on everybody else that’s negative is just not the right way to do it. They’ve had the defenders advantage for six years now. Let’s see what happens without it being so oppressive.
That’s part of the game, though. That’s part of the decisionmaking process for all of these groups. They have to decide if they want to put up citadels and take the risk, if they can defend them or not, where they choose to live, and the like. That’s all part of the game. I’m not sure why people seem to think it should be possible for a small tribe to build a fort next to the Mongol Hordes and expect to be able to defend themselves forever successfully. The last time I checked, Thermopylae was a Persian victory, even if people like talking about the Spartans more.
This is the game. I don’t know why you guys think you’re supposed to be able to defeat a group a hundred times your size. Hell, the only reason the Imperium won the last war was because we outlasted them and had more structures to burn. That was the strategy.
We don’t.
But what you’re arguing for here skews that balance of power even more in favor of Goliath because, what? A PDS is annoying for you?
But this:
Is why it’s NOT comparable. The Imperium’s ludicrous size let’s it have that option, something most others can’t even hope at. This set of changes won’t inspire fights. It’ll only discourage people from trying even more, or else help to push them into NPC stations if they do. It’ll only encourage people to continue centralizing because it’ll make it that much harder for people to go out and do their own thing.
If that’s what you’re here for, then I guess hey, you keep on keepin’ on.
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But part and parcel of that ‘fix’ needs to be fixing how it’s sold. They need to tell players ‘no, you can’t have your home unless you have a big group’. And they have to be ready to face the response that you and I know they will get. And which will be justified.
No, it reduces tedium for you.
Don’t go trying to pull out Asher’s ‘money in the bank’ speech on me, man, I was there the first time he gave it. 
Again: making it more boring and tedious for you. What you’re advocating makes it more boring and tedious for all of the small groups—the people who are in here telling you that because it’s their structures we’re talking about here—and it means they’ll go away, and you won’t have anyone to farm for the holy content.
You mean by providing the defenders with a big force multiplier? I mean, you’re literally complaining about someone being able to win with N-minus.
Right, so find ways to do the things you’re working to keep the mechanics from letting them do, until the big group… falls apart due to rampant mis-management? That’s how we stopped losing. I can’t count the number of times we openly opined that if PAPI’s leadership was even halfway competent, we’d have lost Delve—including 1DQ1-A—in the first three months of the war.
Neither is making bad design choices that have a major negative impact on everyone who isn’t in a major bloc.
Forever? No, obviously not. But it also shouldn’t be possible for the Mongols to sleepwalk through an assault. And yeah, what we’re arguing for is unrealistic. But it has to be, because if it’s not, you know what ends?
Content.
If the small groups can’t eke out an existence in the shadows of the blocs, then all of null and lowsec will quickly solidify into static borders, where the local power can only be opposed by the next great power. Because that’s how people work. Periods of instability and conflict don’t last. They show up as the punctuation at the end of civilizations’ sentences, before the next civilization rises to impose order.
Which would make for a far more boring-ass game than the one you’re complaining about.
No, the only reason we won the war is their leaders were incompetent. I’ll be happy to sit down with you sometime and go over all of the ways we should have lost, if you’d like.
Again, yes, citadels need fixing. But the fixing they need isn’t tweaking some numbers or twisting some knobs. They need to actually get overhauled, just like supercapitals do. They need to be looked at in light of a clear, honest assessment of ‘what are these things actually for?’ and that assessment needs to be communicated to the company’s customers. And that needs to happen before changes are made, so those customers can assess how their consumer habits need to respond.
Edit: I’ll even take that a little farther: that assessment needs to get communicated to the customers before the changes are discussed, so that the discussion that can take feedback about the assessment into account. No surprises. No fait accomplis.
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Amen to this. Titan’s aren’t special anymore. It’s about time they were treated as such.
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It’s more boring and tedious for everybody. Is there ANYBODY arguing that current citadel mechanics are making the game more fun for them? The only person who has fun in this current model is the guy sitting in the gunner’s seat. Do we really want to design the game so that it benefits one person at the expense of dozens?
They don’t win - that’s the point. At best, this prolongs the inevitable. The only way that small groups have been able to successfully beat bigger groups is by boring them to death. I would prefer that we figure out a way to make it possible to combat N+1 in a meaningful way, but I will take what CCP can do in a timely fashion, and that’s stuff like this.
I really hate it when you pull the patronizing routine on me. They lost the war because their leaders were incompetent and we had the space and the structures to allow their incompetence to counter their numbers advantage, and we punished them the entire time.
If you’ve got ideas in that regard, I’m happy to pass them on. These changes are a direct result of the FCs pushing for these changes. But I’m not willing to sacrifice good enough in some quixotic attempt at getting to perfect, which seems to be what you’re advocating for.
TIL Telling you the truth is patronizing you.
Huh.
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Maybe in Null this works, but in my experience in low and WH, if a group wants you dead a gunner in a decent fit structure isnt going to stop them.
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That’s what I was saying.
Offering to explain to me how we won the last war like I don’t know was patronizing. I was there, too. I was explaining this to thousands of people weekly for a year or more. Acting like I don’t know how we won is a ridiculous insult.
I certainly have my own ideas for reworks, they aren’t perfect, probably break down entirely at nullbloc scales, but seem, generally, to be a reasonable compromise in my mind. Such changes I’ve passed to devs privately, where able, such as CCP Rattatti, but since you’re asking… and I know the ask was aimed at Arrendis, I’m answering anyway.
Generally speaking, I think tether should be disabled after armor is broken, like service modules being forced offline.
I think it reasonable to balance away from the current missile focused defensive setup, and more toward making them a ‘fleetbase’ design focused on a heavier, more robust fighter setup, with higher damage, slightly lower health than upwell fighters currently have, and making structures formidable at the start of a fight, but able to have a good chunk of their DPS burned away over the course by determined, and prepared attackers. I do know, however, this setup has its own set of considerations, and problems, mainly that, frankly it breaks down the moment tidi is introduced because fighters break with heavy tidi, but probably would work out better for medium and small fights.
I think the defensive capacities need to be rethought heavily, and yeah, ya know what, rait and athanor shouldn’t be able to contest a guy in a dread, but I think an Astrahus should definitely require a prepared committment to burn down, by more than just one person.
I think that some of Arrendis’ points have some merit in regard to adjusting PD as a directional damage reduction, making it a proper munitions intercept setup, though I’d be sad to see it lose the utility of destroying fighters and drones.
These are just what I have off the top of my head, for the record. I’ve talked at length about this with various friends in different sized groups, from Bloc level, to more around my own small scale, and most agree it could be a better system, if done right.
i posted my idea dont forget to pass it down
So they don’t win, because the only way they win is… you know… win. Is it possible for them to achieve their objective, or not?
This isn’t even a stopgap. This is spackling over a ticking bomb. It hides the problem, and tries to pretend it’s solved. Meanwhile, you’ll have people just throw up their hands and walk away from the game, just like they always do when CCP rams something down their throats despite being told ‘please, no, you’re gonna ruin my game experience’. You don’t fix a thing by distracting some people with a slightly easier time and telling everyone else ‘yeaaaah, uhm… you guys are just boned. Have fun being screwed!’
more fun than…? Because if the question is ‘is there ANYBODY arguing that current citadel mechanics are making the game more fun for them than this?’ then I’m gonna just point to @kenrailae and @Lauralite_Anne_Brezia and say 'uhm… yeah, clearly there is, and maybe, Mr. Player Representative, you should talk to those players about their concerns before telling them that you know better about their situation and playstyle than they do.
Dude, if the EVE ecosystem were functioning properly, the big blocs wouldn’t even be 1/10th of the population of the game. You don’t get the game healtyh by screwing people over and creating the impression of ‘join the Borg or don’t bother playing’.
The big blocs have an inordinate amount of relative military power. The game should be balanced in a way that gives us an equally disproportionate share of the inconvenience. To take the ‘money in the bank’ analogy one step further: reffing the structure is money in the bank. Balancing the structure is taxes, and you don’t put the burden of you tax system on the people who are already benefitting from the system the least. Great power, great responsibility, to those whom much is given, 90% marginal top bracket under Eisenhower in the greatest economic boom history had ever seen, blah blah blah, any of this ring any bells?
I’m not patronizing you, man. No, it wasn’t the space and the structures. That would not have been a sufficient counter if they hadn’t made one major mistake after another.
TIL you’re not the regular line member you keep insisting you are?
Good enough for whom, though? That’s the issue. Hell, you say ‘the FCs wanted these changes’. Which FCs? Bloc-level FCs? Did you talk to any smaller-group FCs, the people who’ve had to defend structures against Snuff or Dock Workers?
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The inability of the server to host PAPI’s numbers advantage ended some of the fights. But the problem there is the structure being the centerpiece where everyone wants to be. Sov mechanics distribute players with the node spawns. I read the fozzisov whine, but it does what seems a necessary job: distributing players so the servers can handle it. It also gives rise to the need for multiple FC’s, fleets.
Small groups don’t have that ability; perhaps structure defenses should work differently, depending on their system security bands.
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So it’s good enough for you to have the option and space and manpower to wait however long it takes for the rest of the galaxy to get bored, fall apart, whatever, but when people ask you to stop advocating for removing tools that allow them to dig in and be difficult and drag out getting wiped out of their space, suddenly it’s annoying and bad gameplay and it has to go.
God help me, I never thought I’d give Mr Epeen credit for anything, but holy cow if you’re not giving his slagging you at every corner some credence. Jeebus Brisc.
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I feel like I’m the only one who remembers what it was like living out of a POS pre-citadels as a small industrial nerd in a highsec corp of just a handful of people. For comparison sake a large POS tower could have anchored on it guns(of multiple sizes), EWAR, Shield hardeners, Scramblers, Neuts. And manufacturing arrays, research arrays, ore processing and ship arrays. All in all it cost several billion isk to setup, more than an Astrahaus - less than a Fortizar. You made choices about what you onlined as a group vs what you were doing at the time or who you were fighting.
The POS could be manned and you could choose what thing you(or multiple of you if you had the skills trained between friends) were gunning. If you weren’t there, the damn thing attempted to gun itself based on standings/wars, albeit using RNG as to what modules were firing but one dude in a stealth bomber or coercer was going to get nuked eventually. I probably have 30 corp killmails from the fly zapper we had setup in a wormhole of just t1 exploration frigates that got nosey and warped to the POS, and it did it unmanned.
Get wardec’d by some random highsec trade route campers looking for easy kills and they try to shoot your POS? Well you’ve gotta be there but with 1 or 2 people manning the POS guns VS their 3 or 4 sniping battleships and 2 logi they typically don’t hang around when even a medium sized POS guns(large ammo), and ewar or neuts get trained on them. A POS had the ability to deter the lazy kill farming trolls. No amount of being active in the gunner seat of a Raitaru or Athanor will have the same effect, regardless of its fit.
While I appreciate that a group of FCs have opinions about how boring and unrewarding fighting against citadels is I still don’t agree that they should be made weaker, no need to link it again. From the perspective of a small group of nerds who has played this game for a decade and a half - citadels have been an underwhelming replacement for what I feel like we’ve lost. Citadels are underpowered to deal with threats of similar size compared to what our options are in the citadel world we live.
Their inability to defend themselves from even a small group of active players or 3 AFK nerds at zero in leshaks and 2 guardians is tragic. Getting a Medium sized citadel that can do 1/10th of what you could do previously with a single POS for nearly the same Isk outlay is the opposite of thoughtful, immersive or engaging gameplay. There is nothing aspirational feeling left after you slowly watch your Raitaru/Athanor get killed by 4 dudes in RR cruisers after experiencing Eve pre-citadels.
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of things I think should be changed about Citadels, but making them weaker is not going to help anybody except the lazy folk who want to be able to kill them with even less risk/stuff on grid. Nullsec blocks don’t need this, they already have an overwhelming number of people to sit and press F1 while being completely unconcerned about the structures ability to defend itself, who only wake up when an opposing fleet is on grid. Nobody is concerned about the structure effecting the outcome of that fight(with the exception of the untethered capitals wanting the PDS to clear the bubbles so they can run away).
POS’s used more fuel, and required starbase charters(an isk and LP sink)
You could only have a limited number of them in a system(one per moon)
Asset Safety wasn’t a thing, everything you put in it was at risk
Singular reinforcement timer(meaning less time farting around if you actually wanted the thing to die)
Change that stuff - don’t make them weaker - Make them cost 3x-4x what they cost now, fix the proliferation problem(where, what size and how many can be anchored), the forever asset safety problem but make them bloody the nose of the trolls, people looking for an uncontested bash and the lazy just looking for an easy killmail and core drop. Because being cheap to make or run and easy AFK killmails for the bottom feeders/trolls doesn’t have to be part of the design/path.
Sorry this is already too long - Brisc and the FCs who signed that citadel reddit post - while I appreciate you and the work you do in nullsec I disagree with these solutions to the proposed problems.
Make people buy asset safety insurance, 10% the value of their docked assets per month to get a 50/50 shot at asset safety, the other 50% of their stuff drops when it explodes. They go AFK, let it be an auto-paid bill like the other stuff you can setup to autopay itself. It goes into Asset Safety? The station that receives it charges them for holding it every month, another thing that you can set to autopay… You go AFK for long enough you run out of money? The NPC station auctions your stuff off a % at a time, per month till it’s gone.
Sorry again for the length, been playing since the late 2000’s and have a lot of feelings/thoughts.
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I cannot overstate how many of Eve’s issues would be solved if people had to JUST pay for storing and upkeeping their ships and gear, much less going even so far as buying asset safety insurance. You want to fix N+1? That’s how you do it. Put space restraints on citadels, and charge people for storing stuff everywhere.
But yes, the points about POS’s are right on, even if the POS access system was a mess. At this point, I am 150% team bring back POS’s and delete all citadels.
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No point arguing with you guys. You refuse to accept anything I’m suggesting. You are right, I am wrong. The experience of two small gang players should trump every major FC in the game.
I’m just a line member, how dare I have experience and conversations with people that might give me some indication of the problems. We should instead listen to those whose response to literally everything is “you’re doing it wrong” and whose idea of constructive feedback is “do a complete overhaul, but I can’t give you any more detail than that.”
Enjoy your echo chamber. I’m done with it.
If you’ll note @Brisc_Rubal , I gave a potential point of significant overhaul, so kindly take the suggestion to CCP, as you said you’d do.
I also haven’t asked Arrendis to speak for me. The current state of affairs isn’t the most fun for me, but I know that this change would make it even less fun than it already is, for me and mine.
I’m trying to give my legitimate outlook, and not be an ass about it, even if I personally disagree with the stance you have.
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If this is going to be your response to some people saying ‘Hey, woah, this is a concern’ then step down from the CSM, and don’t run again. This is childish, Brisc. Literally nobody said structures were perfect don’t change them, they’re fantastic. What people have pointed out is this change runs a very serious concern of disproportionally affecting a playstyle, and your response to that is ‘But in Gonz, we did this thing, so you should do this thing to, while I advocate for you to NOT be able to do that thing because it’s “Bad Gameplay” for all us CSM and FC people.’
I’ve lost a TON of respect for you today. Multiple suggestions were put forward for other ways the challenges with citadels could be addressed, and your response is ‘No, this is the way because all these 15 minutes of fame FC’s and I say so.’
-signed, former alliance mate
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I’m sorry that me having a different opinion than you is somehow disrespectful. I am doing what I think is the best thing for the most people in the game. If you want to convince me I am wrong, convince me. Make an argument, explain why this is bad and what would be better. I am not immune to being persuaded, but after having Pando, Dark Shines and a dozen other major FCs that everybody knows telling me these issues for three years, and convincing me they correct, I’m not sure why I’m supposed to just say “Oh ■■■■, well, Kenraile says this is bad, so I should ignore all of these other experts and side with him, or he’ll say all the trolls are right and I should resign, and I don’t want that!”
Seriously, stop it.