A lot of people have been very vocal about the negative sentiments here on the changes being forced through, which I agree with and don’t particularly feel the need to parrot something that’s already been said more eloquently.
What hasn’t been mentioned is the way that these changes are about to disproportionately effect the remaining investment in Pochven and make an area of space and playerbase already in an incredibly disadvantaged region that much harder, particularly with the changes to medium structures. The changes proposed will just make it even more difficult for smaller groups actually interested in the RP and gameplay of Pochven to hold their ground and instead get completely rolled over by nullsec blocks with infinite coffers that can just buy out the largest structures in the region and pull in their 400 man fleets for structure defense at the drop of a hat by filamenting in. The region is already dangerously close to becoming just a space superhighway for the blue donut, and the few groups that have been able to maintain Pochven as its own unique area of space have only been able to hold out by maintaining their modest infrastructure that makes the region viable, most of that being medium sized structures.
Last news we got on Pochven structures was back in July that gave me hope that there was some conversation to be had about reevaluating structures role in Pochven and we haven’t heard any updates or follow-up since. During that time, it’s been a constant uphill battle not only to live in the region but to just keep it from having all the life and flavor sucked out of it by having it become completely inaccessible to anyone not in a nullbloc crabbing fleet staged in their unassailable fortizars. Instead of preventing Pochven from having a monopoly by phasing out structures, its just made null empires the sole people capable of maintaining infrastructure with no real hope of breaking that monopoly on infrastructure thats not locked behind Trig standings (read: completely inaccessible for any form of recruitment. Thus, all things being even, impossible to have any sort of long term investment there.)
This is all without even getting into how it makes Pochven into a nothing-sandwich, were no one is able to take risks or invest in any form of content and engagement beyond crabbing for fear of retaliation and losing their irreplaceable critical infrastructure over any minor infraction. Any actually fun engagement that could have happened between Trig loyalists and EDENCOM loyalists became extremely unfun, toxic, and had a short shelf life when we were dealing with irreplaceable assets and no ability to create new conflict flashpoints once they have been destroyed. I can speak for several people on both sides when I say that the lack of ability to replace assets in Pochven is a leading cause for the lack of content there compared to what it would be if there was some ability to skirmish consistently over structures like you can anywhere else in space.
Here’s my thinking, if the goal of this is really to seperate medium structures into their own “class” while limiting the amount of structures in Pochven then why not create special rules for Pochven that only allow for the deployment of medium structures? This would allow medium structures to act as FOBs within Pochven, flashpoints for conflict, and allow some settlement and foothold in the region while still being a more difficult risk and investment to defend. This would also allow structures without the ability for nullblocs to dominate the region by dropping dozens of Fortizars off every gate and turn it into a massive toll road.
That seems like the most reasonable direction given these changes to medium structures. Is there any thought on implementing something like this in Pochven since the last update in July?