Is it really to address structure spam? If so, why not simply have an exponential fuel cost applied for every additional medium structure in a system (excuding buildings like ansiblexes, cyno beacons, etc). It rewards people that were there first – incentivizing long-term residents – and makes it cost prohibitive for smaller groups to operate in crowded environments. The economic negative feedback loop self-regulates.
For example (with completely arbitrary numbers):
First medium structure in system: 1.0x multiplier to fuel costs
2nd medium structure in system: 1.2x multiplier to fuel costs
3rd medium structure in system: 1.8x multiplier to fuel costs
4th medium structure in system: 2.5x multiplier to fuel costs
etc
The fuel queue shifts as structures are blown up. If the 1st medium structure in system gets blown up, the 2nd now gets moved up to be the 1st and has its fuel costs lowered. Hooray, the newer residents get rewarded for staying there long term now. This provides economic incentive for attackers whose goal is to inhabit the space they are attacking without providing additional incentives for “let’s just grief smaller corps’ medium structures” (the status quo remains).
If you’re a small group in a lone system, things carry on as normal. If you’re the group with the 2nd medium structure in system, you have incentive to blow up the group of whoever owns the 1st medium structure.
Nullsec might care a little bit but typically has the scale to address these higher costs, while smaller groups don’t, which disincentivizes structure spam and incentivizes small groups spreading out, without adding more incentives for bigger groups to blow up smaller groups’ medium structures “just because we can and its easier” (they still can for the existing reasons – just no new reasons are introduced).
For WH space, I can’t comment (I have no experience) so this idea might suit them terribly as well.
Why would you add fuels costs on Athanors for example, they are there to pull moon goo to field to be mined. Maybe just allow one single moon grabber structure that pulls from every moon then?
Maybe another great step is to enable the indy structures to do everything in one structure? Radical idea that…
My suggestion is just that: merely an illustrative example. Feel free to adjust it as you see fit. Exclude Athanors, whatever else. My only point is that the goal is unclear, and just reading the temperature of the room it sounds like the goal is “reduce structure spam” and I just wanted to provide an illustrative example on how there’s other ways to achieve that without mucking about reinforcement timers, which seems disproportionately hostile to small group gameplay.
I acknowledge I don’t understand what the stated goal of this change is. If it is the same as the past change, it is:
Which, TBH, I don’t follow the logic how the proposed timer changes for medium structures address “on-grid ship variety” at all.
I don’t think CCP is doing this because of structure spam, not from what I can make out. As far as I can see they don’t like medium structures as a class because they are unable to balance them properly. Which seems a bit weak.
The changes in the previous structure adjustment was purely to give dreads a role in my opinion, as Astrahus bashers, I guess this could be the same thing here. We all know that CCP said they would find a role for dreads?
It is so sad to see that someone in your position does not even understand the everyday game experience of smaller groups. I seriously doubt that trying to explain what I already said to you is of any value because you simply cannot understand it.
The “amount of times” we saved a medium structure is completely irrelevant because as a small group our intention is to be as invisible as possible, to be as unattractive as a target as possible and if attacked grant as little benefit to any attacker as possible. Because if you do, you will be attacked again and again and again. And we have been successful in doing so this far.
But u know what? The 3-timers-structure-grind is a BIG part in that success because only a very few people are bored enough to get a 30-man fleet into our boring hole for a whole week just to get a 600m Core in the end. Not knowing if they would even get it because at the second timer (Armor) they will have to show their force when we are online and have the Astra manned and a few HACs with Guardians in front of it. They can’t come with some crap-alts then, but they have to bring their main force, at least a good part of it. And that means they are revealed and we can pass that info to some allies, asking them if they want to come to the final fight (Structure). If not, okay, we need to evac then. But if yes, we have at least a CHANCE to survive.
With removing one timer this CHANCE is gone. Completely. Our shilelds will be shot down by some anonymous NPC-Corp-BCs while we are offline and when we do log in and have a date for the now “last” timer, what shall we do but evac? Do you expect us to prepare for a “fight” just to give the 20 Ikitursas+10 Guardians that may come even more Kills and Loot? We don’t even have the pilots for that any more because everonye needs to sit in a hauler/freighter and log off valuable ■■■■.
Shall we call for help? What do we tell our bigger friends? “Hey, look, 3 Drakes of some NPC corp shot our shields down, do you want to come with 30 People for our timer?”. Do you really think we can find anyone willing to mobilize a potent PvP-Fleet and roll into our chain and scout and waste a whole evening for us if we can’t even tell them who the attacker is and what to expect? They will just shrug and tell us to evac.
Currently there is CONTENT generated TWO TIMES. First time at the Armor Timer when we can try a first defense on our own. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. But even if we lose that fight, we don’t lose EVERYTHING we own. Just the ships maybe, but we get valuable intel out of it.
And even if we lose, there is the chance of a second time CONTENT, if we can manage to get some allies by giving them name and numbers of the attacker so they can evaluate if they want to fight them or not.
With this change you remove BOTH FIGHTS. We can’t fight at the first timer because we already need to be in complete evac mode and have all and every member available get into Cargo ships logging out assets. We can’t wait with that until after a battle because they will kill the structure very fast and the system will be swarmed with combatprobes and interceptors and interdictors so not one of our freighters will make it to a safespot and survive the 30second logoff.
No problem, there never was hope anyway. My post is merely an expression of sadness about the way this game goes.
Just go on pushing for more changes that benefit the blobs crushing everything in their way with as little inconvenience as possible. There isn’t even a problem that needs fixing, but who really cares? M Structures are just garbage assets of the lower classes on the silk carpets of the big blocs, an annoyance for the powerful, they need to be removed swiftly if the masters say so…
See, this is a perfect example of why I get frustrated. You claim that I can’t possibly understand your perspective, and then you write something like this that demonstrates you don’t understand my perspective. You claim there is no problem, when there is and has been, and you can ask anybody in nullsec about it and they’ll explain it to you. Then you throw in the typical whining about big groups, as if the majority of players in the game aren’t in big groups.
Sorry, I’m not going to advocate for something that benefits 100 people at the expense of 100,000. If that’s what you were hoping I was going to do, you’re talking to the wrong CSM. But hey, I guess I’m the only one here. What a shame.
Brisc, we all get upset with how these forums are, hell I have people chasing after me accusing me of all sorts of isms, and I know you get a hard time too. But look at the content that they are talking about. That is a pretty damn good overview of why this is a bad decision.
You did say in the previous thread on the last structure changes that this was something that the Bloc FC’s you were in contact a lot with wanted those changes and you mentioned that it was a drag, so that is the reason why you and them are in favour of it. You could get upset with me because I rather like the pain in the butt drag side of it as it adds to our defence, feel free to say that, I can take it.
I think this is a done deal, that CCP have not bothered to reply at all makes it pretty evident. I am not at all sure what is their reasoning, it makes no sense at all to me, I even went back and tried to work it out from the first post, but it makes no sense?
I guess you haven’t seen structure spam used as a strategy then?
While I do think the introduction of cores made this strategy less effective (as it requires defenders to put some stakes in the fight in order to get access to reinforcement timers), I still remember seeing the dozens of Raitarus spammed in the UX3-N2 constellation in Catch when Brave fought Simple Farmers (using ‘UX3-N2 holdings’ as their structure holding corp) there in 2020. Some zkillboard searches will confirm it.
To be fair, I do not know more recent examples of structure spam at that scale, but structure spam as a strategy is definitely not imaginary.
False, I have plenty of ships that cost more than most athanors and astrahuses.
Exactly, it is a group loss. Much easier to hand a group loss than a solo loss. An athanor/astrahus is not that expensive and can easily be replaced by any small group or really any group that cares.
Eh, that’s a little off. You’ve got an environment where things are extremely competitive, and it was very well-understood by everyone (except, apparently, CCP) that players would always push every possible offensive and defensive advantage literally as far as they could until the system broke… because that’s what they were already doing, and had been doing for almost a decade at that point.
In that kind of environment, if the developers don’t want players to do exactly what the players have demonstrated they’ll do… yeah, a fair degree of ‘and look what happened’ is on the devs. Just like it is every time there’s a raft of changes and null says ‘please don’t do this. If you do this, we will do X because we’re in an arms race and will have to do X to remain competitive. But X will be terrible for the game, long-term. Please do not put us in a position where we have to do X.’
Are players responsible for their own actions? Of course… but their actions are a response to the environment they’re in.
But there would be a loss of options for players, and more of the ever-increasing homogenization that has been smothering EVE for years. How long before there’s One True Way™ to play EVE? More and more, I find myself in agreement w/@Elsebeth_Rhiannon : ‘content’ is a dirty word. It’s taken the idea of players engaging with the game in hundreds of interesting ways and replaced it with this same-y pablum of meaningless, instant-gratification ‘let’s shoot at someone’ crap.
If I wanted to play a game of vapid and shallow pvp, I’d go play League w/Asher. Or any one of a hundred button-mashers that do pvp better. I like EVE for its depth, and because the fights, at their best, are meaningful.
But now we’re entering an age of ‘structures blow up if you sneeze at them!’ and ‘Need a new ship? Toss a coin to your Developer, and get one right out of the Pack!’ and frankly… what’s the frikkin point of playing that game? Why bother with that shallow, ephemeral dross?
How long before we’re all just logging into thunderdome for some quick 15 v 15 matches with the release of the ‘World of Drakes’ patch?
Aehm. You know it isn’t about the goddamn Astrahus but all the stuff you need there to live as a corp in a wormhole? You need like 5-10 different ships per member, be it mining, gas-harvesting, scanning, rolling, fighting, ratting.
In addition you need LOTS of fitting modules, charges, ammo in huge chunks because you don’t know when to get access to a market station in K-space. Containers, Capsticks, Minerals, Fuelblocks whatever…
You have industry, reaction and PI stuff stored there for a dozen people or more. you can’t fly everything out and in every day because sometimes the chain is camped or - how can you - you have no time for eve for a few days.
Its not like this station is empty. If it was, nobody would care for that loss.
If you lose your Astra as small WH corp you basically lose your HOME, including all industry jobs, materials stored there and whatnot. That could be billions worth of ISK per member. And you have to evacuate all that stuff or trash whatever you cannot evacuate so the attacker doesn’t get any loot - because if he does, he might just come back next month.
I have 7 Simple Farmer Astrahus on my killboard from 2017 and 2018, and the mechanics were much more in their favour. As soon as the changes were put in place to make them more vulnerable they dropped even more structures, the spam became greater with the increased vulnerability. I am not sure what they are doing with the cores now, but I am guessing they can’t do what they were doing at this point, but the drops they got were such maybe they still can?
Don’t assume that because they’re not posting that they’re not reading. CCP doesn’t tend to engage in debate amongst players. They leave that to us. I think what she wrote was self-evident.
First off, no where did I mention WH’s. I am talking in general.
Secondly, wormholes are dangerous. They are more risk than any other portion of the game. Are these changes going to ■■■■ over wormholes? Absolutely. It caters to large groups who can just turbo stomp smaller groups. Am I okay with this? I don’t know. I have mixed feelings about it as I do want the small fry to be able to thrive, but at the same time, it shouldn’t be “easy,” which it isn’t already but again, that is the point of wormhole living.