There is an issue with the limited fuel bay though.
Nothing prevents anyone from having 10 milion units of any fuel in their personal hangar, or corporation offices. Which they can just clone jump into the structure, or just instawarp inty go there, or have alpha accounts for each system/constellation, and simply put the fuel from hangar to fuel bay.
Sadly that wouldn’t help, as much as I would love for it to matter.
All of the other debate or options seems irrelevant, because as @Brisc_Rubal mentioned, there is limited amount of dev effort CCP is willing to put into this issue. And since it is already on SISI - that means it has already finished development, and is now “in testing”.
Also, a speculation on my part, but as also Brisc mentioned, it seems that nobody apart from sovnull considers structure spam to be an issue. So I think this whole “nerf” came to be simply by representatives voted in by us, players, representing the majority of the players, e.g. nullsec, have been doing what they are supposed to - represent their voters. And I agree that it is too easy to simply anchor as many Astrahuses as you want, with infinite fuel, provided you have enough isk.
So the voters complained that there is many strucures, and they are unfun and pita to get rid of. There was even some letter by FCs that citadel mechanic sucks and is terrible and needs rework. I don’t think this is what they meant.
IMO this all stems from the fact that “abandoned” state mechanic is incomplete. It only works if the structure is really “abandoned” - which is measured by fuel + active module in it. Considering how cheap it is to fuel Astrahus + clone bay, then you can realistically fuel it for years.
So the structure spam can be also solved in other ways apart for the “limited fuel bay” which can be worked around as I pointed out above.
For example, you could increase the fuel costs for the structure every week depending on decrease in activity - real activity, people using the station, docking in it, any way you can measure “being active”.
The “activity” measurement could take in many inputs that mean people actively live in it, to combat simply 1 alpha char undocking+docking. You can measure things like changes in personal hangars (people doing things with their items), or dock/undock numbers. Online numbers and durations, etc.
Based on this metric, lets say that over the course of 1 month, the fuel cost would increase 10x? Maybe even more, 10x would be roughly 1m ISK per day. I would even make it exponential in time, the longer you are inactive the more fuel it consumes. Up to 50x for example.
This could have lower and upper limit, and its goal would be to increase the fuel demands of really unused stations. Such stations that exist simply to exist and bother other people in the area.
I think it is much better from game design standpoint to simply make these “unused” stations to be more effort to keep fueled and not drop into abandoned state. And since @Brisc_Rubal you mentioned that it shouldn’t be only for M structures, because they would be special. I agree! This mechanic should be for ALL structures. And even more noticeable the larger the structure!
Or you can keep the timers, but structure consumes waaay more fuel while in reinforcement. This would make it much easier to force structure to go into abandoned state, and it might actually be much easier to implement compared to my previous idea. Simple - shoot a structure’s shield, and the initial reinforcement timer will consume 90% of fuel in the fuel bay, or leave enough just for the hull timer, forcing you to login and put more fuel in, somehow.
Much easier to implement IMO, no need to create special metric, track it, have some feedback system on said metric, etc.
Ofcourse it is more effort to implement really, but I don’t understand what is so urgent about the NS structure spam, that this MUST be pushed through at all costs, even if it breaks some parts of the game? What is such a huge time pressure? We developed a feature, its now on testing, so we don’t want to remake it?
Doesn’t that kinda defeat the whole purpose of TESTING environment, where you put things to be tested and had feedback on? I think this whole thread shows some very good points and options. Like my first suggestion with Dreads + weapons.
/rant/
I don’t know, lately it seems to me that CCP is very heavy-handed with ANY change. Year ago it was industry rework, which made faction BS and anything above BS so expensive to buy, that nobody really wants to risk them. Now there are these 2 proposed changes, which follow the same line - industry change is reverted by half because, suprise, it was extremely heavy-handed, and the M structures can now be deleted in 1.5 day. Also kinda heavy handed?
/rant/