Siege Green - Structure Updates Now Avaialble for Testing

Feature Previews & Feedback Balance and Mechanics
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I have just recently started reading through this tread. So far interesting comments. But one item I am missing is what issue is attempting to be fixed?

I see referenced to structure spam, whatever that is, and that is about it. Where is structure spam? And where is it causing issues?

What we have in this game is very similar to World War I or whatever it is called in the various parts of the world. Huge trench systems have evolved. Two major power blocks in Null and a large number of smaller blocks that align themselves to suit their needs at the moment. You have probes launched to search for weak spots in the large trench systems looking for a breakthrough that will “End war for all time”.

You have the “frontier” space, wormhole, that has to fight off the “savages” of the Old American West. They build a village and fortify it against the savages to exploit the wealth of the system. They build with the resourced that they imported hoping to build a better life for their family and friends.

You have High Sec with the police force handy and on call for almost any emergency. You found your small business and hope that it will grow in this Switzerland of space. Hoping you too can become the next Nestle.

But the Great Powers rule most of the map board. Carrying out nightly raids on the other trench system looking for a weakness to exploit. Or in the rare cases actually causing a breakthrough but they can’t quite get to Paris before the next trench system is constructed and (insert bad guy name here) are stopped.

I keep hearing “Space is dangerous”. But I don’t want to play in that world. It is too much like (insert dangerous neighborhood here). I would not like to live there. I want to mine in peace and research my BP collection and sell the items that other folks use somewhere in that bad neighborhood and count my isk and 



If this game were truly dangerous why would someone even start to play. The older players should just hang off the new player stations and blow the new players away when they start on the first day and teach them to stay the heck away from that game.

But we don’t. We want the new player. We want the new player to get hooked on the game and keep coming back for whatever it is they are looking for. We want them to build structures that they can call home and have some sense of security. To branch off their small group that they have managed to gather, as discussed in the latest video extolling the virtues of this game by CCP, and accomplish some goal that they have set for themselves. It might be in HS, LS, WH, or Null.

CCP has forced the creation of multiple stations. To mine a moon, I need to have an Athanor. To mine two moons, I need yet another. To react the moon material, I need one type of station. The build the next in the chain, I need another type of station. To build with the material something even grander, I need yet a third. So now I am a small/medium sized corporation in NS that 10 or more structures just so I can build T2 battleships. And my corporation can now lose it all because we are in the same time zone and one of the slightly larger groups have noticed us and want to kick over that anthill because they can.

So, my small group is left with a decision. Do we group or just say forget it, I have had enough of this “fun” and go and do something like have a real life.

But all of this comes back to, What is trying to be fixed with this change? This does nothing to fix the complex situation that every long term player of the game has faced and “overcome” when starting the game. It does not make it easier to start this game. In many respects it does give a push to those that are just tired of the constant changes to how they “make a living” in the game to walk away. Similar to all the changes over the past few years to farming, excuse me, mining and building. I have seen many long term players throw in the towel and walk away. It takes a great deal of work to replace that one long term player with another.

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429

You make a great point and have made it better than I could hope. I am one of those small beginning players starting eek my existence from the stars. Every change seems to move any of my goals just a little farther out of reach, whether it be higher costs, changes to skill trees and changes to mining ships, or making my home just a little less secure.

I will keep adapting and moving as needed to survive.

It seems like the real life that Eve seems to mirror so well, The Biggest Corporations change the rules to the game when the little guy gets a start on some success. It is sad that with so much wealth and opportunity the rules need to be changed all the time to stop the inconvenience of a third trip to a station to finish it off. It is a game of counter and response.

If I understand the Station spam problem correctly, it seems to be a game of counter and response. A Corp figures the price of surviving is more stations than you can blow up in a day, so they pay the price of survival. Now the Large blocs want to be able to take those stations out in two trips instead of three, so they pressure CCP to change the Stations to make them easier to blow up and avoid the waste of time because no one shows up to defend against overwhelming odds.

Oh well just another brick in the road.

One thing I haven’t seen mentioned, it the logistics of moving a large structure into wormhole space. It is impossible to get a large structure into a C1 unless you build it there. And even if you build it, you can’t deploy it because you can’t get a ship with a large enough cargo hold through a medium size wormhole. In the C2-C4’s it isn’t as difficult provided your group is large enough to afford and fly an Orca Cargo vessel. You could build a freighter in the system but then how do you get it out. You can’t repackage a freighter small enough to move. I know though, these are small details, and I shouldn’t complain because as it has already been pointed out a thousand times, If you can’t defend it, you shouldn’t have it.

Thanks for those of you that read this far into the thread. I hope CCP thinks about the removal of the timer before putting it in the game. There are just some places where that change becomes inequitable to a far larger degree than its benefit to those that like the change.

As far as the Shield cap removal, I hope that change gets more dreads for my friends and I to destroy with Condors.

Fly your preferred safety setting!!!

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430

CCP, also from me.
Please do not apply this update to highsec.

I am a solo industrialist. Near my home system are Raitaru and Athanor owned by small corps. I use them to reduce production costs. If don’t use them, I won’t be able to compete with major corps for product prices.

I have never owned a structure before and have never fought to attack or defence it too. So I can’t imagine how this update will change the battle for medium structures. But at least I understand that medium structures are easier to destroy than they are now. I am very afraid that it will delight highsec wardec corps and they will destroy the Raitaru and Athanor I use.

Of course, I understand that medium structures can be destroyed even with current specifications, and we always have to take the risk of happening this if use them. However, nerfing medium structures may significantly reduce free Engineering Complexes and Refineries in highsec space. If this happens, manufacturing bases will be limited and it will be very difficult for solo industrialists to continue their business.

This may be a useless worry, but may become reality. You can test to destroy medium structures with SISI, but won’t know how it will affect life of players unless the update lives at TQ. And when it turns out that it was “overkill”, it’s too late. Not a few players will lose desire for playing EVE. The shock of being destroyed a playstyle is much greater than destroyed a ship.

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431

Another important part, in my opinion, of station balancing which I didn’t see mentioned are the trade cartels some stations and namely the Perimeter keep has created. These things rake in trillions to a handful of people (and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say it’s per day or at worst week). Last time with technetium and the R64s CCP did intervene at a point (I think the justification was the t2 mods prices). At the moment I don’t have the data to assess how much of economical damage is having such % of the Eve ISK transactions fueled through the pockets of what is effectively 3-4 guys who have 0 business or moral obligations towards CCP or Eve.

But hey lets focus on the important things - remove the timers (possibly all) so goons and co can rat in pДаce.

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432

Great post overall !

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If you guys are removing the damage cap for the shields, why don’t you increase shield regen to 5k/sec for medium structures and 15k/sec for large structures? This will prevent a single dude, or a dude with a couple alts from logging in the middle of the night and reffing the structure! So it will force you to bring a force to shoot any of these.

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434

because they have been told that the structures are “already too strong” and “need to be nerfed”. :rofl:

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435

My dude, a single Leshak puts out over 2K DPS without even being fit for damage. If you go full glass cannon and implants it’s almost 4K. Not to mention there are these things called Marauders, the Kronos can put out 3-3.5K DPS easily.

Edit: And I’m not counting drones here, only guns.

436

Well


We’re two weeks on, roughly, without any real sign of an answer to many of the raised questions or concerns, and only really clarifications of the original posting.

This leads me, unfortunately, to the conclusion that yes, small group collateral damage from the changes are indeed acceptable in the general sense, as has usually been the case before.

I’d have preferred an upfront statement of such, instead of this stifling silence.

No. I am not unsubscribing. No, I’m not quitting the game, and no, people can’t have my stuff.

What I am doing however, in light of this, the previous structure changes, and the planned subscription price hikes, is consolidating my accounts down to two, and, well, canceling my plans to ever use mediums for anything meaningful until such time as they are anything other than an entertainingly easy kick over.

@CCP_Aurora @CCP_Zelus , I very much hope that whatever is planned FOR FANFEST related to structures, if anything, is actually good, and not further nerfs. But until then, we shall see what happens I suppose.

P.S.
Tell whoever it was that chose to put the Valkyrie battleship skins back in the NES that it was an excellent choice.

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437

For what it is worth, I built a Rorqual in a C2, and self-destructed it when we moved out.

I think I got something like 700m from the default insurance.

438

I’m not so sure about that, in this specific case.
Usually, changes posted here for “feedback” are more of listed as a “sneak peak” as you say.
But, due to the overall silence from CCP and large negative responses, it looks like this may have been put on hold for a time.
Hopefully for CCP to re-evaluate this perspective on player owned structures, and hopefully to get the nullbloc CSM folks pull their heads out of their rears with their views of “small groups” being a fleet of 100 or so.

In any case, be sure to holler in your corp channels, IRCs, and slack clones such as discord for folks to log into the forums and heart posts reflecting their views!

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439

Then there should be no reason not to do this! since it will be so easy to overcome anyways!

440

That, or it will be released on Fanfest patch day. :joy:

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441

but there is one: It would be far too simple. (
and CCP has been told these structures are already too strong and “need to be nerfed”! :rofl: )

We all know that the KISS rule of designing stuff that people should interact with is nonsense and you have to make things as complicated and unintuitive as possible to sell them as “fancy”, “new” and “creative”.[/irony off]

Just for reference:
A customs office (which should be a step below player-owned-stations) is listed ingame with 10.000.000 shield HP and a passive recharge time of 13h+53min+20sec = 50.000sec). That equals an average shield regen of 200hp/sec, or a peak recharge of 1.000hp/sec at 25% shields. (took the shield regen chart from eve-uni).

Now lets design a KISS way for M Structures:
They are bigger, more expensive and also of more strategic value than POCOs, so they should have more shields. Lets try 25.000.000 at 50% omni resistance.

Oh wait! SO MUCH? Well, thats not even as much as a Dread Guristas Medium POS Tower (30.000.000 + resistances) has. And that thing fires back automatically, can and will be equipped with lots of hardeners, does cost a lot less, does not need a core to operate (and reward enemies with) and consumes less fuel. So yes, 25.000.000 shield for an M-Citadel is absolutely fine and in line with other structures!

Now we look at the KISS rule and assume that a POCO and a Citadel both use Structure Shield Generators, so we set the regen time to 50.000 seconds as well. We end up with 500hp/sec average regen, peaking at 2500hp/sec at 25% shields. Now after 50% resists that pretty much equals 5000ehp/sec passive tank. Voila!

What do we have achieved now?
Whoever wants to attack this citadel has to bring around 10.000 DPS to the table. That equals:

  • 3-4 Leshaks/Marauders or
  • 6-8 Battleships/Tier3 Battlecruiser or
  • 10-12 Battlecruiser or
  • 15+ Cruiser or Bomber

You can try with less, but you will basically shoot a very very long time then as you will hardly overcome the regen. This makes sure an attempt to engage the station has to be at least somewhat serious, in most cases revealing the identity (and with that the capabilities and/or intentions) of the attacker, so the defender has the chance to evaluate his options.

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442

Based on feedback we are going to be increasing the new minimum armor reinforcement durations for Medium-sized structures as follows:

  • Medium structure in Wormhole/Triglavian system: 2.5 days (was going to be 1.5 days)
  • Medium structure in Null-sec system: 3.5 days (was going to be 2.5 days)
  • Medium structure in Low-sec system: 3.5 days (was going to be 2.5 days)

This will give Medium-sized structure owners slightly longer advance notice of a defensive requirement.

Additionally the random jitter time which is applied when picking the reinforcement exit time for Medium structures is being reduced to +/- 1.5 hours - so a potential window of 3 hours (down from +/- 3 hours - a potential window of 6 hours). This will narrow the uncertainty of the exit time for the defenders, making their choice of exit hour more meaningful.

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443

Thanks for the update.

The community still lacks a motivational reason, or goal, of these particular changes. What problem is being addressed, why are medium structures not in a satisfactory position, and what does a satisfactory position in the ecosystem look like?

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444

For years players have said citadels replaced outposts and POS - but neither replaced either one close enough. I personally liked where this was headed as if you remove the fact that POS use stront and M citadels use a digital timer, their RF and kill cycle would be pretty dang close → therefore we would finally have a replacement for POS or very very close - these changes fix the one drawback to the old POS where you could only go a max of 1D 17H without checking on it to see if it was RF’d - you get notifications either way - but the same rule applies - now the time between RF and kill is a bit longer - allows you to find friends get ready etc. but it stilll leans more towards full POS replacement.

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Which still doesn’t answer the questions CCP has refused to answer for 2 weeks now:

What problem does CCP intend this change to fix?
What does ‘a balanced place in the ecosystem’ look like for M structures in CCP’s opinion?

The longer they refuse to answer these questions for themselves, the more it looks like this whole ‘update’ is just ‘ok, ok, shut the hell up and stop whining that you have to do work, FCs’.

And no, this does not make M structures a replacement for POS. POS can defend themselves. POS can have multiple simultaneous gunners. POS could be repaired during the fight, and the timer kited, leading to more tactical options on both sides.

Right now, this is just ‘CCP is dumbing things down to make bloc FCs happier and shut them up already’.

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446

Nor does just increasing the timer window address the very long testimonials of people who actually fight and defend over armor timers. It just makes it a day longer that your entire structure gets streamrolled by a revelation* with 150 feroxes on the other side of a cyno. It’s still the exact same problem, you just get to stare at it for a day longer.

Also, my whole POS set up might cost me a few hundreds mils isk. How much does an Australia house cost again?

How is that at all comparable?

Also, ALSO hilarious that the CSM and CCP’s response is ‘Just blue more people’


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447

450 replies of feedback, this is all you have.

Is there any more coming to add to this?

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