Siege Green - Structure Updates Now Avaialble for Testing

Feature Previews & Feedback Balance and Mechanics
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448

Upwell Structures and M-Set structures in particular still are not very good analogues for replacement of POS towers let alone “very very close.”

  1. Anchoring and Online times have quite significant differences

    POS Towers take 15 Minutes at the small end and an hour at the Large end to bring online

    Upwell structures (M, L, and XL) Take 15 Minutes + 24 Hours + 15 Minutes, placing their time vulnerable like that of Medium POS Towers, while taking approx 48x longer to provide minimum functionality. To say nothing of volume disparities, risk disparities in minimum functionality, etc

  2. Upwell Structures lack automated defenses or the capacity for multiple gunners on active defense

    While multiple gunners is less of an issue as all weapons can be controlled by a single pilot in an Upwell Structure, the combined firepower capability of the structure is lessened from what it potentially could have been on some POS tower configurations

    These initially were trades for both an additional reinforcement window, easier control over the reinforcement window, and the now gone Invulnerability Schedule. With yet another trade going away, and a significant nerf already occurring a few weeks prior, I’m not sure it’s worth the trade anymore.

  3. POS eHP and Remote Repair vs Minimum Time on Grid to Reinforce / Destroy

    Adding on to defensive Options, POS towers had the option to fit resistances, and receive remote reps, allowing multiple dynamics to fights. While these Remote Repairs were almost all Shield Based, this was another tradeoff of ease of management and onlining for the repair windows, invulnerability, and DPS caps based around requiring a minimum time on field to destroy any single buffer. One buffer losing DPS Cap entirely and another’s buffer having most of its HP removed significantly reduces the amount of time one has to stay on-grid to destroy it, without compensating with additional options to actively engage in the gameplay, as Remote Reps still would not really function with how Upwell Structures are designed to work.

To say nothing of many, many other feature and timer disparities between the two, there are trades and differences that are excellent for Quality of Life and ease of use for Upwell Structures vs POS towers, but I’m unsure if Quality of Life really makes up for the advantages in mechanics that are effectively in place

Examples include ability to degrade combat efficacy of POS towers, ability for a POS to chose something other than Missiles, requirement for an ongoing administrative cost for fueling the POS by having a limited Fuel Bay size

To say nothing of the fact we have nothing from CCP as to what the problem this is intending to fix, and what a balanced place in the ecosystem looks like, by what metrics has this or will this be measured?

The addition of a day to Reinforcement Timers lessens the blow somewhat by giving time to evacuate and gather forces for defense maybe, but it still doesn’t fix the issues being talked about with the proposed Change, nor does it help in understanding why the change is being proposed in the first place.

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449

Then make them cheaper, and make their weapons a metric ton stronger if you want a pos replacement, You can’t have these wet noodle structures that are as easy to kill as a pos, but cost 15 times more at a minimum.

Otherwise, and I know you don’t give a toss about people who can’t show up with infinite money, infinite ships and infinite people, medium structures ONLY use will be the thing you’re trying to stop them being, an annoyance to Sov space.

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450

It is like someone cutting off your arm and giving you your hand back…

Still +/- 1.5 hours is worth a little, not much but…

When I first saw this I came in and said that I expected at some point to be back in hisec sitting in an NPC station and wondering what I should do next in this game. So I have removed ships I don’t really use, reduced my footprint and set up the ISK to cover asset safety and did a few others things that I will not go into. I will stick with this for a bit, because why not…

I asked for the reason for this as the OP posted what I can only define as babble speak, a totally meaningless explanation that you get when speaking to someone high up in civil service. Which is to avoid answering the question rather than answering it…

Someone said to me, they want more destroyed so there can be more loss, maybe that, or is this the role for Dreadnoughts that was promised. Who knows…

What is clear is that it is a very bad move for overall game balance and while initially you would get more destroyed as the change percolates through there will be less to destroy going forward. Anyway, we did try…

Disappointed…, but with the lack of any real reply not unexpected…

And thanks Brisc for listening and discussing.

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451

@CCP_Masterplan
@CCP_Aurora

A POS is cheaper, faster to deploy, doesn’t give attackers a core to loot, can shoot back automatically, has more DPS and better application, has more EHP and passive recharge. And by the looks of it you either don’t plan to or lack the capabilities to remove them.

Why should I use a citadel? :thinking: :thinking: :thinking:

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452

This only helps larger groups (who are the culpritsthat abuse structure spam), and will destroy any small organizations ability to deploy structures.

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453

That’s a nice feedback ! But still hard for small corps whom have IRL specialy with the recent small structurs’defence weapons nerf.

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454

What about highsec? It is one of the most negatively affected parts with the changes and where medium structures are not a problem. It leaves for no time to organize any help for defences

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455

You know the minute you get war decked that you need to start preparing. High sec gets far more notice in that regard than anybody else.

456

I remember you wanting a direct example of an armor timer fight a bit back, and recently one was presented in a non-opsec requiring fashion, so here you are @Brisc_Rubal

The additional context here, is that SPD, I-RED, and CalMil and friends fought off the cerberus fleet, timer ticked over, Cruisers Crew escalated to caps to try and tap off the renewed shields, and DeepWater third partied the caps.

Fights of this sort are about to become much less common.

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457

As shown above, small groups depend on the armor timer to defend their structures and its not our fault nullbloc fcs are lazy. Finals are not defensible for small groups.

Another Armor Timer that was successfully defended: Battle Report Tool

Here we have a final timer Battle Report Tool, the only time nullbloc FCs will join a fight is if they can promise their members a dank structure killmail.

CCP need to stop listening to Reddit whiners.

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458

Except that with the proposed changes, there is no time to get allies involved or coordinate with them. There are a lot of groups in HS with only 1 structure. So that automaticly is a war hq. As large structures are more costly and a bigger payday for attackers, they go for a medium structure. With the changes they will have the armor timer on the 1st opportunity after 24 hours have passed when the shield is gone. So a war that goes active on a friday means a dead structure before sunday is over.

This has been considered to little time for wormhole space yet it is considered fine for highsec? Not to mention that CONCORD will blap anyone not legally involved. So you need to get allies involved and coordinate with them in a super narrow window.

459

Based on what feedback? You adressed not a single point that was made by the overwhelming majority of the posters.

Here is the feedback from this topic in a very condensed form:

  • this change will significantly reduce the chances of any small corp to defend agains any bigger attacker. It helps the blob, it hurts any newcomers.

  • your “solution” does not help anything in that matter.

Here are some questions you might want to answer to elaborate your decision (assuming you have really read some of the feedback in this topic):

Please explain to us “little guys” why it is intentional that the reinforcement for a small corp’s heart of operations shall be that easy that it can be done without even using any kind of serious force? Basically by any bored roaming gang without even the need of a well-thought fleet-concept or anything?

Please explain to us “little guys” why it betters the game to incredibly reward the attacker with low buffers, less timers and almost completely useless weapon systems on these structures and a guaranteed core to drop as loot? An attacker who already has the benefit to chose a target way below his own capabilities?

Please explain to us “little guys” why this incredibly hurting change for small corps is the “best alternative” despite having so many other options shown in this topic alone.

Thank you for your time.

PS: And even if you must go down your road for reasons not explained yet, why the heck not following KISS and just make it 3.5days for M-structures everywhere? There isn’t even a lore-explaination why Reinforcement should work less efficient in Pochven or WH-Space, it’s just nonsense, artificially implemented to reward lazy attackers.

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460

Bias Nullbloc CSM & Reddit is what they mean.

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461

Perhaps this belongs in a completely different topic, but “big places to live in space” might, itself, be an interesting new area for Eve players of take part in.

If you welded to together a few Bowheads, Fenrirs, Vindicators, and 100 Mammoths, used their high, mid, low slots for “habitation, industrial, defense, strategic” modules, you’d have some interesting highly varied structures. Think of the many ways you can build a T3 Cruiser. This might open up whole new vistas of “structure” game play.

And it NEEDS to start with the Minmatar, ok. THEY are the tinkerers. OK!

New class of modules: Adhoc Structure Adaptation Fittings.

BTW. When you look at some of the NPC stations you can’t help but notice they look like BIG ships with stuff welded on. Some of them look like you could light off a propulsion system and start moving.

462

Sure there is. You’ve got 4.5 days. That’s longer than every other area of space. And, like I said, you know as soon as you’re war decked your stuff is at risk.

If you can’t defend your stuff in high sec, don’t have it. I and others busted our asses to get war decs fixed specifically to ensure that smaller high sec groups wouldn’t be griefed out of the game by war deccers. If you can’t defend a structure, there are literally dozens and dozens of places in highsec to live out of.

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463

Reduce unanchor times of Medium structures to 1 day or less. I cant imagine groups with a 100 medium structures that they’d even bother unanchoring them.

I can put up a tower, set it up, WIN a battle, and drop it again between the time period of lunch and dinner

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464

Sort of?

I mean, you don’t know when the timer will be until it’s hit, so that shaves off the 24h notice from the wardec.

Then you need time to get your friends to come in as defenders on a highsec war, which can take some time.

But that’s not all… no no.

Here’s a hypothetical…

You’ve got a small corp that’s basically you and half dozen friends you know RL that you came to EVE with. You have an Athanor in middle bumfukkistan because nobody really gives a crap about highsec moons 50 billion gates from a market hub, and hey, it makes you enough money to do stuff and let you and your friends relax and enjoy some goo-mining on the first weekend of the month. It’s the only structure you guys have, cuz hey, who can afford to be all spendy with a structure you don’t need? Anyway, it’s highsec. It’s the low-effort part of space. It’s the place where you don’t need to be superOMGalert to reds or watch out for new wormholes spawning… it’s freakin’ highsec, and you guys are pretty damn casual.

Recently, something happened. A Good Thing™. Really. Maybe someone got married. Maybe they had a kid. Maybe they got a promotion. Maybe they just had a freakin’ backyard get together because the weather’s nice. So, you left the house mid-afternoon on Sunday, came home, went to bed, and then got up the next day and go to work. You’ve got a 90-minute commute, because screw the goddamned Long Island Expressway (or local regional variation of 100-mile 6-lane parking lot). Work starts at 8, you’re out 5, because you get an hour lunch, but that crap ain’t paid, and the Man wants his 8 hours. So, you get home from work just before 7, get some dinner, and sit down to play some EVE Online.

Hey, did you know that around 4:30pm local time the day before, you got wardec’d? Yeah, your shields are already gone. Now, because you guys are mostly active around 8-10pm your time, that’s when you set the timer: 9pm, right in the middle.

Congratulations, your Athanor’s only timer comes out at 7:30pm on Tuesday. Because you guys only have the 1 structure. So it’s your War HQ. So it comes out at the first available window more than 24h after it got hit. Which is the day after it got hit.

So, you call in friends and friends of friends, allies, though you’re not all in the same alliance. You get on the horn to a bunch of people in a discord all of your groups share, and start leaving messages, because not everyone’s around right then. And you start moving things out to an NPC station. You leave messages for your corpmates to evac, too. Eventually, you go to bed.

The next morning, you need to get up early. So you can login to EVE to check to see who’s been able to get buttons pushed. If you’re lucky, your friends have already done the ‘offer to join as a defender’ If not… well, screw you, hippie, you gotta go to work.

During the day, you can’t really play EVE at work. But you kinda… sneak it in, on your laptop, during a late lunch at 3pm. Because at 3:45, it’s too late. It takes 4h for any allies to be able to shoot at the attackers after you push the button to accept their aid.

Nobody has any idea what kind of numbers will turn up, because nobody’s had time to talk to their guys. Nobody has any ability to coordinate, because people are at work. You can’t even doublecheck to make sure you’ve got ammo in the structure, because stuck at freakin’ work.

Oh, and there’s a car accident on the way home that has the highway backed up even worse. Not horrible, as traffic jams go, but it definitely sucks.

It also sucks to have completely missed your own structure defense, and because you didn’t show, none of your corpmates had a clue how to handle things, and your allies got annoyed that you bailed on your own timer. Good luck getting their help next time.

4.5 days though, right? Or, you know, one frantic evening of scrambling to try to salvage something… but hey, I guess having a life and a job that doesn’t let you play EVE at work means you don’t deserve to be able to mine a moon in a highly in-demand system like Jorus, with its 126 whole jumps in the last 24h. Go back to WoW, casual.

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465

All of this stuff can happen now. Real life can always get in the way of the game, and there’s no way (or reason) for CCP to balance the game around all the what-ifs that can happen in somebody’s life. Again, highsec gets more time than anywhere else for their structures. If those guys don’t think they can defend their structures, they shouldn’t have them. This isn’t WHs or Nullsec where you have to have citadels to exist.

466

But right now, there’s a second timer. That in and of itself mitigates the ‘RL got in the way’ risks, and gives people the time to potentially get friends together to defend their structures. That’s one of the big reasons CCP gave for having a second timer. The idea was that you couldn’t get through the whole ‘Lost our home’ without at least 1 weekend.

Hell, it’s why you used to be able to set the day for your hull timer, so you could at least make sure your people would be able to get online.

But in the end, none of this discussion matters, because we can’t give good feedback about a proposed solution for a problem when we don’t know what the problem is. CCP still haven’t actually told us what problem they’re trying to fix beyond ‘a balanced place in the ecosystem’, how medium structures are unbalanced beyond ‘FCs complained on reddit’, or what a balanced spot even looks like.

And every day they can’t or won’t articulate what they actual problem they’re trying to solve is, the more this looks like ‘bloc FCs bitched and we want to make sure they tell their fleet members to be happy’-style flailing to quiet an increasingly disgruntled customer base.

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467

What do you think happens if they explain to you (beyond what was already explained) what the problem is? Here’s what happens: 1) People argue that whatever the problem is really isn’t a problem; 2) Each area of space then expounds on why the problem isn’t a problem in their space, but is somewhere else; 3) Everybody starts trying to redesign the game to solve the problem without knowing CCP’s resources or how difficult the their solution will be and 4) Everybody is still mad and still saying don’t change anything.

So maybe that’s why they’re not explaining what they already explained.