Popping in here to note that according to zKilll there has not been an uptick in medium structures destroyed across highsec in the past 7 days compared to 7 days before that, back a few times. (I encourage other players to keep tracking this – use the advanced search function)
The largest current contributor to structure destruction is the imperium’s small campaign against FI.RE in the south.
I would guess the number of structures destroyed is mainly scaling with how many players are playing Eve Online actively which is down lately a bit, as we all know.
Seems that once again we find that players are conservative & stuck in their ways and game design changes do not have a large effect on their behavior.
I think we need to pay attention to other factors, for example there was already a massive reduction in medium structures in hisec. To be blunt making it easier on a reduced pot of targets was always going to be a bit iffy to say that it proves anything?
As for me, I could refer to the fact that since the change hit my group lost more medium structures in nullsec, however part of that was because they had been reinforced to their final timer and the hull HP was made so small they finished them off in ten minutes flat. I will of course not use these as an example in whether this patch is good or not.
My metric will be how many people are operating in WH space, Lowsec and NPC nullsec after this has properly embedded in with it being made so much easier to get a killmail on medium structures. For example at an abstract level we see Astrahus and Raitaru’s as being utterly useless. An Athanor has to be able to be used at least once to pay for itself on decent moons and twice on poor moons. It is calculations like that which are the real meat in the pie… and totally ignored by CCP!
Nope, not grammar policing, just trying to provide information to someone who seemed to lack it. Gotta remember, most of the people I deal with every day don’t live on my continent.
Then highsec is already orders of magnitude safer. You can’t gank structures. No wardec, no opening fire. So in addition to it being impossible to just troll-ping someone’s structures over and over with no investment until they get tired of defending (because you have to pay to keep the wardec up) the owner gets 24h notice that their structures might get shot.
Yeah. I’m very comfortable with the cloaky-mwd thing, so low sec ain’t so bad. But bubbles and interdictors and Hics are dangerous. Cool, but dangerous.
There’s one little null route segment I routinely have to take to avoid that unforgivable broken highway that Trigsy CCP provided for “fun.” I’ve spent hours getting the bookmarks in place to ensure I can avoid getting caught.
Once again CCP has shown marvelous genius for attacking the real issue of Eve, which is getting new player and retaining new players. Excellence in action!
CCP is in the quandary of whether to use production to expand their current cities (multi-account whales) or use that production to make new Settlers (new players) and expand.
Add mechanics to reward CEO’s of corps for each Omega with less then a year since “birth”. Reward the pushers of the addiction, so to speak. Obviously folks will figure out how to exploit this, but it can only lead to more “younger” characters.
Just wait, the kill mails are coming. My corp just lost 3 medium structures. After the shield was popped our timer was 3 days 6 hours. These changes have been out a week. So you’ll start see it soon.
Starting to see it now, the Coalition I am in has lost quite a few now and the losses are accelerating.
NB. As I expected the thought process is that all medium structures are deemed to be worthless throwaway structures and are not worth defending, this has actually reduced content, not a very smart move by CCP. Still I have to laugh…
What happened with the small upwell structures, and are we ever going to get that solo player base with the modularity, mobility and the ability to cloak, no mobile depots don’t count. That was mentioned way before upwells were a thing? CCP has a bad habit of forcing people to play together or requiring a group of people just to do something that could be done entirely with one person. to use structures you have to corp up or with any new feature ore compression for example multiboxing shouldn’t have to be a thing to do that for those of us that just want to solo efficiently we are completely ignored. Oh and where are we on the whole walking in stations/ships and captain’s quarters (I loved that feature really raised immersion.)
This is another example of the Korean company slowly killing game we loved way was!! Now with this structure thing you force people wake up middle night if able defend People do have real life you realize It not going To make better what trying do If anything you gonna loose people because it just not worth the isk and time even put up a structure there nothing wrong with timers as is it fair and not like do not get destroyed in current way have,Reason a lot people play so long is have plan coordinate these things brings groups together now small fleet can destroy structure with changes are suggesting. This will not improve game or your plex income if make it pay win then all these years as a great game will slowly be gone all ready many left because of dumb ■■■■ ideas you all doing now more frequently aka interdiction loss on interceptors t3 was dumb as example interceptors and t3 nullified were always able be caught with right setup and a good ping was know need for that change either like one with structures does not need change either. If want kill game slowly just take it off line now eventually it will die anyways because dumb changes and listening too certain csm members who only benefit from these changes/large alliances
Many Athanors and Raitaru have been destroyed since this patch was released. Most of the places where they were destroyed are High-sec, then J-Space and Low-sec, and don’t seem to increase that much in Null-sec.
Congratulations to those who represented Null in CSM16. Your last job was a great success. Now, Null-sec manufacturers are making big profits as High-sec manufacturers have lost their competitiveness significantly.
CCP, this situation is what you wanted with this patch, right?
So, funny thing you mentioned this. I decided to put my IT skills to use, and I created a quick n dirty Golang tool to actually scrape the data from zKill:
After taking that resulting data and applying a 5-day moving average, surprise surprise! Maybe for one month, small structure destruction was elevated – note patch day is the very middle of the graph – before things return to nominal rates:
After patch day, everything spikes because everyone goes for the easy first.
After this “initial rush”, activity decays to a new normal. That is what is interesting: the long-term effects of this.
So, destruction long-term has settled back into the same nominal rate. I use “nominal rate” to mean “the same rate as before the patch”. Why does “nominal rate” matter? For comments like this:
If people are destroying small structures the same as before for months at this point, then people are still “spamming” them up at the same rate. Otherwise, at this point, either:
Spam would decrease, so available targets would have dried up at this point, and the destruction rate decreases to below previous levels. This is not observed nor supported in data.
People would be spamming them at the same rate, but attackers would be more enthusiastic about destroying small structures, so the rate would have been at some higher level. This is not observed nor supported in data. We’ll come back to the “enthusiasm” of some select people and groups later.
“Spamminess” and “Ease of – and willingness – to destroy” together determine the availability of targets and the rate they are able to be destroyed. Not enough targets because of less spam – rate goes down. People still willing to spam but the easier destruction is applying pressure? Rate goes up.
This is super important for the next section!
Let’s move on to space geography and gameplay.
We heard a lot of complaints about:
Small gangs in lowsec
Small gangs in wormholes
…and how they are going to disproportionately bear the brunt of activity. If this were true, we’d expect destruction rates to go up in each, as people keep trying to use these citadels at the same rate, but are more easily destroyed.
For example:
To which the prevailing thought that brought us here today is:
So, maybe it would be compelling data if the rates of destruction were higher in lowsec and wormhole space?
But recall that nullsec wanted to address “small structure spam”. Those alliances can afford to not put down small structures, so conceivably targets just dry up in nullsec, and destruction rates decrease.
Wormhole: Had elevated destruction rate for a long time, but settling down to something long-term, hard to tell.
Null sec: Nominal or lower long-term destruction rate
Knowing what we know before: Nullsec destruction is at a low long-term rate, implying they’ve “cleaned up” and there’s no interest to destroy small structures there like there used to be.
Lowsec is growing, and Wormholes have had a very very long decay to some new nominal rate. Probably because people are struggling to still get footholds and such in wormhole space, and the data suggests both these groups of players are now fighting more often.
So, finally, this leads us to the “willingness to destroy”. It was very clear that Brisc was interested what large groups were doing:
So I went through the extra effort to take the ZKill scrapes and examine every single attacker on the killmail. If it belonged to Init or Brisc, I added them up.
Here’s that utility coming into play for the bigger groups:
As was predicted, HS, LS, and WH space got bent over a table and smacked.
Harder to move into LS and WH space, and a lot more folks with greedy eyes on you if or when you do – a lot of the leveling down for the “new normal” is that the easy targets have been hit (if they weren’t moved out quick enough).
But for null-sec, there was ‘net zero’ effect in that Eve has taken an almost 2-year step backwards in how Sov is handled and the options for smaller groups to take over chunks of Sov – once again, it’s the big boy’s game and the deck is stacked in their favor once again.
Also HS refining was hit – in theory manufacturing was also hit, but the HS manufacturing penalties are such that you fall into “the items were free because I mined them with my own minerals” with 90% of the items made in HS sold at a loss compared to straight up refining and then selling the minerals… but it is a loss in production, in a sense. It’s hard to really judge those as there are no real metrics for quantity/value/time-wasted when it comes to industry jobs that were initiated and stalled then lost when a citadel dies, same for jump clone losses.
first.
