being a member of a smaller nullsec alliance and having seen the frequency and effects of skyhook raids — it seems like it’s tilting the scales further in the direction of large blocs. The main issue being that if you’re weak in any TZ, you can basically forget producing skyhook resources. Not sure what the market will work like after the sov switchover is complete, but it’ll be an additional tax on small alliances either way.
I don’t think this is a good direction for game mechanics to push the game in. And I think there’s a simple solution that still keeps the new engagement created by skyhooks: give each planet a predetermined, random vulnerability window for its skyhook. The length of the window would be the same everywhere (something like 4 - 6 hours), but it starts at a random time on each planet. This window would be completely static and easily discoverable (probably even on global map or so).
The effect I’d hope for from this is that an alliance that is active for e.g. “half” TZ could still defend roughly “half” of skyhooks that line up with their activity period, instead of just getting shafted on all skyhooks by people raiding them when the alliance has lower activity.
The point is to make it a proportional thing rather than a hard drop as it currently is.
I don’t think this would massively diminish the new engagement brought in by skyhooks; as a raider you will need to make an extra hop or two since only e.g. 25% (assuming a 6h vulnerability window) of skyhooks would be available for raiding. Yes it will be a bit less lucrative, IMHO that could be partially compensated by adjusting the “immature materials” loss mechanic.
As far as I understood it, the Skyhooks are not meant to be used by small groups. They are a part of large-alliance-infrastructure that generates resources those alliances need to develop and improve their space, and even they have to be careful where they want to place them if they don’t want to risk being raided constantly - and what they use the generated resources for.
These things are explicitly NOT for profit generation of small groups or Alt-Corps. It is very simple: If you can’t maintain a number of active players in an area that could swiftly respond to any intruders trying to raid the skyhooks, those things are simply out of your weight class. And no, as a small group you don’t need the resources they produce, because the Moon Drills are also not for you. That stuff is meant for Empires and shall fuel the war-machine, not fill the wallets of every little Nullsec Corp living in their backwater system with their own army of alts, hoping no one will come around for a week so they can grind ISK all day long.
They’re meant to be used by anyone who holds sov null, be it one system or a hundred.
The issue the OP has is that they don’t have people for 24/7 guard duty because the damn things are vulnerable 24/7 and can be robbed in 10 minutes.
@Amalia_Vionox The correct answer is to rob your own skyhooks because that yields 40% of the contents right here and now. In order to get better output than that you’d have to defend them for like, 2 weeks constantly and if you get robbed all your work in that gets reset. Until CCP removes their heads from their asses, your best bet is to rob your own skyhooks and go to bed and just accept that if someone robs them again at night you will just lose the night’s yield.
Skyhooks can produce three things depending on the planet types: workforce, power and reagents.
To live in null sec you will want at least to have access to mining and combat anomalies for your members, which requires upgrading the Sovereignty hub. Workforce and power are required for these upgrades, where workforce can be transported between systems and power cannot.
And then there are reagents, which allow you to get:
passive ISK (moon mining - provided you can defend your moons from raids)
passive ISK (selling reagents - provided you can defend your skyhooks from raids)
supercapital construction
But to access these things you either need to pay for, to raid for or to have group big enough to have a presence all day to fight for reagents. In other words, your group needs more than just claim a few systems in order to produce supercapital ships.
Not every small group is meant to get passive ISK or produce supercapital ships.
A null sec group will need workforce and power. I don’t see why it needs reagents, those are mostly nice to have.
And if your small group really wants reagents, why not raid other groups for their reagents during the time of the day you are available?
Then let me rephrase it: They are not meant to be easy-money-generators, but content creators for larger groups. They are not meant to be placed everywhere but in key locations where you actually have a chance to either jump on the raiders and/or protect the resources they generate.
Thats absolutely intentional.
Frequent self-stealing is currently a workaround to prevent them becoming too full if you can’t really defend them, but you also have a lot of waste (destroyed immature reagents) compared to letting them run for a longer time (while providing constant protection). I am not sure “vulnerability windows” would be a good thing, because that would make them too much a passive income for basically everyone.
The reagents are needed for the moon drills and are the only things thst can be taken from the skyhook.
Since the drills have a wider selection of where they can be placed compared to the skyhooks, I’ve seen or i thought i seen CCP mention that small groups can use the drills on lower less producing moons and have the athenors on the more important moons
Moon drills exist to make the occasional use of Cyno jammers and Cyno beacons costly.
How? Let me explain: Magmatic gas is only used for those three items. Cyno Jammers and Cyno Beacons are incidentally useful and powerful, but aren’t needed most of the time. Without Moon Drills people could run cyno jammers and cyno beacons at a much lower price and worse, if Skyhook production was high enough to produce more than the few cyno jammers and beacons in the game require, the price could plummet making the Skyhook raids on Lava planets nearly worthless. CCP however also added Moon Drills, which means Magmatic Gas is at least worth the ore that you could passively drain out of moons.
By tying the price of Magmatic Gas to moon ore via the Moon Drill structure there always is a healthy demand and price for Magmatic Gas.
Likewise the high demand for the utility of Ansiblex Jump gates is what I suspect will drive the demand and cost for Superionic ice and is what causes the infrastructure for supercapital production (which is the one other thing that requires Superionic ice) to be expensive in this new system.
Self stealing is the meta, not a workaround for indefensible ones. I mean sure you can let them run… but the way the ramp-up works means you’ll get less than what you could get from stealing for a while, and it’ll take at least a week just to get to the breakeven point. I don’t remember the exact numbers but unless you can defend it constantly you’re almost always better off self-stealing than risking someone ruining the entire thing because you had to take a dump that took longer than 10 minutes.
Sure, it is simply more convenient, less risky and better to calculate. But it isn’t the way CCP really wants those things to work. Which means we will see balance changes, because obviosly the “solution” against raids shouldn’t be to just “raid” your own Skyhooks. I am not sure how they will try to solve it, but hopefully not in a way that makes those things riskless moneyprinters for everyone and his dog. I personally would aim in a direction that allows raiders to slowly leech the silos instead of instantly destroying everything after 10 minutes, so the owner can save a part of his resources even if he needs 15, or 30 minutes or even an hour to respond. The amount that can be stolen could also be capped with reinforcement periods after a successful raid to make sure raiders have to do multiple assaults on the Skyhook if they want more resources.
I should probably clarify that “smaller nullsec alliance” is still >1000 member count. It’s still not enough to defend skyhooks 24×7, I’m not sure if we’re especially poorly spread on TZ, or just “skill issue”, or everyone short of Goons and FRT is having the same problems. But honestly I don’t think intentionally adding content that favors the large groups is, uh, “conducive to a healthy player base”. There’s enough natural drift to 2-3 huge alliances, we don’t need game mechanics to strengthen that push even further?
(btw: AFAICT it’s each alliance for themselves even if you’re a large bloc member, so this even further pushes people to the “elephants”?)
That’s what I thought/assumed; in our case it’s the 10…20 range, if that’s already too small there are less than 25 alliances in game that can even use this mechanic?
I’m aware of the self-robbing thing, and we’ve started doing that, but that just somewhat softens the impact. I’m arguing from a position that if you can defend half the day, you should get half the skyhooks, and that favoring the few huge alliances even further is bad for the game overall¹. I’d be equally happy if the entire mechanic is somehow overhauled, but I don’t have great ideas for this. The suggestion I posted is IMHO a minor improvement without destroying the new player engagement (which has given us some very enjoyable fights too!)
¹ tbh I don’t know how successful Goons and FRT are in defending their Skyhooks. Maybe they can’t do it either. Those timers are pretty damn short.
It feels right now that they are easy-money-generators for larger groups. But I don’t have actual data.
btw. It also feels like this pushes alliance to create an alpha account for each system they hold sov in, find someone who can run that many clients, and have a toon sit in each system just so you get better notifications. Especially for those “light” hours — it’s not like there are 0 players on, it just focuses around the HQ system. Pretty sure we have been skyhook robbed without any notice a few times too. (Geometry of your systems matters of course… long pipes are a massive disadvantage against mesh-y pockets… though it’s perfectly OK and has always been the case that some systems are better and some are worse for any mechanic.)
I guess those alpha toons are one way for CCP to raise ‘active’ player stats xD
Yeah, you got that exactly right: You then can only have Skyhooks in your HQ system and maybe the 1-2 adjacent systems. And not more. Thats absolutely intentional, you shouldn’t have them in all or even most of your systems, but only in those where you can react quickly, even outside your prime time. This isn’t a thing alliances should use large-scale within all their dozen or hundred claimed systems, but only in the populated ones.
You’ll have to excuse me for not trusting that from just you saying so . Has CCP said this anywhere?
If you hit the right time of the day — and that will happen — I’m gonna argue that number collapses to 0 on all but the largest alliances. If we get a ping we could probably log in a bunch of people who are flexible with their life and work schedules, but it’s just not “play time”. That’s why I’m arguing this mechanic is benefitting the few giants. Which I don’t believe is a good thing.
Your argument about populated systems certainly applies, but you’re talking about systems populated 24×7. And, to a degree, this means the game is putting a 24×7 standby duty on its players. I get paid good money for that duty IRL, rightfully, and it’s not acceptable for a game at all. Neither is forcing geographical diversity. Alliances and corps are circles of friends. “Make some friends on the other side of the planet or get disadvantaged in this game” is… I don’t know what to call it.
do you see actual downsides in the mechanic I suggested? What are they?
you’re arguing these shouldn’t be easy-money-generators. I think they are, at the very least, creating a strong bias towards the very large groups¹. Where do you see the disconnect?
¹ again, I still have no clue how skyhook defense is working out for other people. I wouldn’t be surprised if noone at all is currently able to defend skyhooks to the expected degree.
P.S.: we’re now completely on discussing the expectations behind, and not the mechanic itself. That’s not going to be a particularly fruitful discussion since we’re now looking at a divergence of perspectives and personal opinions. I don’t think any of us are going to be particularly open about changing those…
I would also like to see where CCP said that, as far as I could see it was for nullsec alliances as such. To be honest I don’t think CCP will change it to specific TZ because they have made vulnerability of structures for the first timer to be 24/24 7/7 and the skyhook fits in with the ESS as a concept. So at the end of the day I think that only big alliances will get the full yield, the small alliances will just have to stick with robbing their own unless CCP finds a way to block them from doing that in some way because why not hurt the small guys further…
PS I guess I can say I am bitter, but also amused because CCP basically removed the armour timer for medium structures because major block FC’s had difficulty getting their member in fleet to shoot them, so screw the small groups that have to use them because their large structures get headshot by the big groups, says it all…
Small alliances in nullsec and WH space, playing Eve on ultra hard mode, you are the real elite!!!
Mhm. ESS is inherently tied to someone ratting in the system… I think that’s the opposite, activity causes it to fill up and become a juicy target, and it’s kinda perfect to require that if you wanna crab out you better be able to defend it too
Structures do have more than one timer tho… you could also say the skyhook’s timer is the last timer and then it doesn’t line up…
Also just to be clear, I’m not suggesting “specific TZ”, I’m suggesting “random and uncontrollable”. It’s just a variable in the DB that gets set on the planet, once. Might even be in the SDE, and/or the ingame map “show currently vulnerable skyhooks”. Statistics will smooth it out across 24h… (It would create another layer of “more/less valuable systems” depending on your TZ, especially if you only have sov in 2-3 systems, but I think it’d still be a much fairer chance…)
I used the word concept as in the theft concept, sorry if I did not make it clear., but yeah I agree.
I am half expecting them to stop the owner alliance from robbing their own structure…
Sorry I did not mean to put that in your mouth, that was me suggesting it because it is the only way that I felt that they could adjust it and I can’t see them doing it. But a random timer, why not, though I would hope the probability gets linked in with the sov timers in some way, */- like structures. EDIT - Are you suggesting to shoot it and there is a timer before it can be linked to and this is random?
Anyway good posts and excuse my flippant reply, as I just find robbing our own structures hilarious…
Ah, no - lemme just make up an example. Jita VI (Lava) gets 13:52 EVE time assigned, so you can link & steal from it between 13:52 and +6h = 19:52. Everything works as before, but you can’t do it outside this time span. The 6h duration is the same on all planets, but 13:52 is stored in the EVE DB for Jita VI. Absolutely no way to change it, no matter what happens to the Skyhook or if there even is one. You can also still attack the skyhook itself (don’t know the exact mechanics on that, not super relevant normally), just can’t steal from it.
Jita VII (Ice) gets 08:33, Ikuchi I (Lava) gets 17:48, Ikuchi II (Lava) gets 12:32, etc… for each alliance, some planets will be great and others will be garbage based on the alliance’s TZ; if you’re extremely small you can still get shafted (but to be fair you can also just be unlucky and have no Lava planets at all, and also this will drive conflict). If you have a handful planets then statistics kick in and it aligns to how active you are — the more time you can defend, the more planets become viable to try running them longer. Also creates a risk vs. reward decision for planets on the fringe of your TZ, do you self-steal or not?
(Not sure about 6h, that can certainly be balanced. The RNG for rolling the start time could be biased in some way, but I’m not sure that’s a good idea… especially since it would be permanent with my suggestion.)
Reminds me of this (AFAIK fake, but funny) Winston Churchill quote “Americans always do the right thing, once they have exhausted all other possibilities.”
There would be time windows for theft and defense opportunities and andom availability of planets in all zones, but it wouldn’t be because players choose that time, but because players choose planets with the time that fits their schedule.
I think it’s a good way to improve the current skyhook system, because this meta of self-stealing doesn’t seem ideal to me.
. Has CCP said this anywhere?
