o7,
First, I understand that bashing a structure is part of the game…however, once a structure is successfully defended, there should be a cool down time on before the shields can be hit again. I’m thinking 24 hours.
This gives the defendant time to rearm, refit and plan for the next attack.
The fact that an enemy can hit the shields, then not show up until after the repair timer completes it cycle, and hit it again once the defendant logs off is just crazy…this creates a never-ending cycle of timers.
That this tactic would be applied was pointed out months before the change hits the servers. CCP likes this kind of creative gameplay. If you can’t defend against attacks every day during your prime time there is no point for your corp owning structures.
Also it will not be a never-ending cycle. At some point you get exhausted from daily form-ups for nothing and give up, then the attacker’s come and complete the job.
I don’t see why this is now a problem. We have had reinforcement timers since time immemorial with POSes and there was no massive issue with “troll” reinforcements that I am aware of. How is the Upwell 2.0 situation any different?
If anything, the situation with POSes was much better for these hypothetical “troll” reinforcers because you couldn’t afford to assume they wouldn’t come back to finish the job or risk losing everything in your POS. WIth Upwell, you get a third timer on your preferred time and date to make your final stand, even if they show up for the armor timer. And then there is the asset safety which mean even if these attackers waste hours of their life with fake reinforcements to lull you into complacency before springing their trap and showing up for a final timer, they get hardly anything for their efforts.
This doesn’t seem to me to actually be a thing. To actually cause any harm you have to put more time and effort into attacking than the defender by far, which at that point means your aren’t really trolling.
Before you only needed to win two timers to explode the whole thing.
I am still highly skeptical this is a problem - reinforcing a station multiple times requires significant effort well past the point of anything that can be considered trolling, and is more than the effort the defenders have to do to form up for an single armor timer. But if it is somehow, maybe the solution is to not disable structure services after the armor timer.
But I’d really like to see some numbers or even anecdotes that this is even happening. From the outside, it seems an awfully labour intensive tactic to keep up. Structure bashing isn’t fun, and if you are going to go to the effort to reinforce something even once, you probably have the intention to follow through. I see how you might abort if something you can’t handle shows up to defend the station, but I can’t see anyone wasting their time doing that more than a couple times before they give up and going after another target. You are literally wasting more of your time, not to mention risking significantly more, with “troll” reinforcments than the target you are trying to damage.
I know some groups, whose dedicated activity is to remove highsec industry structures, whether the “trolling” is better than going for straight structure bash depends on many factors. The OP is the first here to complain about that tactic.
All fair points in the replies, but my point is that the aggressors are not showing up to fight on the armor timer. They wait until fleet has stood down and RF once again to get a new timer versus actually fighting. It’s more of a “ha ha, made you form,” with no content. And this is a valid tactic, no argument there.
And again, this is just my opinion, but there should be a cool down period before an aggressor can RF your structure.
