In regards to PvE, why would I ever pay for repairs anywhere (or taken to an extreme, even carry a rep), or carry nanite paste, when I can just clog up the outside of almost anyone’s structure for five minutes? I mean, I just did that after accidentally almost burning out my guns (long story) and saved myself almost ten million in repairs.
Am I the only one who sees this as a gameplay issue?
Tethering has a lot to do with the highsec/lowsec/nullsec/WH space issues. The OP seems to refer to highsec, where everything is free and easy. Yeah, you can pay 10,000 isk to repair something in an NPC station, or you can fly up next to a citadel and get free repairs. No real difference.
Everywhere else, it is hard to just stumble into a free citadel. It is a real benefit to having one of these things deployed, being able to tether and get free reps. If citadels were getting destroyed in highsec, it would be much less of an issue.
Tethering is not the problem - citadel spam in highsec is the problem.
We have to beg CCP to change something. Right now hardly anybody will attack the citadels in highsec because they do not drop anything valuable. Plus, you have to pay for a wardec and then work through at least two very annoying invulnerability timers. Oh, and you have to own your own citadel in order to even start a wardec, which is truly the height of irony for somebody who wants to get rid of this space garbage.
In fact, citadel destruction is so rare that the people who do manage to get their structures blown up actually come on these forums to complain that it is unfair that they can be blown up at all and that anybody who attacks a highsec citadel is some sort of mean-spirited bully. So . . . ?
Since the repairs are free inside the citadel, why would you waste 5 minutes tethering when you can just dock, click a couple times, and undock in less than a minute?