Update on Asset Safety values for Supers & Titans

EVE Information Portal Announcements
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As someone who’s lost stuff to asset safety I can say truthfully “don’t fly what you can’t afford to lose” or “don’t be daft enough to store all your stuff in a destroyable structure”.

All citadels no matter what they’re used for were made to be destroyed, you know that when you put all your stuff in there.

I’ll be honest here, I really don’t know why asset safety exists, everything should be at risk of being either destroyed or ejected into space as containers or as salvageable wrecks, and I mean everything from a humble Shuttle BPO to multi Trillion isk Titan BPO’s.

If you can’t defend your Keepstars that’s your alliance issue and when it goes down it should all be up for grabs.

Nor should anything change because you’re away on holiday or training, that’s your choice and you know and accept those risks.

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226

The problem that I have with removing asset safety is twofold.
First, that citadels were intended as a replacement for outposts, which did NOT eject all your crap into space ever.
Second, that citadels already promised asset safety, and removing it would be a massive rugpull to the playerbase. How many posts have we seen about people coming back and going “dude where’s my stuff” only to be told that for the sin of not keeping up on a game they’re not currently playing all their stuff is gone. Imagine Forsaken Fortress times a thousand.

I don’t think removing asset safety is going to attract more players, but it sure as hell will keep away the ones who leave.

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227
  • The point isn’t “attracting new players”, new players have no idea about Asset Safety and it’s impact.
  • The point also isn’t “returning players” because in perspective they are such a small minority that they are largely irrelevant to the long term health of the game.

Both of these points are very much irrelevant when talking about the actual effects that Asset Safety in it’s current form has on the game. Which is mainly: reducing motivation both for attackers and defenders to fight over stations. The attacker can’t loot much of value nor has a strategic benefit of cutting off access to important war assets (Capital Fleets, Supercaps) - which the conquering of an outpost effectively did! The defender has no reason to field a fleet or call in allies if the attacker looks stronger, because it is much easier to just move everything into Asset Safety and claim it back later. It intensifies maximum risk-averse fights and removes strategical value from victories.

And we can see the result for years now: The big groups asset stockpiles grow stronger than ever, they can’t be really challenged nor destroyed any more. Yet they keep producing and producing to a degree that any fighting just becomes pointless. And the exact results are megablocs (as we can see) that barely have some border skirmishes or multi-thousand-player alliances just folding like a house of cards because everyone rather saves his stuff than to fight for a greater goal. It makes the game dull and boring - which is in the long term leading to political stagnation AND the loss of attractiveness overall. As we can also see: the real player numbers are going down, partially offset by more and more (partially free) Altchars that keep the login numbers from sinking to the cellar.

It is of course obvious that we can’t just “remove asset safety” completely now that it is in the game. But it should be reformed. In a way that players don’t lose everything and always have the option to save enough for a comfortable rebuild/restart should their alliance get beaten to dust. And in a way that strategic assaults on stations known for harbouring huge war asset stockpiles of your opponent still become valuable again.

Yes, you are right with that: Citadels were designed as replacements for outposts. And those didn’t drop everything when conquered. But Outposts were magnitudes more expensive and rare than Athanors, Raitarus or Astrahuses. You hadn’t an Outpost in every system, or even mutliple, means you hadn’t “asset safety” conveniently around every corner. Locally you had to use POSes, which still were full loot objects if you couldn’t evacuate or defend them. Including everything that was in the Hangars and Silos there.

So, what is needed is to tone down Asset Safety in it’s current form. Not completely remove it everywhere.

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228

Fair point. How about this:

Asset Safety cost: 15% of value → 25% of value.
The alliance that does the most damage to the citadel gets 40% of the asset safety fees from that structure paid to the alliance wallet.

This keeps the ISK sink the same, makes not evacuating or fighting harder on the loser, and provides an incentive to bash big structures beyond just the core, while ensuring no one “loses” their stuff.

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229

Why settle for 25%? Set it to 100% of the items value. Also, 66.6b for a titan hull? Omegalul. All titan hulls are now valued at a much more realistic in game price of 200b isk. Revert the refunds, and actually negative the wallets of everyone instead.

Eve is a hard game for hard people, yes? Not bubble blowing space babies who should be docked up in Jita.

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230

I doubt it would solve the problem that I want to adress. Also it could easily lead to structure farming, aka bigger groups constantly jumping on the structures of smaller corps just to collect the asset safety fees. Shifting around fee prices is just bandaid for an incredibly bad core design.

What we need are mechanics that allow for strategical and tactical decisions, both coming with consequences. While the strategic decisions are made by the structure owning groups leadership, the tactical decisions are made by the attacker and defenders players in the specific situation of an attack.

Any solution to the asset-safety problem has to accept two core features, which were part of the old design:

  1. not every structure has asset safety, only some key fallback stations in each region. An option would be to make “asset safety” a “service module” that can only be installed on XL structures. It has really high fuel requirements but also add another timer and strongly boosts the defensive and offensive capabilities of said strucure. So each group can handpick stations it wants to upgrade to local “castles” with that service module. All others are “free game”. And of course an opponent can scout which the ones are that are upgraded with “asset safety” to pick his targets wisely in case of an invasion.

  2. “asset safety” never teleports away assets from any system, but rather “locks” them down in quantum stasis. They aren’t destroyed, but you can only reclaim them on an upgraded XL station in the same system. Which means your group either re-conquers the system and builds a new XL station, you join the winning side if your group is destroyed, you bring an alt into the winning group to contract those stasis items to him or you do a “firesale” like in the old days, offering your locked items for a discount price to the winners.

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231

Ah my dear, “asset safety”?

I was not aware ANYONE is using this.

I stopped using it about 3 months into the game, back in 2017- it is just waste of ISK and time you need to click two or three times to get it.

BUT. as per usual, people see the pay out and then they say WOOOOOOOOOOO, forgetting or not realizing that when they PAY for “best” one, they are getting few coins more then they did not pay anything.

Basically it is what I call “sheep tax” or as devs would call- “ISK sink”…

Here is an example for Azariel:

FREE insurance will get you ISK: 1,491,287,948

“BEST” insurance will pay you ISK: 3,728,219,870

And people see that bigger number and their Johnson gets HARD…not realizing they need to pay 1,118,465,961 for it, basically only getting 2,5bil for it.

Now, you get 2,5bil if you pay once….but if you pay twice, you get 1,4bil, three time loser will get only 300mil…

But I will bet you any money someone will come here and call me a liar or that i do not understand “the higher math of it”….buhahahahahaha

232

You seem to be thinking of insurance, not asset safety.

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233

I’m not sure they were thinking of anything other than how big to make their next dosage of space drugs.