I should clarify as I worded my last post poorly.
I meant upkeep on a given structure is X million, where X is the number of structures in system.
I’ll change my previous post.
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I don’t know how the hell this wasn’t implemented when they were released.
I’d like to see entosis used to open out of schedule vulnerability windows, so that if someone owns a structure but can’t project power to it, they have a greater risk of losing it.
no change
I was just thinking of something like this yesterday.
Why not introduce something like the Alliance Tax - more corps more ISK.
of structures would increase the cost, but not the size of the structure.
Monthly administrative fee by concord
1 Upwell = 10 million
2 = 20
3 = 40
4 = 80
5 = 160
Etc
If a corp doesn’t have the funds to maintain it - it begins the shut down and unachor phase (gives players/corps time to find the ISK to stop it). It would assist safety player stuff. Turn off services and unfit modules. It would also be an all or nothing system, where if you had the ISK to support 3 structures but you had 4 up it wouldn’t take the ISK for just 3 and unachor one, it would begin to unachor all of them.
I’m in favor of this. All the people at the structure need to be paid.
And in return, each structure makes ISK one way or another.
Even just a small engineering complex saves ISK, as you can compress the ores and do only one trip to haul your ores instead of several or using a Freighter.
Maybe add the ability to set fees for services like ore compression and the like as an option?
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amarisen does have a point, if you have stations in systems 0.1 and higher, paying for them through taxes to the local race government makes sense. though there probably should be some extra factors to determine that, such as the size of the entity that owns it, the sec status and for maybe a more detailed system, based on the race owning the space and/or the traffic that system encounters. should reduce the amount of citadels in high traffic areas, could influence player migrations, and hopefully, not screw small corps/alliances and wormholers.
The thing I want to achieve with this is limiting the number of structures a group will have, while trying to encourage them to place the bigger structures of bigger groups.
i’m still titter-tottering on what the cost should be based off or scaled. Flat? Some sort of Index system? Number of structures owned? system/constellation/region
You people need to go back & read the initial structure threads. It’s obvious most of you are new enough to not have been involved at the time in the discussion since you are bringing up identical points that were raised then, and the reasons they are bad ideas are still valid.
I like base consumption but the indexed rate would ■■■■ over wormholers so no to that.
Care to link and summarize?
Links on the old forums off the Dev blogs?
Basically, Citadels etc are not meant to be POS mk 2 but a hybrid of station, outpost & POS mechanics. And part of that is that the basic structure doesn’t need constant maintaining. Only abilities you want it to have do.
I think there’s a balance somewhere between zero fuel requirements, and making fuelling an onerous task*
A small fuel block amount for all regions, and an indexed isk cost in empire would be my choice. Just to keep spam down a bit.
- Fuelling towers for ASCN back when loads of them were needed to ensure sov, and the fuel components were all separate and in weird proportions. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone
Well, that is why I prefer the ISK payment idea in this case. Although some kind of maintaining (less than fueling POS) is what I generally like to see. If you own a structure, you need to “use” it. Also, as stated before, without fuel I would only cut down “additional” services, which of one could be the shield timer. That would be a step forward into the “easier to remove” demand without crushing over the whole system.
You can’t implement a structure that both drops (next to) nothing, and requires 5-10 player-hours to explode and expect them to generate much conflict on their own. It also doesn’t help that these structures require at least two wardecs, that is 100M ISK+ to even attempt to shoot in highsec. It was completely predictable, and pointed out at the time that these things would just start accumulating if they had no maintenance cost.
I get that fuelling POSes wasn’t fun and that CCP was going for a more permanent-like theme with these structures, but it is clear they erred too much on the side of safety, probably in large part to ensure their uptake by players. This is fine, but they really need to finish implementing them ASAP and get to that balance pass where they are made fun to fight over as was the original goal. A defended station should be a tough opponent and force multiplier, but an undefended or abandoned one should not require 5-10 player hours (over the course of a whole week, and at times, often inconvenient, determined by the defender) of watching a white bar turn into a red bar. That isn’t fun or engaging, and the opportunity cost of doing that instead of grinding ISK (or getting a proper night’s sleep) is too great for it to be done lightly.
I don’t think that can be realized without some system for maintenance that puts the station into a more vulnerable state if abandoned that is easier to attack (and possibly tuning down the medium Upwell structure reinforcements as they are so spammable). Honestly, the poll doesn’t really concern me as either ISK or fuel would do, as would an indexing system or not. CCP can figure out what else they want to accomplish with this modification, whether to sink ISK or materials, or give a reason to spread out or not.
Even with such a modification to make abandoned stations easier to remove, there is still precious little reason to fight over them without a greater purpose like securing sov. The market module is about as close as I have seen to an Upwell-based conflict driver, so I will again take this opportunity to suggest to CCP and the CSM that they consider adding some sort of limited modules or rigs that can only be fit to a single Upwell structure in a system or constellation (much like I guess the upcoming mining platforms will be linked to a single moon) so that players have something to fight over.
Sorry for drifting off-topic there.
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Not sure, why I ask this, but if it’s such a hassle to remove the abandoned citadels, why bother?
As far as I can tell, they don’t hurt anyone or block out the sun.
Another option, not offered by the poll, would be to require charters to operate a structure in empire space. No charters, the service modules go offline - same as no fuel.
Since the only source for charters are NPC loyalty stores they will provide a small but useful ISK sink.
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While I support this, this poll is biased there should be a “no change” option to get a true consensus.
A ‘only one citadel can have this’ makes it too easy for a large organisation to monopolise a particular thing in an area (Highsec is the only area this sort of thing is really relevant in really), since the large group can count on having a larger defence fleet than any other attackers.
Citadels also are utterly pathetic in highsec and provide hardly any force multiplication meaning that a small group can not ‘punch up’ when defending one, at best a highsec Citadel can be considered about the effect of a Battleship with a bit more EHP, but costs you a pilot anyway.
Conflict drivers for low/null/wh’s already exist, highsec just needs far fewer stations, if 80% of highsec systems were stationless, having control over all the structures in a system gives you total control over the system index and who can dock in your system, which then makes highsec wars actually semi practical.
However given in my current constellation there is an average of 2 structures to a system tops, with several having no structures at all, and the highest count being 5, and some already listed as for sale or gone inactive… I think you are all way way overstating the issue here. Perimiter is not a normal system, don’t base things on it’s structure count.
[quote=“Temmet_Vuld, post:36, topic:4019, full:true”]
Not sure, why I ask this, but if it’s such a hassle to remove the abandoned citadels, why bother?
As far as I can tell, they don’t hurt anyone or block out the sun.
[/quote]There are many reasons, from philosophical to practical, why you would want to remove a citadel. The most pressing is if you are trying to secure space or an objective. Leaving enemy structures in space you just took give your enemy a place to stage out of. Being able to constantly respawn and reship in your system, or base out of, is major advantage for them. This applies for all areas of the game, from sov nullsec, to Faction Warfare space, to wormhole evictions, to even highsec if you want to try to claim an ice belt by force. Fighting over structures as part of winning that objective is one thing and that is good and maybe structures are reasonably balanced here with only a few tweaks needed (void bombs come to mind here), but removing undefended structures should not be pure tedium and require hours and hours of multiple people’s lives to do if the owner has been expelled from that space or quit the game.
More philosophically, this game is suppose to be about conflict. It’s great that people are building and deploying structures, but if no one is fighting over them because they are invulnerable 97% of the time and that 3% vulnerability is in timezone 10% of the players regularly play in there is an issue. Things in Eve are meant to be fought over and destroyed, not made so horrible, or even impossible to even try to contest with moving vulnerability window games that no one bothers. At the very least, abandoned structures should have a way to be cleared out at a fraction of the effort required to attack a maintained/defended one.
I don’t care that they are piling up everywhere and acting as an eyesore, at least not yet. I am much more concerned about the ability to tedium-tank and time-zone tank with them and spam them everywhere to the point no one can or will spend the dozens of player hours to clear them out of newly conquered space. Until something is done about that, they will not fulfill their potential as content generators, and worse, asphyxiate the game and increase stagnation by dramatically increasing the number of hours required to take and secure space.
Edit: So a proposal to fix this? Add a token ISK or fuel cost to Upwell structures that requires a minute of player action every month to refill or pay. You can even waive that maintenance cost if a fuel-using service is fit and active. But if your station becomes ‘abandoned’ because no services are running and no maintenance is done, tethering is disabled (just like the Force Field on an abandoned POS went down) and the shield reinforcement timer goes away. Further, to reduce the number of player-hours to clear them out, entosis modules can now apply damage equal to the full damage cap on an abandoned structure (just like the original Upwell structure proposal). If at anytime before it explodes a defender shows up and “reactivates” the structure, tethering immediately turns back on and the entosis module stops functioning and the attackers again have to use a DPS fleet to attack it.
This not only makes abandoned structures much easier to kill while leaving defended ones as quite defensible, but adds back a minor amount of management that will put some tedium back to the defender’s side disincentivizing spamming them everywhere as a strategy. It also is very similar to the POS paradigm we already have, and opens the possibility of someone forgetting to pay a bill (or pretending to do so) sparking conflict.
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