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The idea sounds great but has some fatal flaws.

I would liken it to funding free girls schools in some of the more 'restless' tribal regions of Afghanistan.
Free schools? Awesome, who doesn't like education?
Free schools for girls? Great idea. Traditionaly undereducated in that area. Only positives can come of it.

What could possibly go wrong?


What 'could' go wrong is your average low sec 'pirate' has the attention span and interest in industry of a gnat. I could count the time it will take until the PCO's are being reinforced in days, on one hand.

Tears > Proft, always. That is all. Assume you are planning for Mogadishu in this game and you won't go wrong. Some members of CCP definitely seem to have a 'peace in our time' and 'wouldn't it be nice if we could all just be logical and get along' attitude.

Disapointing news - we don't.

I'd love if there was a multi-tiered approach to attacking/conquering structures. I was asking myself: How will this change help me to get owners of COs in w-space to come out of their POS and defend their assets? Or give us an incentive to board a ship and attack people who attack our COs.

Right now, the change will do little to generate actual fights, as in ships firing upon other ships. When I attack a CO, the owner, even if online, will probably just ignore me and expect that I will go away after a while. And he'll be right, because shooting that stupid structure isn't worth hours of my time.

It's clear that a structure must be hard to conquer and reinforced mode is necessary because nobody can or should have to be online 24/7. But what if there were multiple escalations while attacking a CO, or any structure?

Ideas:

1. Instead of a "it's either whole or it's destroyed" approach, create several states for COs. A fleet attacking a CO could now put it into a "disrupted mode" quickly and without reinforcing it. The attacker would get some benefit out of this and the owner would suffer a loss. Maybe the CO could have 100% efficiency initially, and when damaged, it would drop valuable parts which can be looted. Its efficiency decreases and the owner has to replace the lost parts later – or come out and defend the CO.

This way a limited disruptive attack would make sense for attackers and be bad for the owners, but they wouldn't lose their CO unless the attacker is willing to go all the way.

Of course the problem remains that owners may simply be asleep at the time of the attack. That's a serious obstacle. So here's another, quite crazy idea:

2. Let corps define an official "prime-time window". This should probably be 8 hours long. During this time of day, the corp is expected to be active and logged-in, and their structures are especially vulnerable. Outside of this time window, they are better protected. The window can be changed, but any change becomes effective only after some days or maybe a week, so it cannot be changed to impede an ongoing or imminent attack.

So for example, when I enter a w-space and the resident corp is active, it will be their prime-time window and I can attack their COs easily, doing a lot of damage in a short time. The owners will have to fight to stop me, or suffer some loss.

If I come into their system when no one is online, it will probably not be their prime-time and I'll have a hard time getting those COs down. This could be implemented by lowering/heightening their resistances.

There still needs to be protection for those days when everybody is just busy with RL. So structures couldn't be lost completely without reinforced mode, only damaged and looted. Incentivize regular, limited attacks without completely screwing over people who just couldn't be there.

Clearly people are divided on this new feature and i think CCP need to put some more thought into it instead of their "release the feature and if it doesn't work, we'll nerf it later" approach.

What i would like to see:

The destruction of the customs office should not net the agressor a killmail - this may dissuade roaming fleets from attacking without any real purpose other that to pad their killboard.

Customs offices should have a corp hanger (rentable?) - Players should be able to grant launch pad access to their corporation

Multiple tax rate - The owner of a customs office should be able to assign different tax rates to the different standing available.

I think all the above could enable the players to create a corp wide business out of the PI system, and we would eventually see the majority of customs offices only being destroyed by competing PI industry corps and not a blob of pirates.

So, I've been reading this forum since yesterday and so far, this is the TL;DR version:

-POCO in null is a decent idea, stay with it
-POCO in low-sec is NOT, I repeat, NOT a good idea, as illustrated by the dozens of issues that people already brought up
-Tax increase in high sec, well, no one really cares that much because prices will go up to compensate
-POCO in WH: great idea if the PI stuff is transferred automatically to a station or a corp hanger on the POCO itself

@ the Dev's

Maybe a little suggestion ....................


The designers / teams that are both working on the Capital changes and the PI Changes just ..

Swap over

Maybe then you will get a better idea on how to change the game because you really
haven't got a clue at the moment tbh.

Year 2011, 18th of October:
CCP publishes a devblog detailing changes to EVE - changes which are going to add new gameplay and iterate on an older feature. Finally.

One day and 44 pages later:
There's an outcry in the community. Again.




On a serious note:
Great feature - would love to set different tax rates according to standings though. Noone wants to charge his friends the same as his enemies. Making the CO take alliance standings into consideration would be cool too.

Actually after reading much of this thread I think he does know what the player base is like. I get the distinct impression that it is in fact their intention to make PI an alliance level asset but for some reason they do not want to come out and just admit it openly.

Most of the flaming back and forth on this thread have been about some risk v reward crap, which misses the whole point of many of those who do not like this. It's not a "risk" factor, it's that PI in 0.0 (and probably low sec?) will no longer be assessable to those outside of the alliances at all. As I see it (not in a tinfoil hat way) this fits in with what CCP have stated their goals are for 0.0, that whole "farms and fields" thingy they briefly mentioned, the desire to create more reasons for the big alliances to fight, the whole ABC's in wormhole mess, and they also briefly stated I believe the idea that T2 production should happen mostly in null too. This fits with that.

Now wether or not these are good things, that's a different argument, one that goes to what the nature of 0.0 ad lowsec should be (should all assets in 0.0 be alliance assets by default? Room for anyone outside of the big alliances?). Now I don't really know the answer to that, and I won't even pretend to, but thats the big gorilla everyone in the room is dancing around and it would be nice if CCP would at least stop ignoring it too and quit being so coy about it. Then maybe some actual constructive progress could be made (but probably not).

They really just need to say that, BUT they won't because many of the people that play eve don't want to be in alliances or can't be for financial/play time reasons and they'd basically be telling those people to stop doing PI all together (may as well run incursions, right?)

Also, the player base is saying "NO! STOP! THIS IS A BAD IDEA! THINK IT THROUGH MORE!" This is CCP pushing their game mechanics on players that don't have time to be on 20+ hours a week. But, after all, it is their game.

Perhaps I should be on the CSM. lol.

But on a more serious note, Perhaps if you keep the low-sec customs office NPC owned, but make the tax a bit higher than the high sec tax. OR you could make it so they are owned by the NPC empires that actually hold the sov, and make the tax rate based on standings (even with good standings, the tax should be higher/equal to high sec taxes)

+1

Leave low sec alone. Jack up taxes 5000% for all I care, its still peanuts. POCO will not work in low sec. I will not move to high sec as it won't be worth the time/effort. I will not join a blob alliance just to play eve and I will not 'grind' pve. Ergo you are forcing a lot of people with a lot of invested time and effort out of the game, or on to grind by ripping away low sec.

PI is a casual player's 'in' to eve online. Fiscally it makes no sense as a business decision to encourage those people to quit.