Player Features and Ideas Discussion

That shabby station is your alliance capital, where you keep all your favorite stuff and awesome ships? Cool...sorta There has been many a discussion over the years about what you should be able to do with your station, and what the bad people should be able to do to your station.


I'll start with MY opinion on those bad people and what they really want to do with their big shiny space toys; this is EVE after all, conflict is priority #1. They want to come in and pop giant holes in the walls, ejecting everything (you, your billions in assets, and whatever else might be stuck inside) out into the battlefield for all to rumage through, LOL at, kill or steal.

On the other hand, the residents want their station to be a refuge, safe guarding all their valuables, and remaining in their control until YC 2300..whatever year is far away. This is a game, played by people, some of whom have real lives to attend to; so we need some middle ground to work with, hence reinforcement timers.

There are numerous threads raging about having to burn through needless timers for undefended sov. I want to look at the other end of the timers; currently there is very little motivation for defending the initial assault. Most groups see the incoming fleet, fire up the air raid sirens, tell everyone to get safe or dock up (quietly laugh at the moron who doesn't and loses his 2 bil ratting tengu), assess that they can't counter the baddies, then proceed to hide their heads in the sand, and wait. BORING!! We need a game mechanic that pushes us outside the station into defense mode more often.


In comes the destructible outpost discussion. There are three parts to this topic:
1-Should the outpost be destroyed completely? I lean toward no on this part, at least initially. Parts 2 and 3 offer much more interesting alternatives

2-What should go into repairing the station? Sitting a bunch of carriers outside to triage the station is so 2007. Returning the station to a usable form should be similar to the initial building process; there's this item in space, dump various PI goods and minerals in, more depending on what stage of reinforcement the station is coming out from. Then get those carriers out and triage like you mean it. Adding more cost and hassle to the repair process would be a helpful motivating to defend the station from the start; or be a great way to demoralize the residents even faster. While the station is reinforced, I think it provides a great opportunity for DUST514 to come into play. After the station enters the shield timer, the attackers could drop in their "ground troops", opening up an area of engagement that really will have an effect on EVE (we still haven't heard much on it's effects on PI yet, cough cough). The dust players could fight over the various station services, not just the current ones which are shot by eve ships, but they could also fight for control over docking rights, various incarna features which Soundwave wants to put on his credit card for us, and asset control...but wait that's #3

3-Dude, where's my titan BPO? IMHO asset security is very important in EVE. However, there should be opportunities for hostiles to disrupt your access and ability to use those items, and a small chance to take them; the only current way to do any of this is to take the station. Most of the discussion on this subject points toward items in destroyed stations being destroyed, dropped, firesale on the market, or shipped to your nearest low sec station for a fee. For the sake of argument, once the station enters the armor timer, let those dust players start fighting over item access, and if the station is flipped, give the attackers some percentage of assets based on various DUST battle goals, then let the loser's assets go to the nearest low sec station or wherever (they're gonna be a little mad no matter where you dump what's left). If the station is held by the defenders, all the items return to where they were. Now some of you are likely starting to rage about your most important stuff that you would never want in this position, so you would just take it back to high sec, in my scenario; BUT WAIT THERE's MORE.

After all thats done and everyone has been given some (short amount of) time to get the asset issues sorted, then maybe the pop the wreck of the station that remains.


EVE is all about balance and my proposed ideas throw everything toward assets being at risk? No sir, it does not. Reading through some of Seleene's blogs and campaign thread (not an election plug, just giving credit), he mentioned the idea of "citadel outposts" and "capital systems". The first thing that entered my head was SOV 4 and all the bittervets whining about endless dread fleets.

However, this is a better application of the concept behind SOV 4; a single capital system for an alliance with an untouchable station and sov structures, requiring X number of other stations before the citadel can be built and only that single station/sov is untouchable, until the alliance is below Y number of stations. This citadel station should have all station services and more manufacturing lines, or the capital system should be allowed to have multiple stations, in order to allow better use of industry.

This would be the true capital of your alliance, not just some random system with a cool name, but carefully picked, the center of everything that your alliance does. This is where you put that ultra expensive important stuff, such as cap production, major market hub, alliance use ships; giving you ample time to evac in the case of your other systems are getting overrun.


I think these additions would add more fights to the sov grind, and put assets at some risk, while maintaining a balance with asset security. I cant wait for the 1st BPO/capital ship collection to get YOINKED while someone is on vacation.

reserved, cuz i can

PvP at any level is not an ISK sink. While Outpost destruction would afford some sink from the cost of the BPC, most of the ISK is transfered to another party or parties. When I buy minerals I simply give you my ISK, it doesn't vanish.

And there are actually plenty of mechanics to simply move assets of destroyed stations. From a malice point of view, the current system is far more cruel. Having 400 billion in an Outpost you know you will never dock up in again. Nuking the outpost and having all my stuff appear somewhere else would be great for the guy in the first circumstance.

To be honest, I think the issue of "all my assets are gone" is an important one.

What would be a better idea than a destructable station would be something like: services are targetable, 100% destructable structures. At the moment, when you shoot a service, it just sits at 0%, and waits to be repaired.

However, if you make it so they actually go "pop," it gives people a reason to defend the initial assault (cause they're expensive, and logistically a pain in the ass to replace)

A station with destroyed services would still hold everyone's assets, but wouldn't be able to function as a very viable staging platform until fixed (and it would be expensive to do so, as they must be entirely replaced. i'm thinking maybe a bil per service).

It would make sov grabs a bit more dynamic. "Don't want to defend the station right now? Okay, say goodbye to a couple bil!"

It makes all of the services harder to keep going across a large empire, but avoids the inevitable "all my assets are gone" part of entirely destructable stations. And no, I don't want dust players taking my assets.