Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Instead of waiting 14-30 days, how about it just blows up if the hacking attempt fails? ;)

Personally, I'd rather see their Anchoring Routines deteriorate over a 30 day period of being offline....so that after 30 days, it is unanchored and left sitting there.

This idea has been posted many times before... Please do a forum search and pull in the good thoughts from other threads!

Now, my 0.02 isk worth:

A.) Hacking a POS should be an illegal form of aggression. Simply put, if you hack a POS in empire, you lose sec status and get concorded. If you want to hack that POS without concord intervention, wardec the owning corp first!

This serves to give the "owners" a warning period prior to having their POS hacked. You may not like that, but it is reasonable fair!

In lowsec, this means you gain a suspect timer, and take a sec hit unless you wardec first.

In Nullsec & W-space, this means you can do it anytime...

The owners of the POS should receive notification that someone is "hacking" their POS... just as if it was being shot!

B.) "Hacking" the POS does not necessarily need to be limited to the hacking minigame. While they use the same "term", that doesn't mean they should use the same mechanics. I would suggest you need a new skill(s) with appropriate pre-reqs. Personally, I think Starbase Defense Management should absolutely be a prereq (i.e. a skill that isn't so ubiquitous and quickly trained up), and then maybe Hacking 4/5, Salvaging 4/5, and maybe even racial encryption Skills for race-specific POS hacker modules.

C.) Hacking a POS should be slow, and leave you in some form of danger. This could simply mean it takes 10-20 minutes to "complete" the hacking process, where you are decloaked next to the POS the whole time. This could mean you take damage to your ship while hacking.... enough damage to generally mean make using a ship smaller than a battlecruiser awkward (alternatively, the hack module could simply have steep fitting requirements) .

Essentially, hacking another person's POS means you put yourself at risk. None of the risks I suggested are "major" risks, but reasonable risks.

No, it wouldn't...

1.) Reducing shield HP helps, but a control tower has an enormous amount of Armor and Structure. For example, the Large, Medium, and Small Gallente control towers have 8m, 4m, and 2m armor, and 10m, 5m, and 2.5m structure EHP. A solo Dreadnaught (lol) puts out about 10k dps, and would take 30 minutes to kill the large, 15m to kill the medium, and 7.5 minutes to kill the small. Your gankfit BS/Tier 3 BC (1.5k dps) would take 6.5x as long!

2.) Why would you bother? If you are bored in a Supercarrier, and local is friendly, perhaps. But otherwise you're looking at spending and hour and a half+ to kill a small tower, and 6+ hours to kill a large tower. Granted, you can bring 10 people and speed up the process, but why bother? It's a ton of time to spend to gain what: A tower killmail? People generally won't bother removing the tower, because it isn't worth their time!

"I usually hate myself afterwards though" is exactly the problem. Shooting a tower is a very low-reward, boring thing. I've shot plenty of structures in my time, and frankly very few people will actually bother. Furthermore, this will do absolutely NOTHING to remedy the enormous amount of POS trash floating around highsec! I used to be in the "just remove their shields" camp, but am now firmly in the "that's not enough camp" because it really doesn't improve anything. So, you now have 10m instead of 50m EHP to shoot to get that low to no reward! Nobody is going to start shooting POS towers because of this change!

As for the "problem of people" hijacking towers... Why is that a problem? That's an amazing opportunity for more PvP!!! As long as the "hack attempt" was reasonably timed (say 10 minutes), and can only be done on an anchored POS, everything works out quite well.
A small pos takes 7.5 minutes to Online, and you can online it while cloaked (as long as you put fuel in the bay when you deploy it!). If you are on the ball, it is not possible for this to be stolen from you.
A medium POS takes 15 & and a large takes 30 minutes to Online.... meaning you need to protect it a bit while its going up. In general, this is just opens up the door for PvP.

Furthermore, it gives people a reason to wardec corps that have tons of offline POSes floating around highsec. It gives people a reason to fuel their POS's (cause anchored is not completely secure).

I operate a few POS myself for mining & S&I, and I understand your concern that RL takes us away, and a POS goes offline. The result is you potentially losing everything at the POS, and that would be a big hit. I also come at it from the other side, where I travel around nullsec in a frig and keep an eye out for offline poses, and when I find some with engage-able mods I like to destroying them (hardeners, labs, Assembly Arrays, CHA, SMA's, etc..).

Perhaps there is a nice compromise: If there is stront in the stront bay when you hack the POS, the POS goes into RF mode. At the end of RF mode, all the stront is used up, and the POS can be hacked again. This would generate a "warning mail" to everyone with appropriate roles, and give you time to respond.

Creating a mechanic to claim offline POS's would:

a.) not prevent the contender from messing with the planets in a system... they would simply need to fuel or stront the POS if they think they are going to be attacked.

b.) give people a reason to take down that abandoned pos.

c.) still encourage wardeccing the POS corp so you could bring some friends and claim it.

None of your "bullet points" is a reason to dis-allow a properly implemented POS hacking mechanic, and you do nothing to address the fact players have NO REASON to simply attack and remove an abandoned pos, which this helps provide!