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Well, I certainly hope that the plan to be able to fight over PI resources continues to be developed. Until that time we will have to be content with people being able to leach your resources by harvesting the area's you are harvesting (directly reducing your yield) and being able to place your own POCO there and tax them how you see fit.

As to being able to tap into the goods I produce, not counting market games and scams, removing product from inattentive players is a long standing tradition for us all... whenever they try to move them in an AFK (or not so AFK) hauler.

Whoa.. Easy there.. This thread is supposed to be about the siphoning.. Not extolling us with your imaginary epeen..

CCP has made lots of changes over the years that have pissed off loads of people for different reasons.. This is a welcome change for us folks that choose not to ride the sheeple bandwagon..

Thumbs up for once CCP. Looking forward to the progression of the moon siphoning..

With CCP hinting that they are looking at doing moon mining through moon belts how is this new feature actually going to apply to the game then?

Kinda redundant?

i believe it was mentioned at fanfest, should be on one of those youtube videos.

Yeah, wasn't that a Soundwave thing?

We can all agree on the necessity of making people actually inhabit space. I don't like rolling through swathes of empty nullsec space any more than the next guy; I just don't think that letting people covertly leech stuff off moons is the way to do it. I'd much rather see something that one could bring in and deploy in a system to de-spawn resources or otherwise inhibit useful activity in a very high-profile manner that would draw out / encourage fights... something where usage works more like this:

• Enter system, deploy or contest some kind of structure (for this example, l;et's say you push something out next to someone's Ihub that disrupts one of its functions by-- say-- disabling an upgrade)


• Module pops up like a beacon for everyone in system (just like a sov structure) when it starts onlining


• After a while (let's say 10 to 20 minutes, for example's sake), the module onlines and whatever upgrade you wanted to disable stops working (if you jammed the JB thing, JBs go offline; if you jammed the cyno nav thing, no more cynogens; if you disabled the pirate upgrades, the system's anomalies pop back to its baseline; etc)


• These services remain disabled until the locals come through and destroy the structure


• The structure should probably have maybe a million EHP-- enough that it allows an outnumbered group of marauding players some time to skirmish with a much larger defense fleet that comes to clear the structure, but not enough that a couple of guys in DPS battleships couldn't clear it within a couple of minutes if it's not defended.

Something like this would cause the "right" amount of disruption in a helpful way. First of all, the disruption is public-- everyone in the system (or trying to use the beacon or connected JB) will know about it immediately. Second, the Thing would allow various degrees of disruption to suit the size of the gang that's deploying it: if you only have a couple of people then disabling a key jump bridge system would probably result in you being dogpiled by half an alliance fairly quickly, but if you disrupt someone's anomaly spawns then maybe only the ratters in that particular system will be motivated enough to form a gang.

It also doesn't penalize people for not being logged in-- a major flaw of the siphon. If there's nobody online (even in a major ratting hub) because of timezone effects, then there's no reason to drop a disruptor, and even if you did nobody would be penalized. There would also be no motivation for the attackers to leave a disruptor in a system while they aren't available to fight, so it doesn't encourage AFK griefing (like the siphon does).

This is just an example, but this is the kind of strategy CCP should be adopting for these kinds of "small gang content." Anything covert isn't going to generate fights; anything really major will just cause blobbing. Solutions need to be scalable to suit an attacker's capabilities. A solo attacker may choose to just roam about in a HAC trying to kill ratters. A gang of ten may choose to try and force a small fight by disrupting people's ability to rat. A gang of one hundred might disable a JB link during a hostile alliance's fleet operations, cutting off reinforcements and forcing that alliance to either divert people to restore the link or send their reinforcements through lengthy, dangerous gate routes. This idea is already way better than the siphon idea and I've only spent twenty minutes thinking about it: just think what CCP's full-time game designers should be able to come up with in a similar vein!

Alright, I had to think about this for a while.

As it stands now, if we ignore FW for a while, lowsec is basically vast areas of pretty much useless space. This space is sprinkled with a couple of high quality and a bunch of moderate moons. Anything but these moons is for most purposes useless.

Traditionally, control over moons revolves around fighting fleet battles on timers. Therefore nullsec alliances come to lowsec to claim these valuable moons, as smaller lowsec groups in general don't have the power to win these fights. But along with the major alliances, the smaller nullsec groups and corporations also commonly profit from lowsec moons. Even if you're a small corp, it's easy to leverage your contacts in the alliance to get a fleet together to claim (and later defend) a couple of R16 - R32 moons. These moons provide much needed income to smaller individual entities, who might not get a proper share of nullsec riches.

One possible reason behind introducing a siphon mechanic could be the transfer of ownership of these lowsec moons from nullsec entities to groups occupying lowsec space. I would like to point out that this was not one of the reasons stated in the devblog. To accomplish this, one could seek to change moon income to depend not on timer fleet fights, but on continued presence in the system the moon is in.

If this was the design goal, then a moongoo stealing mechanic could very well be a way to accomplish it. However, in its current implementation, it does anything but that. Instead of encouraging active presence around the moon, it only pushes for alt proliferation - both from the attacker's and the defender's side. There is no point in bringing a fleet to deploy a siphon when you have to do so under POS guns. There is no point in bringing a fleet to destroy a siphon when it can be blown up by POS guns. Without bubbles, cloaky haulers in lowsec are virtually unstoppable, so there is nothing you can do to stop your tower from being siphoned, other than keep an alt on watch at all times.



However, going off on a tangent, let us examine the consequences of such a design change: what if moongoo income in lowsec was really changed to be controlled by active presence in the system, no matter the actual game mechanics behind it? Who would it benefit? Who would it harm?

First of all, entities living in lowsec would enjoy a new income stream, as they could take away the income from small-scale nullsec residents occupying the moons. They would definitely benefit from this, and overall the corporation/alliance income curve from highsec -> lowsec -> nullsec would be greatly straightened.

Large nullsec alliances mostly lay claims to R64s in lowsec. Depending on the new mechanic used to control moons, they could most likely still more or less easily project sufficient power to either claim the moons, or at least disrupt the moon operation to the level that nobody can profit from it. (Example, with a siphon-like mechanic, stick a tower on a moon and don't mine anything from it. You won't get any money, but neither will anyone trying to steal from you.)

However, such a change would really hurt the small individual corporations in nullsec. These corps often rely on lowsec moon income to sponsor internal corp programs, such as SRP, tournaments, training new members, etc. - things that usually aren't handled (and financed) on an alliance level. As individual small corps lose income, people would be more and more attracted to the big alliances who control the R64 moons and moons in nullsec. This would lead to a loss of individuality for these corps, and even further homogenization of 0.0.

I think that in the long-term, without introducing additional sources of corporation-level income in nullsec, such a change would lead to further poisoning of the nullsec metagame. We would see even larger clusters of nameless grunts rallied under a single flag, instead of a diverse political landscape with all sizes of corps and alliances working together or against each other.

There is not enough wealth to be had in nullsec to support all levels - alliance, corporation, and individual income. Lowsec currently plays a big role in filling the gaps, and entities with significant assets in lowsec will fight hard against mechanics implemented to take it away from them. As Greyscale said, making profiting off lowsec towers tedious will not stop us from doing it. We will do it, and we will hate it.



I don't know whether this shift of moon income from being dependent on a PvP fleet fight to continuous activity in the system is the intent of the POS siphons as envisioned by CCP. But I believe that a) the current implementation of siphons doesn't accomplish that, and b) the idea itself is flawed and without additional supplementary changes will have negative long-term results.

If you want nullsec corporations to free up lowsec moons, first introduce an adequate income source that can be used on a corporation level in nullsec. Spare us terrible clockwork check-in mechanics.

1. Yes there is but syphons aren't going to effect nulsec so much as lowsec operators. When you hear of mining pos's being reinforced where are they?? The majority are in lowsec due to their proximity, ease of access, nulsec moons are often difficult to access and guarded better.
2. Passive income?? you have never managed a pos have you? People keep saying moon mining is passive income, it is far from passive.
3. Actually he was pretty close to my own experiences in nul, I'm no pro as far as nul goes but it in reality is nothing like most would think.
4.The drag bubble analogy is exactly right. It is not dropping the bubble that creates the content it is what happens after the bubble is dropped. Dropping a syphon is not creating anything more than passive isk for the person who drops it, at such minimal risk and low cost it is stupid. A 10mil isk module which requires virtually no upkeep can shut down a 400 mil pos??

If CCP really wants syphons to create "game play" - other than giving those who drop them free isk, make it so the syphon needs to be anchored and monitored. If the owner of the syphon cloaks, logs off or leaves system, the syphon turns off. You don't have to sit with the syphon but do need to be uncloaked and logged into the system of you syphon. That would give pos owners the opportunity to actually engage the person trying to steal from them.

Let's hope the "leveling out" won't require rolling back trillions out of people's wallets this time.

2. Passive income.... until one manages a moon or a reaction farm, one is not permitted to state if moon income is passive or not.