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In before small gang tears when ratters use cheap bumping Stabbers to force their ships outside the 15km radius

Any reason why the ESS doesn't have a reinforcement timer? It would in my opinion be really neat if we could force ratters to use it, leave local and return later to either get a fight or ISK.

a) A single pilot can pull in around 60m/hour. So, 3 hours for a single pilot.
b) I can't see people actively blowing these up as they come across them, so they will likely last until someone comes after their space, or to diminish their income. So, how long it would last depends on where it is put and who puts it up. Right now, an ESS in the north might last months, while an ESS in HED-GP might only last a couple minutes.
c) Anyone who feels relatively safe in their control of the space they are ratting in.

im gonna feel flamed for this but, how about getting rid of the isk increase thing and just make the thing earn LP to capsuleers?. people would still get their bounties nerfed, but they would earn LP for grinding rats. maybe increase the thing from 0,15 at the start to 0,4 or 0,5 per 1000 isk, i would even say to increase it to 1 LP per 1000 isk.

for example:

-ESS active in system reduces the bounty payments to 90%, at full deployment players earn 1 LP per 1000 isk.

killing a pirate BS rated at 1 million would earn you 1000 LPs.

these LPs are taken as concord LPs and can be redeemable to any corporation in the game, except of course, pirate corporations

the other would be:

-ESS active reduces bounty payments to 90%, that remaining 10% is paid to players in CONCORD LPs......the ratio of conversion i dont know......

"Only one ESS can be active in a system at any given time." From the original dev blog.

I am a bit concerned that you are willing to potentially influence the market so heavily so close to feature release.

Not saying that anything will happen, as I have not done the analysis in deep. But, with such a short time frame, neither have you.

I am not certain the concept of the ESS is worth the damage it can do to the market.

By staying in high sec, as most people will do with their alts. Or did you miss the consequences of the 1st anom nerf?

Pretty much, I'm still dreaming of the days CCP do a PVE overhaul where we would see it closer to PVP. Very hard to manage though.

That's a very good question.

You would still basically never sit in the anom and take the fight against a player, while tanking him and the rats. Anoms are solo oriented content, not a fleet thing. This makes it extremely hard to attempt to re-balance in any way.

Speed of completion will always determine the amount of reward per time spent. Which will always mean the thinnest tank possible, to maximize applied damage. This means 4 damage mods, which you will not generally see on a pvp ship - especially one meant to engage multiple hostiles at a time. This also means shield tank / application mods, not tackle and ewar in mids. Logistics mean a large group activity with 2+ players dealing no damage at all.

Basically, the payout would need to be completion based and completion time somehow become dps independent, without being doable by a cloaky warp stabbed frigate like FW plexes.

This seems to me to be the easier part: A few high-DPS ships accompanied by sensible support and tackle, with non-ridiculous lock ranges and real ship attributes. That would make EWAR both effective and useful, and it would advantage non-trivial buffer and burst tanks. Make especially valuable or prominent rats warp out when things turn against them, unless tackled. Bring back the change that made rats regard all intruders as hostile. Then they're a wild card instead of a guaranteed disadvantage for the person running the anom (or vice versa). Adjust rewards so that the vastly lower quantity of rat ships doesn't result in a vastly reduced payout. You could have small anoms with just a few rats that can be run solo or in tandem and larger sites that more or less require fleets of varying sizes, and which have a roughly Incursion-style payout system to encourage fleets--but if someone wants to try storming them solo in a shiny battleship, sure.

The tricky part is getting anyone in an anom to fight, because you can generally assume that anyone coming after you is looking for a gank, not Honorable Space Combat, and if they've warped to your anom it's because they're reasonably sure they can take you handily. This is where I think the rat-as-wildcard mechanic would make things more interesting, but it's also where large numbers of anoms of various sizes per system would be useful: if there were enough ratters in system to respond to one ratter's distress call in the ships they're currently flying, without generating a long stream of comedy killmails for the marauders, then they could credibly protect each other. Ratters could agree on shield or armor doctrines, and the fleets in the larger anoms would likely have logis. In that case, however, I'm not sure how many roaming gangs would bother, unless they had clearly superior numbers. That's not a problem that any mechanic is going to be able to solve.

For extra credit, teach the rats how to use the new deployables.