Player Features and Ideas Discussion

That is not true. It is entirely possible to develop them into a mechanic that will not punish small groups of players with a few moons, but will be a larger problem for people who own "too many" moons. For instance, if it was easier (= in any way feasible in the first place) for the siphon owner to defend them from being destroyed, it would be harder on large alliances who own moons far away from where they actually live, and not really affect people who own moons in their home system. The reason for this being simple: remote moons will be operated by fewer people with less of a foothold in the area, while moons operated near a corporation's staging logically will have more active players to defend them.


Which is why I have never mentioned it.



A nice HP tweak would be to get more of their EHP into their shield, because that recharges. A few times I've been in a situation where the POS owner slowly whittles down the siphon's measly structure HP by getting off one volley before I drive him away from it. However, that wouldn't really be anything more than a tweak, and wouldn't ultimately fix the siphons at all.



As I've said before, I'm not set out to make heaps of ISK using siphons. My primary interest in them is to be a pain in the butt for people who run money POSes far away from where they actually live, as I really think they're intended to be.

Comparing siphons to POS income is kinda dumb, anyway. The two are certainly directly related to each other, but they're fundamentally different. POS income is passive, while siphons are designed to be a way to steal from that passive income by means of active gameplay. The issue is, siphons are a moderate failure in that regard, and that is exactly the purpose of this thread: fixing the siphons to not suck at what they are supposed to do.

I'm not denying POSes are a significant logistics effort. They require relatively large initial effort to set up, and you need to maintain them regularly to keep them up and running. However, you really seem to be exaggerating their complexity in your posts -- once set up, maintenance is a rote, and with a huge amount of HP and reinforcement timers the likelihood of them being violenced upon, especially within the confines of the blue donut, is probably too slim for what their gains are. You really can't deny that in practice and compared to other forms of income, POS income is mostly passive and remarkably low-risk, rather significant income. Before siphons were introduced, literally the only risk to moon mining was one of your neighbours violencing upon your POS, and that happens way too seldom to POSes in sov null.

EDIT: Also, stealing 60 units out of 100 is very efficient. However, it's not cost-efficient, twice so on anything that isn't Dysprosium. It takes 19 hours of uninterrupted siphoning to break even on a Technetium moon. If you're siphoning Cadmium or something, jesus christ what are you even doing you're gonna be there for 29 hours and still haven't made back your initial investment.

Unfortunately for making isk - which, given that the first half of your OP was about making isk and the frequency with which it's popped up throughout the rest of your posts, is what your main concern is - a dysprosium moon is worth about 5.5m isk per hour. That actually is not very much isk at all for something that requires heaps of nerds to take and defend, plus multiple visits a day from the handlers, plus the normal fueling & emptying of silos. Given that they seem to be undervalued for the amount of effort required to upkeep them, I'm glad that you agree that increasing moon value by a factor of ten would be appropriate, which would naturally have the side effect of making your siphons more profitable.




Of course, that will never happen, so alas. In the meantime, I've passed your thread on to aforementioned logistics team. While they aren't very big fans of siphons, I'm sure the knowledge that their tireless efforts to keep our moons in Delve clear caused you to come here and sperg out a bunch will keep them going.

Please do your research before complaining about something. Its usually simple to work out what reaction is most likely taking place on a moon.

99% of reactions either use some sort of material on the moon or import it from another tower in the same system; difficulty and risk increase exponentially when you have to jump a gate.

This means you can launch your own moon probe to see what is on the moon, and survey the other towers in system to see if theyre owned by the same corp. From there it takes only a very basic knowledge of how moon goo works to determine what they're mining.

No, I haven't. Thanks for enlightening me about this -- it's still a sort of a dumb reason IMO, but at least it's a reason.


And that's exactly why the siphons won't really work for making money on a wider scale (unless you find heaps of mostly unmaintained R64s, which hopefully don't exist after the introduction of siphons). That's completely alright, though, as their purpose is to steal resources, but as I've numerous times said, their cost-inefficiency makes them rather poor for that purpose -- you may deny 60% of the resource for a bit, but the process of keeping that up is expensive, and actively defending the siphons is tricky and unrewarding. This is why I suggested moving the siphons further away from POS shields. Not off grid, but further away so that they aren't 10km outside of the POS shields. Scooping the siphons would also help in this regard.

Other than that, please try and keep the thread on-topic. You would think a member of the CSM would know better than to attempt to derail a Features & Ideas thread into smugness and GRR GOONS -bickering.

EDIT: Also, the first half of my post was about their cost-efficiency, not about their ISK making prospects. They are extremely cost-inefficient, especially on anything that isn't Dysprosium, and you really can't deny this.

IMO I think they shouldn't store stolen reactions at all. They should be genuinely about harassing income of your target and should just destroy what they huff. They're clearly not a particularly reliable way of making isk so maybe they shouldn't make isk at all and focus on being annoying?

Aight so either you are really bad at math, or you come from a country where "trillion" actually means "billion". I'm not sure which.


You seem to be all over the place with your arguments. Are they for stealing or are they for harassment? Make up your mind.

I think an argument can be made for making siphons being destruction only tools, but I think that would be a mistake.

It's important that we widen our view and determine first what siphons are intended to do, if they're meeting that intent, and if not, what can be done to make that happen before we move towards changing the original intent to something new.

The siphon idea is focused around disrupting the collection of moon materials in a clandestine way. That last part is important, because siphons are small and can be placed without alerting anyone, which means that anyone from a one man corporation to the largest coalition can use these effectively.

We have to try and ensure that changes scale well, and currently the siphon's profitability scales well enough, no matter how many people are on your side. Note that this post isn't to say whether the profit itself is suitable, only that the scaling is more or less on target.

If we were to remove the collection of moon materials which can be collected by anyone we'd see a change that would negatively effect the smaller groups but wouldn't really matter to the larger groups. Being able to actually profit off of your theft is part of the attraction that smaller groups see in using these against large, powerful foes - a way to strike at them without having to clash fleets with one another. The idea there - that smaller groups can strike at larger groups without having to force a fight - is the core concept behind the siphons, as I said, but the question is whether it's meeting its goal?

Currently it's not. People aren't incentivized to use them because the follow through isn't rewarding enough for the attacker. The defender can clear siphons with minimal (yet mind-numbing) effort which doesn't allow a siphon's collected resourced to swell into a useful amount. In conjunction with this, game play is stale and boring. Siphons need player interaction at a micro level so that the size of one's corporation, alliance, or coalition doesn't play into it still, yet players are given actual things to do.

We're at a point where siphons could be made useful, fun, and engaging without changing their intent, and that's what we should push for.

yeah massive mistype on my part, but yes billion is what I meant...

Why can't you actively defend them?

What else are you expecting them to do? They are built to take advantage of opportunity. That's kinda one of the corner stones of Eve, seizing opportunities given. They already Disrupt moon goo processing. They already force POS owners to baby sit their networks more diligently. They also allow you the opportunity to make some of your isk back, or else steal from other people's work.


Most these problems have to be considered in reflection of POS mechanics as well. Those particular mechanics are known to be a very broken mess which CCP has kind of avoided re-writing because... well... they'd prolly have to redo the entire system.

So far I've seen 2, maybe 3 viable suggestions to improve them:

Make them scoop able(which is sensible, but also somewhat debatable as you're talking about POS mechanics again, which require anchoring quite a few structures(some with relatively lengthy anchor and online timers)

Make it so POS guns can't target them. This is sensible, if a bit of a PITA for POS owners, it does force the opportunity for interaction between attacker and defender.

Shift some of their EHP into their shield. Maybe this is necessary... maybe not. You used Sniping Oracles as your example of why. I respond with any fleet committed to a position as opposed to long range sniping fleets. Your fleet has to stay on your POS or station to rep it... snipers warp in at range, primary 1-2 vessels, fire, and warp off. This isn't exclusive to Siphon's. Your response is likely going to be 'You can warp your fleet off or try to fly out to them, or put scouts on their warp ins to decloak and tackle.' This is true, but your ship is a ship, and this is a cheap structure. You can still put scouts on their warp ins, though, and can also counter with snipers of your own, or a sensor damp or two.



Lastly, these units are not meant to in any way replace owning a POS in terms of net gains. Their meant to pick and choose and take a bit from this person, then this person, then that person. If you keep siphoning the same thing... well, it's like continuously RF'ing the same tower. It becomes a predictable pattern. Shifting around, preying on the few hours of opportunity you have from target to target is more in line with the spirit of these siphons. They weren't meant to be a way to shut down active POS owners who monitor and care for their networks. In line with the system they were slaved to, No, siphons aren't really fun... but have you managed a POS network lately? I'd rather mine... at least then I get to shoot some belt rats from time to time. Until the POS re-write.... siphons are kinda doomed to be of a similar mind to their parent system, POS's, because any drastic changes to them puts them well out of balance with current POS mechanics.

You COULD siege the POS owners in their stations.... you COULD attack their towers elsewhere... there are alot of things you COULD do to draw their attention from their POS's... I'm NOT saying these are worth the time and suddenly turn these units into isk factories... I am saying that using them alone and hoping they work with a few ships to try and gank anything that comes to the siphon seems like a bland and unimaginative use for these modules.

How do they not make sense? By just being in the game, the threat of having your towers siphoned has turned moon mining from a completely passive value factory to a mostly passive value factory. Gameplay mechanics wise they definitely have a right to exist, and removing them would be a step backwards as far as promoting smaller scale active gameplay goes.

Or do you perhaps mean they make no sense from a setting standpoint? I'd also have to disagree with you there.