Player Features and Ideas Discussion

This feature request grew out of a Twitter discussion started by Cherenadine Harper and driven in collaborations with several current and potential CSMs (Ali Aras, Mike Azariah, Sugar Kyle) as well as feedback from several regular EVE blogosphere and Twitter participants. Now I’d like to open up discussion to the whole EVE community.

• My blog post on the topic: Repo Man
• Sugar Kyle’s blog post: Hacking Sticks
• Cherenadine Harper’s blog post: Nails in the Coffin of Space

In short, I believe (as I think many do) that POS towers left to rot, unfueled around a moon, are a blight on New Eden and should be ripe for salvaging since their owners have not seen fit to defend them. I use the term salvage very intentionally. I believe that these items are space junk and thus the original owner has more or less given up title to them.

In writing my post and through comments and conversation on Twitter, I have moderated my original approach (which was: “Have Anchoring V? POS offline? It’s yours!”) in the interest of moving the conversation forward productively and addressing the concerns of those who live in different sorts of space and may have differing opinions.

The primary realistic argument to my original premise was that RL sometimes bites and you can’t get to your POS to refuel it, despite your best intentions. The other argument (especially in highsec), which to me holds little water, is “I stuck a bunch of unfueled POS up for contingencies”. While smart, this is lame and IMO you should lose your unfueled POS for being lazy and cheap. A few other objections revolved around “just take it” being weak game play.

So with that said, here is my proposal. I understand that CCP will likely shriek and run yelling obscenities about POS code, but no ask, no get. Also at worst it may inform the discussion around the future of structures designed to replace POS.

1. A new status be created for POS: Standby.
2. Online, Anchoring and Reinforced modes remain unchanged from current.
3. If POS fuel runs out (including charters in highsec), the POS switches from Online to Standby, rather than from Online to Anchored/Offline as today. The POS must be at full shields in order to enter Standby mode. Otherwise it drops into Reinforced instead.
4. In most ways, Standby is very much like Reinforced. Like Reinforced, Standby mode is fueled by Strontium Clathrates. The shields will slowly drop to 25% over the course of 48 hours. The major difference is that the stront will be consumed at a far slower rate, leading to Standby lasting 28 days (assuming a full stront bay), and consuming stront at an even rate that entire time. Like Reinforced, Standby is shown with an on-grid (not system-wide) in-space timer and status. [Side note: To me 28 days is ridiculously long – I think a week is far more reasonable. But I’m trying to be accommodating here.]
5. If the POS is refueled while in Standby, the POS returns to Online mode over the course of 24 hours.
6. If the POS is shot while in Standby, it obeys current rules for going into Reinforced. This means that within the first 48 hours (as the shield winds down to 25%) it must be shot several times, thereafter one shell should do the trick. Obviously this also means that the stront consumption accelerates to rules dictated by Reinforced status.
7. Once Standby mode ends, the tower goes offline to Anchored status. At this point the tower officially changes status from property to salvage, in game terms. It’s basically a white wreck. Anyone can take a shot at stealing it.
8. Once in Anchored but unpowered status, the structure may be hacked. Hacking should use the standard hacking modules and skills. Difficulty of hacking rises with size and faction, with a small basic tower being relatively easy, and a large pirate faction tower being very tough.
9. Once hacked, the tower must be removed by someone with appropriate Anchoring skills (Anchoring 3 (small), 4 (medium) or 5 (large)).

I believe that this approach solves several ends in a fair and balanced way. It gives an incentive to remove proven dead towers – and defines that as more than 4 weeks unfueled. It gives work to a new class of potentially low-skilled character – POS salvager, creating new game play. It doesn’t waste the time of potential salvagers because the POS has an in-space timer showing when it will be salvageable. It cleans up space, leading to better performance. It potentially reduces POS cost by putting more on the market. And it does this while giving lazy POS owners a full month to refuel their station, and in fact provides them another tool against attack, since any tower in Standby obviously is stronted, so no reason to bother with a stront check.

BONUS SUGGESTION: I think there is an opportunity for a new ship here – or better yet (thanks to Coffee Rocks for the suggestion), a repurposing of the currently-useless Primae. Specifically, the ship should be designed to hold a POS tower and potentially a bit more loot, plus have bonuses to space and hacking in order to take down and grab POS towers efficiently. This would be (and the Primae is) an ORE ship leveraging the same skill tree.

I have agreed with Sugar and Rhavas on this. It seems I maybe the only one that does. On the blog posts it seems everyone is against this. I do not understand why.

So in highsec, I presume your "standby" mode would require a wardec in order to shoot it?

Yep, in Standby, all normal rules would apply. You'd still need a wardec.

However, the minute it drops out of Standby and into Anchored, it is "white" salvage. No wardec, no flashy, first person to hack and grab it gets it.

Well, that's reassuring at least. Too many of the "offline POS" related ideas want "push button, receive moon slot" simplicity...

Regarding your proposal, it just seems too tedious overall. If I find a derelict tower on a moon I want, owned by a obviously dead/inactive corp, I'd rather just issue a dec and get me and some friends to shoot it in Oracles for a few hours and be done with it rather than play a 28 day game of status transitions.

I'd also rather see the tower have to be destroyed, in order to maintain the destruction/production cycle of Eve.

As an alternative, maybe a tower that goes offline could lose 1/2 or 2/3 of its HP? It seems that most people don't want to deal with the time sink of shooting a tower (for example, even I would rather find something else to do than solo a large caldari)

A lot of the conversation covers what are good ways to cover this. I do not think that we have to settle with one way. I'd love multiple approaches to the situation considering the existence of POS in each space is a bit different.

However, placeholder POS iritate me. Turn it on. If you want the spot, fuel it.

if left to wind down in standby mode on its own it does not require a war dec and anyone can hack and scoop. hacking should at least make u go suspect or something.

I think it would be more interesting to let multiple people try to hack it at once; may not be easy to code however?

I'm going to offer a simple counter-proposal:

1. When a POS runs out of either fuel blocks or charters, it goes into reinforced mode if there are Strontium Clathrates available.
2. Otherwise, the POS and any modules immediately go offline, are unanchored and become available for salvaging. This incurs a suspect (but not criminal) flag and does not require a WarDec.

I appreciate that the OP wants to include a 28-day respite, but there is already so much abuse that abandoned POS have become a blight in EVE (regardless of the type of space) - and seriously hinder new player and corporation development.

The above mechanic ensures an automatic and expedient removal of these floating junkyards and instead turns them into profitable salvage for the keen observer. It also eliminates the ability to abuse the "placeholder" mechanic, one that affords corporations the ability to run boosting links from within a non-fueled POS as well as provide safe haven for ships. This also introduces a new warfare mechanic in the form of being able to implement a blockade to "starve out" a POS by preventing refueling.

I love most of this, but one nit to pick:

This is IMO a catastrophic regression from the present day. Right now, if you mess up and forget to fuel your POS, you have to pray that nobody finds it before you get back to it, because an offline POS has exposed incredibly valuable loot piñatas (that is, your CHA/SMA or silos). Come to think of it, this applies to almost any tower but a bare staging stick: you're probably maintaining a POS as space-infrastructure, and that's probably got some valuable stuff on it.

Unless, of course, you're envisioning Standby mode including the POS shield, which IMO would *also* be a bad idea-- after all, then one could "fuel" a POS with Strontium Clathrates as a cheapskate mode, and one's valuable assets would be more protected than they are now against fuel mishaps.

I'd rather see fueling a Standby POS act the same as onlining it-- for whatever the online time is, the shield isn't up, then it springs to life at the end.