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Given the context of your comment, which was directed at me, I don't think my interpretation here was unreasonable. Your comment was insulting whether you intended it as such or not. Something my parents used to say that's stuck with me "It's not just what you say, it's how others take it." Useful advice IMO. Anyways I accept that you weren't trying to be insulting, so setting that aside...

1a. Yes, but there are a lot of ways to determine this, all of them would make someone unhappy (which may require CCP to spend a lot of time manually moving Citadels) or would cause some sort of bug or issue with placement.

1b. "Or reimburse them". I was trying to indicate that another option would be to simply take them all down and give them back to the players or give them equivalent value, hence the idea of reimbursing. This causes its own issues though.

1c. You can't place a Citadel within 1000km of a gate, another Citadel, or certain other objects. Any method that moves a Citadel would have to avoid violating these rules, making it more complicated than simply pushing them off grid or moving them randomly. Also see above about petitions and similar issues.

2. There's an idea in Computer Security that any determined attacker will eventually break through any defense because there are simply more attackers with more combined resources than there are defenders at any organization. Similarly there are a relatively small number of devs with finite time. The time required to test everything so that there are never any issues with any of it is far to long to be practical. Generally the response to this is "well then just test it more so most issues get caught" to which I respond "They do, that's what we have now."

Humans are fallible, there will always be things that get through into the game. This is true for any game or piece of software. Testing mitigates, it doesn't eliminate.

Also often the idea that "the devs don't play the game!" comes more from someone feeling like their portion of the game (their playstyle, ect) is being neglected, not from the devs not actually understanding the game. Sure some things that feel obvious to one player get through, but Eve is huge and no one player or Dev can understand literally all of it. Anyone claiming otherwise is either an idiot or lying.

3. I've heard more or less the same thing said about ratting Carriers, and yet those die all the time. There's still a significant difference between something that is literally invulnerable and unkillable and a Carrier that is only very difficult to trap and kill. Besides as we hashed to death in the other thread, the threat posed by a Carrier's fighters is significantly smaller these days, and it's very possible a well equipped solo player or small gang could escape or fight his fighters off. That's very different from a Citadel where that same gang either dies or runs. Probably dies.

4. Not really seeing the issue with Citadels in Low. They can't camp gates, they can only be used defensively, so where's the issue? As for the idea that they should become vulnerable if they attack, that got covered back in the first few pages of the thread. Short answer though? It would make them basically worthless 95% of the time and you would have to lock down who could gun one so hard it's not funny, further reducing their usefulness and ability to actually protect people.

The issue here is that an invulnerable structure is being used offensively, not that someone can run back to one when on home terf. People have been able to do that with POSes since they were introduced.

You could've made a change to affect bubbels position/effect relative to citadels, which was the issue you sought to resolve. Instead you just went and did yet another "Shoot fish in a barrel with a shotgun" move.
This change will have implications you seem to not be aware of, me neither, but this does not feel like a considred move ccp.

/me still remembers a fun night where we put up a fishnet in the middle of a system, far far away from anything celestial or "manmade" This will now forever remain a distant memory...

EVE physics is totally different than real world physics. Drag in vacuum, warp fields based on friction, and violation of the quantum no-communication theorem. Not to mention the inconsistent and bizarre ages and masses when you show info on celestials. And there's a lot more wrong than that. But it's just a game.

However, you made some comments about the real world.

Lets look at these one by one.

First, in an earlier post you're incorrect about the time warp effect. Warp field equations in general relativity allow backwards time travel, so they may not even be physically meaningful once quantum mechanics (which implies backwards time travel is impossible) is combined with general relativity.

Secondly, assuming you could create such a warp field it would be trivial to make the locally flat internal region large enough to avoid any harm to the ship. The space inside the field follows a free fall geodesic, so you wouldn't experience any g forces from the acceleration of the warp bubble itself. The edges of the field are obviously extremely dangerous due to tidal forces but I've already addressed that.

Finally, under realistic initial conditions you wouldn't be able to just turn on your warp drive and go anywhere. You'd have to send someone ahead of you the slow way (sub-light speeds) to prepare the space the warp field will pass through in advance. Once this is done, you can initiate your warp drive and travel arbitrarily fast towards your destination. This preserves causality since someone had to get there the hard way and set things up for you, so your warp field never gets out of their light cone.

Actually, EVE was brilliant here. There is a chronicle about how the Old Man's Star gate was built that involves someone getting there the slow, hard way to build the stargate at that end. That's probably very realistic. So think of a warp field more as a train track than a Star Trek warp drive. Once the track is made any ship that has a warp drive can ride the track to the destination.

And that brings us to your point about how a bubble couldn't "catch" a warping vessel. This is incorrect, under realistic conditions a warping vessel probably needs an external influence to disengage the warp field when it reaches the end of the "track".

Although there are solutions that don't require a track they have other problems such as requiring tachyonic negative mass (wow!) or permitting backwards time travel.

So if anything, under realistic conditions you'd probably have a bubble at the start and end of every warp corridor to mark the end points of the FTL train track



Yep.



This won't work. Although quantum mechanics is non-local, no information can be transmitted this way. It's called the no-communication theorem. Essentially, it's impossible to know whether the state you're reading is the result of the other party influencing the entangled system, or just an artifact of the uncertainty of the measurement. Causality (information carrying events) propagates at the speed of light, and it isn't possible for 2 space-like separated events to influence each other.

EVE avoids the no-communication theorem via technobabble

The reality is that space-like separated events can't transmit information between them. Remember space-like means there is no future directed curve that joins the events in 4-space. For all practical purposes they are in separate universes until enough time passes that they become light-like and eventually time-like separated (assuming space isn't expanding fast enough between them that they are always space-like separated - there are events in our universe we will never receive due to this).

The only way to do FTL communication is to make a shortcut in 4-space between the events. That's how the "track" style warp drive explained earlier works. You're taking two points and creating a shorter path between them, but this requires preparing the length of that path at less than the speed of light the first time you use it. Once you've gotten there the hard way and laid the warp field train track you can send future information along this conduit.

That way you aren't violating causality; you've just spent the proper time (and energy) to change the shape of the universe. It isn't really FTL



This stuff has been thought of. It won't work for reasons. The future of Star Trek-esque FTL looks bleak.

Besides, why not focus on what we know we can do? For example, getting a probe to 5-10% the speed of light is within our technology, although currently prohibitively expensive as a mission. And assuming you can get 1G of constant acceleration (which would be no small feat, such a thing is well beyond our technology!) you could reach practically anywhere in the universe within your lifespan thanks to a combination of length contraction and time dilation. The downside is everyone you know will be long, long, dead by the time you get there making it the ultimate one way ticket.

Jesus H Christ. I don't know what career you're currently in, but if you're not the Chief of Technobabble (Chief Engineer) for the next Star Trek series, then it's a cardinal sin.

Good Idea CCP.

Your overall tone in your original post was incredibly condescending, starting with the bit where you tried to explain basic design philosophy to a professional game dev in a way that suggests that you think they aren't aware of it.

Also your example here is sarcasm, not particularly condescending. I also never suggested you weren't a dev, there's certainly a lot of them around the community, I just said you were being condescending and explaining to someone how to do their job (something that is generally considered condescending as an act, almost regardless of phrasing).

Last note on this bit, there's a big difference between software development and game development, and the skills sets are no where near completely interchangeable.



The problem here is that someone can camp for zero risk the vast majority of the time. Your suggestion doesn't actually fix that.

Your proposed solution is to widen the vulnerability window on structures that already have pretty wide windows. If you were to even multiply a Fortizar's window by 2x you have 12 hours of vulnerability. If you take your suggestions and multiply it by 5-10x you've got more than a day at least, which negates the point of vulnerability windows, which is to allow the defenders some control over when they can be attacked without having to essentially run on-call for their members.

As far as learning curve goes, complexity can be good, complexity for the sake of complexity and nothing else is not. Similarly preserving complexity or "the learning cliff" isn't necessarily a good thing for its own sake. I've spent enough time in this game helping out newbies to know that first hand.



No, it comes at the same price and risk as having a Citadel anywhere else. The problem is the out sized reward it provides, which this change remedies.


Read through the rest of the thread and find one single instance of something this impacts outside of citadel camping. I've thread the entire thing and there isn't one. The people objecting to this change either have vague and nebulous objections, like yours, with no specific backing beyond "why are you changing bubbles if Citadels are the problem!?!?" or they think Citadel camping is fine and want it preserved in some fashion.

The closest anyone's come to a real objection is the hypothetical of a Carrier parked on a Citadel on a gate, but that's still got more risk to it than just the Citadel camp.

Personally I'm ambivalent about Citadel camping staying or going, but I can't really fault CCP's logic or their decision on how to address it. It's the most minimally disruptive of the available options, and costs players the least in time, materials, and adjustment in play.

They can be destroyed however they are so cheap they're pointless to destroy. They'll pop another astro as soon as the one you put all the work in to destroy is gone.

Personally, I think we are ready to go back to the original design of the bubbles, that dropped you from warp if your warp path intersected the bubble in any way, including warping from Point A to Point B having a stop bubble 3/4 of a way in between.

That would make the entirety of bubbles fun again.

This seems more like "Mythical Man Month" than an actually useful fact. Even if you assume a completely unfitted Astrahaus you can kill one with a couple of dreads and reinforce it fairly quickly. Even taking a fairly generous ISK rate of 200m an hour per person that's still around 10 "man hours" to break even and with fittings it's around 50. It does not take 50 people to kill an Astrehaus, nor does it take 50 man hours unless the enemy defends it reasonably well.

Im sorry but drag bubbles are the most ridiculous mechanic in the game. They should be removed.