Jita Park Speakers Corner

Eve Online has always been like this. You have always been served up on a platter as content for the other players. It is the core idea of the game: Everyone vs. Everyone.

Highsec has never been, or was ever suppose to be safe. CCP did a severe disservice to the game by allowing POSes with 24h take-down timers (thus be immune to wars) to be in the game for so long. It was a major oversight that engendered a severe sense of entitlement in a segment of the player base that they can play the game at no risk to the other players. Corrective action was long overdue to fix this major failure in game design and the new Upwell structures, while not perfect, seem to do a much better job at creating content that the highsec POS did.

As for your "cauldron", players have been claiming the 'Eve is dying' or will die if they are not given more safety since 2003. This, despite the fact that the Eve player base grew the fastest at a time when highsec, and the game in general, was much more dangerous and losses mattered much more than they do today in the current 'everyone-is-rich' state of New Eden. Only after CCP made a major push to increase safety, particularly in highsec, did player growth stall and then go into decline. Now, this correlation isn't proof of anything, but it should give you pause when some carebear makes the claim that subscriber numbers will skyrocket if they are given a corner of New Eden immune from non-consensual player interaction or competition.

No offense here, but you seem not to have got the message: Eve Online is a full-time, PvP sandbox game. CCP spells this out clearly in the New Pilot FAQ. That means you are not intended to be able to play the game as "high sec PVE and Industrial players" only. You are always kept vulnerable to other players who can interfere with your PvE or industry which is consistent with the fact that the fruits of your PvE and industry interfere with the other players who are all part of our shared player-driven economy.

This doesn't mean there isn't a place for you in New Eden, it may just not be in a player corporation, the competitive unit of the game. Player corporations are optional, thus so are wars. If wars are interfering with your game play and you have no interest in competing, then go back to the NPC corp where you can PvE and do industry safe from war declarations. Will you be as efficient at it as a group of players who do offer themselves up as content, taking the risk of attack and spending the effort to secure and defend themselves? No, but why should you make as much income as they do given you are not providing for your defence nor are you likely to suffer any losses?

If you do not want to risk or defend an Upwell structure, than don't. This game is about trade-offs and for far too long, highsec POSes had none. It is perfectly possible to do industry in NPC stations, or one of the numerous low-fee Engineering Complexes that are all over highsec now, from an NPC corp. Yes, it is true you are losing access to game play regarding structure management (terrible game play in my opinion - setting up a POS makes me want to tear my hair out) but now some small amount of risk is being injected back into the game opening the door for the possibility of content.

CSM members, if you are reading this, I would ask you to impress on CCP that while these new structures are a good start, what is really needed now is more conflict drivers in highsec so players actually want to go through the tedium to blow these things up. More stuff that accesses or improves limited or finite resources, like the Market Module that lead to all those explosions last week in Perimeter. Things in limited supply that players will fight over.

I have high hopes for the Drilling Platforms, so please remind CCP of the success of the Market Module in generating content, and push them to include some planet, system or constellation exclusive bonus or access that players want to fight over, like with the current moon mining, in the functionality of this next group of structures.

You want facts? Only a handful of Engineering Complexes have been exploded in highsec, a large fraction of which were by one group (Pandemic Horde) in one system (Perimeter) despite the fact there is an Engineering Complex in almost every system anywhere near a trade hub, and beyond for that matter. No one is going to spend 10+ person hours (and 100M ISK) to destroy a structure that drops next to nothing unless there is some other compelling reason to do so. Maybe industry indexes in a system will prove to be that, or the taxes from customers unwilling or unable (such as apparently yourself) to defend their own structure, but on their own CCP has made them unrewarding and boring to shoot, so much so that practically no one is doing it. That's fine as a baseline, but there really needs to be some additional conflict drivers that put you at increased risk for increased rewards if people are going to fight over them.

I am sorry CCP is taking away your invulnerable highsec POSes, but honestly it is for the best. There will be teeth gnashing and whining from the entitled and those resistant to change, but just like the removal of off-grid boosting, it is for the betterment of the game.

Good luck though on your campaign to save your 100%-immune-to-attack player-owned stations. Given the fundamental premise of Eve Online, I fear you'll need it.

Of course they do. How can you deny the self-evident fact that a highsec POS can be taken down in hours, yet a war declaration doesn't go live for a full 24 hours giving plenty of time for a highsec POS user to pack up and store their assets in an invulnerable NPC station? There is literally no way for someone who objects to a highsec POS to explode the vast majority of those in-space assets which can be taken down from behind the invulnerability of a POS shield and then placed safely in a hanger. Much like the POS-boosting Orcas and Rorquals of old, players can benefit from these assets with zero risk of losing them. This is, and always has been, completely broken from a game design view.

Asking for a simple balance pass of the capabilities of the Upwell structures is a reasonable request. I think CCP themselves said they would do so once they have been in the wild a while and they have collected some data. However, CCP was transparent about the design of these structures and the obvious reason why there are no AoE weapons allowed in highsec: the CrimeWatch mechanics. You can't have Upwell structures bombing or AoE doomsdaying non-war targets in highsec. This circumvents CONCORD (or comically, would cause CONCORD to explode your citadel). This decreased offensive capability is offset by the lack of availability of capitals to the attackers. Maybe this balance isn't quite right and some of the offensive systems need a buff for highsec conflict - I won't claim to have access to the data that would point either way - but I am sure there is no chance of highsec Upwell structures getting access to the same AoE weapons as they do in low/nullsec, at least without a complete rework of the CrimeWatch system.

In any case though, the new structures are intended to act as force multipliers and the fate of the structure determined by a fight on-grid between two (or more) fleets. They are not suppose to be 'Death Stars' that can defend themselves alone. With that in mind to set your expectations of what changes are possible, I'll leave it to the CSM to relay your concerns to CCP.

Of course it is invulnerable. If something is impossible to destroy (like a highsec POS protected by CONCORD or tucked in a station hanger), it is invulnerable. That is the definition of the word invulnerable.

The point is moot however since invulnerable POSes are on the way out of highsec. As for your other ideas, sure, free-fire zones, or other such CONCORD-invalidating mechanics around highsec structures would be cool. Such changes are non-trivial however to implement, and will open highsec players up to all sorts of risks they might not be happy with. Various CCP developers have indicated they would like to have a better, more fluid system for groups to fight over structures in highsec, as well as their desire to let capital ships back into highsec, so maybe long-term something like this will happen. But it will happen as part of a complete re-imagining of highsec CrimeWatch and war mechanics, not some simple 'balance pass' that we could get any time soon.

What might be good is if someone familiar with highsec war and structure mechanics was voted on the next CSM to champion such a major effort.

Highsec POSes can go from the invulnerable state of being protected by CONCORD (you can't gank a POS), to the invulnerable state of being stashed in an NPC station well before any war goes live with there being nothing an aggressor can do. Thus, they are invulnerable unless their owner chooses to risk them by leaving them up during a war. There is no risk of losing them non-consensually yet their owner derives benefits from having them in space. This is broken and has been fixed by CCP first with POCOs, and now with the Upwell structures. I am not sure why you are so fixated on a word when I am sure you agree with the general situation as I just spelled it out.

I have no major problem with the current way ECs and Citadels have been implemented. Requiring a small fleet to contest them is perfectly reasonable, although I will point out the original design called for them to be vulnerable to a single person in a entosis-fit frigate. That was fine with me too. I don't see why you think it is good for the game that there are artificial bars to attack a structure, or that they should defend themselves. They are they to generate content and be fought over (Build Your Dreams; Wreck Their Dreams) so making it difficult to attack doesn't serve anyone. That's a major problem with the 100%-get-out-of-war-free card the current POSes have in that since an attacker knows the most likely outcome of a wardec is that the POS will be taken down during the 24h warm-up leaving them with no fight and 50M ISK in the hole so they stop even trying. So much content stops before it even could begin.

Now that POCOs and Upwell structures have to remain in space until the war starts (as POSes should have been all along) the structure owner has something on the line. There is a cost to evasion (the potential loss of the structure) so there is an incentive to try to defend. Sure, in many cases the guy coming to wreck their dream may be too strong and thus it not worth trying to defend, but at least now there is a chance of some player stories, and interesting fights, being created.

Invulnerable POSes are/were bad for the game. They just made it harder for aspiring industrialists to get into the game and made pointless busy work for POS owners to set-up, and then tear down a POS every time a war was declared. All this terrible game play is being swept aside and some trade-offs being put back into the game. Owning an EC will not make sense for all industrialists now as the risks and costs associated are higher, but for many it will and they will serve as content for others (and will be rewarded for making themselves vulnerable). The Eve ecosystem will be healthier for it.

Lol. Ok friend, now you are the one being daft. I've had carebears sneer 'get good' in some near impossible game situations, but this one takes the cake.

A large POS shield has something like 40 000 000 HP. In a 0.5 system, a gank Talos can put out 1 000 DPS and lasts 20 seconds or so before exploding. That means, in order to do 40M HP in damage in 20s, you need 2 000 Taloses and spend thus about 200B ISK to gank it. If it is shield hardened, you might need closer to 8 000 Taloses, a number that would easily crash the server node (actually, even 100 people simultaneously spawning CONCORD on a grid seems to crash the node). Even a small POS would need something like 500 gank Taloses, a number beyond pretty much everyone in the game, and come with 1 000X the cost of that small POS tower they are shooting.

Oh, and that is just to reinforce the shield. You still have to gank through the armour and structure. And this is only in a 0.5: things get hilariously more impossible as you shorten the CONCORD response time as you move up the security status of the system.

This incompatibility of the 'EHP wall' and the CONCORD mechanic is the very reason why capital ships are banned from highsec - they are impossible to gank and thus invulnerable when flown by an NPC corp member. No POS shield has ever been ganked in higshec, nor will ever be ganked given the astronomical cost and the real impossibility of having that many pilots on a single node.

Why are you dragging your thread off topic by making impossible suggestions that highlight your ignorance of basic game mechanics, rather than discussing actual changes to the game you want to see implemented? POSes are leaving. Surely you have some ideas that would make the Upwell structures more palatable for you that you can share with the CSM?

Thousands of people don't show up. In fact, due to hardware limitations, they can't even show up. And why would they just to lose hundreds of billions in gank ships to shoot something for no reward?

If you are going to assert with a straight face that there is any possibility of thousands of people getting together and spending hundreds of billions of ISK in lost ships to gank your 50M ISK small POS tower, I don't know what to say. In fact, I don't have to say anything as that says more about your view of game balance than anything I could.

You have simultaneously claimed in this thread that you want to make highsec more dangerous, and that it is reasonable that it take impossible numbers of players (spending 1 000X the value of your tower) to shoot your in-space structure. You have no coherent points, and seem to lack even a basic understanding of how much effort is required to shoot a structure and the motivations of the players that do this. You do not seem to want even to discuss the topic of your original post - the capabilities of the new Upwell structures - but rather prattle on endlessly about whether the server can actually handle the amount of players it would require to gank a highsec POS tower. Answer: it can't. And we will never find out because a) there is no group that is going to throw away close to a trillion ISK on the pointless exercise, and b) the invulnerable POSes are being phased out in probably less than a year now.

I suggest you try to re-focus on your energies on reality here and that is the new structures that will replace POSes. Regardless of their invulnerability in highsec, the POS code comes with all sorts of other problems so CCP is chomping at the bit to delete it from the game so soon the new structures will be the only game in town. They too are impossible to gank, but CCP has made that irrelevant by keeping them in space for 7 days to allow a legal war declaration to remove CONCORD and allow a proper fight to take place over the structures in highsec.

Let's try one more time to get your train-wreck of a thread back on track. Specifically, what changes do you think would improve the offensive/defensive capabilities of the Upwell structures in highsec?