Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I was reading a different thread here, and the topic of capturing Citadels came up.

It was related, but unrelated to the context of the OP so I decided to start a new thread on it. Ironically "Capture Citadels" returned exactly 0 hits, so I'm wondering if the search function is broken.

One of the most annoying things about Citadels is blowing them up. It can be fun when someone shows up to fight... but 99% of the citadels I've bashed have been empty.

Which means that people need more incentive to defend them.

We shouldn't change the cost, nor should we make their defense easier. Which leaves "political" motivations.

If a citadel could be captured with magic wands on their last timer (entosis instead of dps), it would have potentially massive consequences to sov stability. At the very least, whoever captured it could deanchor it and sell it.

I am NOT saying replace the dps mechanic with an entosis mechanic, I'm saying make them both an option.

I would go a step further and say that stuff in a citadel that gets captured IN SOV NULL shouldn't go into asset safety, it should go to the new citadel owners. Mirrors old station mechanics when you lose the ability to dock.

Now you've got incentive to defend your ****, if not a mad rush to empty your stuff out of it. As has been said by a thousand players a thousand times over, Eve isn't safe. Why should your assets be safe?

I agree, it's not 100% the same.. but lets be honest, will the capturing corp ever let you in? Probably not. For all intents and purposes unless you take that station back, those assets are gone.

I'm not proposing that it be an identical mechanic, I'm proposing that it encourage players to fight.

Consider a different example... Perimeter.

Imagine the fun fights we might get if people start blowing up market hub citadels. I'd show up to fight, if it meant protecting what was mine. The market people would literally lose their **** if they had assets tied up in a market that was about to disappear. I know that this is completely contrary to what I initially said (as Perimeter is not SOV NULL) but really you'd incentivize a lot of players defending the citadel. And that's what we want, is content.

Yea, but what if sov null stations were to stop being a thing? We know POS are disappearing, so why not sov stations?

What about systems that don't have stations, or stations that don't have certain services?

The Perimeter example is an outlier - as said, it's not SOV NULL.. and you're probably right, the safe players would take their ball to Jita instead.

But in SOV NULL... oh the possibilities for forcing conflict. For making people fight for things, rather than just saying "meh... it's only a Fortizar".

Tell me that GSF wouldn't rage-burn a huge fleet to defend a stocked staging system, if you knew that those assets would not only be gone to you, but be given to the enemy that now has a fully stocked staging system of their own?

Sure that works for every-day stuff, but I'm guessing people wouldn't want to fly 20 jumps to hit a market hub. It also doesn't answer the question of defending staging systems. If all your stuff is in stations in NPC null and lowsec, are you really going to be able to sustain a fight deep in sov null space?

Then there are renter corps to worry about... are you going to force them to fly 20 jumps to reach a market hub?

Ultimately, yes, stations would end up being market hubs. But if sov stations disappeared, you'd be forced to defend your citadels a lot more diligently.

Edit:
I'm not just talking about item hangers. I'm talking about ship hangers too. If it's in a sov citadel and you lose the citadel, it belongs to the new owner of the citadel.

Lose a key citadel and you could well lose access to a substantial number of re-ship reinforcements.

Couple of problems with this:

First off, you're incorrect about the old station/Outpost mechanics as someone else already pointed out. Your stuff stayed yours you just risked losing access to it. The reason CCP introduced Asset Safety is because otherwise no one would actually be willing to use or live out of a Citadel when there are better options available in stations and Outposts where you don't lose everything when things get kaploded.

Problem two, there's no reason you would *ever* kill a Citadel over capturing it even without getting to steal the stuff inside. That takes a *very* significant mineral sink out of the game, and would likely cause the price of Citadels to drop like a rock since very few would be getting destroyed now.

Lastly your basic premise, that "eve isn't safe so why should your assets be safe?" is flawed. Eve is as safe as you make it. When something in the game is really and truly 100% "you will lose your ship" unsafe then people either find a way around it or find a way to minimize their loss down to a level that's acceptable to them. Case and point, Cyno ships. There's nothing that I can think of in Eve closer to a "you will lose this" than a Cyno Frigate, so what people do is make them as absolutely dirt cheap as physically possible and just assume they're going to pop. Heck I saw someone yesterday as I was warping through Low Sec very clearly light a Cyno and then blow it up themselves, probably for Op Sec reasons.

If you made Citadels capturable you'd wreck the economy because they'd no longer replace the mineral sink of POSes.

If you take away Asset Safety people will stop keeping their stuff in Citadels all together, and they still won't defend them.

Would you bring an entosis fleet to a fight? Probably not.

The entosis ship(s) would be standing by in case they did not bring a fight... which they most certainly would if it were worth defending. I know I wouldn't want to be flying a gimped entosis ship during a major battle.

If you can't bring entosis ships, then your next best bet is to destroy the citadel.

One could force a choice between entosis and destruction by having entosis affect the timer in some manner that would severely limit your ability to destroy it. Say for example, causing the timer to perma-run at 3/4 speed if it gets entosised more than 30% or something. Just throwing out wild ideas off the top of my head.

In short, the only time a citadel would actually be captured is when you don't defend it.

Then you have to consider the impact to industry from all the extra major engagements that would happen. Ship builders would see increased demand for ships, which would probably stabilize the mineral costs to some extent.


Edit:
Regarding your other two points, as mentioned, take away sov stations and there is no choice. If you want to live in sov null, there's a risk associated with the reward of sov null.

You're right that people will mitigate their losses by doing stuff and things. Large alliances with multiple doctrines however will find that infeasible.

Last I checked, that's what the timers were for. I believe the owner of the citadel can even choose which window they want their citadel to be vulnerable for.....

I don't need to, I just need to bring a big enough regular fleet and a couple of Entosis ships as support, and if my enemy already isn't showing up then that's not going to be too hard. Plus, functionally speaking, I don't need to kill the Citadel and the Fleet I just need to kill the defense fleet until they stop showing up and then I can capture the Citadel at my leisure. This might not work in some cases but in would absolutely work a lot of the time, especially since you've just dangled a bit 2-15B ISK carrot in front of every moderately large group in the game to go around pillaging every Citadel they can find.

As to the idea that this would create more large engagements, I find that highly unlikely. There's no more reason here to defend a Citadel than there is now unless you have unwisely packed it full of stuff, which most groups won't do as a form of risk management. Any stuff that is in the Citadel can be evac'd when it's attacked. If you take away the ability to do that then we'll be back to Null before we had Outposts when "good space" was space with NPC stations nearby and that's where people clustered because to do otherwise wasn't feasible for line members.

At that point the large alliances will either stage out of NPC stations too, probably making them inaccessible to smaller entities, or they'll be big enough to soak the loss at which point only the large entities can afford the risk of occupying large tracts of Null space since only they can absorb the loss if a staging Citadel goes pop with all their backup ships in it.

Take away the NPC stations and you've probably killed a good chunk of the population in Null, between people like the renters, the more casual line members that now can't keep a ratting ship safe to their satisfaction, and the complete inability to leave assets in Null when you take a break from the game.

I get the allure of ideas like this that massively increase the likely loss associated with some feature, but the result won't be a good one. The hope is that it'll create content by incentivizing conflict, but the actual result in practice will be that people will either find a way to mitigate the risk and bypass the change or they'll flee away from something that is now too high risk to be sustainable, so the end result of too high a swing in risk vs reward is actually the destruction of content not the creation of it.

If you're going to massively increase risk you need a carrot to balance it out, or you need the actual change in perceived safety to be smaller than the realistic change in perceived safety. For example if CCP were to make Freighters have a 50% chance for any given item not to show up on a Cargo Scanner. This sounds great, but realistically someone is still going to have a pretty good idea of how much the Freighter is carrying and it won't save anyone's ship. It probably would encourage a lot of players into making stupid decisions with their Freighter loading though.

Yea, you can bring enough of a regular fleet - but so can they. And they have a citadel shooting void bombs at your logistics and shooting missiles at your entosis ships, while they have a fleet attacking your fleet. They have a home-field advantage.

If you can field a bigger fleet, say for example GSF (since I'm picking on them already) against some 5-player corp, then the 5-player corp probably belongs in NPC null or lowsec where regular asset safety applies, and the citadels aren't worth big alliances/coalitions attacking anyways.

The carrot is dangling between the two sides... one wants to keep the carrot, the other wants to take the carrot.

They absolutely can go pillaging... but there's always bigger groups out there, and the big groups keep the other big groups in line. You can't leave your own stuff undefended for too long. You can absolutely capture other citadels, but you remain at-risk from the other big groups making their own inroads into your space.

Speaking for my own corp policy, we're required to have doctrine ships on standby. X number of one doctrine, X number of another doctrine, etc. Those ships have to be docked somewhere. In the absence of SOV stations, citadels are the only choice. If you need to be able to respond to an attack on your space, you can't store them all in one place either, or it'll just be too far to fly to respond in time.


If the risk becomes too high, maybe it will become 1 of one doctrine, instead of 3 of one doctrine. That is risk mitigation, whilst maintaining the ability to fight for your space. You lose one, yea it sucks, and yea that's the point - you want to not lose your stuff.

And as you say... players can try to evac. Assuming the system's not being gate camped, that should be their way out. Perhaps then the fight turns into breaking through the blockade to evac your stuff before the final timer. It means more ships in space, and more potential for conflict, where before asset safety by its current design protects you from having to risk your stuff.

As a potential way to reduce the risk/loss to a player, have 50% (it's a number, the concept matters) of your assets transferred via asset safety. The other 50% gets lost during the capture process. Which 50%? Random.

Lot of people are not to used to lose a ship in a "fair" fight, imagine if they lose everything because were the only one showed up to defend a citadel....