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There is little reason to attack the aggressors while the CO is in reinforcement. Wait for reinforcement to end and then repair your CO. If they then attack the CO again, you can shoot them.

You're screwed if you have set multiple COs to come out of reinforcement at roughly the same time though.

I've clarified this in the previous post. I was looking at this as more of a griefing tactic prevention. Shoot the POCO once, then dock and wait for defending fleet to leave, then undock and shoot at it again. Rinse and repeat. A 24 hour kill right will at least let the defending fleet leave a token force that won't lose standings shooting at the griefer.

If anyone tries that, he will lose sec too, and pretty soon will go under -5. Then you'll enjoy a permanent killright on him

You still need a victory condition for the defender then. For conquerable outposts, you can blow up the SBUs and avoid repping the station. For POCOs, I'd say a timer (say 1 hour) after coming out of RF before it self-reps would be perfect.


So? The char that shoots the POCO will lose sec. It doesn't matter if it's in an ibis or a dread. Unless you want to transfer the aggro to his main somehow?

Very possible.

Just to play devil's advocate here, I could bring in faction warfare control bunker mechanics and say that a victory condition isn't needed, just that the ownership switches on the next downtime after RF ends.

FW has people online all day, so you have some chance of getting a fight at a random time with little warning. A normal corp doesn't. Even the big blocs have their prime time. The defender needs at least a chance to defend in their own timezone: a reinforcement timer, a fight after it ends, and a way to win that fight and return to status quo.

If these structures don't encourage fights, they are pointless, nobody likes shooting structures. If you want these to change hands without fighting, maybe we should be able to lease them off the empires instead? The highest bidder each month gets to charge tax for the CO?

NOTE: that last bit was not a serious proposal.

(Had to shorten the quote to get enough characters to be able to respond. Original post I have quoted is here: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=237400#post237400 )


Problem with indestructible POCOs: It gives even more power to the power blocs we already have. Keep in mind that with the currently proposed mechanic just because there is a POCO doesn't mean you can use it! So you might not only lose access but also have a now unfriendly POCO you're unable to destroy as a small industrial corp, instead of just having the cost of putting another one up.
Powerful entities would not have to invest a single ISK to get control of regions POCOs. While the income from one or even 10 POCOs may be negligible, it eventually does add up if you have 100-300. All they need to do it have a gang of say a dozen or two reinforce all those, come back after 2 days and take over every POCO whose shied was not repaired to the 25% needed to reset the reinforcement mode. Repeat once a month or so. Yea, the access to the planets will stay there IF they allow neutrals/reds (depends on if this is gonna be changed). And they can at least in theory take it back but they easily have the numbers to defend that and ward of any attacks that industrial corps can usually manage (let's say they just drop 10 carriers and 20 BS, rarely can an industrial corp can match that) and they get some ships to shoot at.
They have NO upkeep cost for any of this, again: NOT A SINGLE ISK HAS TO BE SPENT BY THE ATTACKER FOR THIS!

With destructible POCOs the incentive for large entities to attack drops significantly. Yes, they can grieve people, but it's tedious and provides NO payout WHATSOEVER. They don't drop anything upon destruction. It would be solely to grieve, and there is no reason anyone would do that on a large scale except to influence the market and control prices. Providing a payout to grieving these structures is a very VERY bad thing in my opinion!

Also see my answer to C below for additional thoughts on this in combination with other mechanics!


I agree, the problem with profit and return of investment needs to be fixed independently (and that it's a side issue). If this isn't change the whole PI market will go bananas anyway. I think these NPC COs should be removed after a while, but an alternative would still be to just increase the price until it is so high that it exceeds the value of the items, and the remove it. This would then allow the global removal of all those remaining at some time in the future.

continued below....

What if POCO worked like this:

1) You cannot un-anchor a POCO or gantry
2) While only one POCO can be anchored, any number of gantries can be.
3) If there is only one anchored item, it uses the planet's magnetic field to make itself invulnerable.
4) If more than one item is anchored this invulnerability is disrupted and all can be attacked.

Result: drive by shootings no longer work, grief killings are virtually gone. If you want to destroy a POCO you got to commit, buy one yourself and anchor it. Sorry griefers, but eve is a cruel place.

Second result: This becomes even more the domain of the big boys. So lets do this as well:

If you build a launchpad on the planet and you cannot use the POCO (either because its not there, or you do not have rights) you can launch a 10,000 cu m can from the pad. Cost to be worked out, but high.

(quoting response 1390 by Creat)

I don't disagree at all that it is a valid tactic.

The idea of this whole thing is to increase player to player interaction. If, as you propose, it's very challenging to get a fleet together to go out and defend your PCO before it gets reinforced, you are increasing player interaction, but only marginally.

1 player vulnerable? Yeah, to an extent I guess. In the vast emptiness of low, null and WH space, not very much exposed, especially if your diversionary attackers are in a cloaky. It doesn't take a BS to generate a warning email.

Kill off defending players 1 by 1? You're kidding right? If the defender is so stupid to warp to 0 to see if someone is attacking a PCO, they deserve to lose it. Have a tactical 150+ km away from the POCO and you can see if a attack is occurring in your battleship and warp off before you can be tackled.

Why would you send ships out worth more than the PCO to begin with? The only thing you are defending is the income, and the value (80 mil ISK) of the PCO. You don't lose SOV, you don't loose assets held within the PCO, you don't get anchored structures around the PCO. Yeah, I would go for a fight for fights sake, but you don't need a PCO to get into a fleet fight.

I think the dev's are comparing a POS attack with a PCO attack, and I don't think that is a fair comparison. POS's have significant defenses which shoot first that would have a tendency to discourage people shooting just to have a email sent.

I do agree that many people won't use a diverse attack to attack a PCO. Too much of a pain. The more serious problem is random people just generating tons of emails to PCO owners. The end result is that you never go out to defend a PCO. The purpose of the PCO (to increase interaction) doesn't occur.

Security stasis hit? Only in low sec. Not in WH's and not in null sec. If I'm already at -10 which is not too unusual, why would I care any way? Better things to do for those with -10 stasis? Assuming that a email is not generated when a PCO is put into RF mode, you have to go out to check to see if your PCO is in RF mode. I might kill you when you come to check, or if the PCO is in reinforced mode, when your sitting there for minutes in a 130m ISK uncloaked logi repping the 80m ISK PCO. (Why would a logi pilot do that... I'm not sure, but they could. I wouldn't). Bring a fleet to keep the logi safe? Sure, it's easy to get 10 pilots to spend 30 minutes of their game time to save 80mil ISK. They make an average of what 20 mil ISK an hour each, so it cost them 100m ISK to save 80m ISK.

Why defend (or attack) the PCO when it comes out of RF mode? It's 80m ISK, and doesnt generate much income, not worth much effort to defend it. I get a kill mail if I destroy it, but other than that... I get no ISK. Not worth much effort to destroy it, especially if I don't have a desire to put up my own PCO in it's place.

I would think, atleast in low sec, those putting up PCO's would not be the same group of people attacking them for the most part. If I'm in the group trying to make money with a PCO, 80mil PCO loss would be a cost of doing business. Loosing a couple t1 BC's worth 40mil each in defending that 80mil PCO, and you quickly learn that it's better letting the PCO get destroyed and replacing it later than defending it.

It's been my argument all along, the economics don't make sense with the plan as proposed. I don't see a way to make the economics work without breaking lots of other things in the process, at least that accomplishes the 2 goals they started out to achieve.

If your a Trekkie, remember the episode in ST:TNG where Data creates a daughter named Lal? Lal dies because of a cascading failure that keeps growing. That's like this idea. Fixing the original idea breaks something else. Fixing that breaks something else, the fix for that breaks something else, etc, etc.

I was unaware... I would still wonder though, given the impetus to encourage PCO anchoring, why it wasn't set at a volume to accommodate all Blockade Runners (i.e. Crane)?