Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I think the Mobile Siphon Units need to be looked at. I really like the idea, but in practice they are kind of crap.

First off, the least controversial opinion: there's no way to siphon Complex Reactions (that I know of). The 'Rote' siphons only take simple reactions, and the 'Hybrid' siphons take polymer reactions or something. None of the siphons suck in stuff like Ferrogel or any of that jazz that's worth lots of money, which I think is more than a little silly.

Second, they're too expensive. While I do understand they can't be Mobile Depot kinda cheap, ~13m a pop is just too expensive for their efficiency. At 13m a pop, even if you're siphoning the most high-value stuff you can find, you need to keep the siphon up for five hours if you want to break even, or over six hours if you want to make any kind of profit. For something that's killed in a couple of minutes and easily discovered by any pos jockey passing by the system hitting dscan once, that's just not right.

Here's what I think could be done to make them better:

First off, add a way to siphon complex reactions. Honestly, just let the 'Rote' siphon do that. I don't see any sense in complex reactions being immune to siphoning like this.

Secondly, do something about their efficiency. On a Promethium moon you need the siphon alive for five hours to turn a profit. On a Thulium moon, it's over ten hours. While that may sound sensible in theory (they're "passive income"), in practice it's absolutely horrible. Not only can anyone loot from the siphons (which is completely ok btw), but they are easily detected and take only a couple of minutes to kill, especially if your POS has guns. All it takes is for a single person in that system to hit dscan once in that five or ten-hour period and the siphon will be completely useless in terms of profit. That is not balanced.

So for the efficiency, there's a couple of approaches I can think of. First the obvious ones, make them cheaper. Even if they were 50% of the cost they're now they wouldn't be broken. Alternatively, you could make them huff more goo, but this couldn't be some pansy 10% increase or anything as that would be way too small to fix anything.

You could also make them harder to kill. I don't necessarily mean just giving them more EHP, in fact that would be a pretty useless change. For instance, allow them to be deployed further away from the POS. I've caught Oracles, ceptors and bombers on my siphons, but since on a large POS the distance between the siphon and the force fierd is like 15km or something, they can just slowboat into the POS instead of getting killed. If you could deploy the siphons 100km or more away from the forcefield, people couldn't just run into the POS unless they use a sniper ship, however in a sniper ship they give up the ability to loot the siphoned goo before destroying it.

You could also look into making them completely impervious to POS guns. Right now, it looks like people tend to put a couple of guns on all of their money POSes for the explicit purpose of shooting siphons. It'd be nice if they were forced to actually risk stuff when destroying the siphons, instead of just sitting safely inside a POS field.

Getting a notification when your siphon is under attack would be neat, but might also go against the spirit of the siphons.

Anyway let me know what you think.

EDIT: Oh yeah and if it was possible for the owner to scoop up the siphons, that'd be great. If you're not going to change the price, at least do this. This would reward active gameplay of guarding your siphons, as when the POS owner notices them you can go there, scoop it up, and run for it, instead of just having to play cat-and-mouse with them to keep it alive for just one more tick.

Oh yeah and if it was possible for the owner to scoop up the siphons, that'd be great. If you're not going to change the price, at least do this. This would reward active gameplay of guarding your siphons, as when the owner notices them you can go there, scoop it up, and run for it, instead of just having to play cat-and-mouse with them to keep it alive for just one more tick.

If they were supposed to be harassment tools, they would be cheaper and waste more material, so you couldn't make more money with them but the POS owner would lose just as much. I would be completely ok with such a change, by the way. In fact, if there was a siphon that has a waste factor of 100% but is significantly cheaper than the current ones, I'd be all over it.

However, the siphons were pitched by CCP in one of the devblogs or dev videos as a way for non-POS owning people to get into the moon goo market, and as they are now, they do not fulfill that purpose adequately.

You are also failing to realise that most moons aren't owned by individual pilots but groups of pilots. They may be refueled by an individual pilot, but there is a very large group of pilots whose best interest is to keep the moons clear of siphons. This, combined with the fact that it takes almost zero effort to hit dscan and spot the siphons, means that they simply aren't efficient as either harassment or money-making tools. You can cover this period by having four pilots in relatively different timezones log in once a day, fly around in a ceptor for 10 minutes hitting dscan, and POS gunning down any siphons they find -- and there's a lot more than four pilots in most alliances.

Finally, what I'm asking for absolutely does not have any potential to invalidate owning a moon goo moon. There can only be one siphon actively siphoning from a moon, so it's never possible for siphons to take all of the goo a harvesting array produces. If you never clear your moons, sure, you'll lose a sizeable chunk of produce, but honestly, passive income is a ridicilously dumb concept and anything that requires you to actually do something to make heaps of ISK is good in my books.

EDIT: So just to make it clear, what I'm asking for is making the siphons an "active player's" way of getting moon goo. I'm ok with having to babysit them, but having to babysit them for six hours just to not lose money doing so is completely unreasonable. Thus, if I had to choose between changes to their price and changes that make them reward active gameplay more, I'd go for the latter.

What if siphons psuedo-cloaked?
Deploy your Siphon, as soon as it onlines it shimmers and disappears, disappearing from the overview, d-scan...etc. Decloaking it by closing with it is required before it can be interacted with, shot or whatever else. But the only way to find it (except accidentally) is to follow the faint trail which links it to the array (only visible outside the shield perhaps?).
Entirely graphical breadcrumb trails would mean a cursory inspection is unlikely to detect the siphon, increasing the potential payoff but making astute POS operators better off.

Just because a tower says 'X' corp doesn't mean the vast majority of that corp/alliance have anything to do with it, take care of it, check it, or even know of its existence until the 'Defend our POS, Possible cap kills' op goes out. POS's are one of those mechanics alot of people would rather just have nothing to do with, unless killing a carrier repping one is involved.

You CAN get into the moon-goo market with them.... but you have to pick your targets. If you're trying to siphon R64 towers that are likely babysat day and night.... well... there's yer problem. Like ganking or Hunting... pick your targets. You also CAN get into the trit market by ganking miners.... but really there is no substitute for mining veldspar or playing the market if you're trying to amass Trit.

Sure it takes '0 effort' to hit dscan and detect a siphon, but then you have to go and find it. Some planets have 20 or 30 moons. No, you probably don't care about the other 29 moons on that planet, but if you own the 1 Pro moon on that planet, you're going to go and check it if you see it on D scan. Is it not active game play to check your towers? You don't plan on taking a PL tower with a 1 man army. Why should you be able to turn a profit off someone else putting in the work to take a tower, with a 1 man industrial?


You're saying it takes very little effort to destroy a siphon, but it really doesn't take much to set one up either. I'm not 100% sure on the exact process, but it's not much more complex than warp to, decloak, anchor, warp away. A POS requires hours of management every week at modest minimum. People putting in more than that to make sure you don't get 10 hrs unmolested... why should they be gutted by someone spending 2 minutes? Unlike a freighter who takes no precautions, a POS owner can't do anything other than check their tower regularly, then engage in active game play to shoot any siphons. A Tower won't do it for them. This to me, fulfills your active game play requirement. A standard siphon will drain 60 units of raw material, according to it's in game info sheet. A POS only harvests 100/hr on most mats.... is 2/3 of the POS's harvesting ability not enough? Mileage may vary slightly on Processed materials, but it's not too radically different.


These things are comparable in price and material req's to a cruiser. That's not that expensive. You can make more than that with a single L4 mission, in the comfort and safety of high sec without having to baby sit a piddly POS-related mechanic, or doing a bit of ratting. Find a handful of BS rats and you've made about that.



What you're asking for CAN invalidate owning a moon. That siphon stealing 60 out of 100 units makes the cost of running quite a few moon mat towers WELL above the profit margin. Cadmium moons aren't the greatest, but they're not completely unworthy of time spent on them either. If you are stealing 2/3 of their production, those things are barely breaking even, if that. Anything less than that isn't even worth doing anymore. It barely is now.


POS owners have to do alot more than any siphon deployer will ever have to do. Import/build fuel, move fuel, move product, constantly check their vulnerable assets in space, arrange defense when attacked..... and that's just after setting the thing up, moving in all the stuff for it, and establishing reaction chains(if any). A siphon guy warps to and deploys, comes back for bacon later. I don't understand how you're not seeing the POS owner as involved in active game play?

POSes are visible on dscan. Siphons are visible on dscan. It's very easy to figure out where a siphon is when you see it on dscan, by dabbling in the dark arts that are the angle slider. And if you're not blue to whoever siphoned it, who doesn't want free killmails?

In my books, warping inside of POS shields and POS gunning down a siphon is not active play any more than any other semi-afk activity is. You're not putting yourself in any danger. Shooting the siphon with an Oracle or a bomber on the other hand is putting yourself in some risk, but it's not a very significant risk since you can just be right outside of POS shields and run inside of it if anyone shows up. Hence my proposition of allowing siphons to be up to 100km away from the POS shield.


The issue is that they aren't in any way or form cost effective. There is no reason whatsoever to really use them. Because of their low profit margins, you can't really use them for making money: R64's are relatively few and far between and easily cleared by their owners, and even they require a minimum of 6 hours of siphoning to make a profit. On the other hand, R32's and lower should never ever be siphoned, it takes literally several days of uninterrupted siphoning for your siphon to make a profit off of those, and with the 900m3 cargohold the siphons have, you're going to have to empty it every 16 or so hours. That is not "entering the moon goo market".

On the other hand, because of their other functionality, they're ineffective at harassment too. Right now all they accomplish is force a couple of people to log in a couple of times a day to clear them, if any exist. They can't be used for baiting because you can just shoot them from right outside of the POS shields and fly back into the POS if someone threatens you. They're simply kinda crap right now.


An R64 would still pay for itself even if you let someone siphon off it 24/7. However, with such an important high-value asset, having to pay some attention to it is not at all uncalled for.



If your definition of active and good Eve gameplay is owning hundreds of systems of space that no one is really ever going to contest, all your assets protected by reinforce timers and a huge blue blob, and all the maintenance needed on your side being refueling a POS once a week and logging in a couple of times a day to check for siphons, then I really don't know what to say.

The entire purpose of siphons is to allow people to raid the normally practically invulnerable POSes without a months-long deployment involving supercaps. And they're really kinda crap for that purpose.

I have to agree that the siphon idea was well-intended but poorly executed. My major issue isn't necessarily the mechanics, but the lack of interaction between players and lack of incentive to take action. When Ali Aras asked me what one feature from the last year I had issues with, this was my focus and reply.

Yes, that is exactly what my gripe with them is.

Personally I've been using them to try and catch the people who shoot them. I've had some success, but it's too easy for them to get away by eg. flying into the POS shields. We even incapped the guns on some money POSes so that the POS owners would have to use ships to shoot the siphons. This is why eg. having the siphons 100km away from the POS shields would help a little.

I won't lie, making dank money off of them would be great too, but most importantly I'm interested in killmails and guerilla tactics against the owners of the POSes, and they really aren't very efficient at either of those right now.

Just no. Op obviously doesn't own a moon and doesn't like to consider sides of the story other than the side that benefits him.

The current siphon rate is fine. You have to balance the siphon being effective against giving the tower owner reasonable opportunity to protect their investment. It would be game breakingly unfair to increase siphon rates as tower owners would lose way too much without a reasonable opportunity to prevent it.

The siphon balance is just like reinforcement timers. Anyone can hit a tower whenever they want, but if it is stronted properly it can't be killed for around a day, giving the owner an opportunity to discover the attack and defend their assets. This siphon change would be the equivalent of reducing the max stront timers to like an hour or two.

There must be risk of loss, and beyond the risk of having a tower killed this is where the siphon comes into play. But with that risk of loss there must be afforded the opportunity to defend your assets and investments if you log on and check in reasonable intervals.

Now, if you want to argue reducing the price of siphons from like 13 mill to 10 mill, whatever. But not much below that. Just like the tower owner, the siphoner has to have risk to their reward, and their only real "risk" is the loss of investment (via siphon being blowed up or the goo stolen). That investment needs to be something material, or there is no real risk.

Siphons should have to be placed on the moon that the pos is located. If a pos can be anchored in that location, so too can a siphon. Keep them on D-scan but require that they be probed down. This helps everyone.

It requires that siphon users find a spot near but not necessarily on grid with the pos. This keeps them safe from pos guns and less risk options to dispose of it. It also forces the player to bookmark the siphon location if they wish to extract anything from it.

For defenders it is still visible on D-scan so it is still easy to tell there is one on a pos but it would require them to probe it down. This gives all players a wider variety of siphons (similar to mobile depots) with different degrees of difficulty to scan down. It also forces them to leave the pos shield to scan it down, then return only to leave with a combat ship to dispose of it.

Further those who are more opportunistic can use this as a way to steal from everyone involved by scanning down siphons and stealing from them.

Give them a 10% greater yield 5% of which is loss of material (so +5% yield +5% waste)

Attacker gets to do more damage/make more profit
Defender has to assume some risk to remove it
Third parties can raid it.

This also allows for high EHP high sig models as well as lower EHP lower sig models.