Player Features and Ideas Discussion

With the recent buffs to outpost upgrades, people have started actually upgrading outposts. And we've quickly discovered a lot of bad things about it. However I'd like to focus on one issue I believe could be solved simply.

Right now, to upgrade a station, you drop your upgrade egg about 90 minutes before downtime, and immediately start anchoring. You then rush to fill the thing with multiple freighters in that extra thirty minutes so that you can hit 'build' before downtime. Everyone adheres to this strict schedule, which minimizes the time that an upgrade egg is vulnerable to being found and killed, and people don't really take risks with stuff that had to be freightered from highsec and is 1b at a minimum and goes up to 15b. When downtime hits, the upgrade 'hatches' and becomes permanent.

The issue is this limits the people able to upgrade stations - and to potentially kill upgrades - to a limited group of people: those that can play EVE shortly before downtime. Americans - such as me! - would have to wake up at about 4:30 AM to upgrade a station. That is, to put it mildly, never going to happen - let alone nine times in a row which is what you need to go from a bare outpost to tier 3.

Now, there's a lot of ways the entire process could be fixed: it was hacked in like half a decade ago and is sort of a hair-pulling unfun process. But fixing all of those issues would require a lot of work, and this is a feature actually used rarely enough it probably isn't worth doing out of sequence. Same with it using downtime: downtime things suck, but you'd probably have to do a ton of work to make the upgrade not happen at downtime.

My suggestion is this: expand the anchoring time to 120 minutes. Once anchored, the upgrade becomes invulnerable (like a TCU). If not filled and built by downtime, it unanchors. Or explodes, I guess, if you manage to make it that long without managing to fill the thing and hit build perhaps you deserve to lose it. This, in my view, is a win for everyone. The european logistics guy no longer is the only one who can upgrade an outpost, so other people who want to can tick that one thing off their to-do list, and once the novelty has worn off the responsibility can be passed around more people.

It's also good for attackers who might want to kill an upgrade. To my knowledge this has only happened once, ever (and they don't generate killmails so I can't research). But to the extent this happens, anyone looking to kill an upgrade now has a longer time they can find and kill the upgrade, and people who don't play EVE in the hour before downtime also can potentially kill an upgrade egg. It's an improvement for everyone, a change that penalizes nobody and gives nobody a new advantage over other parties.

It is my theory - having never actually looked at a single line of code - that such a change could be hacked in relatively easily compared to any other fix for upgrade mechanics. If that's not true, then obviously this change isn't really worth doing before there's a comprehensive rework of outposts and their upgrades and I will sigh and wonder why I trained outpost construction V in the first place.

Thanks!

The process for building outposts is similar to this, and I feel like it could easily apply to building outposts as well.