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It would be interesting if, as part of their redo with caps, they allow caps back into high sec.

Taking down structures has always been a chore in high sec. But why should that be an excuse to leave things as they are?

Since AoE weapons won't be allowed on high sec Citadels (how easy would it be to slip a neutral into the fleet and get CONCORD to then finish the work) an attacking fleet will just need to worry about staying alive - something more easily done without AoE hitting your fleet. It will still be just as boring as taking down a well formed large POS in high sec now, but still doable.

CCP could simplify it by blocking XL Citadels from high sec, just as caps are restricted. And it could easily be justified by story line that the simple fact is the 4 empires don't fully trust capsuleers with such large threats to their own power blocks.

If citadels replace POS's, does this mean the end of passive moon goo?

something like that; it's been hinted they want players to active mine moon minerals, but nothing it's 100% atm

Saying the same thing again and again only makes it more tedious, not more convincing, Pedro.

I get your point, and frankly don't think XLs should be anchorable in HS anyway, kinda like player-owned stations. But that's a different thing.

On your point of there not being enough pilots, when Eve presents a challenge, players improvise. Large numbers of players have come together for incursions, FW, pocos, live events etc., and a lot of that has been community-based and not tied just to alliances or corps. It's a different environment than low/nullsec or w-space, and it would be silly to dismiss the potential of emergent gameplay.

There is massive amount of isk in all those cases. Or chance at rare killmails (live events)

Pocos can be killed with 3 afk trail accounts dessys they aren't even in the same range as what an XL is being proposes as/.

you think the community will get together to randomly grind structures for no reason other to structure grind?

these will be no different than the POS of today in high sec unless there is something personal involved no one shoots them.


The community comes together when there is a reason. Right now large POS aren't a reason and I don't see things with better defense being any better of a reason.

Actually no one has suggested that people would get together to grind something for no reason, so from your perspective conflict arrives from creating a loot pinata, being easy to kill by limited people, or due to some upset between people. Sounds such deep meaningful reasons.

And what community do you refer to, the Merc groups, the gankers, or null sec alliances, or the player killers, or the HTFU group, or the posters in C&P?

A large POS is cheap, I can't really compare that to an Outpost can I, you are comparing apples with pears, an XL Citadel is to replace an Outpost, in hisec at the moment no one shoots outposts and yet they complain when CCP introduces an outpost sized structure that can be shot, while other new structures will be introduced to replace the functionality of the POS.

The POS is not being replaced by XL structures as such, there are a whole suite of structures coming to replace the POS.

The simple fact is that entities in hisec are small because the environment does not reward people for reaching a certain size, in fact if you are a indy corp, it actively punishes you, and merc or war dec corps tend to be small because of all the emo around certain egos in this game, plus the fact that their prey is largely hiding from them as there is nothing worth fighting over. Oh dear a war dec, lets go play another game while being logged on in a station.

These things are something interesting, something to aspire towards and yet so many Eve players are so blinkered in pushing their own self-interest for easy loot pinatas that they will destroy any chance to create a change in the game and people complain they are too tough.

I am hoping that a major Indy hisec alliance is formed, using the same virtual structure as currently but with a top layer of PvP characters who will put one of these up and create a market hub for blues only if CCP has the vision to introduce that functionality, i.e this means people can only trade there if blue, the conflict from that could be epic, because I know it will upset certain null sec alliances a great deal and yet all we get is moans about how tough they are. They have to be tough, though in all honesty they are not that tough in fact they are at the borderline of not being tough enough certainly for null sec.

Other people have tried to link in the impact of these things on the little groups ion terms of the efforts in Sov, so what if a large alliance has put one up where I have a Medium one, if no one is using the damn thing it hardly bothers me. OK it makes it easier for them to operate should they come in force, but hell a Medium one though painful to lose can be replaced easy enough, I just do the time honoured Eve thing of come back later. The survivability of a home station is key to making people spread out in 0.0.

CCP may listen to people moaning that they are too tough and that will be a major shame for Eve, its a pity that Eve being a tough game is only really tough for those that are prey.

3 hour ops / sieges are rare, but they happen. Players on the attacker's side may come and go as RL permits, some won't be sitting there for the full 3 hours or even all three attacks. The citadels are planned to drop some loot, depending on who you are, needing to bring out a freighter to loot an XL Citadel wreck may be worth the trouble. I've emphasized the loot drops in this quote from the dev blog, below:

Back in this post, I offered the idea that personal / corp hanger asset protection could be made to depend on the Citadel size class: What if the "M" or even the "L" size were not covered by the asset relocation feature in K-Space? Perhaps the "L" size could offer "partial asset relocation?"

That's a valid counter for large alliances launching Outposts today, XL citadels are supposed to be a similar effort and expense and provide a similar safety mechanism. The rest of us who can't afford outpost-level expenses, risk asset loss every day, putting stuff in POS hangers.

You know the facts don't support your hypothesis at all? The whole "Eve is harsh" thing was the original design of this game. It was conceived of as a single shard, full-time competitive PvP game where players were in constant struggle for each other in a dark, harsh universe. It was designed as a game where players had maximum freedom to kill each other and nowhere is safe. But over the years, this harshness has been constantly eroded and now highsec has never been safer. Highsec back in the day was a much more dangerous place full of can flippers, gankers, wardecers, awoxers and so forth. Crimewatch 2.0 neutered the can flippers, the profitability of suicide ganking has been nerfed into the ground, wardec fees were raised from 2 M ISK to 50M ISK and the "corp drop-reform" exploit was declared no longer an exploit, and highsec awoxing was patched out of the game last March. Highsec has never been a safer place since the game's inception.

Interestingly, the plateau and eventually decline in player counts correlates well with the period in the game (around 2010/11) when CCP started seriously buffing highsec safety, while simultaneously buffing highsec rewards by adding more lucrative PvE content to highsec like incursions. In fact, after the normal post-expansion boost, the game stopped growing and then went into decline ever since the Incursion expansion in November 2010. It's been all downhill since CCP made highsec both the safest and most lucrative sector of the space in the game in an attempt to cater to these PvP-averse highsec residents.

Now these facts are just correlative and other factors obviously contribute to the health of the game other than highsec safety, but it is undeniable that removing/nerfing non-consensual PvP in highsec has not produced any growth over the last five years. Others have explored this point in detail so I won't dwell on it, but it is clear that in fact Eve's fastest and most consistent growth occurred at a time when highsec was much more dangerous. I see no reason why making it even more safe is going to reverse the trend.

The problem is of course, is not giving safety to some risk-averse player who just wants to shoot red crosses by themselves; they are almost irrelevant to the game as a whole anyway. No, the problem is that these pockets of lucrative safety draw the "real" Eve players, the ones that are playing the game as the full-time PvP sandbox game it was designed as, away from the more dangerous space to grind an income in safety. This removes targets, content and potential conflict from the other spaces asphyxiating the game elsewhere. It not only turns highsec into a consensual-only PvP zone, but because Eve is an integrated sandbox game, it turns the whole game into a consensual-only PvP zone. This is why I believe Eve is stagnant and players are complaining of lack of content: because when all PvP is consensual, there is nothing meaningful to lose.

This is why we need to be given the tools to, in CCP Seagull's words, "mess with" other players everywhere, but especially in highsec where they are earning their living. XL Citadels if released in highsec they have to contestable by other players in a reasonably easy fashion as we players are suppose to be producing the content for this game. There is no point adding toys to the sandbox that the other players cannot touch. I am not worried though, CCP knows this and seems to have refocused lately on increasing this player-driven gameplay so XL Citadels will have a counter so they can be attacked (without requiring 200+ hours of player effort) or they won't appear there at all.