Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Four times now I have had assets within a free citadel when the situational rules for the citadel has changed. One had permission rules changed, another one destroyed, One changed hands to another Corp who closed off access permissions, and another one was taken down.

There really should be a method or notification system around these actions that can notify the players that have assets within these structures to give them an opportunity to retrieve their assets/clones before they become inaccessible and put into asset safety. It may be unreasonable to have all changes automatically cause an alert every time before changes become implemented, but I think there should be a convenient way for the owners of structures to courteously inform the players that use their structures that things are changing, other than requiring each player to have an ear within the structure owner's corp.

Or is there already something like that which I am unaware of and no one uses?

IIRC there's a notification for asset safety being triggered, there is not for things like the Citadel being reinforced or taken down, though some of the situations you've listed here would be hard to impossible to notify people with assets in a Citadel of in advance. For example permission rules changes are, and should be, instantaneous. Similarly a Citadel being taken offline would be pretty hard to notify users of ahead of time since I'm reasonably certain you lose access and asset safety is triggered as soon as someone pushes the "put back in box" button.

The ownership change and reinforce timers could be added, but at least in the case of the ownership change it's unlikely you would have enough advanced notice to move anything if the owners are going to change the permissions.

All in favor of an informational message letting you know things have changed, provided it could be done easily. More in favor of CCP allowing something like external access to the internal hanger as part of that update for contract delivery they keep talking about.

Someone who wants to change permissions on their Citadel would have very little reason to ever give advance warning, so I don't see many people using this for legitimate purposes which kind of makes it a poor use of time for CCP to implement.

Letting people customize a message even more so, since it would take about five minutes for someone to get the bright idea to set up a Citadel one jump from Jita and then periodically spam people with penises or something.

As for courtesy... have you met people in this game? Or even people in general? If someone's changing access permissions on a formerly public Citadel then they either A. have a very immediate and pressing reason to do so, B. are doing so suddenly as an intentional PvP action, either for market reasons or something else, or C are just intentionally screwing with people. In all of these cases it seems highly unlikely that the person in question would be willing to send out a courtesy mail to users and wait a few days for them to get their stuff.

Generally speaking my take on Citadels is "user beware". That's why I tell people I fly with not to store anything important in a Citadel over a Station even in HIgh Sec, and several Incursion groups take a similar stance because there's a possibility of someone locking you out of it for a week.

I have asked for similarly focused features that allow a station owner to be courteous to their users in another thread.

EvE is widely regarded to be a 'sandbox' where a player is free manipulate the sand in whatever way they wish, but this ideology begins to fall flat where the sandbox itself forces or coerces a player to act a certain way. In this case, a player is forced to be discourteous because options to display courtesy are not implemented or available.

I have very few customers. Few enough that I was able to contact each one before shuttering a citadel to tell them I was closing it down. I fueled the station for long enough to complete their jobs and left them time to fetch their things. It was a terribly unprofitable thing to do in terms of ISK, but ISK isn't the only type of asset there is. There is also trust, and whether you wield your trust for good or ill, it is necessary to have means to acquire this asset, such as displaying you care enough about people using your structure to notify them of changes that will affect them.

Most people I contacted replied to me and were appreciative of the notice. Some offered to pull their research or manufacturing jobs early to save me the expense of running the service just for them. A reply is a courtesy. Pulling a job early is a courtesy. It is a small sample size, but it seems to me that players can and do display courtesy to one another.

This is more than a feature request. It's about preserving an aspect of the sandbox that is essential to making a structure owner's actions meaningful outside of their 'in' group. Actions are only meaningful where there is choice. Take away or refuse to implement those choices and structures are just NPC stations with nice bonuses that appear, disappear, and change rules seemingly at random, assuming you are not the station owner who controls these changes. This leaves a majority of the player base not particularly interested in structures they can not own. They are faceless even more so than NPCs with whom you at least have a digit that shows how much they like or dislike you.

For structures to be truly a success, they need to be more than just random buildings or curious baubles you saw while flying from place to place. They need to be an entity with an identity, tone, and personality set by interactions between the station owners and the users of that station, and for that to happen we will need options available to make these interactions possible.

With the exception of the derided 'care bear', I think most of us derive our satisfaction and reasons to keep playing from our relationships, good and bad, with the other denizens of this murky and dangerous space simulator, so the more people we can anger or please, the better.

I mentioned I have 'few customers' not as a complaint, but as a matter of statistics and feasibility.

Because I have few, it was possible to contact them all. Were I a 'hub', this would be beyond impractical. Hence, the attempt to be courteous was feasible.

Because I contacted few people, the statistical significance of the survey is rather small. I don't know if other people have contrary experiences when doing the same thing I did.

• I do not know who is running a job in my structure, only that someone started a job at some point in time.
• I do not know who has an active market order in my structure.
• I do not know who has stuff in my structure.

I do not think it is too much to ask that I be able to entreat with these people, even if the mechanism for this does not identify them. It would be even better if I could refund them for lost time, or inconvenience, and especially the costs of any jobs that would never complete. Businesses routinely offer olive branches to customers who, for one reason or another, don't get the service they paid for. They also send announcements of their planned changes, or even just an announcement to say they're changing nothing but their name, so the feature seems well within the corporate mindset and theme of EvE. Don't like what a business has to say to you? Fire them and take your business elsewhere.

I'm under no illusion that setting up a market or service is a fast track to wealth in EvE, and I don't have designs on being much of a hub of activity for hundreds of unknown parties so I can sip ISK off what they do. I am asking for some method or ability to be polite to folks when I need to change something, and to be able to offer to minimize the negative impact of those changes.

The OP asked for this very thing, for there to be a means to contact him in the event something was changing with a structure and at least one response was that 'nobody would use this feature'. I would. Another response was that it was advisable to never put anything of value in a player structure, which is in my opinion indicative of a problem. A problem that can be reduced or mitigated by a player willing to use this feature.