Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Another idea I’ve had for a while but never put down in the ideas forum, I don’t think… With the discussion of such in the CSM though I figured it was time.

So station gets “destroyed” now what?

If you are inside the station: You have access to your ships (you can change ships), and medical is operating on emergency power (you can update your clone, but cannot add a jump clone”. All other station services are offline. You have access to your hanger, so you can load your goods in the ship of your choice and undock.

Outside the station: The station appears as a wreaked module. You cannot dock in this station, but you can approach it and open it like a can (a special can). In this can you’ll only see your stuff. Nobody else can see your stuff, you can’t see anyone else’s stuff. The objective of this is to give people a chance to evac everything they own. You can right click ships and choice “repackage”, “eject” or “board ship”. You’re also allowed to repackage and stack items (more to make it easier on the server, rather than have repackaged ships eject hundreds of stacks of ammo). You cannot place anything back in the can, so once it’s removed, it’s out for good.

This way, if the station gets blown up, technically your stuff isn’t lost, but it could be extremely difficult to remove.

Courier contracts could be created going from this point to another station (so you can pay someone to remove your loot), but not from another station to this one, to prevent people from delivering (or trying to deliver) items to destroyed stations.

WTS and Auction contracts could be created in the same way, but not WTB from that station.

All market items would be returned to the player that owns them. Or maybe you could leave the market up, and people buying items would just have to fetch them wreak. Maybe new orders could be placed? Allowing people to put items in their hanger up for sale as long as they had the skills to do it from space. Either way this would slowly degrade as people were no longer allowed to place new items in the station.

The next part I’m up in the air about. I feel it would create a great PvP opportunity while allowing the servers some breathing room after a time, but the flip side of it is people that left the game for long periods of time would lose their stuff.

After a while (let’s say a year) everything still left in the station gets thrown into one community can anyone can access (regardless of standings etc, because at this point there is no station owner). If this happens –exactly- one year after the station is destroyed, it would be a great chance to get free stuff. It may draw people looking for good deals from all over eve, hoping to grab BPO’s in their stealth bomber right as the station comes out. Because it’s set on a timer, anyone could look at Dotlan and get this information. If you want to relax the load on the servers a bit, after 2 years (or after the last item is removed), the station structure finally gives into the gravitational tide of the planet and is completely destroyed (allowing you to put up a new station too). I can understand though how CCP wouldn’t want to completely remove items from a player that is gone for more than a year, as this could reduce the odds of returning, so this might be best left out.

It wasn't really my idea, well, like I said, I considered it a long time ago, but it (destroying stations) was brought up during the recent CSM meeting. They were unanimous in their support for this. The reason being that sometimes an invading army might -want- to just salt the earth, they don't care about saving a region, and there is a lot of stations being dropped these days.

I don't think the suggestion is to FORCE people to destroy them, it's to give them the option of destroying them, or taking them. Also, while I left open the option of getting free stuff (more because I think it would encourage pvp), I also mentioned that I wasn't sure this was a great idea.

I disagree with pretty much everything else in your post. You really aren't giving enough credit to how much people in Eve like to simply destroy things. Some people just want to watch the world burn. I wouldn't hesitate for a second if I was running a campaign against a decent opponent and could pay someone like PL to simply go in and destroy their home station with the majority of their ships and assets in them. Even if the assets themselves weren't destroyed, the havoc this would create while they tried to move things to a different location would be great. Actually, to be honest, as long as there's a killmail somehow involved, I wouldn't hesitate a second to do it just to make them miserable, strategic value or not.

Also, yes, it was a massive undertaking to get stations frequent in 0.0, at first... I know several players now who could personally buy their own station. It isn't such a massive undertaking anymore, which is part of the reason why it's being discussed now.

Anyway, you don't seem to have read the new CSM minutes. You should probably take a look at those.

potato, po-ta-to :P Yes, I was talking about the player version of stations, outposts.



I defiantly don't think it should be destroyed immediately. The risk vs reward would have to be enormous for people to want to bring things out. The potential loss is just too big. Timers wouldn't do anything, nor do null sec people want more timers. It's like someone on the CSM said in the minutes. The CVA war was over in 3 days and then 52 of these stations (with timers) to grind though. Really, with the amount of things that are in stations, especially blueprint originals, if you are trying to draw more manufacturing and more players to nullsec, I don't think there's a bonus in the would that would make it worth it if their goods were at risk of being completely destroyed the first time the station fell.

Another thing CCP was concerned about wasn't just deterring people from moving out, but returning players. If I quit the game for a few months I may come back to a hostile station that's been conquered, but I can still get to my stuff to firesale it, or put it up on the market, or put a hopeful courier contract up, or try to load it on my ship and get it out myself. The point is that stations are safe, I can walk away from the game for a while and know that while getting my stuff can be hard, it's still there. If I returned from the game after a few months and everything I owned, all my BPO's and all my capital ships had been blown up in a station, chances are players would ragequit. As funny as that can be sometimes, it's not really healthy for the playerbase.

-IF- items are going to be destroyed, I felt giving people a year to get to them might be enough, but even then I know plenty of people who have left and come back after longer than a year. The more I think about it, the more I'm against destroying items at all, but I figured if it was going to be considered then it should be included in my suggestion.

I disagree, this view is altogether shortsighted; I had stuff in various systems in deep 0.0 that I knew was completely safe because I just had to wait long enough for a friendly force to take it over

Think about it: every region in Eve (with the exception of DC space) has changed hands in the past two years. I play the long game; my assets are not gone, i just cant get to them right now.


The way I would do station destruction would be as a self destruct button; the owning corporation's CEO pushes that button and a timer starts, 48 hours + however long it is until the next downtime, it appears in space just like a reinforcement timer, and it pauses if the station gets put into reinforced. It can be stopped at any time by the CEO or a director of the owning corporation.

If the timer ticks down to 0, the station is gone when the server comes back up; maybe the stuff is moved out of the station to the nearest NPC station like they talked about in the CSM, that way too many people wont be buthurt about losing their stuffs.

That way, you could leave the ground decimated if you were losing a war, leaving an empty region for the conquerors to deal with, or you could run a scorched earth campaign, just conquering opponent's systems for long enough to blow up their stations. That way running to an NPC space area and waiting for the war to blow over (a la -A-) could leave you coming back to an empty land.

I'm pretty sure CCP said when they put in player built outposts that they would never be destructible.

If they change their stance then they need to give a heads up, at least a year or so, before implementation.

Otherwise they need to give a grace period where players can choose to have their items moved to a station of their choice. Players shouldn't suffer because they took ccp at their word when they said stations would not be destructible.