War, War Never Changes

For a low sec Faction Warfare alliance, we sure are spending a lot of time in null sec lately with numerous timers, CTAs, and fleet actions!

Last fall going into null sec was a diversion from a war zone that had grown stale and quiet as Caldari Militia licked their wounds, but multiple successes turned the expeditionary force into an occupancy force for the Gallente Militia and Galmilistan was born in Cloud Ring region.

The big attraction for holding on to these systems in Cloud Ring are these two little icons...

Those two things are Outposts, and on June 5th CCP is going to do a one time conversion of all outposts in the game to special faction Citadels, items that cannot be gotten in any other manner in game ever again. From the dev blog:

Each of these new faction Citadels will have the stats of an improved Fortizar, and share the Fortizar’s docking restrictions. Each will gain a set of special bonuses connected to their former station identity: combining the defensive benefits of a Fortizar with extra bonuses usually reserved for more vulnerable structures.
- The Minmatar Outpost replacement Citadels will gain a bonus to reprocessing (smaller than the bonus on Refineries)
- The Amarr Outpost replacement Citadels will gain bonuses to manufacturing (smaller than the bonus on Engineering Complexes)
- The Caldari Outpost replacement Citadels will gain bonuses to research (smaller than the bonus on Engineering Complexes)
- The Gallente Outpost replacement Citadels will have an extra service module slot and gain a bonus to service module fuel use
- The “Immensea” Conquerable Station replacement Citadels will gain extra defensive benefits, hitpoints and slots as well as milder versions of the bonuses from the other four faction Citadels.

These new faction Citadels will be able to be unanchored, scooped and redeployed just like any other Upwell structure. They will not be manufacturable by capsuleers.
The faction Citadels replacing upgraded Outposts will receive another exclusive benefit: new special edition faction structure rigs. Which of these powerful rigs you receive will depend on the upgrades installed on the Outpost being replaced. The combined Outpost upgrades installed on each Outpost will all be added to a single faction rig so that the other two rig slots will remain free for use with normal L-set rigs. 

Like the faction Citadels themselves, these rigs will be exclusive to the Outpost upgrade event and no more will ever be added to New Eden. These rigs will begin installed and will be destroyed if removed or if their host Citadel is unanchored (just like a normal rig).

Needless to say, these are going to be very valuable assets to the owning corporations on June 5th, so other entities are poking around the edges of existing owners and their space looking for weak spots where these outposts can be conquered before then and held until after the conversion.

Hence the timers, defenses, and CTAs. For now, we are a sov holding entity.

Providence Will Burn

Providence will burn.

If there is one sure thing to come out of all the Citadel dev blogs, Providence is going to burn.

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Providence is a weird null sec region. Its shallow null sec, with not one but two exits to high sec directly and another two connections to low sec. Its true sec is not very good so making ISK from ratting is consequently poor so its never been overly desirable to large coalitions to add to their empires. As a result the CVA alliance / coalition often lives there due to role play reasons and because other coalitions like to have someplace to roam for farming kills. Occasionally CVA gets kicked out but they bide their time in nearby lowsec and slowly work their way back in eventually. No one wants Providence more than old CVA.

But the most peculiar aspect of Providence is the fact that its positively infested with player constructed outposts. Its easier to count systems without an outpost, 8 this morning, than it is to count the rest. That's 8 empty systems out of 84 systems in total. That's right, 76 outposts. There are other similarly heavily constructed regions, but Providence is the only one not claimed by a major null sec coalition.

As a result, the major empires often visit Providence for various reasons with varying degrees of force. Sometimes just a "for fun" deployment to get fights out of CVA and their small allies, other times to drop in on some other's deployment as "honourable third parties", rarely with the goal to remove CVA because they are known to at least try to defend their space and give a fight.

But other times, most notably this past summer, major empires use Providence as a testing ground for new mechanics or doctrines. For example, when Fozzie Sov replaced Dominion Sov mechanics several entities invaded Providence to get a handle on the intricacies of the new mechanics against and opponent that did not present a significant threat in retaliation. CVA is not a threat to invade Deklein ever.

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Player Owned Stations, aka Outposts and Player Owned Starbases, aka POSes, were both designed to give players something to own where they could exist and perform certain tasks or store assets. However they are two entirely different mechanics with vastly different rules about owning, destroying, taking, and working in them. You could not have purposely designed two more disparate systems for accomplishing roughly the same goals at different scales.

CCP is smart and rather than trying to marry two vastly different and barely understood legacy code bases into one working system, they are circumventing the issue and creating a new system to obsolete the old ones: Citadels. The new constructs will fulfill the goals of player ownership at both the small corporate or even personal level up to the alliance / coalition level under a single fresh code base. As Citadels come online, the lights in the old POSes and Outposts can go dark.

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Or can they?

For POSes, its pretty straight forward. Stop allowing fuel to be made for them after Citadels have been around for a while and you have encouraged players to make the transition to the new constructs. Those players that have left the game and the POSes abandoned in space will slowly go dark as fuel runs out and will be destroyed by attrition over time if their owners did not take them down themselves.

But Outposts cannot be so easily retired. They don't require fuel and cannot be destroyed. How can we convince players to move to new Citadels when old Outposts offer much the same funcitonality but in safer confines?

The only answer is that after Citadels have been introduced and established as working as intended, CCP will add the ability to destroy Outposts and remove the ability to build new ones, thus allowing attrition over time to remove the old structures to be replaced by the new Citadels.

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So you are a large coalition and you hear that CCP is going to allow Outposts to be destroyed. Are you going to destroy your own assets in your own space? Nah, not unless Outposts lose a lot of functionality and it becomes an economic necessity to remove them. Invade a neighbour and start a full blown war? Maybe. Or will you descend on Providence, filled with Outposts defended by an enemy that cannot effectively retaliate, a region known for being a test bed of new mechanics? Think of all the juicy tears and killmails to result from going from system to system and reducing the years of hard work to ashes without any repercussions at all...

Providence will burn.

It's Time: Destructible Outposts

Gallente Administrative Outpost

One of the craziest things to come out of null sec recently was the CFC "dead zoning" the captured 0-W778 outpost to prevent Nulli Secunda and friends from ever having a chance to ex-filtrate their trapped assets. Crazy in that its only the mechanics of EVE that force this unusual move.

For those unaware, "dead zoning" a system is where you install an independent owning corporation of a station that has no blues on its friends list so no one outside of that corporation can dock there. And that corporation only has one member who is an alt of CFC leadership so not even spies in CFC or their allies can secretly liberate the assets.

The CFC chose to do this action because even though they have conquered the station in a fight from N3 coalition, they cannot do anything to the enemy's assets in that station. Those hangers, corporate and personal, are inviolate as they are in all stations and outposts across New Eden.

(DEFINITION: The term station and outpost are often used interchangeably when referring to outposts that are player-built in null sec space. In actual fact, stations are permanent structures  placed in game by the developers as in high sec and low sec and some regions of null sec where they can be NPC owned or "Conquerable Stations". Outposts are player built, smaller with fewer facilities than stations, and are all "conquerable".)

Since outposts and stations are indestructible, I've watched null sec over the years become infested with player built outposts. And since the services offered in each one are limited compared to a station, and each faction outpost has a different role (Amarr outposts for production, Minmatar for refining, Caldari for research, and Gallente for offices), AND there can only be one outpost per system, so the spread of outposts is partially in response to the needs of your average alliance. The other part is that players want to make their mark on their territory and the bang-for-the-buck of an outpost is second to none, a defensive position from which to fight and organize.

Has it gotten out of control?

One of the big downsides to the proliferation of outposts in null sec is that there is less and less room in which to add an outpost. Its conceivable that the satisfaction of a group of players building their own outpost some years in the future will be denied the next generation of players because all of null sec is filled up already! Sure, that scenario may be far fetched, but its not out of the realm of possibility.

So I think its time to seriously consider adding mechanics for the destruction of outposts.

I realize this is not a trivial thing to propose and there are a lot of hurdles to overcome in order to achieve this gameplay, but I think the payoff in the long run is worth it so stay with me to the end of the post before you flame me.

Burn Them To The Ground

First off, give the players lots of notice, months of notice, that outposts will become destroyable. After all, I'm sure there are years of traps assets in some remote stations and players deserve plenty of time to see if they can liberate, sell, or otherwise make use of them. I'm not a monster, after all.

Then on the day the new mechanic goes live, the mechanics for conquering an outpost go away. Instead, you can shoot an outpost until either (a) you negotiate with the owner for transfer of the structure, probably including some time to evac their stuff, or (b) its structure hitpoints reaches zero at which point it explodes. All logged pilots currently in that station are ejected in their current ship, all non piloted ships and assets are destroyed or dropped in the new outpost wreck which can be looted as normal wrecks go (I'm thinking the drop rate should be closer to 10-25% rather than 50% reflecting the massive scale destruction an outpost goes through). Logged off pilots would log in to find themselves e-warping from a random point 1 million km off to the location where the outpost used to be. And yes, destroying an outpost would generate a killmail.

Let the destruction of null sec commence!

Build Them Up Again

On the upside of all this destruction, new outposts can be built. I think its time for CCP to relax some restrictions and allow multiple outposts to be built per system in null sec. I also think some of their facilities should be increased but that a discussion I'm not prepared for today.

However, one thing I am prepared to put forth is that once we have destructible outposts on the menu, we should look at allowing them to be built in wormholes. Now, before you get the rope to lynch me, hear me out. Right now in wormholes, corporations and alliances are colonizing them and living out of Player Owned Starbases, aka POSes. There is a lot of compelling gameplay coming out of wormholes surrounding POSes and a lot of the quality of life difficulties about living in wormholes comes from the limitations of POSes and their code base complexity for getting changes (which is something else I will talk about another day). If we have destructible Outposts then we can consider allowing them to be built in wormhole space by enterprising corporations, which would act as focal points for the entities that live there AND provide another gameplay option as outposts can be transferred from one entity to another, unlike a POS tower. I think this can increase gameplay options in wormhole space while also increasing quality of life for these pilots.

I also considered allowing them to be built in low sec but with the slew of NPC available stations I didn't feel like there was compelling new gameplay to be opened up by that change, although the idea sounds cool to me for purely personal reasons.

Objection!

I can think of some objections to this plan right off the bat, so let's see if they can be addressed.

Someone out of the game a long time comes back, and finds all their stuff stored in an outpost gone. This is the biggest pickle and one that's hard to get around. There are some easy options like "HTFU" which could be applied if the advertising campaign of this change reaches far enough, but this might be addressed more simply by moving all inactive accounts' stuff and clones to the nearest NPC station (remember, stations are still indestructible), and perhaps we let people submit petitions for the same resolution if they have problems logging in prior to the change.

Null sec entities will simply base out of low sec or null sec NPC stations. To be fair, this is any alliance's backup plan already, so the concern is if this change will make them do more of that. For shallow null sec I can see that happening but in deeper null sec pilots will need to base closer to where they are flying and living out of a POS is no fun.

After a brief conflagration of destruction, most of null sec will become empty wastelands. I think this is hyperbole speaking. I think alliances will build outposts and maintain them as needed, but they might be less cavalier about storing all the alliances assets in them.

CCP never intended for wormhole space to be settled with things like outposts. I retort that while CCP never intended a lot of things, they still happened! And wormhole space is settled, living in POSes, as miserable as it is. Let's give them something else meaningful to build and lose out there.

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Alright, your turn.