Moons were/are one of the biggest parts of a sov war. Why? The value of r64s and r32s can be enormous. In the case of Tenerifis, the value per month is about 114 billion ISK (reference link at the bottom).Using the example of Tenerifis, the month of July saw very little content generated from moon mining POSes.
Possible content:
Not really content:
In the case of the zkillboard links above, only one moon mining POS seemed to be involved in something other than having offline modules destroyed, except that one POS which had more than one random subcap shoot at its modules wasn’t an r64 POS because that system doesn’t have any. For an entire month, 114bil in income seems to have been uninterrupted, and that’s just one region of nullsec. Granted there have likely been many brawls and skirmishes over r64s in lowsec or even NPC nullsec, but that seems to be more a factor of geographic accessibility.
With the notable exception of adding alchemy reactions and seeding some additional r64s in EVE, the attributes and results of moon goo have remained unaltered. While the Technetium consortium was nerfed, moons in nullsec seemed to trend towards an ever more stagnant resource. Severely cutting the range of carriers and dreadnoughts in Phoebe may have made the matter worse. No one wants to grind several dozen hardened POSes with a fleet of subcaps.
While the exhausting slog of DPS grinding has been fixed for several things and is even going to be fixed for POSes as they’re phased out for Citadels, that brings another problem: moon mining Citadels. The absolute last thing that needs to be added to EVE is a moon mining structure whose vulnerability window is NOT 24/7. As a static and perhaps stagnant, completely passive income, it does not need any kind of protection in the form of vulnerability windows.
The issues with both moon goo and the new Citadels are two-fold. Nullsec players will absolutely not want moon goo to be altered into a resource that decays and respawns elsewhere in the universe. For one, it goes against years of politics and alliance survival/development. It is the core income which provides a net for unlucky or incompetent fleets by (in a good alliance) providing full SRP for such events. Secondly, in all the dev blogs, CSM factoids, and threads that I’ve read or ctrl+f’d, Citadels are not made to be mobile. Deploying a Citadel for moon mining only to have the goo run out in days, weeks, or even a couple months is not cost-efficient unless the Citadel can be taken down and redeployed…. and that does not seem to be a mechanic concurrent with CCP’s current Citadel thought-design.
In our cries for content and CCP’s war to create it, moon goo has been overlooked. As a valuable, passive resource it has created some of the most destructive content in EVE (destruction which is good for our consumption-based economy), but not in any broad way. It isn’t in the interest of nullsec to have moon goo change because it is a fact that nullsec has grown dependent upon the revenue stream. Perhaps the better word is ‘complacent’.
Dependency shouldn’t factor against mechanic changes. Fleet metas are changed all the time because of dependency. We’re EVE players. We adapt or give up and quit.
Moon goo needs to be changed, and it needs to be addressed before Citadels are deployed/POSes begin their phasing out. I sincerely hope that CCP and the CSM have already addressed this issue of Citadel moon mining and continued static/stagnant moon goo income within their private meetings, but I will say this again: The absolute, last thing nullsec needs to promote ‘content’ is an immobile, moon mining structure whose vulnerability window is only a few hours a week.
