This past Thursday CCP Fozzie released what turned out to be a quite controversial developer blog regarding revisions to be done to the Upwell Structures (Citadels) to be released on February 13th.
CCP Fozzie took the time to answer some of the most common questions in the feedback thread:
Hey folks. Thanks for reading the blog and for the replies so far!
I’ve replied to several of the questions in the thread so far, but there are three issues that we’re seeing raised a repeatedly in the thread that we wanted to give special attention:The Standup GTFO
Big thanks to everyone who has been giving us feedback on this module so far. We’re hearing you loud and clear and spent some time discussing the concerns raised by the community as a team internally and with the CSM today. What I can say with confidence right now is that we will definitely be making major changes to this part of the plan based on your feedback so far. We are seriously considering a few options right now including fully removing the Standup GTFO from the plan, or limiting it to highec only (where fights tend to be a bit smaller and where AoE weapon options are much more limited for structure owners). Keep passing along your feedback and we’ll update you all on the plan as it develops next week.
5 minute fitting period
We’re seeing plenty of concern that this period makes deploying structures too easy. We definitely consider those concerns valid. This mode was added to the plan largely because we were seeing both in feedback and metrics that there was too much of an “all or nothing” element to structure anchoring where the survival rate of anchoring structures in their onlining vulnerability was quite low while the survival rate of structures that made it past that phase was too high. The goal here is to make this distinction less severe by increasing the survivability in that initial repair timer while reducing it for the rest of the structure lifetime through vulnerability and combat changes. We will be taking a look at how the combat changes shake out on the test server and evaluating with that feedback over the coming weeks before deployment.
TiDi and repair timers
We’ve been seeing quite a few requests about dilation of repair timers since the recent Cloud Ring fight where a titan distraction allowed a keepstar to repair. We won’t rule out changing the relationship between the repair timer and TiDi at some point, but I can definitely say that changes of that nature are non-trivial.
The repair timers were originally set to use “wall-clock” rather than “sim-clock” time, both because of their relatively long duration compared to most sim-clock features and because under the current system more than one server node must keep track of the structure state changes and sim-clock timers are always limited to a single server node. We took a look at the code to see how reasonable it would be to change and came away determining that it would be far from a quick or simple change.
To be completely honest we’re also a bit concerned that dilating that timer would actually cause more complaints (150 minute repair timers can feel pretty rough) rather than less. Like most decisions relating to server performance in very heavy fights this is a matter of tradeoffs and a bunch of difficult choices with no easy/good answers.
Thanks again for the feedback everyone! I also want to just repeat the reminder from the Test Server forum thread that the stats of modules and structures on SISI right now are not even remotely close to final (especially the new stuff). Remember that there will also be a lot of bugs with early test server builds. We really appreciate everyone checking out the test server and submitting bug reports, they are extremely helpful.
Have a good night o/– CCP Fozzie
