Gogela wrote:The bar to take out a citadel is so low. Pandemic Horde has taken out quite a few in Perimeter. If there are too many citadels than I would suggest there just isn't enough war. When there really are too many, than start deccing your neighbors. Hell I'm seeing 2-5 bil drops from dead citadels on the reg. There's ISK to be made there.
Setting arbitrary limits on how much you can build in a single system is very un-EvE. You have what you need to solve this on your own. Hire a merc corp... they'll have your system cleared in a week.
edit: I do think, however, that some fraction (say ~5%) of goods otherwise covered by asset safety should be eligible to drop, and of that 5% half should be destroyed and half should drop to the wreck. That would REALLY solve your 'too many citadels' problem.
I think as long as we have 100% asset safety in NPC stations (or NPC stations) we will need 100% asset safety in player-owned structures. It works in wormholes because there is no choice, and perhaps it will work in the new space CCP Seagull intends to put in the game if it also lacks 100% safe and invulnerable NPC stations, but everywhere else CCP was correct to recognize they will just not be used, or at least favoured to be used, if they are competing with the safety of NPC stations.
As for the citadel accumulation, I agree there just isn't enough war or reasons to declare war. There should be reasons why your average corp would want to remove their competitors. While I don't doubt there have been profitable Astrahuses exploded, looking at the last week of kills in highsec show the drop ranges from 0 to 300M ISK with a median in the sub-100M ISK range. Add the salvage/wreck drop and you are barely above the wardec fee cost, making a very poor payday for multiple people to spend multiple hours on given how much more lucrative ISK/h PvE is available in this game. Direct piracy just isn't going to motivate anyone to systematically clear these as a profession with the current numbers. Perhaps they will cherry-pick a few of the most expensive fit/worst defended ones, but as a baseline they are just not profitable to explode.
What is needed is more conflict drivers so people want their competitors gone. You should be able to own a structure relatively safely, but there should also be more reward available for people to make themselves a target and to fight over. If the best game theory solution is always to just deploy a structure of your own rather than attack and remove another group's structure, then players will keep doing that and we will get more and more structures, but with only a handful of them ever exploding. Things like the market module which is causing notable fights in Perimeter, or even POCOs and their monopoly on a single planet which have moved players to mount significant campaigns to claim the right to tax PI production.
CCP has given us a pretty sandbox to play in, but there is honestly precious little in it to generate fights over, especially in highsec where everyone is rich, safe, and resources are in such excess there is no reason to fight over them.