This post is a follow-up to a previous post about content drivers.
On Friday, 1st May during the mid European afternoon, the unthinkable happened.
In the year 2020, and in the years leading up to it, giant Dread brawls occur typically over pure bait and traps – not over any strategic objectives – at least not anywhere near the frequency they used to before Citadels were introduced.
To me, when I hear news of or take part in a capital ship brawl, I most often feel a sadness afterwards, because of what it took for it to happen. My strucutre shooting is usually an uneventful, boring process with little to distract from the dispiriting barrage of void or guided damage bombs – bombs which hugely limit your ship choices for an assault. Barely ever does a structure shoot involve using any capital ships, the very purpose for which they were originally designed.
The few capital vs capital brawls today take place away from Upwell structures. There is little to nothing at stake, nothing to take, nothing worth putting up a hearty defence for.
The epic, trailerworthy fight in X-7OMU was sparked over an attack on a POS, a depricated ancient structure that has no damage cap, no AoE void or damage bombs and no value other than being a small safe shield – you can’t even lock targets with your ship when you are inside that safe space. What a piece of trash!
Before the age of the Upwell structure pilots cried out in a wail of despair “please, please save us from these terrible structures! We hate shooting them and repping them!”
Of course, I am cherry picking the history here – who here enjoyed setting up a POS and its modules, who enjoyed the arcane UI and black magic of linking structures together for industrial applications?
Nevertheless, you will likely find huge numbers of fleet pilots who long for the days of POS warfare over what we have now. They mattered. POSes were exclusively placed on valuable, limited real estate. They were easier to shoot. They required pilots and ships actually turn up to defend them. They had a single timer that used gameplay to decide upon the exit window. You could use capital ships for, at the very least, the initial reinforcement without the almost guarantee you’d lose some of them to the structure. They were used to hold valuable passive income sources, which were cruelly ripped away from all of us as primary content generators.
I don’t miss how janky POS code was. But I do miss what they provided, compared to the structures of today.
I am dedicated to bringing back solid, alliance level content drivers and returning objectives worth fighting for in Eve.