This is a bit of a follow-up to my previous post on manufacturing. 

It has been about a month and a half since that post and roughly three months total since I started converting my two mining characters into full time industry characters. The process was very straightforward and as I mentioned previously, I have focused on T2 production as I felt it afforded me the best playing field from which to work with. It did not require me to research BPOs until I was blue in the face and allowed me to jump immediately into the fray. I am producing a total of four items regularly. In addition, I have a well researched Entosis BPO that I also have blogged about when I made a market blunder early on. I have been able to occasionally build some Entosis links along with my T2 production when the opportunity presents but generally speaking outside of the recent Provi conflict, the items are lower margin and slower moving so I do not focus on them much. I do all my production from a station to avoid moving materials or risking anything in a POS.

August is really what I consider to be the first full month of production for me. During this month, my second account finished his training to have a full 10 slots of production (everything except Advanced Mass Production V). I also, per usual, had to buy two PLEX to keep these accounts moving. According to LMEVE, which is still running nicely for me, my profit for August was 3.3B ISK including buying the two PLEX.

Not too shabby.

All this after starting with a couple hundred million ISK in addition to the original Entosis BPO. I also had about 1B ISK as captial that I had saved from mining. I certainly believe that the capital accelerated my growth and allowed me to fully utilize the 20 slots rapidly. The flip side of that is that these are completely alt characters for me generating zero other income. A newer player actively playing their character, running cosmic anomalies or missions while building up their industry, can easily get their captial to the necessary level. A few good random drops from a high-sec escalation can jumpstart any industry player.

I hope this serves as a good lesson for those newer players.  Industry in EVE is mostly easy, very accessible, and can be very profitable.

First, there have been two recent devblogs posted regarding the most updated information about the upcoming Citadels.  The first, I feel safe in Citadel city talks primarily about the asset safety mechanisms in the Citadels. The second, Citadels, sieges and you outlines the vulnerability timers and siege aspects of the structures.

Second, the SoundCloud recording of the recent wormhole structure chat has been posted. This is an important discussion to listen to as it outlines many of the concerns of wormhole space residents regarding these dev blogs.

There is a lot of information to digest in these three resources and a lot of summaries have been posted about them so I'm not going to reiterate those. What I would like to do, is bring my perspective to these proposals as a whole, specifically from our perspective as a corp.

Regarding asset safety, I think it is pretty clear from both the comments and the discussion recording that the wormhole community at large is very strongly opinionated that asset safety does not belong in w-space. My own personal thoughts are that asset safety belongs strictly to XL structures which are replacing Outposts. POSes today offer no such asset safety and mirroring that functionality should be the goal. If CCP does end up removing asset safety from w-space, there isn't much else to say on this topic.

The actual sieging process is a bit more interesting. Currently the proposed average time to attack a structure lies with 30 minutes of Entosis and reinforcement periods that span roughly a week of time. The proposal allows for an amount of vulnerability time to be spread out over the course of a week in one hour blocks with a medium Citadel currently having a total of 6 hours of time. This time is set per structure. There are some very wide ranging implications here that reach far beyond the obvious length of time that an invasion might take. Not only are the windows somewhat hidden from the attackers unless they are active, but they can, and likely will be, set to coincide with their most active times. When you also consider the number of structures possible, individual vs. corporate Citadels, as well as the yet to be announced assembly platforms, etc. the act of attacking or evicting a group will involve a large number of possibly disparate timers making the act of attacking more challenging.

Today, evictions or sieges involve typically a weekend op due to the length of strontium. The proposed longer times combined with the free anchoring of structures seems to me to really open up the meta for wormhole invasions. Instead of an all-in, all-or-nothing, free for all weekend, there is a potentially much more strategic plan required involving beach-head structures and coordinated attacks. Instead of having to or being able to maintain explicit hole control for the entire weekend op, it instead becomes an actual invasion with assets deployed, control moving back and forth between groups and reinforcements arriving or not. There is a lot of potential change here that I am actually quite interested to see how wormhole corporations respond. A lot of the current discussion revolves around trying to retain the current meta and timings. I think there is an distinct opportunity here to embrace the change and see how things work out. The idea of a long siege is very foreign to people who are currently used to "quick" and dirty evictions, that doesn't make the possibility of "real" invasions a bad thing. Defenders have a large advantage with the current proposal. This would extend to invaders who deploy a beachhead in your wormhole and become defenders of their own structure. It is very possible that multiple groups could wrestle for a significant period of time over a hole especially with off timezone vulnerability windows limiting their attack window.

There is a definite challenge on the horizon for how Citadel weapons are balanced against what is either a single Entosis ship that cannot receive reps or a fleet of ships with Entosis that have to stay on grid for possibly 30 minutes. This will be the next big point of interest for me as it will dictate the kind of force that a manned Citadel can brush off. As a smaller group, a manned Citadel may be a strong part of our defense.

So far I am very encouraged by the information being put out. The security improvements are a huge personal plus for these structures for me. The is no doubt that the face of EVE is changing with these structures. I am looking forward to more details and very pleased with the level of engagement CCP has made with the wormhole community on our concerns.