Hey folks. As most of you know we are planning to release new Refinery structures in the EVE Online: Lifeblood expansion on October 24th. These structures will be the new home for moon mining and reactions, as well as being bonused for refining.

We have been discussing these new structures and their mechanics with all of you in the EVE community for much of the year, including some excellent discussions at Fanfest and with the CSM. One concern that was raised both by Fanfest attendees and the CSM was the risk that current structure deployment mechanics might be abused to “block” the orbital moon mining locations by ninja-deploying a Refinery and forcing their opponents to wait 24hrs (or longer in the case of sovereign nullsec space) to interact with that structure. This is an issue that can apply to all Upwell structures at the moment, but it would be especially vulnerable to abuse with Refineries.

After our discussions with the CSM and the wider community we have decided to make a surgical adjustment to the flow when deploying Upwell structures. As of the Lifeblood release there will be a new 15 minute repair timer immediately after a structure is deployed. It will begin after the structure name, access profile, and vulnerability schedule is chosen but before the 24 hour anchoring period. The existing repair timer at the end of the 24 hour vulnerability period will remain in place.

This means the current flow of:

Drag structure into space -> Choose name, profile and vulnerability schedule -> 24hr anchoring -> 15 minute repair (vulnerable) -> Online

will become:

Drag structure into space -> Choose name, profile and vulnerability schedule -> 15 minute repair (vulnerable) -> 24hr anchoring -> 15 minute repair (vulnerable) -> Online

Important: I want to make it clear that we don’t consider this to be the only issue with Upwell structure vulnerability mechanics. We are aware of and agree with the frustrations many players are expressing with the general Upwell structure vulnerability mechanics being too heavily weighted towards defenders and not providing enough options for interaction in the attacker’s time zones. We absolutely intend to make changes to these areas in the future, and will be continuing the dialogue with the CSM and eventually with the wider playerbase.

The new initial deployment repair cycle will be on SISI in the next few days so you can all start trying it for yourself, and we are very interested in hearing what you all think.

Thanks!

-Team Five 0