Castle Tax

CCP have announced a new reward for those who kill active structures, to be paid for by the structure owners. Or something like that.

https://www.eveonline.com/article/qfzmf8/quantum-cores

In summary, from October 13 for new Structures, and January 12 for old Structures, a new item called a Quantum Core will need to be installed for a structure to be brought and kept online.

Each structure has its own specific variant of a Quantum Core. There are 5 NPC Corporations you can purchase them from, and another 5 NPC Corporations you can sell them too.

They range in size from 500m3 to 250,000m3, and in cost from 600 Million to 30 Billion ISK.

They drop 100% of the time – so are a base / guaranteed reward for attackers.

They add nothing to the game play of structure owners, aside being something else expensive to haul and risk.

I have remarked (complained) all along that when compared to POS, the Structure game play was anti-solo / anti-casual. As CCP have continued to make structures more expensive and more vulnerable, that has only become more the case.

The Azbel I built and used for a while? It was a 4+ Billion ISK risk to do that. To do the same again with this change I would have to put an additional 3 Billion ISK bounty on it to encourage the local Pirates to destroy it for me.  That is a fair bit of ISK.

There really should be some sort of intermediate stepping stone, a Structure Lite, for newer, less rich, solo / casual players to participate in.  But CCP doesn’t want to encourage that.

As the DEV Blog outlines, this is part of CCP’s focus on making consequences for player actions and the stakes required to make them.  For quite some time that consequence has been negative for those who like to build Castles.  It certainly encourages the game to become leaner and meaner.