No its not the same.  One person lags out a little too much past cover gets vaporized causing chain explosions in the group.  Turrets should be cheap to build(they are) and should not be used for extreme passive defense.  Turrets should die regularly and not be the end all be all.  As it stands you can basically place a terminal on top of the mineral field put two turrets up.  Energy transfer them once they are built and GG.  Safe mining.

I agree here about the lag point(that's why I said "about the same"), but turrets could be buffed in other ways than damage too. The main motivation behind increased occupied area is to reduce the amount of turret spam that can be set up in small sections. Turrets need powergrid backing it which generates even more graphical and network lag. CPU and Reactor on terminals helps too of course but detecting around an area with a cluster of turrets and other structures will still be painfully laggy without increased occupied area or something else to force the base to spread out a little more than now.

Another unrelated suggestion that pops to my head if the developers go for the terraforming slope that lets assaults and lights walk past is to increase turrets hit dispersion so they have hard time shooting lights and assaults. That way the ganks and roams in lights is still possible on Gamma and turrets won't be instapopping those poor things but when the sh*t hits the fans, the turrets still help.

@Rage Rex: Please go and read again what I suggested. It's not a buff to the effectiveness of defenses.

Make turrets reinforceable along with the structure limits. This will at least give gamma base owners some measure of safety knowing their base wont be ringed overnight. It will be needed to give people the confidence to build back on gamma I think.

Shadowmine, that's a good suggestion. With the limited CPU and Reactor we will not see everyone throw turrets up en masse when danger appears and the provided 3 days buffer is very helpful.

You don't lose your base.  You just have to fight to regain control in some aspects.  TBH, this will change nothing.  All people are going to do is go next to a teleport drop X number of terminals->spam turrets -> yay turtle island!  Even with 3k radius.

Buildings auto terraform, sure. But Minor imperfections only. Returning to the way it was and using turrets to pull down walls, no.

This thread sparked a huge and protacted and vocal discussion in our TS last night about the future of Gamma.

Zoom, while I was very surprised at the candor of your response here, clearly you choose to let the Gamma Change cat out of the bag. I think Jita asked this directly, and with good reason, but at what point will you index what is currently on the field?

It doesn't matter the fine details of any change, but if there is some sort of legacy or reimbursement, you have to index it at some point. If you say today, well fine. If you say 2 weeks, the various sides will look at what they have, and what they can break of others, and plan accordingly. Although I and my side will continue our course at this time, I would hate to waste 2 weeks or 2 months, doing something thats a waste of time. I'm sure the other side feels the same.

When the mission change and the Epri change were announced, the time between announcement and implication allowed for those in the correct position a huge advantage. And I think it was 3 months for the Epri change and longer for missions. I mined, a lot.

It takes nothing for you to index the server. Are you going to do this? And when? If you say today ... although its probably the fairest, our enemies will say "you guys have all the stuff!" If you say a month, this will give enough time for those who want to remove others assets from the game the opportunity to do so, and will cause players to dramatically shift focus from current activites. It takes 15 days to successfully seige a Hi Tech Terminal. This requires more than 15 days, simply in the planning and execution. our enemies have a plan, and they are in the middle of it. We have plans too.

What should we do?

Evac

Do you mean run away?

Rage Rex, assets lost thru gameplay .. umm why would you reimburse those?
If so I have 15 Mesmer Mk2, and counting, losses via gameplay I'd be happy to take back.

This does ruin the surprise too,

lololololololol

I think Merkle is on the right track.

With a looming time deadline of Steam release, the most effective thing to do at this point is:

* Reset Gamma
* Remove beacon TF
* Devs Create (3) flat 'base' areas on each gamma island with 2 'natural' impassable sides per base.
     Note: 3 is better than 2, it may not mean that 3 sides will settle there, but it leaves it as a possiblity.

- Details follow

Valid question, yes. Although we have made a database backup today, there is no way that we could do a reimbursement based on this. It's enough to move your assets to alpha/beta now after the snapshot, and you would get them duped with the gamma reimbursement based on the snapshot.

The only way to reimburse is to do it at the time of the reset. The thing to consider here indeed as you suggest, is that people would be playing gammas with different goals in their minds between now and then, since now there would be a proclaimed end to it all. Not sure that this is a bad thing, but certainly different.