Right so hopefully this will be short. Participation in weakenings is low for both minor and major weakenings. Why?

Major Weakenings

It is absurdly difficult to destroy a construct. You have to make a dedicated effort to keep going after a construct weakening after weakening. Without any resistance at all you could possibly take it down in two weakenings. With slight resistance, about three or four. With serious resistance, I do not believe it is possible to EVER take the construct down.

You just have to miss one weakening on the offensive in order to have to practically start all over again. Regardless of how interested players are in taking down the construct, at some point you just will not have enough people to mount an offense.

It is not exactly encouraging conflict if the only way to take a construct down in a reasonable amount of time, if one considers 14 to 20 rl days reasonable, is to have little resistance. Because honestly, what org is going to want to use a large amount of resources to go into a fruitless battle? Which is what the ones with a lot of resistance are.

The final insult to injury is that if you finally do manage to take down a construct, it will be back up in 7 days. Constructs are supposed to be things that you make a choice whether to have or not but it's kind of a no brainer if you can not defend the thing at all and still have use of it for 75% of the time.

Mini Weakenings

The effort outweighs the benefits. Pretty simple. It is useful to participate in one when you are planning a big raid and want them to actually spend power when they use that discretionary power to get rid of you, but other than that....

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For about a week, we saw interest in nexus battles grow sharply. Why? Because regardless of whether you won or lost, you got a clear personal and organizational benefit from it. A benefit beyond what you could get if you just found something else to do for that time period. Was the benefit extreme? Yes, but so was what it got changed to. The letdown from that alone probably contributed greatly to the sharp decline in interest. So I'd say bring it back. Not in the millions it was of course, but not the pittance it is now either. Somewhere in the middle goldwise. Or make it so you can redeem the spheres for other interesting things.

It is hard to really determine how best to go about fixing the rest of it if people will not participate. So my suggestion is not even worry about the other problems with the system at the moment and just focus on getting people to want to participate again. Once there is actual interest there will be more ideas and input into improving it all around.

THe personal gain to weakneings should definitly be high if you want people doing something which basically cuts you off from the rest of hte game for a while.

Sure, I'm all for encouraging participating!

What exactly is the solution? (Give me sample numbers.)

I'm posting this as someone who has no real use for his constructs, so take it with a grain of salt.

I think costs for colossi should go way, way down (to 20-30% of what they are now), costs for rebuilding should drop a more modest amount, the health of constructs and colossi cut roughly in half for major weakenings, and the time that a construct is shut down after a minor weakening raised to 8-15 hours. Everything is painfully expensive, but also very static. The constructs are almost always up and running, and they're really easy to take for granted.

I actually find the minor weakenings to be more engaging than the major ones as it stands right now. You can actually do something with a minor weakening. Constructs go down, particles get collected. Major weakenings are infrequent and often end in a lost colossus and nothing else.

I would say it's fruitless or overly difficult to take down a construct. The Crypt fell several times if I remember correctly. Though I do agree with you that the interest is dropping and the effort put in vastly outweighs the gain.

When constructs gained the ability to get up and RUN away from colossi, I knew I was pretty much done trying.

It's a crude solution but at this point bribery probably works best (Given all the changes the system has gone through, resentment regarding constructs in general, perceptions that whenever an org is successful at it things just get progressively harder, the bugs, etc. inspiring interest is more difficult then were it just a new system being introduced)

You used to be able to sell particles for 200 to 700 gold a piece. This was flooding the economy with millions of gold. Simple solution, make it so you can sell particles for 250 to 400 gold a piece. Directly. Not having to trade these spheres around. Alternatively, make the spheres themselves cheaper (and more abundant! and could we please make it so you can insert spheres into a construct any time instead of just during major weakenings?) in terms of particles and more abundant. Though this gets into the problem with orgs basically having free constructs again. Direct selling is easier and simpler.

During a mini-weakening 15 people focusing for 45 minutes can net about 2000 particles. This would earn between 500,000 and 800,000 gold. Assuming the org takes half to help offset the gold sink that are constructs or the power sink that they are, that's between 16,000 to 26,000 per person depending on how good a deal those who traded it in could get.

Addendum: To limit people just doing every mini-weakening possible, which there were complaints about before, make it so particles that come off the construct during mini-weakenings decrease the more people focus on them. So let's say a construct holds a maximum of 3000 particles accumulated on it at any one time. It accumulates particles at the rate of 1500 each day (60 per hour). You do a mini-weakening and loosen off 2000 particles. There are 1000 particles left. In the 10 hours till the next mini-weakening it gains back 600 particles so it has 1600. You participate in that one two and get all 1600 off. If you keep participating in every mini-weakening, you end up only being able to get a maximum of 600 particles each time. Not really worth it. You would need to leave the construct alone for two days for it to be back to full particle potential. Of course, if an org keeps several constructs, it is not too difficult to alternate around each weakening. But an org does not have to have any constructs at all and if they choose to maintain several then they are essentially choosing to have to defend more.

Where is the help file to sell particles?

I didn't even know you could do such things.... I was once at a weakening, and collecting particles but nobody told me what to do with them, save give them to Kaervas.

The help scroll is HELP AURONIDION.
And as for Catarin's post, she's right. As leader of the Star Aviators (Celest's Aethership Fleet) if I didn't give them a share of the cut we wouldn't attend weakenings, period.

I also think that the times that the construct is taken down should be doubled; it would give everyone a reason to defend.

Another thing I think should occur is the particles from us Bombarding should be automatically deposited into the ship's aetherhold rather than just put on the ground; that's why we decided not to attack at one point. No point in attacking something that won't die and the other organization would even receive benefits from.

Or at least, put into space over the dock, so they have to scoop it up still.

I have to agree with the points raised in the inital post. It's a royal pain in the ass to take down constructs these days. Two to three weakenings is the bare minimum to take down a construct with NO resistance on the part of the defenders. NO ground force, NO aetherspace forces, nothing. Not a shred of resistance. The constructs are fricken bears to take down and all you need is one weakening to fall at 5 AM Eastern time, and there's just 1 person who can heal the construct to have all the work undone.

I think constructs need to have their HP slashed. There's little interst in them because it takes forever to destroy one, and it's usually no question to spend the comms/power/gold etc. to have it raised. Mainly because the ones that are targetted, usually for Celest and Mag it's the free cosmic ripple one, or in Mag's case the Crypt. And one week is not enough time to really capitalize on the *brief* edge you have, IE: being able to fight on the other side's Cosmic plane without ripples.

In one weakening, I remember it was one ship with a colossus against negliable Mag resistance. I think we managed to take the Free cosmic ripple one down like, maybe 10%? It's been awhile but it was negligable when compared to the fact that we sat there for an hour bombing as often as possible with a colussus slugging away. It wasn't much to be honest.

I think the best way to get interest back in is to get it so that it doesn't take an insane amount of effort for it to bear fruit. Right now I think it would take probably about 4 ships and a colossus with no resistance to take out one construct in one run. I think the most ships I've ever seen Celest pull togather in a weakening was 3, that was only once, and I don't think one had a full crew. That's off the charts right now given the still limited playerbase of the game. I'd wager that 4, maybe 5 ships is the total number of full crew ships Celest and Mag could get if they both teamed up, and even that would be a task in and of itself given the rarity of Empaths.

So step one, reduce the amount of damage it takes to kill constructs. That will get more people motivated to actually make an effort to take advantage of weakenings so that it can actually do something.

Next step, increase the "long term" benefits of blowing up a construct. You kill the Free-Cosmic Ripple construct, you have about a week or so to try and scrounge up enough people at the right time to capitilize on that. My suggestion for this is, keep the same down-time between destruction and construction, but after it's built, it takes time for the construct to actually start working,
IE: Until the next weakening, you only get partial benefit from it. With the Crypt, it only grants the Archlich for those who already have Lich, but not free-lich for everybody, until the next weakening. With the Free Cosmic Ripple, you can only do one free Ripple a real-life day, all others cost regular power, until the next weakening. With the Fountain, you can only pray to half of the supernals, IE: Just Raziela and Japhiel. Shakiniel, Elohora and Methrenton require full fuctioning construct. This way, there's a period of no benefit, then a period of only partial benefit, thus giving more leway time.

I'm sure there are a few more ways, but that's just the ones I can think of.

The "partial time" is the time while it's building. There should NOT be another partial step, otherwise you're dealing with throwing away a lot of comms for nothing if it's being assaulted the next Weakening.

Especially for constructs that are lame duck Constructs to begin with. How do you weaken them? They come pre-weakened!