I resubscribed recently and promptly checked out the new mobile depot for it's "immersion factor", so to say. Sadly, there was hardly one, in my opinion.
Looking at the depot, i thought: wouldn't it be cool to have you own little home with a spectacular view at all the pretty nebulas - from the viewpoint of an avatar/person and not of a ship-entity?
Literally through a window into space.
And then it hit me - all the small fragments and pieces of "proper", "meaningful" WiS are already there. We have the mobile depot to store your stuff and refit your ship while you are away from a station or a starbase and maybe somewhere deep into Nullsec. We already have a somewhat working prototype for walking in a room and interaction with objects in 3rd person view. We have got a new ship with some serious firepower to allow players sneaking into low and null for ratting, exploration or pvp more easily. There is also some general focus on exploration lately, with various new loots.
And there is constant demand for some vanity items and avatar decorations.
Putting these fragments together creates a logical(from my standpoint, at least) evolution of the WiS concept - one that serves a game purpose involving direct interaction with FiS content.
Therefore my suggestion:Restart WiS in a smaller, more controllable environment, that does not carry the burden of a gigantic vision about hundreds of wildly emoting players on your screen at once - or even the horrors at Jitat 4-4 - and gigantic, varying station environments.
Start with a personal outpost - not unlike a mobile depot - with a room, similar to the current WiS one and a big window into space to remind you of what game you are playing
.
Allow players to dock to it and store 2 ships there, limiting it to the cruiser size. Allow players to decorate their home - look at Mass Effect captain's quarters for a very simple way. It would be already enough for a start.
Create some useful holoscreens with some interesting information for the 3rd view: for example display of PI reactor time, production etc.
And now allow players to invite one(1) another person into their home, if they keep one of the two hangar slots free to dock to.
From here it's easy to slowly go up in size:
A 10 people outpost for small corporation, stores 20 ships, may be decorated. Several rooms(where you are able to encounter all other inhabitants inside at the same time) and at it's heart the war room where you can use a map tool to mark places and discuss ship movements etc in a graphical way.
This outpost would be hard to locate and, compared to a moon tower, would be ideal for groups that do not like to see their installation being scouted and hotdropped by 100 capitals on their first day in nullsec.
Next would be a 30-40 people trading outpost/casino/amusement park involving some sabotage, wild 3rd person shooting, FiS pewpewing and bank robbing - and all sorts of profitable ingame buisiness opportunities.
I would like to write more as i have a couple of ideas on fairly easy money for CCP, but this post is already a bit too big and i just wanted to see if there is general interest in the ideas above. If you liked what you've read and found that interesting, just comment here or like this post and i will add more details on hows and whys later.