Alice Katsuko
Terra Incognita
Unclaimed.
204
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Posted - 2013.03.04 08:26:00 -
[1] - Quote
I will probably get lynched for this, but I agree fully with CCP Seagull on deciding to hold off on the aesthetic component of the POS system, in order to focus on POS functionality. An eye-candy rework of the POS mechanic is not what the community needs, regardless of what the community thinks it wants. An aesthetic POS expansion will be doomed to failure, because aesthetics are not a major, or even a minor problem with POSes, or even a problem at all.
The current disaggregated system of a single control tower surrounded by detached modules works fine. Some folk may not like the way it looks, but point to anything in the game, and a lot of people will hate its aesthetics. That's part of EVE. But the detached structure system allows a lot of flexibility for the POS designer. I can position modules within easy reach of one another for industrial purposes, out of the way of ships, and anywhere else I damn well please. I can set up tight batteries for easy repping and rearmament, or have a lot of small clusters.
I currently run two large and one small tower; I use them almost every day, in addition to a weekly trip to fuel up mining tower a in the middle of nowhere. So I speak from experience when I say that the current POS layout is fine. If it's changed to a unitary structure, that's fine by me; if it's left alone, I also don't care. Aesthetics are not a big problem, and should not be a priority.
The problem with POSes is the underlying link to corporate roles. The corporate role system has little granularity, especially regarding industry and structure access. Some parts of the role assignment system have little functionality; others are unintuitive and difficult to utilize to their full potential. Improving corporate roles to allow more granular control over access rights, and allowing greater control over access to control towers, will be a much better use of developer time than making a pretty little Lego minigame that no-one really uses because the underlying functionality is broken. Make no mistake -- aesthetics are nice, and I won't complain if the POS rework comes with a major aesthetic overhaul, but aesthetics should not take place of a solid re-design of the POS framework and how it interfaces with actual use of the towers themselves.
We have had aesthetic expansions without any content. The player base will fiddle with the pretty lights, and then shrug and ignore it. Anyone who thinks otherwise should consider just how successful and useful Incarna was. Technically, Incarna is amazing, but it has no interactive component, no gameplay.
I would like a POS system where giving permission for someone to manufacture ammo does not also allow him to cancel every corp industrial and research job in the universe. I want to be able to segregate access to different arrays based on title and role. I want blueprint lockdown to not induce carpal tunnel syndrome. And if I want to give someone access to everything, then by God I should be allowed to do that as well, sanity be damned. In sum, I want better control over who can do what to which thing at a POS.
**** modular POSes. I want modular corp roles and modular corp access. The pretty eye candy can wait.
That being said, there are some easy improvements to the current POS system:
- POS refining arrays. They refine at a max 75% efficiency. This may have made sense before Rorquals and exhumers were a thing. But now, they have too little capacity (one or two Hulks can keep an intensive refining array busy), are too slow, and take way too much fitting space. More damnably, it is always more efficient to compress minerals for export than to use the refining array, even considering the cost of fuel. Allow for 100% refining at these things, or at least massively improve their throughpout so a player faces a meaningful choice between
- Missile batteries. Why do they consume CPU? Why are they the only weapon system that goes offline under reinforce? A tower full of missiles can be tanked by a battleship local repper, so the entire POS missile system could use a major look at.
- Blasters. Tower optimal and tracking is calculated from the control tower. Blaster optimal and falloff combined is less than the radius of all but a small tower's shield.
- Containers in corp hangars. Please do this, and allow us to restrict who can remove containers from a given division.
- Divisions in the ship maintenance array. As a stopgap measure. |