I
strongly disagree with the abandonment of the modular POS system, and support this thread in its entirety.
It's been said by CCP that the development of the modular POS system would only help a few people; POSs impact daily life for thousands of players (to use CCP Seagull's terminology, the 'instigators' and 'enablers', especially the latter, have to deal with them
all the time), and it's one of the most ancient and diseased features of EVE. I also think properly reimplemented, they can be an amazing source for the player interaction that CCP says it's striving for.
It's also been said that it would be too much effort, and I respectfully disagree here as well. I think that you can spread the work out over a long period of time and develop it alongside other features. To quote
my suggestion in the minutes blog thread:
Quote:Here's what I'll suggest: let's break things down into meaningful chunks, and make it an 18/24 month project. Build the new POS system slowly as a 'farms and fields' conflict driver in all levels of space; eg, you anchor the new towers at certain beacons/exploration sites to seize control of them and provide resources/abilities, and keep the old system roughly the same until the new system is full featured enough to feasibly replace it.
Start out doing something simple for summer 2013 (small POSs anchored directly attached to comets, mining for moongoo - no guns or anything too complex, think something like a POCO), but expand iteratively from there over time to new areas while working on reimplementing POS functionality alongside this. Maybe you add med towers, reactors, guns, corp storage, and mooring in winter 2013; maybe large towers, industry, labs, reprocessing, market, contracts, and moon anchoring in summer 2014; and maybe the full system can be replaced by winter 2014 with full docking/captains quarters, forcefields, etc.
I think this is in line with what CCP Unifex posted in
his blog. I think the biggest argument that I have to make here is that
this isn't going away. If you don't do this
NOW and just kick the can down the road, in two years or five years or ten years the utter misery of the POS system is going to be dragging EVE down. Hell, it already is.
-Chaos