Mioelnir
Cataclysm Enterprises
Nulli Secunda
88
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Posted - 2013.01.22 04:05:00 -
[1] - Quote
I've been a player since 2007. I've also been in 0.0 since 2007. Very few things have stayed the same out here since then. One of them, is that every pvp campaign is preceeded by a call and need for staging towers.
Depending on the circumstances, those towers have escorts during setup. Or protection afterwards. Or are simply used as intended. Indeed, they have been - and still are - usually dropped by a select few people, that may even go to such lengths as skill a Rorqual (without the industrial core etc) on an otherwise pvp character, since it's the ship of choice for pos drops on a "hot grid".
Now, why is this only a select few, when POS have so much impact day to day on every nullsec dweller? Is it because the logistic guys are greedy and don't want to share this awesome gameplay? Most certainly not.
It is because the mechanics surrounding a POS are god-awful and riddled with bugs, traps and pitfalls, that noone wants to touch them with a 10-foot pole.
In a sense, the gameplay experience of POS and the code responsible for them seem to be a lot alike from what we players can infer from all the dev interviews that have been given over the years.
I urge CCP to not shelf the POS refactoring, it would be the most short-sighted decision in years.
I don't know what kind of tangled mess the current POS code really is, but if it were possible to at least try to bring it in the realms of POLA and WYSIWYG, that would be a major upgrade. If a POS' manage menu and its internal decision on what it was really configured to do were the same, introducing people to the mechanics would be a lot simpler.
Also, POS setup is a inherently designed single player activity, since a POS only supports one player setting it up. Bump the amount of modules that can online/offline/anchor/... to 25 and limit it per player to the level of the anchoring skill, and it becomes worthwhile to drop a POS as a group activity, since players are no longer forced to sit around and do nothing or actively hinder each others actions.
The simple fact that POS are still used, and have always been used, in absolute abundance, throughout new eden, DESPITE the bugs, shortcomings and game mechanics surrounding them should speak encyclopedic volumes about how important they are to the gameplay in eve.
Such content would usually and rightfully just be ignored. |