Alice Katsuko
Terra Incognita
Intrepid Crossing
82
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Posted - 2011.10.23 16:32:00 -
[1] - Quote
Very nice work, both in the concept and in taking player feedback into account. Looking forward to whatever the final version of this will be.
It won't take a fleet of dreads to reinforce a POCO. With the current HP, a small gang of stealth bombers can do the job in fifteen or twenty minutes. This is both a good and a bad thing. It's good because it allows small gangs to harass nullsec residents, and means that there isn't much incentive to bring huge structure-shooting blobs to take POCOs down, especially since there may be dozens of POCOs in a single system. It's bad because a small gang can go through several systems during the POCO owner's downtime and reinforce all the POCOs, then force the owner to babysit them all when they come out of reinforced mode; on the other hand, this is the price of ownership.
Besides which, the profits from PI are so low that no sane alliance or corporation will drop a capital fleet on one. Nullsec alliances obviously will clear out POCOs which they do not own from their space, but that's the way things should be. Nullsec alliances don't leave hostile towers floating about in their space, and they don't leave hostile IHubs or TCUs, either, for obvious reasons. But I very much doubt that capital fleets will ever be used to kill POCOs unless their HP is drastically increased, and that would be bad since it would encourage blobbing or simply make POCOs pointless to shoot at except for sovereign holders.
I am not sure why anyone would run ninja PI operations in sovereign nullsec. The risk doesn't seem to be worth the effort, especially considering that most nullsec alliances will form a fleet to shoot a cloaky hauler on principle, and since cloaky haulers have rather low cargo capacity. This should not be a significant concern. I especially do not understand why anyone would run high-level PI operations in sovereign nullsec space.
A single individual is not supposed to be able to own his personal POCO except in relatively empty pockets of space. Near as I understand it, POCOs are meant to be corporate or alliance assets. So it should require some sort of group-level organization to keep a POCO safe. Similarly, a corporation which goes to the effort of building and defending a POCO should be able to make life difficult for people whom it does not like.
I do agree that we should not be able to completely exclude players from running PI, but players already can use the command launchpad for export. Why not make a new, higher-capacity launchpad that can be easily moved alongside the ECU/processor cluster but has less storage space and less launch capacity than the customs office pad? Better yet, make that launchpad draw on neighboring storage silos. This would make storage silos actually useful, and would allow players to bypass a POCO. Better yet, allow import via this new launchpad, albeit at a greater cost. This way when Dust allows us to build death rays on planets by moving certain construction parts down to a planet, a small ninja alliance can drop a small colony and build its death ray unnoticed, then nuke a few dreads. 
I am not entirely sure that preventing players from excluding others based on standings but allowing them to set any tax rate would solve anything. If I set a tax rate to 1000% of the current price for all reds, it would be as though I had excluded reds from using the POCO. Not allowing me to set different tax rates seems contrary to the sandbox.
For NPC nullsec, it may be a good idea to keep customs offices, make them conquerable, prohibit exclusion of players and cap the maximum tax rate. After all, that space is owned by big-name pirates, who presumably run their own planet-based industries and don't want a bunch of pod-pilots crashing their parade. |