Spergison wrote:First, I'd like to say one thing that really really worries me before I address the ideas in this post.
These types of market changing updates -however small they may be- need to be managed better.
This information needs to be protected and released at a scheduled time so that all players have a fair chance at being notified. Changing market mechanics can't be haphazardly discussed like this.
CSM members, or CCP players that may be aware of these ideas well before they are implemented may place orders for affected commodities and sell on the speculation bubbles these announcements create.
This is along the lines of Don't fly what you can't afford to lose...
Trust no-one, including CCP.
/Tinfoil Hat
Now to the meat of the idea, specifically the fuel blocks.
A lot of people have said this and I'm gonna have to agree. Most of the changes you've been working on make large alliance life easier or more interesting and seem to be focused on stirring up the big sov world. At the same time you're working on making the beginning-game enticing to new players. As a less-than-a-year-old guy what I see is that you're bringing sov mechanics to the game as a whole. Every noob corp that dreams of its own POS, or noob player who wants to delve in PI or moon goo now has to take into account the local PI market and taxes at customs. The cost of stepping out as a POS holding entity will be enourmously increased by the customs offices and now the fuel reqs. If you can't fuel a tower at fuel utilization, you can't play little empire builder.
As a WH resident and sometime fuel bay admin for a few towers, I am not happy with the recent changes in wspace PI and POS fueling. Both changes are perhaps nifty for large alliance kspace folks, but they make wspace more complicated and risky. You just took the math out of the logistics runs for people who don't make their own fuel and transferred it to the people who make fuel, which is 99% of all WH dwellers, and increased fuel use significantly. Our fueling is now more expensive and more complicated.
IMHO make a new product that has some tangible benefit besides 'math iz hard' so people can choose to use the new fuel or not. Smaller perhaps, or globally burnable (works with all faction towers regardless of 'tope type). Or make it so the POS always uses the same amount of fuel but can be fueled without this new 'convenient' product.
Otherwise the goals of self sufficiency in localized areas are not being served by this idea and the smaller enclaves of players are being penalized with yet more clicking and basically a barely simplified spreadsheet. Right now we stuff PI into the tower, sell excess occasionally for beer money, and make risky runs for ice products. Soon we will need to make and anchor customs modules, defend them, set up another array, and change our math to burn more fuel than we burn right now. that is not happy fun time. This is spend more to spend more to risk more to click more to get what we already have.
My idea of happy fun time involves addressing roles and rights for us content creators so we can work together better. One of the biggest barriers to player interaction is the levels of mistrust the Corporation and POS roles create. The ONLY way to assign any type of access control in a POS involves putting the entire station at risk. You need to make it easier for us to trust each other when we want to involve more pilots in our endevours. This is why WH corps require personal POS, New Eden has FTL travel but can't put padlocks on ships.
How about 'Dock for Self' and 'Dock for Corp' in the SMAs, with a corp role that can undock/pilot any ship in a given SMA?
How about repackaging things in a CHA, or swapping subsystems without having to go to kspace. Or anchorable personal hangars instead of a bunch of cans when you're hiking.
My crystal ball, dusty as it may be, shows me a future where PI products are the new technetium, regional production is monopolized by large alliances and coalitions, and the startup and maintenance cost for any corp wanting a POS is prohibitively high.