Jita Park Speakers Corner

"Unifex stated that what CCP did was spend effort and prototype what would make a good POS system. It would, however, only affect the group of people who manage POSes. Focusing that amount of time and effort on some small singular aspect of the game and delivering only that “is what will kill the business”

I'm sure I'm not alone in disagreeing with the assessment that POSes are a small singular aspect of the game used by some handful of people. On the contrary, Player Owned Stations are a large enough aspect to warrant their own themed expansion. They're useful in any area of space and for nearly every play style out there. Homes for wormholers, staging points for nullsec and lowsec, production, research, I can go on.

If the task of revamping POSes is too big, that's one thing, but it's certainly not too small.

Please reconsider.

Fair points, but I will note that the very re-work needed makes it a real rat-hole for development cash. There's needed a layered approach to roles not unlike network permissions privileges - Groups that can be created and populated by the CEO which have specific levels of access to various resources.

Basically, CCP need to look at network management and copy the best practices found there - Which will not be particularly easy to fit into the existing structure. That's gonna be 'spensive.

And that is an excellent point.

The only answer to that is that there's only so much that can be done at once, if you want anything to get done - you can't just assigne one Dev to work solo on something this ambitious - you need a team, and there are only so many Devs to go around; something else they judged more important would've needed to have been back-burnered.

I think the whole idea was that a modular POS would be a personal structure. It wouldn't be a corp entity any more, so you could remove all the entanglement with corp roles. The owner could then white list individuals/corps/alliances to use the structure. You could also join your structure to another, to share resources, security, whatever. I mean, we see it all the time in the PVE missions: pirate has his casino, bar, mining colony and ship bays all in the area, it would be great to be able to do that as well.

There are so many great ideas involving the modular POS idea, that it's a shame CCP has tossed it aside.

the tl;dr; imho is:

CCP made a bunch of grand promises about the future a few months ago. CSM minutes come out and all of a sudden we are back at the CSM4.

• The old CCP is back! Promises about development and then all those features get pushed back to soon™. Yesterday it was POS's. Now they are promising us another Apocrypha, as they've done so many times since that expansion came out.


• The CSM isn't pushing for commitments to specifics. They speak in broad general terms about the distant future, and the only conflicts arising between the CSM and the devs is about how the desv should be giving the CSM more respect. ...because that's what's important.


• devblog and feedback trail off and when we do hear something it's a dev saying "oh! would you like that?", then saying "wow! that's a really interesting idea! we love you players! you are so smart!". 2 months later that idea is forgotten and the dev is off to praise some other "really smart and interesting" player, thus placating the base with the promise of tomorrow.

Shedding tears for modular, scalable POSes.

I will be holding back the rage until I know what they are actually doing in 2013 instead. It better be based on a sound idea. I am not hopeful that their alternative will sway me in terms of what should be a priority here. I don't see anything worth doing more than a POS revamp, but maybe I am wrong. I hope I am.

They can fix roles without having to re-do POS's.

From page 19:

"Unifex: Once we have a theme, we can begin to thread the issues you've identified as needing to be prioritized into that theme. POS's, for example, desperately need some improvement. How do we fit that work into our theme? Maybe we don't do all of the modular POS work at once, but we start by making some modules, solving the hangar problem, for instance. But that new hangar module would also exist to support other new activities as part of the themed expansion. "

Emphasis mine.

CCP never said they won't touch POS's this year, only that they're not halting all other projects and putting every staff person in Reykjavik into pumping out Modular POS's into one expansion at the expense of any other projects they need to accomplish.

Just a reminder to everyone, there is a thread for this feedback here.

I think we are all pretty much in agreement that CCP shouldn't throw all its resources for an extended period on one project.

I am starting to wonder really though what was really meant in that meeting. Was it the results of the prototype that didn't touch enough people? Not the concept itself but the prototype that they worked on.

Twostep seemed concerned enough about the POS revamp being in trouble to write his blog and start his thread.

Hopefully some clarity will come soon, cause it sure read like the POS was no longer on the table in the minutes, but perhaps many of us are just misreading. I'll be heading back into it for a reread in a bit, but I'd love to hear from those there.