Jita Park Speakers Corner

Post... from POS-occupied null.

Putting aside my experience in W-space.

If your corp is based in K-space where there is competition for manufacturing, research, invention slots, your CEO or an underling might be running a POS as part of corp operations. Time & frustration running the POS takes these people away from other aspects of the game & that effects everyone in their corp.

revamp plz

i remembered i have one of those blog things, so i wrote a thing about how i feel about poses.

http://www.skorpiuschronicles.com/?p=839

Going from hi-sec stations to a POS hangar is a major shock to the syatem. Lets leave aside the permissions issues, and just look at the interface. Inside a POS, you can't show contents on containers or ships, you can't access containers or ship cargo, you get annoying permissions warnings every time you deposit an item in a hangar (even if there's nothing stopping you removing it), and you can't repackage stuff.

For example, to put stuff into a container, you need to undock in an indy big enough to hold the container, put the container in the indy, put the stuff in the container, put the container back in the POS hangar (click through warning), and finally put back the indy. Ugh!

And since everything in the POS belongs to the POS, it completely breaks the assets search interface. I might have a few billion in assets sitting in a hangar division, but as far as the game is concerned I have no assets. Too bad if I want to find out where a given module or resource is located.

Even if we don't get modular POS-es, at least fix the inventory and permissions issues on the current iteration. Please.

After a further look at this post I realised that as I had said before NOWHERE does CCP say it will do anything about POS other than the usual SOON and that is set with THE OVERHAUL CANNOT HAPPEN ALL AT ONCE

and this little line I missed
"I can't make promises for game designers or the people that make content for EVE Online."
So in another words what he is saying is that his statement is just more CCP fluff with no actual content.

I will admit after this I could never go to a Fanfest, they will bring out something they have wasted hours of man hours on that could be used to fix the game to show their Vision for the Future and I would just be sour and storm out as it would just be another pile of lies from CCP.

POS fix?? Yay?

+1 do something about this.

1. They should be more logical - for example common storage space.
2. Have more DPS - be able to take at least one capital during a reinforce phase ( if someone is stupid )
3. Be more customizable
4. Pos shield could be an additional module - vary in size ... and fuel consumption
5. Have different base setups:
- industry pos 1 reinforce but no major ship storage
- "home pos" large ship storage ... but no industry capability ( multiple reinforce timers ... yes sometimes you want to get 3 days off from the game)
- military instalation High damage, high defence - JB, Cyno Jammers etc ... no industry or big ship storage, but large shield .

So how many pages do we need in order to show that POSs are not just for a "small portion of the community"? And that contrary to what CCP thinks, the playerbase does not expect it to be ALL RELEASED AT ONCE. What we want is for CCP to actually START working on it.

Same goes for Corporation Roles.....

Taking CSM Two step's blog post as a starting point, I'd like to highlight one specific line right near the top, from the CSM minutes - "It would, however, only affect the group of people who manage POSes."

I am sorry CCP, but you have here revealed two MAJOR flaws in your collective thinking.

1) You have seriously under estimated how many people care about modular POS, or POS control/maintenance/access/etc. So called "POS managers" exist ONLY because the existed implementation is both geared towards that point of view, and enforces it by being unbearable to the masses.

2) You have seriously under estimated just how much you can change POSs, in terms of player interaction (HCI, believe it or not you 'could' even make them noob 'friendly'), software level design and implementation, and let's not forget fundamental behaviour and functionality.

Yes, POSs have a huge number of things tied into them. For start, hangers and ship array for living, refineries, labs, reactions, construction arrays, defensive mods, and optionally manable offensive mods. For another list, indy corp science work, drug manufacture, super capital manufacture, jump bridges, moon goo, any and all parts of wormhole life (how many people do that, insignificant minority, all POS managers you say?), oh and lets not forget the role they used to have in sov control. I dare suggest more could be listed.

I agree with CCP, this is a huge complicated and seriously daunting task. I would not have suggested doing it in a 'single' expansion under the old system, but also find it inconceivable that sections cannot (or would not, or might not) be linked to the themes of the next three or four expansions.

You want themes, I have one. It ties in to problems with POSs and null-sec. I call it "helping the little guy", or "how small entities can live in null-sec without an outpost or clone station". Oh yeah BTW, null-sec has a serious issue with distribution of medical clone facilities. Imagine being able to build a POS up to be a bit like an outpost on a smaller scale. This means lots of personal hanger space (anchor for self, access by allowance list as in custom channels), the ability to boost the shield/fitting stats of a tower (either linking of towers, or new modules for shield/PG/CPU), and finally addition of a new POS module for medical clones (corp has automatic 'office' rites for medical). Dedicated fuel hangers (s/m/l) would solve scaling better than internal bays, and time (seconds) taken to consume a block instead of number of blocks per unit time.

On the inevitable thought of "but that'll mean far too much new artwork", feel free to reuse existing models where appropriate for a year or so. There in no reason why a 'modular personal hanger' should look any different from the old fashioned 'generic achored hanger' at first release. Much as we love Eve being pretty, we prefer function before form. You don't even need to replace the anchoring with a nicer Lego(tm) clip-on functionality until the last stage two years from now.


Now I return to where I started on this, with the one line quote and the flaws it reveals. I offer you my professional opinions and advice as a software engineer with experience creating complicated modular systems on multi-year projects.

1) DO NOT ever start a system rebuild be asking things like "what's wrong with the current system" and assuming things like "few users means few potential users". Equally, never start by looking to 'fix' or 'improve' the current system. Generally speaking, looking at an old system will not help, because the old system doesn't work. Invariably it either never worked, or the use case out grew the solution.

2) Always start with a fresh slate, ask "what is possible, desirable, desperately wanted, and needed" (ask in that order, implement in reverse). Ask repeatedly in different contexts, "what might different classes of user do with it, back-end admin (databases/etc), technical freedom versus limitation, etc".

3) Just because you're 'Agile' doesn't mean you can't be predetermined. Do the long term final design up front, and be certain it's one you can stick with. Do it at the high level, and do it at the mid level, let Agile handle the low level. It's easy to define a large 'complex' system that can be compartmentally built and work flawlessly, if you ask enough questions; oh and if you build the answers of "I don't know (yet)" into the design. In so doing, develop a 'general' solution instead of a custom one. You have recently succeeded at this sort of thing with smaller issues, such as Crimewatch. In fact as you demostrated in Crimewatch, no software problem is too complicated if you ask simple enough questions.


Please, please, please CCP, make 'POSs for all' and 'null-sec for the little guy' your top priorities for summer 2013. We will forgive you a small implementation, if you have instead a solid and guarunteed design for these features that will be incrementally delivered, without failure or back tracking.

P.S. Not only does null-sec lack sufficient medical facilites, but sov space is impossible for the little folk. It's giants and pets. Perhaps sov maintenance bills should increase exponentially with the number and quality of systems held.