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CCP goes a couple of derp-free weeks and now they're back to their old, familiar, paste-eating shenanigans.

The Tier 3 battlecruisers are a colossally stupid solution in search of a problem. 'Tier 2 battlecruisers (drake/hurricane) are overpowered! Let's introduce Tier 3 battlecruisers! Derp!'

POS pellets are another colossally stupid solution in search of a problem. Catering to the large alliance drones who fuel multiple towers is bullshit. If people want to claim a bunch of moons, it SHOULD be a pain in the ass.

Besides, if it's all about logistics, reduce the size of a few items by .1 here or .2 there and presto, you've achieved the same result without reducing the glorious complexity/diversity that is emblematic of EVE. Or better yet, introduce these stupid pellets of yours, not as POS fuel, but as items that can be reprocessed at a POS corporate hangar into POS fuel at the stated amounts. That way the people who are too stupid to use spreadsheets can enjoy the logistical benefits of their POS pellets and those of us who like the options that are available with the current system can continue to enjoy them. ... And you get to **** over the market speculators as an added bonus.

POS Fuel blocks, about bloody time!

And the reason why we couldn't have had this sooner is?



Perhaps next time you or your fellow Devs have this sort of problem they should consider asking the player base for help via a forum or Dev Blog post? As my old departed Gran use to say, 'Many hands make light work'. And no it wasn't because she had a hand cranked generator .

Term.

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+1 to block granularity increases for faction Towers and Sov fuel savings

+1 to balancing Ozone and Heavy Water in ice

+1 to decreased manufacturing time

-1 to weird extended duration for faction towers - BAD idea, keep timers based on one hour. Period. Granularity increase FTW!

Other than that - GOOD WORK CCP! thanks Greyscale. Now fix alliance POS usage issues.

Oh, +1 to that idea of several sizes of Corp Hangar Array. That could work.

Cost-push inflation is entirely justified, and isn't at all what people are usually discussing when they talk about inflation in MMOs.

I just hate the idea of having an ammunition assembly array. It adds complexity to my POS-operator's duties. Why not let the POS itself convert old-styled fuels into new-styled pellets?
Say i load the old fuels into the fuel bay, press the button and POS converts them into pellets.

The size isn't the problem, the problem is that 'pos fuel' is bullshit complexity for the sake of complexity. Having to manage pos fuel isn't fun and doesn't add anything to the game. More changes like this thanks.

Pay someone else to do the assembly. Pass the cost onto your end users. Problem solved.

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.

This will go a long way to making POS maintenance less of a PITA - nice job, CCP.

Just two things come to mind, that have already been pointed out in some form or another:

- to preserve faction or sov bonuses, use a number like 120 that you can get 1/2 and 1/4 of, or take 25%, 33% or 50% of without getting into fractions. LCM is a powerful tool - use that to accommodate any other special case. Fuel cost savings are a huge reason for putting up with the high cost of faction towers; whichever nugget told you it was about convenience is very misinformed, and simply increasing fuel bay size will be a poor substitute to doing the right thing.

- change the color of the blocks.. really hard to tell them apart. Granted, it's not turret-icon bad, but consider making the blocks the faction hue instead of spearmint blue; I think it's only appropriate that Minnies will be filling their towers with fuel that looks like rusty Jello.

There seems to be some problems for WH POS users, alliances with Sov and faction POS owners.
In the same way empire charters still must be used as fuel in empire, why not remove the ice from the fuel cube and have only 1 type of fuel cube? Make this fuel cube a P4 item produced by PI.
Then reduce the ice needed for faction towers.
Faction tower will still have less fuel consumption.
Also Sov will give a reduction in ice consumption

WH corps, can produce the p4 inside and only need to bring the ice. It seems the easier way to do it.