Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Dear community,

after having read through the entire minutes of the CSM 9 , my own experience with POS and being a long-term player of the X-Series games i thought it might be a good idea to unfold some ideas around the future of a POS.

The ideas will mostly not take into consideration how things are today as i dont believe that any level of 'fix' will really be successful. A reinvention is needed instead.

POS have many different usages as of now. They are used as defensive structures, as industrial structure and/or storage. So cooking it all down: its basically a super-station in smaller scale.

Everything else we have in Eve is very modular and so are POS in theory but unfortunately things are not scaling nicely with each other. So here is how i think they could look like:


Keep the main tower as your starting point. But make it modular like a ship so one can upgrade fuel bay , CPU and power grid with plug-in modules. In my little optimal world it would hardly have a limitation of how far you can upgrade this base version but since i am aware of different needs we could play along with the current sizes and limit small and medium but allow large basically to be extended endless.

The aboved stated plug-in extensions would have to be costly - that will ensure progression and not everyone spamming the universe with these towers at once. At a certain stage one should be allowed to pay an NPC/Player service to upgrade from medium to large thus disabling any limitations. The npc/player service would create an incentive for people to actually skill towards POS dealings and would give those who run todays logistics some rewarding recognition.

Make the towers versatile enough to use any kind of fuel but reduce effectiveness of non-racial fuel by a certain percentage. This opens up for a great flexible gameplay because if you dont want to or cannot get your hands on the right fuel you can still fuel with any other fuel and keeping it operative. This will ease the workload on the maintenance which is a brutal grind right now but will still require enough work to not be considered auto-running.

Fuel itself brings us to the argument of modern times - any kind of fuelling is pretty backwards - but lets stick to it for the sake of what we have already. Extend the towers with solar panels so they can provide a minimal operation including the protective forcefield. Any other module attached to it (covered in the next section) will require real fuel to be used and make the fuel bay expandable as well (similar to sticking cargo expanders into your hauler). So basically: Make the tower itself into a non-mobile ship with fittings so to say. The solar panels can technically be expanded to work on different levels of effectiveness depending on if the tower is anchored in normal space or wormhole space. Wormhole effects could be used to influence effectiveness of the solar panels thus providing a higher level of defence - which is pretty important for wormholers.

The modules - this is where we have a large playing field. Modern construction is modular. Stick A to B and you get one usage , stick B to C and you get another. The modules themselves should only allow one simple usage - pretty much like a module in a ship or a module in PI is nowadays. Lego® bricks for space is what i see. Put a mining module on the tower and get your moon goo. Stick a processor into it and you can run reactions - you get the picture.


By seperating some base features completely from the modules POS would become very flexible - and also easier to be handled by CCP regarding new features and modules. The base towers dont have to be touched as it will only require extra fuel to be burnt when new and/or more modules are introduced and connected. I hope to see many comments to this!