I recently found out since doing Planetary industry that the customs offices around planets are corporation owned and not Faction owned, and I find it somewhat bizarre that a Corp can place a structure in space that does not require fuel to sustain and keep active.
I propose that the Planetary Customs office system is looked at for economic realism for owning a structure in space generating an income. I say this as all the planets i visit HS are corp owned by a single corporation with only 17 members and once placed are nothing but a isk machine with no requirement to maintain?
The Corps owning these customs offices in High sec should at least be responsible to fuel them to keep active if not active then they should be removed by concord. The current system is creating a unrealistic avenue of income for these structure owners.
Yes I could war dec or contract someone to war dec the corp and destroy the customs office, but in reality these corps with the offices have so much income now it would be ineffective.
Please look into the planetary customs office systems allowing fair opportunity to place and maintain a structure in HS with the requirement to fuel said structures. If these structures are not actively fuelled and maintained then provide the opportunity to commandeer or remove allowing a new corp to own and build a customs office without the need to war dec.
No player owned structure runs on nothing except the customs offices ???
We play as immortal gods commanding a spaceship in a universe with submarine combat physics, where my shots can harmlessly pass through literally everything in space to hit you, and you want realism.
Sorry, cupcake, but Eve is based on how the real world works, and you clearly have no clue about how things really work.
News flash, holding corps are a thing even in the real world. Ever heard of Berkshire-Hathaway? It’s the holding corp owned by Warren Buffet.
Just like a holding corp is there to shield the other companies from legal actions against a single holding, Eve holding corps are there to protect the line members of the Alliance from the impact of constant wardecs coming from people trying to clear the structures they own.
Those wardecs are the maintenance cost you say doesn’t exist. If the alliance putting up the POCOs doesn’t have the strength to defend them, those POCOs will cease to exist, regardless of any arbitrary secondary cost you deem to inject because you have no clue what the fuq you’re talking about.
Agreed, not as a matter of realism though but as a matter of balancing. While at it , the Pocos could also offer PI storage space and other features for ‘rent’.
+1 on this. Monopoly is cancer for a game like EVE and the small circle of entities owning all these structures are effectively immune against what players outside of these circles can do.
Put a good chunk of workload into maintaining such structures and it will somewhat self-balkanize after a while. The way it is now, there are billions each day flowing into pockets for literally doing nothing. (Now waiting for the replies of the obvious strawmen accounts to derail with shitposting.)
Agreed. I remember when PI was first introduced. Within a week nearly every planet was stacked with a POCO owned by someone else. Monopoly for sure with the ability to collect isk. Other deployed structures require upkeep, so why are these any different?
Have you thought about the consequence if it was different? Then suddenly the POCO would expire or at minimum would get inactive. So no more PI for you unless you bring your own POCO and fuel it.
It would in effect mean that either you are blocked from PI on that planet completely while the POCO is inactive and until it expires or someone tears it down and builds a new one and maintains it.
If none of that would happen, you would have to do it yourself. I am sure you have something better to do than fuel and maintain POCOs just for the sake of it.
And why stop at the POCOs? Not that i want that implemented, but why exactly are you not also requesting that your PI installations require fuel?
You can of course make everything as complicated and tedious as possible. The public declared design goal of PI however was to be an easily accessible type of industry for people who have very limited amounts of time to invest in the game.
Having to place and fuel (and constantly defend) my own POCOs sounds less enticing to me than paying someone else some tax.
And I’d hate to have to fuel someone else’s POCO just so I can pay them tax to extract my own PI.
If POCOs would require fuel to function very few of them would be fueled by default, most would simply be offline and only fought over if someone shows interest.
If POCOs would be unfueled and turn vulnerable, eventually locals would pick up because unfueled = the current owner has either no interest or capabilities to maintain and defend them. (And if a POCO was unavailable for a short time, either postpone exporting or use the Command Center export function.) This is the balkanization i spoke about earlier. I doubt there would be many POCOs unavailable over a longer period - for sure for the time frame after the mechanic changed, because current owners milk them with zero effort necessary and would not be able to maintain them all. That’s the current problem, there is huge income with virtually zero risk and zero workload. This is against everything EVE stands for. Higher income must always come with higher risk and/or time investment.
POCOs requiring fuel is loooong overdue. Not much, not a cost factor. But forcing someone who wants to own a POCO to do the job of refueling it every 30d.
Like any other structure that generates profit and has a reinforcement timer.
Important would be: you would need to be physically present to refuel. A remote UI button like we have with PI restart timers would just be botted. Fly there, drop something into the POCO. Make it reports or something similar, no need to be expensive or terribly hard to manufacture, just something that adds workload so the billions these things wash into wallets are actually tied to work. This naturally limits how many of these things a person or entity can run at a time.
Also should make absolutely sure it has to be a character that’s member of the owning corp so emergent pew pew can happen when under wardec if it’s a hisec POCO (aside of the always existing possibility of ganking of course).
Exactly. POCOs should be a way of generating income from holding local dominance over an area. But that requires that you can defend them and maintain them with active players.
Also it’s simply a design issue: All profit-generating structures with a reinforcement timer should require fuel to run. So should POCOs. Especially since they require a wardec to be attacked in HS. If they don’t require fuel, they should only trigger a suspect timer on attack, just like Mobile Depots or Mobile Tractor Units. So again the group thath holds the local power dominance needs to be ready to defend them for as long as they are running and printing money.
No one is going to fuel and maintain POCOs in the volume and locations where they exist today. PI would become a very elite thing limited to where people are actually holding space and have the time and resources to maintain POCOs. It would just eliminate PI for most players.
Absolutely not. It would give back POCO owning into local resident’s hands instead of under the control of large structure holding corps, milking thousands of players for the wallets of a few. The more different entities of different sizes own POCOs in different places, the more potential for conflict over them.
As already said: The amount of fuel isn’t the issue, it can be so small that single roundtrip in a cloakhauler can fill up all POCOs in a system for a month within 5 minutes. People would definitely do that if they live in that area. But the holding-alt of some remote alliance wouldn’t fill up 500 POCOs a month - which is exactly the goal.
Power Projection (which includes economic projection via holding constructs) is one of the major problems in this game, and one way to adress it is to strengthen the need of local presence and activity to gain economic benefits. All systems of taxing, renting or otherwise redistributing money from smaller group’s wallets into bigger group’s wallets by low-effort mechanics need to be changed.
Where there is profit to be made, there will always be people picking it up. Even in some remote highsec corner, where planets are not really valuable, if you can make 100m per month on POCO fees by going around for an hour a month fuelling a constellation, locals will do this. An overlord entity holding thousands of POCOs to milk money for zero work put in, will not. This is what needs to be done to make New Eden a competitive and better place for everyone. The free milking must stop.
