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’.
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.
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.
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.
Congrats, now you can’t do PI at all because the current owners decided it was unprofitable/not worth the effort to run random lowsec customs office #5482. If the owners are so inactive then shoot the POCO and drop your own.
Right…and if you are a one man show and can’t tear it down, nor bringup and maintain one yourself, you just need to swallow it, explode your planetary buildings and commodities and relocate to another planet for umpteenth time. Contradicting the design goals of everyone can do PI, especially the time limited players.
That is the moment where a smaller local rival can challenge that POCO ownership and if the bigger previous owner lost interest because its too much effort for too little gain (because he isn’t even living there) he will gladly agree to sell it and at least get his money back or ignore if they shoot it.
Which is why that issue is not really existing in Lowsec (OP is clearly talking about HS), here a smaller local group can basically harass a POCO to death by constantly reinforcing it until the larger owning corp loses interest to bring a defending fleet over and over for literally no gains. At which point the POCO dies or an agreement is made.
But in HS that is not possible. You need a wardec to even attack POCOs, which means you need a Citadel (aka high initial investment) which will then only lead to the outcome that you will get immediately counter-wardecced from the holding corp’s main group, destroying your station and looting your core. At which point you will have only paid and gained nothing. You simply cannot use the fact that the current owners have defending efforts, because instead of defending their POCOs they simply kill your wardec HQ and even get rewarded with ISK for it, more tha the POCO would have generated in a month. Smaller competition has no chance of hit&run tactics, wearing down a larger force. This system is inherently flawed as we can see by the years-long existing altchar-holding-corp POCO empires in HS that go basically unchallenged and milk thousands of HS players tax money into the pockets of already super-rich large groups. And there are only two options to fix it:
a) give POCOs a (very small) fuel requirement so no one holds POCOs unless he deems the maintainance worth the effort. So only those will hold POCOs who actually live in that area.
b) make POCOs in HS freely attackable like MTUs or Depots, so anyone can challenge them and force the owners to actively defend them if they want to keep them. So only those will hold POCOs who actually live in that area.
