Keep the POS in game

Reason for wanting the POS in game is simply to support mining ops, the reprocessing arrays provide a valuable resource where none is available, many structure owners have chosen not to add a reprocessing mod to their facilities, now I don’t blame them because it costs fuel and a slot for more valuable mods for their game play, mining ops do not always happen in a home system and many corps have mobile ops for mining depending on opportunities, taking the POS out of the game will be a bummer for people who choose mining.

Or at the very least a mobile reprocessing array, or an orca that can compress ore, I really don’t think keeping the POS and reprocessing arrays available will hurt anybody’s feelings…at least I hope.

Isn’t an orca that can compress ore just a rorqual?

I do support an easily deployed and removed structure though.

I think this ship has already sailed.

No, Orca’s don’t compress, as for the other reply, ccp can change their minds, it’s not like moon mining is available in all high sec so moon availability isn’t an issue.

So I think I’ve posted something like this before, but why keep POS when you can just make a service inside citadels that can make something like an astra produce a bubble that has a password like a POS bubble, because the bubble is the only thing that citadels cannot replace in some fashion. Especially with change that the shield timer will be vulnerable at all times so that you can reinforce it and bring down the bubble that way. For reprocessing, we have refineries now, and you can put them down anywhere you could put a POS.

The tether replaces the force field functionality from POSes.

POSes are done. Their poor coding implementation alone guarantees their elimination, but there are are solid game design reasons to remove effectively untouchable industrial arrays from the game as anything protected by a forcefield is in highsec.

Upwell structures can already compress as can NPC stations. I get that there is a significant cost jump from a small POS to a medium refinery, and maybe there is a case for a new smaller (and cheaper) deployable that is properly vulnerable to other players for compression. CCP have been very clear on their desire to deprecate the old POS code and how that will ease future development which is really a good thing for everyone.

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Tether doesn’t, if you think it does, you haven’t flown something that can’t dock to a smaller structure.
I mean if they made it to were you couldn’t get untethered due to bumping then sure. But at current, no it doesn’t.

The idea is to have a cheap structure that can provide enough security for larger ships worth vastly more than the structure, but a structure that could still be easily taken down still. Keepstar vs. POS idea.

The original designed called for no bumping while under tether and as far as I am aware, that is still the intention of CCP to implement. Eventually.

I am not against some cheaper forward staging option in principle, especially if you can’t do industry in it. But honestly, in the age of Eve where we are all flush with ISK and resources, a Raitaru is pretty viable disposable forward staging base. Maybe once they finish implementing the structures they can come up with more niche ones, but I would rather they finish implementing the current plan, including adding the stuff like bump protection under tether, than get distracted with new structures.

Replacing POSes has taken far too long already.

I’m all for change but there is no options for mining ops (mobile), if there is not a facility that has a reprocessing mod, many owners of the Raitaru, etc, don’t want it, they use their slots for other things, but it does stink if mining ops have to depend on others to have reprocessing plants many NPC stations also do not offer reprocessing much less compression (none that I know of), and if your not a pal to the NPC’s it can get expensive/unprofitable to even reprocess in their stations.

Well, they aren’t going away for a while yet and by then, there could be public Athanors everywhere and probably will be just like the proliferation of refining Citadels we initially had. Right now we are sort of in an awkward place where the old structures have been nerfed and/or repurposed while the new refineries aren’t fully online yet or reached equilibrium prices. Certainly, there will be a better chance of a healthy, player-run ecosystem of refineries developing if players know there is an upcoming market for their services with he retirement of POSes and implementation of compression taxes.

But for now you can still use the compression arrays.

I think when compression could be taxed, more would offer a service. Today you need a repro service to also enable compression, but people use compression and reprocess (if they do) somewhere else, hence giving the owner no income.

EDIT: in general one apparent goal of CCP’s design is to kick small and solo entities out of the ownership of structures. Structure ownership is more than ever tight to a corp which can bring the service throughput and the numbers for defense fleets 24/7.

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Indeed. They are making progress at creating some space for economies of scale to be realized by groups over individuals. Let’s hope it works and groups start jockeying over structures improving on the rather lifeless impact services have had so far. I’d love to see a real market for player-owned services realized rather than the tax rate of all public services immediately trending down to zero or the smallest increment the UI will allow.

Being unable to tax compression is a large part of that. I don’t really mine, but it felt incredibly broken when I was experimenting with region buy orders and using someone else’s structure for free to compress ores for transport. Also, the Upwell 2.0 firmware changes should hopefully increase the anemic destruction numbers of these structures putting putting downward pressure on their number perhaps allowing their owners to earn a working wage running them.

Of course if you make them too difficult or costly to defend, then there might not be enough around to supply player demand. Getting the balance right so that player groups can actually make a profit selling public services may be more difficult than CCP thinks, especially when so many players feel entitled to free access to many of these services in cheap and CONCORD-protected POSes.

In the end it might just be a generational project getting players used to interacting with each other for trading services like they always have trading goods. Seems to me there is a long way to go yet.

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There is another option, the two remaining nullsec super powers monopolize the market for public services. Actually this is what we currently see, and with the 24/7 vulnerability coming in Q1/2018, the drive towards that will intensify. If nothing substantially is changed, we all will either be renters or part of the bloc. There will be no room for the “middle class”.

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I don’t believe that will happen at all. Only the real valuable morsels, like the market hubs, will be fought over by the large nullsec groups. Piddly highsec stations which drop nothing and have perfect asset safety hawking industrial services aren’t worth fighting over for the big boys. Sure, those station owners will be more open to extortion from the local highsec thugs, but that actually may give something for the highsec thugs to do other than camp trade hubs. Certainly nullsec quickly lost interest in trying to enforce a highsec POCO monopoly, and unless some service is incredibly valuable and easy to monopolize, like say market modules near Jita, I don’t see anyone bothering.

But I will fully concede I don’t know what will happen. It looks like the solo and small-group industrialists will have to rely on infrastructure owned by someone who can defend it more in the future, but people were saying the same thing before the original Upwell release and that largely hasn’t happened. Upwell structures are so safe and uninteresting to attack that pretty much everyone who wants one outside of the poorest and newest players, has their own deployed somewhere, and as such there is no market for public services. I have no idea if the upcoming changes are sufficient to move the status quo, but I bet things will look pretty much the same come Q1 2018.

We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

I think this “especially when so many players feel entitled to free access to many of these services in cheap and CONCORD-protected POSes” is a bit disingenuous, a POS is only protected in high sec in other places it is not and subject to attack, also the fuel costs, a small POS cost about 250,000 ISK an hour to run so the service they provide is not “free”

But I will say this, as an independent industrialist if I am forced to choose between independence and dependence I will just quit till things settle down because the last time I did that it was years before I came back, the soloist, the independent, must have a place in EVE, not everyone enjoys a ‘groping room’ playstyle.

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That’s fair but being an independent also puts a significant amount of things out of your reach, such as citadels. What I’m reading in this thread is that you guys don’t want to use reprocessing rigs to do your ore compression compared to the compression you’d do almost identically at your POS. I’m not sure this is actually a big deal, and if any of you will suffer too terribly once POS’s are gone and engineering complexes have fully assimilated their function.

Originally the thread was about a POS that serves as a platform for mining ops in places where services are not available, if you mine day in and day out in the same system then that is good but opportunities for better ops will be diminish over time, sadly I feel like the war to force the soloist into player corps is just wrong, a groping room for the lonely people who want someone to point their epeen at.

This new moon mining thing, it requires significant amount of training for mining and reprocessing, with all that investment it is wrong to bash the only players “miners” that would support players who own refineries, and nerfing the soloist is bad for all of those owners as well.

Yeah, but the reason this is mainly, people can’t calculate or value the private ownership above ISK efficiency. There are corps specialized in killing Upwell structures, so you are nowhere safe. Most public production offerings I was using in the last year were not shut down because of profitability but because of destruction. A public service market does not flourish under the current mechanics and the announced changes will make the bad side worse.

I don’t have a silver bullet to balance this, but one part is the wardec mechanics. Currently the attacker dictates it all, the defender must react. I would like a feature introduced where the attacker can attack at any time but has to take a risk by becoming suspect when shooting a structure (basically lowsec mechanics, with the highsec twist).

Also known as a limited engagement timer. I don’t fly in HS so I honestly don’t know how engagement timers work, but I expect that if a fleet of randoms were hired to defend a citadel, they’d have an engagement timer (or should at least get one) by being in fleet with whoever’s in the hot seat of the citadel.

Solo player will still be able to mine. It just no longer is as close to the most efficient setup. You choose to go at it alone, you no longer get the best results. It’s an MMO after all, I’m pretty sure there is supposed to be actual benefits to engaging with other players.