I don’t know that I would say we ‘almost got observation arrays’. When you look at the original dev blog that announced the intent to replace POSes with a new structure system (Upwells), it was all very high-level and ‘these are some ideas we are kicking around for our new structures’, not a list of ‘these things are absolutely happening’:
Before we move forward, we would like to make it clear the changes listed below are ideas and highly theoretical. Those are not set in stone or fixed, we are telling our plans to you, our players, months in advance to initiate feedback and spark interest. Also please remember that concept art is just that, concept.
(This is the same structure concept discussion that brought up player-owned stargates - and we certainly don’t have those now, yet I don’t hear anyone saying we ‘almost got player-owned stargates!’)
Observatory array
Dedicated to intelligence gathering.
- Service module possibilities: Being able to increase, decrease or block Star Map filters in the solar systems they’re deployed, act as solar system wide D-scan blockers, disrupt ship intelligence in the solar system, take over player tracking capabilities from NPC agents or be able to affect or pinpoint cloak users. We are considering basing their effectiveness through a network coverage (like cell phones) so that a single one may not be that useful, but maintaining a bunch of them in space could give a significant advantage.
- Rigs possibilities: anything affecting the duration or effectiveness of what’s mentioned above.
CCP then promptly asked for feedback on potential effects of Observatory Arrays, and the same issues discussed in this thread were discussed there. And that thread only got 33 pages of posts in 15-ish months - clearly people have since gotten more vocal about the discussion.
It is worth noting that as recently as 2017 CCP Rise indicated that while Observatory Arrays and other Sov structures were still in development, the specific abilities were still majorly in the air and CCP had not finalized their abilities - and that the earliest we would see anything in the way of deployment would be 2018.
Extra fun note: Observatory Array BPs/Structures exist in the production EVE database, but they have never been launched for use on either Sisi or TQ - they are simply reference objects with very little data attached to them.