This House is not a Home

This House is not a Home

The issues of living in a POS and POS mechanics have been the hottest topic around the wspace water cooler for some time now.
WH dwellers live exclusively out of POSs, or nothing at all, as it is their only option but POS mechanics are old and have not kept up with the modernization of EVE life.

The suggested fixes to the matter of POSs have varied wildly from 'don't touch it, you'll break WHs' to 'scrap it entirely and give us modular POSs with docking' and everything in between.
Personally, I lean much closer to the 'don't touch it' end of the spectrum as I simply do not trust CCP to redo POSs well and maintain the feel of WH living if they fully redo them.
For instance, I do not want docking of ANY sort anywhere near my WH home and I consider removing the POS force field mechanic a deal breaker on any changes.

That said, POSs very clearly need an update so I'm going to go over what I consider to be the major points that need addressing.  I am going to be venturing slightly into the corp management/roles area since it is very closely linked to some of the major POS issues.
Unfortunately (or possibly fortunately?) I have zero experience on running any sort of industry out of a POS so I will only be touching lightly on it but given how often I hear people complain about it, the image of POS industry I have is that it is also in need of major review and updates.

Note:  These items are not in any particular priority order.


POS Setup

Anyone who has every set up a fresh POS knows how time consuming and tedious it is to do.  There has already been a small pass done by CCP on this a few years back when they removed anchoring timers on most mods and reduced onlining timers but it is still very poor.
This area needs improvement in 2 ways:

1.  There needs to be an onlining queue where you can queue up as many mods as you want and they'll go and online in that order without you needing to wait for one to finish and then hit online on the next one.  Would function similarly to the skill queue and would make onlining a POS way simpler.

2.  You should be able to save POS setups in the same way you can save ship fittings.  In order to use one, you would need to online the tower and set its layout.  Then if you go to anchor a mod at it that is on the loaded layout, it would automatically go to the predefined location as per the layout and anchor there without each mod needing to be manually placed.


POS Security and Access

This is the big one for most WH groups.  Security on current POSs is so limited that it actively limits how much a group can grow until it hits an inevitable security wall of too much risk.
Currently the only security you can put on a POS is a force field password and you can set 3 levels of corp role based access to storage mods and even if you have the role based access setup, the people with higher level access will have access to the items/ships in the lower access storage as well as the people with the highest level access having total access to all your POSs, including pulling fuel and tearing down towers.  Clearly you can't give a 3rd of your corp starbase configuration level access.
This forces large WH corps to set up many 'personal' POSs that are secured by force field password and are shared by a small group of people, at most, that know  and trust each other.  Many large enities have upwards of 50+ such POSs in their home WH which in a 200-300 man corp (about as large are WH corps get) is extreme to absurd levels.

The way I see it, POS security should work in a similar way as chat channel access currently works.  If you have a module level allowed usage list it would allow corps to specify exactly who has access to view and/or take from a particular SMA/CHA or use production mods ect.
Ideally this should be able to be set on the POS level and then further altered on the module level so that you don't need to set it manually for each and every module.

Personal SMAs that work in the same way as personal CHAs are also very much needed.

If proper module level security was implemented to POSs it would allow a far greater number of people to live out of the same POS without risking all their stuff to people they don't know.


Refining Array

Currently the maximum yield you can get when refining ore at a POS is 75%.  Now, I haven't refined or at a POS or elsewhere in over 4 years so this doesn’t really affect me in the slightest but it does seem like this is a super extreme penalty for refining outside of a station.
I do not know what CCPs original reasons for this may have been but I don't see how upping the yield to somewhere in the 90-100% range would hurt anything.
Currently even C1 corps are choosing to build Rorquals in their WHs for the sole purpose of compressing ore so that they can haul it out to high sec to refine it.  Many of those corps then haul to minerals back into their WH for further industrial use. This kind of tedious work around should not be needed for manufacturing items in WHs.


Offline POSs

WH space is littered with old abandoned towers long left to rust in space, their owners long gone and not likely to return.
This topic comes up reasonably often among WH denizens, many of whom want to be able to unanchor and scoop the dead towers.
Personally I don't feel you should be able to just straight up take them but I do agree that removing them should be easier.
I would suggest that an offline POS tower should have zero shields so that you only need to chew through its armour and structure points to blow it up.
Admittedly this is not a super important change but it would clean up the streets of wspace somewhat and unclutter our dscans.


Self Destructing in Force Fields

This shit has to go, enough said.
If not outright banning it, James Argent recently suggested that any SDed ship inside a warp disruption bubble should give a kill mail to the bubble's owner.  This is an idea I like a lot in the alternative to just banning SD inside a POS.


So apart from the admitted industrial changes I'm sure are needed, that's actually the end of my list.
Honestly, I don't think that the 'POS problem' is anywhere near as big as people make it out to be.  Most of the issues are small items with the big ones being POS setup and POS security.
The security changes are sorely needed and I would urge CCP to prioritize them over everything else but I am also quite sure they'd be the hardest for them to implement.

In summary, I actually really like the POS system.  It just needs a few user friendliness upgrades and a real security system.  Apart from that, I'll take a space stick with a force field over any modular POS with docking/mooring/whatever-else-that-isn't-a-force-field any day of the week.

JM