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Wednesday, February 19, 2014

POS, the PITA

Originally published in the September 2013 issue of The Industrialist

If anyone has ever used a POS, then you know it can be a pain in the ass.  Anyone who has ever had to run one knows how my of a piece of shit the POS mechanics are.

 Recently for FDA, we tore down our high sec POS due to continuous war decs.  I pretty much had enough.  I tore the POS down, threw it in a freighter and parked.  I then didn't log (other than to adjust skill queues) until over a month later.  My directors ran the corp and I was pleased that when I finally returned, there was still a corp.  Even without my guiding hand, the directors did well and the active members continued to be active, working with the alliance members.  It was good to see.  If you use labs, you know that finding a high sec lab slot to use for ME/PE and copying is a Sisyphean task, at best.  I myself, and others in the corp who research and invent are running dangerously low on BPC's so something has to be done.  Once again, we will be setting up a pos to do research.  I think we are going to approach it a different way.  In the past, I have pretty much taken on the POS responsibility myself (with some help from the directors).  I think an easy, cut and dry way, to fund the POS is for anyone who uses it to split the monthly cost evenly amongst all the users.  

Anyway, that is neither here nor there.  I am just rambling.  To get back on topic, let's discuss the POS mechanics.  CCP always seems to skirt around POS changes by throwing (sometimes) useless changes to something that really isn't broken and they put POS changes on the back burner (or off the stove all together).

First: Roles management sucks.  Getting all your corp members access to use the POS is a pain in the ass.  You have to make an empty wallet division.  You need to do all sorts of divisional organization to allow access to somethings but now others.  You basically have to set up roles for hanger divisions and hope that people don't steal each others items (intentionally or accidentally).  You don't want to lump your trusted members hanger access with new members.  If you are in high sec, you might have it a little easier.  You can have an office at the NPC station and people (with the training of some skills) can install BPO's from the station so they dont have to fly out to the labs.  

Second: Balancing industrial vs defensive modules.  In high sec, this really doesn’t become an issue unless you are at war.  In Low/Null/WH space, this makes for an interesting juggling act.  The pain in the ass in high sec is the online/offline game.  It takes 1 minute for every defensive module.  You can expect to spend around 30-60 minutes (depending on your defense) prepping or standing down from war decs.  You can only online/offline one module at a time and you can't spread it around to different capsuleers.  Many hands make light work for every where but EVE.  It wouldn't be so bad if you could have 3 people onlining/offlining defenses at the same time, but no.  

We took down our POS pretty much when the Ice mining changes took place.  I don't know what it is like now, nor would I really consider mining ice.  I would just assume buy the fuel blocks than to go through the hassle on assembling the PI materials and then running the BP through manufacturing.  


There are really a whole shit-ton of things that need to be addressed with POS management, but these are the ones that always piss me off.  What are your thoughts?  I would like to hear about them.


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