It’s an Omen

 

CCP Omen took advantage of capsuleers busy ship spinning to throw out a new dev blog on, of all things, Planetary Interaction.  From the outset, regardless of the minutiae of the player owned custom house as an idea, this blog is encouraging in and of itself.  It suggests that CCP are actually prepared to go back to a previous mechanism and iterate upon it. Let’s hope we see much more of this kind of thinking going forward.

The concept – PI custom houses being constructed, placed and owned by player corporations – is an interesting one.  A number of spin off elements and implications immediately present themselves:

• Players using their own custom house to improve the income of their own PI.
•  Players placing custom houses in order to tax other (non allied) players
• Players spending ISK to protect / blow up said custom houses (perhaps with Corps specialising in this)
• Low Sec PI communities evolving?
• Encouraging emigration to Low / Null sec

In terms of the mechanics in detail the application of a HP total (with owner selected ‘window’ of attack post reinforcement) is somewhat concerning.  The current HP values have been described as follows:

=HP scpecification=
* Customs Office Gantry
** Shield: 10,000,000
** Armor: 500,000
** Structure: 300,000

* Customs Office
** Shield: 10,000,000
** Armor: 2,500,000
** Structure: 2,000,000

HP targets bring up the age old problem of “Builder VS Destroyer”.  Obviously the builder wants their structure to remain in place: after all its an investment of both time, effort and ISK.  The Destroyer conversely wants stuff to go bang.  HP structures don’t have a glorious history in EVE (POS, TCUs, SBUs etc) being, by and large, rather dull affairs to attack and rarely prompting the defender to actually mount some form of defence.  It remains to be seen what actual value players place on having / removing these custom houses and what effort they choose to employ in either defending them or breaking them down.

CCP Omen hints that custom houses will play a role in future elements of PI (perhaps a reference to DUST 514).  Personally I’m not convinced that individual players will actually expend vast amounts of effort in protecting these structures – PI can bring in a steady income but its rarely vast wealth and planets are pretty plentiful when alls said and done.  The primary issue is that PI is, well just a bit ‘meh’.  The original concept for PI, your own world with attendant populace and industry was a good one: but are today’s players really that attached to their PI processes that they are prepared to mount a sustained defence of them?

On the flip side, dominating planets with your own corporate network of custom houses may indeed be quite profitable.  The best way to think of this is that PI is an individual concern, tariffs are a corporate concern.  Corps may well bust out the big guns to protect their custom house network.  What is missing from that equation is how corporations can deliver incentives for random strangers to conduct PI under their own umbrella?  Preferential tariff rates may be one solution – but one which would need advertising in some fashion.

There’s an inkling of some good ideas within the player owned custom office (POCO), one which suggests expansion into concepts like smuggling mechanics.  Personally I’m just very pleased to see CCP getting back into the long neglected mechanics of EVE.

Oh and ship spinning.  Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee………………….

C.