Friday 31 August 2012

BB39: Home is where the hangar is

Blog Banter 39: Home - my entry

EVE Blog Banter 39 poses an interesting question: what does "home" mean in EVE Online? That's paraphrased, obviously: you can read the full question and see other entries here.

My answer: home is where you had all your shit for the longest period. Simple and un-romantic, I know. But in EVE, there's not a whole lot else to define home with. You might define home as "the place where my POSes are". But they're really your corp's POSes, so that's more the corp's home than yours.

If you hang around a place long enough, it grows on you. You get to know it. Make a few bookmarks. Anchor a few cans. Accumulate a metric shit ton of mostly useless gear that you never get around to selling. That's what makes it home. But I think...there should be a way to really make it home, rather than just a corp POS or a station that happens to be friendly right now - or NPC. I'll discuss that here, I guess, since I don't really have much else to say on the topic of "what is home?". It's thought-inspiring, but there's not much you can say about the actual topic.

WARNING: rambling probably-should-be-in-F&I bit ahead. TL;DR: make mini-POSes.

A true home should let you customize it, let you park in it, let you build it as you go. Let you make it yours. You can do that with POSes right now...but unless you're fairly rich, run a one-man corp, and have a few alts, POSes are the domain of the people you work for. They're COSes, not POSes. But what if they were smaller?

I like the idea of a "proper" POS. A small station, anchored in deep space, with low maintenance, modularity, and room for customization. Depending on your income and how long you've had it, it could grow from a few storage hangars...
The eagle's nest
...to a sprawling kludge with industrial capability and a trading post.
Hive of scum and villainy
And that would really be home, I think. You built it. You own it. You run it. You've upgraded it over months or years, you know all its little quirks, you still have that one hangar bay with a few Exotic Dancers and 10m3 of Veldspar in...home.

In closing, home in EVE right now is something that you can easily designate, but there need to be more ways to make it truly yours. Mini-POSes could do that. Maybe there are other ways. But we need to have something better than this.


As this is an EVE Online post, please credit references to Jace Errata.

4 comments:

  1. While I like the idea of mini POS - I wonder about the reality of having 100,000 of them spread across the galaxy, and how people will feel when their homes get burnt down around them.

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    1. Two good points there - I hadn't considered the first, actually, but it stands to reason that mini-POSes wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea: some pilots would still be nullsec line soldiers, following the nearest supercap fleet, some would still be station-bound industrialists... an overflow of mini-POSes isn't something I think we'd need to worry about.

      As to the second, well...that's what we call "the way it is in New Eden". :)

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  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  3. Solid post, love the drawings heheh...

    Finally had some time to browse EVE-related blogs, found you through 'blogger users that live in Metropolis'.

    "As this is an EVE Online post, please credit references to Jace Errata."

    I like this idea. I shall take it, with or without your consent, if of any solace, I shall attach a link in my own EVE-blog leading to yours.

    Thank you.

    -- Havoc Lamperouge

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