My opinion, player-owned bases bring some good things to the game, however this is outweighed by the bad things. For example they are good sources of dynamic role-play, but then we get things like EFL corporate base shooting GRN ships on-sight, Hogosha base shooting KNF ships on-sight, etc--that is some awful roleplay resulting from too much dynamism. There are a lot of things like this, where letting people build bases wherever they can get away with it, is outweighed by people who have built bases wherever they could get away with it.
The worst thing about them is the fact that they emphasize player-owned bases, which makes them oorp from the very beginning. The game is setup so that you are supposed to choose a faction and then play that faction, with rules and/or social pressure against things like clan wars, pick-your-tech, etc. POBs turn that whole thing upside down by making a permanent militarized object that belongs to the player and/or their skype clan, rather than to a faction. This has resulted in the faction model being ignored entirely (people using warring factions to supply a base, or docking their lawfuls and unlawfuls on the same base, etc). The absolute worst thing is that the server rules are essentially waived whenever POBs are involved in something. You can sit in your base and give console commands to have it fire on random passing ships, and the admins will just ignore any complaints.
Short version, they are not compatible, and its not sustainable. I am interested in discussion about possible paths forward, especially as involves keeping the good parts.
One idea, is to make the weapon platforms purely defensive only. This function already exists, so basically it would mean eliminating the aggro parts of the code.
Another idea would be to have some pre-made stations that can be captured. For example, there are a bunch of NPC bases in New London, turn a couple of them into derelicts and remove their commodities, and let people try to take control of them and then supply like normal to keep them operational. You could add a couple more in strategic places, like at Cambridge and Dublin gates, and let people fight for them too. This would solve a bunch of problems, and still allow the good things like dynamic role-play and player activity.
![[Image: smuggler-threat-0-1.jpg]](http://i183.photobucket.com/albums/x57/UrsusMorologus/Freelancer%20Discovery/smuggler-threat-0-1.jpg)