PoBs were introduced and experience has been gathered. Most people in the old days used to say "POB placement on bottlenecks = good rp!" and killed off whole parts of the map that way.
It took more than a year to realize the detrimental influence. Action was taken. Gate/hole blocking area denial bases were either moved or the holes/gates moved. Guess what? Gameplay improved a lot! Even some former owners of the most prominent blocking bases agree today.
It will take another year before people realize that "POBs in mining fields" are bad. They make piracy hard/impossible, they break the food chain and therefore are detrimental to gameplay. Mining has never been as safe as today. It's ridiculously boring, if we are honest.
As players who built these bases will likely never understand it, I assume devs will fix it via moving the fields. And that's a necessary step.
We need these activity hubs back. And an activity hub starts with a stative, relatively easy target that is in a known place for quite a while.
I have suggested it for a long time: no POB closer than 20 k from a mining spot.
And for the fear of F1ed pirates: ehm... let's be honest: there are like 1 or 2 players that are doing that.
I agree though, that it is bad.
The solution for the F1ed pirate ship sitting in field/lane should be technical though: instead of the slow "drift over time" mechanic, F1ing should mean an immediate +10k bump off the plane. If you log 10k from the gate/hole/lane, you will only see your metagamed targets passing, while laughing hard.
Linking these 2 topics - POBs in mining fields & F1ing pirates - is a mistake. They are unrelated.
