Posts: 6,763
Threads: 406
Joined: Aug 2007
Staff roles: Story Dev Economy Dev
Also, it takes the same number of player hours to mine the ore and haul the ore whether the players are online at the same time or separated via 12 hours by a resale on a PoB. Probably more actually, because you have 1) the miner, 2) the transnational haulier to the base from the field, 3) the end destination haulier. That's before you even consider the extra hours that go into maintaining PoBs that were built for that purpose. Removing the ability to mine to PoBs instead means miners can only actually play when there is a client directly in front of them - that can be rare enough that smaller factions without a large internal clientbase would be absolutely crippled.
For example, I can log my BMM- and spend an entire evening conducting a mining operation in which over 170,000 units of gold ore are harvested for Canary Wharf / Isle of Skye if that's full. If that option wasn't there, I'd log in and maybe mine 5k for a Bowex transport, have nothing to do, and log off again. PoBs massively increase the length of time miners can operate in one session, and regular sales make those sessions more frequent.
Removing PoBs' most useful utility would see a net slump in mining characters and the entire character build would become markedly less viable. And that's before you even get into the fact that ore storage is basically one of the only uses for PoBs that has to be conducted inRP throughout by its very nature - there are very, very few people who sell produced equipment inRP, preferring instead to flog their cloaks etc through Conn to any old person. The fact that suppliers and haulers have to be friendly with the base and continually visit in order to profit means RP consequences can be applied to a base for their choice of customers. That integrates PoBs into the game environment in a way none of their other functions do.
