Well, there's only one way to have still have sieges and yet take the focus off of POB's. People need something to do with their fleets, I say put them to good use and let the real games begin.
Then all we'd need is a system of rules to dictate who can attack what location, and how often.
Link it all to the economy to generate some new need for fresh trade and investments.
Add half a dozen new scidata fields, maybe crank up the value of ores again. I would say add an additional scidata field to each house maybe, and a couple in the borderworlds, in particular systems like Tau-23 and perhaps an omicron or omega system.
Go back to allowing cloaked spying, jumping transports, and open up some limited multiboxing. Right off the bat there would be a bunch of new things to do and potential roles/jobs to jump into. Let people use two ships at a time, who cares if someone wants to fly an arrastra and train at the same time and mine for themselves, or jump theimselves using a carrier (or use a snub at the same time and use your own carrier's docking modules, letting people use carriers as mobile bases for themselves as well). Jumping transports frees up a lot of time for people and is still something that is earned, like a half a billion on a ship, and sometimes another billion put into a JD, scanner, other ship equipment.
The trick to finding jump convoys is adding an extreme long range scanner with 500k range that only a LF could mount, so someone can play scout. Its not so crazy, in Freeworlds everyone had unlimited scanner range, you could see player ships on your scanner on the other side of the system, hundreds of k away. Still couldn't lock on until close though, but no problem finding players.
Just a few simple changes and there would be a big jump in stuff to do!
