was stated in the previous blog about AOE weapons but no more sign of it in the recent blog about the future of perpetuum

Ranged or static "step on this and die" weapons are a very bad idea in this kind of environment.  As soon as something like this comes out, then the lead alliance on a beta island will heavily mine every single chokepoint so that going there without an alliance ticker will be pointless.

Now if mines end up being introduced as something that can be deployed in a radius around a POS, then I'm all for it, but just being able to litter the landscape with mines will be very game breaking.

Also, AoE ranged weapons are a terrible idea too.  As soon as the first one is introduced, then all other weapons system for PVP become obsolete since you can now hit multiple targets with one shot instead of just one.

On the other hand PBAoE (Point Blank AoE) weapons are perfectly balanced.  Turn it on and it pulses energy out from your bot/mech and damages anyone too close... could be used as a suicide bomber or what not.  Now that's fun and not too game breaking.

Whilst I like the idea of mines, they have to be balanced against being technically implementable. This was a hot topic back in the stEVE beta and into live. The main issue is that if you put something in game which is easily accessible and deployable, you can end up with an overload of resources on the servers.

Now I am not professing to know exactly how such features would impact performance, but as the poster above states, if each alliance can deploys thousands of these things, the server suddenly has a lot more stuff to constantly track and update. Now if there were mines which cost a lot more, but had the AoE effects etc, then this could be much more implementable and definitely require a more tactical approach than just spamming thousands of mines everywhere.

This would be a good place for Dev input, as Annihilator has said, the devs are working on this. If they give us some specs before implementing, the community may come up with something they didn't think of. We can certainly give more focused feedback other then speculation; on a feature that is known to be coming.