When I first read the manifesto, this was during the EVE exodus, this was pretty much what I imagined player-built colonies were going to be like. Just a small area in which to carve out your piece of the map.

Well you are right with that Celebro, however the research tree is something completely new and for player housing as I mentioned they should be able to "recycle" code from the gamma islands. But yeah I still agree that this will take time and even if the devs suddenly want to implement this, chances are we wont see it this year.

However this should not stop us from thinking about ways how to improve this game.

And I also wanted to add the following to my original idea:

We could add tiers to the player built structures on these islands, but with a catch of course. In order to upgrade your player terminal into something more fancy looking you will need special materials which can only be aquired through certain means:

- A special recource only found on gamma or beta islands and necessary to do any upgrading together with tokens found from artifact hunting or having the max relation with a faction.

- Also that gamma recource should not be a plant or ore (otherwise people who have gammas simply would sell it and get more rich without creating conflict for pvp) but a form of energy you have to charge your own spark by staying on or doing special tasks on beta or gamma and is absolutely not tradeable.

So basically you can have an achievement system which gives players fancy objects to place on their land even. Of course lots of pvp achievements, gamma achievements whatever. Heck the steam achievements could reward you ingame tokens for special buildings!

Okay maybe I got a bit off track now but this would be awesome.

IF there will be such a system then there will be Ville/Syndic/Me/%insert_name_here% who will think that its just funny to spam buildings on such islands just for teh lulz and griefing. So limitations should be much harder and complicated or newbies will be unable to use this feature anyway.

Easily countered by making alpha MPC terminals pay rent to the NPC factions. Rent amount has to be dynamic - the more there is demand, the bigger the rents are.

It all opens countless doors for interesting "game mechanics" though.

Aside from all the answers of how to address making this work, the better question is if it's worth the effort.

Player housing in MMO's is a place where you can get away from the world, maybe do some crafting and some decorating, have a few friends over, ect.

Terminals don't provide anything but a harbor.

There is no, and can be no, advantage between docking at an alpha terminal and docking at a 'personal' terminal, other than a long boring robot ride to get there; even less reasons with sparks.

The concept of 'housing' just doesn't translate to Perp.

Colony's, terminals + buildings, is the real draw. And that is just not going to happen on an alpha island.

tl;dr - Too much dev time, not enough game play benefit.

The more critical point in this is to discuss the benefits you should be allowed to have from alpha player build structure.
Strip all resources but allow plants? What about the plants that can be harvested, they are resources. What about NPC beacons, that are in a certain degree resources as well. How to deal, that if this island contains NPCs you will ever have the possibilitiy to make NPC farming that easy, that it can be done by autonomous macros.

If you allow on alpha a player build facility you reduce usability of alpha terminals and outposts.

+1 that it might be good idea to give new player the freedom to learn terraforming on save haven, as terraforming an area in the shape you like is not the easiest task in game.

Old 3D hangar would be a good update. What keeps you back anyway?

Customizable per person is what I meant, unlike the current uniform holo-whatever we have currently.

It's not like we can't bend the story if it makes a better game.

Sure, this is just an idea for the future.

Okay now talking about customizable hangars in terminals got me.

If we take this idea abit further what if when we dock on the main alpha terminals we instead enter some kind of city? We would be not controlling a robot but the spark itself and able to walk around in these terminals. And then there might be a door that leads to a seperate hangar which is instanced for every player and corp, where you can look at your robot from all sides and also be able to built a couple structures inside your hangar to upgrade and get facility boosts.

This is a +1 from me.