Did they make base construction easier or something? From what I remember it took an absurdly large amount of effort to get a base built. And then the stuff you could make with it turned out to be not very useful because you either had to bring crappy fuel with you, or bring fuel that decays. And then having to restock it every day... ugh.
I would much rather see bases be
1) very difficult things to build and vulnerable initially, but after a certain point become permanent fixtures. Then, if a station becomes 'deserted' and nobody visits it anymore because it's way out in omicron armpit, simply have an admin delete it.
Or
2) Cheap and quick to build, easy to destroy pvp combat targets.
I've always been in favor of restricting them to people who actually put some effort into the RP of such a base. I've always said the same about capitol ships as well.
restricting it just to factions is too harsh but having them open gives to much crappy "ENGAGABUNG" RP with just about everyone and their mother flying a cap.
Downside is that these choices were made ages ago and the sake of realistic balance was ignored purely for gameplay. Don't forget, the fact that you can fly a cap on this server brings in a LOT of people.
There used to be pictures here
once known as Richard Farbridge, OBE and Ronaldo Benitez
Well I'll just repeat myself. Removing PoBs entirely in my opinion is a foolish and poorly thought out option, with no real thought behind the consequences, just looking for an easy fix. There are several extremely good PoBs out there being run which provide much activity and a great RP platform.
There are of course many bases that people might consider to be disruptive to gameplay or a "lolwut base". My thought on the best way to regulate would in an ideal scenario be something like SRP. Perhaps a separate application that is sent, with it's own guidelines and requirements etc, so as not to by default have to be of the same quality as a SRP application.
However the problem with that is who would review/decide upon these applications? Admins have enough on their plate as it is and asking them to do even more seems unfair to me and might put them off further. So if any kind of option like this were to be considered, it seems to be either another team would need to be started to oversee PoBs proposals or the Admin team would need to expand.
EDIT: If you want serious answers and to avoid Cat pics, you might want to have this moved to another forum.