Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hello dear interested reader,

I have been around in EVE for a long time now and went through all kinds of activities including the production of goods and transportation of goods. Especially since I have spent the majority of my time in null-sec, I have noticed special practices, I think most people that have engaged in production might have seen the practices that I will describe here now and to which I will give a vague solution.

In most production ventures the producers tend to use items to transport large quantities of minerals. Popular in this area are items such as torpedoes or 425mm Railgun I's. The principle is that the products are compressing the minerals and thereby making it a lot easier to transport these minerals to where the production facilities are.

These practices are comparable to producing Artillery to bring transport large quantities of Steel from, for example, the United States of America to South Korea just to disassemble and melt them down again to produce tanks or warships. The pure thought of it seems ridiculous.

Of course, the refining of goods other than ore can not be abolished. That would be too much of a cut into the economy and ruin the prices for meta items, especially on the lower levels. We can, however, overhaul the production and transport system for goods. Although the ideas that I will outline here might take a lot of work to implement but once this is done, no matter if it is how I present it or in a modified version, the future of the goods transport and way of producing goods will be in shape for whatever future there will be for the game of EVE.

The basic principle is that, as Aristotle put it, "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts". Translated and adapted into EVE would mean that the smallest units in the game are minerals and everything made out of said minerals is bigger than the amount of minerals which you needed to produce it.

As an example: You want to produce a gun for your spaceship. To acquire the minerals you visit your favorite trading hub or contact your local mining group and purchase minerals of the size of 7 cubic meters. You then transport these minerals to the manufacturing facility of your choice and start the production of said gun. After the production process is finished you have all the parts for the gun, which takes the space of 10 cubic meters. You then assemble the gun so you can mount it on your spaceship, where it then takes the space of 15 cubic meters.

Clarifications: These absolute values are just examples and should not be used to scale. The 10 cubic meter parts describe the status of the good as you can buy it in on the market, repackaged.

I suggest the following changes:

Minerals should be decreased in size. This makes them more easily transportable and discourages the use of manufactured items to more efficiently transport minerals. The sizes of items should be adjusted whenever necessary so that the above-mentioned principle applies.

Ships should have production components similar to capital ship components, which need to be produced separately and then assembled to ships. These can be either the same size as the basic minerals or (slightly) bigger as to ease the supply chain management and production of ships.

Ships should generally not be 'repackagable'. To compensate for the increase in size there should be a second variant of the freighter with a bigger but specialized cargo for the transportation of ships. Like with the regular freighter there should also be a tech 2 variation of the ship-freighter, the ship jump freighter, likewise with reduced transport capabilities. A sub-capital variation in the size of an industrial ship should be added to transport ships on a local scale, being in the price range of a tech 2 transport ship with skill requirements similar to a tech 1 industrial. With transport capabilities added for ships, regular transporter ships should be unable to carry ships.

Decrease the cargo size of regular transport ships (T1 and T2 industrials and freighters). Since the transport of ships has been limited to specialized ship transporters and the suggested changes to mineral requirements of items, all other transport ships have a decreased transport need. Not-transport-dedicated ships should get reduced transport capabilities, these include carriers, super-carriers and titans.

The implications of the changes:

Production becomes more localized. Since the transportation of minerals becomes easier than the transportation of the items, more people will start producing goods. This is especially good for the economy of null-sec but also producers in remote regions with little local supply and no close trading hub benefit.

Power-projection in null-sec gets discouraged. With the change to production, sizes and transport capabilities, the transport of large amounts of ships gets more difficult or tedious. The focus will change to either attacking your neighbors, the dependance on local allies, an attack from empire or bringing production facilities such as POSes with you on your trip. Especially the last option would make an attack more easily repel-able.

Ammunition gets bigger. To counter this, combat ships should get a specialized ammunition storage while the normal cargo gets smaller. This is needed since the effect of carrying less ammunition is not desired.

The game gets more ships. New ships are a great way to advertise a game for CCP, more players will join and the economy will need to grow to host more players.

Mining in remote places gets more feasible. With more localized production and easier transport of minerals miners will spread to more remote places too, and thereby unused sources get exploited.

The adjustment (nerf and buff) of ships and ship-prices get easier with the changes to ship construction parts.

For now this is all I can think of. I hope this makes sense to anyone as it does for me. Thank you for reading.

This all sounds most excellent. I have but one suggestion. IMO, carriers should function as the defacto ship transporters. The current reliance on fighters seems to me to be primarily a result of CCP being unable to figure out how to get players to dock inside of another player's ship (what happens on a logoff/disconnect, for example?) Boarding a ship that's inside of another ship from outside of the ship in your pod has always been a little too magical and silly, and so they went with ship-sized drones that aren't even really drones. (Edit: I suspect the solution to carriers will also give us the solution to destructible outposts, at least partially.) Carriers could be large enough to store frigates and cruisers, but no battleships. Supercarriers would then be large enough to store several battleships in addition to a host of smaller ships. Repair and refitting services (and an overhaul of the poor and neglected clone vat bay) included!

All in all, I very much support this idea. +1.

Can we remove fast-travel while we're at it? Jumping halfway across the galaxy just to find some conflict is absolutely ridiculous. New Eden certainly seems a lot smaller after Red Moon Rising ...

(Edit 2: Rather than decreasing Industrial Ship cargohold, just make it so that the default for all cargo holds is that they cannot store ships. Ship transporting vessels, whether the one you mentioned or carriers as I mentioned, would have a docking bay.)

The solution is that instead of having cruiser-sized drones, your corpies who are real people act as the pilots who are based out of your ship. In essence, the carrier becomes more of a mobile mini-station than it currently is, which also reflects the way carriers act in the real world. Now, of course I know that carriers in the real world house planes and not other ships ... but in space I'm not sure this would hold true. Plus it just makes sense from a game design perspective (the tricky part is figuring out what happens to anyone docked when the carrier disconnects.) We would then have a ship that functions very well as a staging platform where we have no POSes/Outposts (which, when implemented in tandem with the removal of cynos, works very nicely as a force projection tactic that actually requires some strategy compared to the current hotdrop tactics.)

No no, heheh. You'd have to remove the fighters. Instead of having fighters, your corpies can now dock their normal ships (not fighters) inside you where they can repair, refit, update clones, etc. But yeah, it's a little off topic except as an alternative to having an entirely new type of cap ship that only moves ships.

You wrote so many words...

for the problem you seem to want to address why not follow KISS principle and just re-adjust reprocessing yields?

You make it sound like the former does not equal the latter. This is meant to be a sci-fi simulator. Granted, CCP has done a generally questionable job of adhering to their stated intent (see: broken space physics, faucet/sink system, dumb-as-rocks-NPCs, any NPC seeded item, boarding ships from a POS/Cap while in space, magical loot transfer, etc, etc) Simulator ought to be as close to reality as it can get within the context (context in this case is science-fiction, set in New Eden.) Hence that whole, "EVE is real!" marketing push, among many other years worth of marketing campaigns and words straight from the mouths of devs over the years.

Sci-fi simulator ... not League of Legends but with spaceships in a persistent world.

To be honest I think a simpler way to go about creating an incentive for local production and mining would be to buff production in null sec, it's my understanding that production slots in particular are a bit of an issue. Couple that with altering JF mechanics and you might be able to create a system in which it would be beneficial to mine and produce ships and modules locally. (You might also inadvertently nerf power projection, always a good thing IMHO.)

The main problem of course is just how easy it is to transport goods in the first place, not just minerals via mineral compression. This wouldn't really change just by altering our ability to move minerals.

I think the likely result from your proposed changes would be that JFs would be used to move minerals for super capital and capital production, and sub capital ships and modules would just continue to be imported from Jita via JF and your proposed ship-JF.

In the end it just boils down to it being extremely unlikely we will ever see meaningful "local" production and mining until either:

a) There is a genuine benefit to producing goods in null over high sec.

b) It is made harder to import fully manufactured goods from high to null sec.

I know your proposal might reduce capacity for transporting mods to some degree, depending on how large they become compared to the base minerals, but in the end I cannot see them becoming so large that transporting them in JFs with >350k capacity is infeasible. Especially not when you then have JFs designed specifically for transporting the ships alongside them.

Production in null-sec is also a problem but that is primarily a reason of upgrading costs for the stations since who would upgrade a station investing several tenth of billions if you can just use POSes? In the end you get huge, specialized (time) bonuses on what you choose to use the station for (either T1 or T2). I hope that is a thing CCP will significantly lower station and upgrade prices with destructible outposts, which is also a point on the agenda as far as I know. I checked the manufacturing slots in Fountain (TEST Alliance home region) and the majority of the slots are not being used.

Mining in null-sec now is a valid way to earn money (up to about 150 million per hour for the highest-value ores) but compared to other activities mining keeps to be one of the more dangerous activities. CCP already laid out plans to change mining barges and exhumers but that does not completely solve the problem since in my view the changes are primarily in planning to counter the hulkageddons and not actually about making mining a better activity. So this claim might be controversial but mining in null-sec needs to get safer, a single AFK cloaker can completely lock down a system and if you really wanted to you could completely lock down a whole region by just parking a single cloaker in each system (and that really is not hard, alliances and blocks can do this without a problem).

Another problem is that low-end ores are extremely limited in null-sec space. The supply of veldspar needs to be increased and CCP should think about introducing another version of veldspar with increased amounts of tritanium in it since that is primarily lacking in null-sec for production.

Minerals already get transported for capital and supercapital production, if it is in pure minerals or in "compressed" items there is no difference. We can not make that harder in any way without somehow completely restricting transport from empire to null-sec and that of course is definitely not something that will ever be implemented.

Goods and minerals should always be free to be transported wherever you want to bring them. With changing the way how you transport from items to minerals you either boost local production or make the transportation of finished goods less efficient. The items need to be build somewhere anyway and I rather have that going on in null-sec than within 5 jumps around Jita. In the end all the good high-end minerals are located in null-sec and largely get imported from there for production in empire, why not turn it around as it was originally supposed to be and how it even stands on the agenda?

Agreed, it defys logic that minerals in the most pure form are much less compressed then stuff made out of them, such as ships and ammo.

Minerals should be the most compressed form, with things made out of them a bit more bulky but close to the same.