Science & Industry

The passive isk argument was made up from the start. Invention has been a big flop because a lot of people fail to add properly. People cant take in the cost of datacores to produce a realistic value of the products they are making. CCP "Fixed" this by giving a easy way to "grind" cores.

A lot of us were "farming" cores, But even when they were 300k/unit we werent making tons of isk.
I had about 17 chars doing this, and 5 accounts that were reserved just for doing production / research / cores.

((3 chars * 6 agents * 120rp/day) / 50)*300k = 12.96m
so nearly 13 mil a day or about 395 mil a month.

With the changes now...
((3 chars * 6 agents * 120rp/day )/100)*(100k-10k)=1.94m
so nearly 2 mil a day or about 59 mil a month.

To get 6 agents (before the standing chamges came through) required a LOT of time and isk to grind chars up to the standings to run your high quality l4 agents. RPM V was a big slog as well. It wasnt something you just decided to do. Even throwing isk at it, you were looking at a good 6 months to train 1 char on your account up to run those 6 agents. So investing 2 years of training time (with plexes or $$$) was costly. 2 years of training time so you can half-pay for an account that doesnt even have a combat char on it. If you were to try to slip in these R&D chars around a main then the timings were not realistic as you would take too much away from your main.

Should you do it now?... I would say no, but RPM 3 or 4 might be okay if your really needing to make that 50 mil a month. It will take you a month to pay back the skill!.

And then there are other considerations too, none of the l4 agents are grouped together closely at all, so prepare for a lot of travel.

The nerf seen me stop all but two of my accounts, so I guess ccp has done well. Shame that they allowed 1 grinder to make as many cores in one day as it took my whole account to make in a year.

Will they get rid of R&D agents now, Probably...
Why?... I am sure they will say no one is using them.
It should have been reworked, but R&D should have been the only source of cores, and a fun tree should have been put in for players, not a nerf.

Also, one guy earlier says he was making cores while his account was inactive, that's been fixed for years, so no he wasnt.