EVE Information Portal

Hi again.

Changes:

• We're going to kick the build time down to 5 minutes and see where that gets us to.
• We're going to allow component assembly arrays to build fuel blocks too because why not.
• We're going to kick the granularity up by a factor of ten and re-implement ~15%/~25% fuel use bonuses for faction towers (and remove the faction-tower-specific bay size increases at the same time).
• CORRECTION: offline timers are not changed, that's still instantaneous; sorry for any confusion, I'm going to get the blog updated in a bit.

WRT the faction tower fuel use, we were hoping that what we were being told by various large-scale fuel operators that maintaining the high refuel interval was the main benefit for most people, as all other things being equal a 1/2/4 scheme is easier to work with than a 10/20/40 one. Obviously we didn't talk to enough small-scale users for whom the use bonus is a bigger deal; this feedback thread has established that this is still a big deal, so we're dropping to our first fallback position and doing 10/20/40 instead.

Things we're not considering:

• Upping cycle times. It breaks reactors etc, and it makes the system harder for players to wrangle. We'd like to move away from designs that require you to memorize data tables to use them properly.
• Making the handover (or anything else to do with this change) more complex/more automated. If for example we determined that we couldn't do this without some form of upgrade script, we'd have cut the feature, because it increases the workload and the risk of this change by a factor of two or three, and at that level we can't justify committing to it. This goes for putting fuel into towers, it goes for running two fuel types at once (which would require major code changes) and so on.

Other things:

• You'll be able to reprocess fuel blocks in the normal way, getting back all the materials etc.
• Currently they're configured to be researchable, with fairly short durations. I'm seeing some questions about this here - is there a strong reason why these need to be unresearchable? I don't have an industry designer on hand right now or I'd ask them :)
• We'll keep an eye on the ice use situation and make further changes there if needed
• WRT the changes to robotics use, assuming large towers are the primary use case then going the other way would kick global consumption up by a factor of 3-4, which would make them a gigantic production bottleneck. Reducing the demand on small/medium towers a little is believed to be a better option than significantly driving up the running costs of all non-small towers everywhere.
• The handover isn't doing anything magic - it'll use old fuel before the switchover and new fuel afterwards. We're saying "half-and-half" because we're recommending you all put a mix of old and new fuel in your towers while the switch is happening, so it has old fuel available before the switch downtime and new fuel available after the downtime.
• WRT talking to players earlier, we have to strike a very careful balance between getting feedback early and not getting people's hopes up. Ideally we'd get input from everyone as soon as we start design work, but our experience has been that bringing very vague designs to the community, and/or pitching designs that subsequently get cut due to being infeasible, creates more disruption than holding back until we're sure something is actually going to work. We do of course talk to subject-matter specialists (ie, people who play that area of the game regularly) within CCP, and the CSM, in the early stages of the design.

Great!

Thx for listening!

Great changes there :)



PE research is fine, and will benefit people who turn block-building into their profession.

Wastage and ME research, I'm not convinced. It will delay the initial availability and/or make fuel more expensive during the changeover period, as people either build them wasting materials or wait to research them. Plus ME research slots are always busy in empire, so you are "forcing" pos owners (especially WH corps) to also get a lab to research the BPOs.

Why not just increase the cycle time of faction towers instead of only increasing there fuel bay size?

Just for the lols:

Nice to Have: Fuel Hauler

e.g. take the Orca and delete:
- 250% bonus to Tractor Beam range
- 100% bonus to Tractor Beam velocity
- 500% bonus to Survey Scanner range
- 99% reduction in CPU need for Gang Link modules
- Can use 3 Gang Link modules simultaneously

change the 50k ORE Hold to 210k Fuel hold (for every kind of POS Fuel inkl. Pellets/Blocks whatever)
+ Jump drive (like JF)
+ paint it green and print a BP on it... (scnr)
e vola...

(skill requirements = Orca + Jumpdrive)

read the last 30 pages.
it is written at least 50 times:
it will change the moon mining, prducing, inventing a.s.o. cycle also...

Most of the complaints in the last dozen pages have been:

- Faction tower fuel savings.

Which can easily be addressed with finer granularity of the fuel pellets such as 100/200/400 for regular towers. At which point you can add back in the Faction/Sov fuel savings. Changing timers is a non-starter, a lot of the POS code probably depends on the assumption that a tick is exactly 60 minutes.

Plus, with a higher granularity - it would allow CCP to introduce *other* structures that consume fuel pellets in varying amounts without having to lock them to the same fuel consumption pattern of 1/2/4. That flexibility alone is a strong reason to go with fuel pellets instead of massive fuel blocks.

- Another step in the fuel production chain.

Unless they charge more then a few million for the BPO, it will just be something where you centralize your fuel production and/or just bring fuel pellets from market (and sell your raw PI/ / ice products at the market). Anchor an Ammo Array at your tower, put it online for 2 days a month and you have enough fuel produced to last a month.

Could be ameliorated a bit if the fuel pellet size is reduced another 10-15% over the current plan. That would mean transporting fuel pellets would save you 20-25% cargo space over hauling the raw products. Which makes logistics slightly easier. It would also mean you could fit closer to a full 28-30 days of fuel in the towers (fewer fueling events per month).

- Heavy Water usage is OMG going up!

Hi-sec towers were probably already capped on CPU (HW usage) due to being focused on research labs. Lo/Null may have consumed less, but I think you'd find that the vast majority of towers out there were already using 50-60% of their CPU.

The cost per month in Heavy Water for a large tower running full tilt on its CPU was a measly 2.2M ISK. Even if HW goes up 10x in price, it doesn't change the fuel costs by more then 22M ISK per month. There have been bigger spikes then that from the POCO speculation and the varous "gank a mack" events over the years.

(Liquid Ozone usage is where things might really get interesting. But overall, fuel needs are being reduced slightly for the large towers, so it will end up being about equal with the costs from before.)

- W-Space Logistics

You're still hauling ice products in from outside. Now you just need to add an ammo array to a POS tower and make it on site.

One big issue here is that the AAA capacity is too low for what it is being asked to do. The capacity of the Ammo Assy Arrays needs to be increased by 2x or 3x.

Edit: Ninja'd by the CCP Devs!

So this means faction towers will use 15% and 25% less fuel total? So instead of a 50% ice reduction it will be a 25% total fuel cost reduction... What kind of effect will this have on PI prices?

Simple really. First, you don't have to have stockpiles of various PI chunks, isotopes, waters, ozones filling your arrays. You bring in the ice products and as you get the PI made you convert them over to fuel.

OR - Option B...

Stop using your own PI for fuel and instead convert it to high value P3 and P4 items, like those being required for the PCO construction. Buy your fuels and bring them in, bring out and sell the P3 and P4 stuff. Giggle at your profits.

Great change.