Player Features and Ideas Discussion

You know, it feels like it's been awhile since I've beat up on someone for posting something like this, so I'm going to go ahead and list all the ways in which you are flatly and hilariously wrong.

• Shipping costs are a thing. This is true even if we pretend enough mining actually happens in nullsec for me to build with minerals mined out there, instead of importing. For example, if I'm building battleships, I can fit 60 battleships worth of minerals into a single JF trip in compressed form, but those 60 hulls would take ten trips to move back to highsec. Assuming I'm flying a Nomad, I'll burn 160m isk worth of fuel, or about 2.66m per hull. At 3h20m to build (PE5 research), that's the equivalent of 800k per hour in "build costs". This extends to other ship classes as well - 33 cruisers per trip round trip costing 15.9m isk is ~480k per hull or about 216k/hr. Twice as many frigates with exactly half the build time per frigate gives you the same 216k/hr.
• If I can't get enough minerals locally, I have to import them. Those 60 BS can be moved in a single JF if I do the compression right, but it's still another 80k per hull in build costs; I'm up to 880k for the battleships, I won't belabor the point by extending it to other hulls.
• If I'm importing compressed minerals, I'm building the guns in empire, which means I'm subject to those fees anyway. 5500 railguns with PE20 is about 593.66 hours of build time, or about 19.8m isk at the proposed 33.3k/hour build cost. That's another ~329,500 isk to my build cost per ship, bringing me to about 1.21m per hour - nearly forty times the 33.3k/hr price point. At this point, even if for some completely idiotic reason there were NPC fees on my player built outpost's slots, they'd be negligible compared to what I'd already paid.
• And finally, a bonus to time doesn't necessarily mean I'm capable of undercutting you, it just means I'm building a bit more product. Too bad that even if we ignore the above three points, that's FAR more than counterbalanced by the presence of eleventy billion drooling industrialists who, when not busy driving anything worth building to razor thin margins, shriek about any potential nerf to their meager livelihood without actually stopping to think about it for a minute or two. Makes it kinda hard to "totally destroy the market" when my output, time bonuses aside, is still a tiny fraction of the market, doesn't it?

/rant

They already hoard the station slots, don't they? I'm not sure how encouraging veteran players to set up their own manufacturing operation is going to make it harder for new players to manufacture in stations. How is making stations less inviting going to make them even more populated?

You grossly underestimate the value of this proposal. One character Manufacturing at a station (10 lines) would spend 8m isk / day on line fees. Alternatively, you could operate a Medium POS for the same amount of isk, build all your stuff 25% faster, and have enough lines to support several characters with on demand private access for production. That is a huge amount of incentive, and if you don't grasp this, I highly doubt you actually partake in Manufacturing.




A.) Highsec manufacturing is generally done in NPC station slots, much moreso than at POS's. Research POS's are far more common, and they are regularly attacked. too, although I'll admit they can be made difficult to take down. Truth is, once you move away from the trade hubs, it is trivial to find open and available manufacturing, PE, and Invention slots in highsec. As such, there is generally no reason to use a POS for these forms of industry. My change insures the POS S&I is actually better than station S&I. No matter if you are a highsec, lowsec, WH, or nullsec industrialist, this is a good thing! This is only a bad thing if you don't have access to a POS.

B.) Nullsec systems may not have as many moons on average as highsec, but they typically have more than enough moons to setup a sizeable manufacturing system via POS's. This changes helps that.

C.) QQ, nullsec isn't safe. I'm sorry, but I'm calling out your bullshit on this point. First off, nullsec residents regularly have massive amounts of wealth in their nullsec stations, and I don't believe for a moment that they are too risk adverse to manufacture there. Generally, it is the travel costs of moving goods to/from markets that hinder significant nullsec production.

With this in mind, lets examine your list:

1.) My proposal addresses the Price vs Effort/Risk of POS manufacturing. Why do you care if it is in highsec or nullsec!

2.) Nullsec Sov already reduce the fuel costs of utilizing a POS. You don't need to jack up the cost of charters, although a small increase would be alright.

3.) Swap manufacturing in Highsec stations to nullsec stations? HTFU, nullsec stations are not risky to use!

4.) While I have a lot of mixed feelings on JF usage, increasing fuel cost and removing mineral compression will do NOTHING to help nullsec industry. If you want to help nullsec industry, you need to reduce the transportation costs, which are the main reason nullsec industry cannot compete with highsec. Alternatively, you could bump all production in highsec by some significant amount, but I honestly am not addressing that here. Here I am balancing POS vs Station S&I.

Your extra cost would get passed on to the consumer. The consumer would pay about 120k extra for a battleship hull and so not even notice.

OP I agree, but not until POSes are overhauled and arrays are improved.

Of course, because this change worked so well with the Odyssey and Inferno patch already.



1) Then that should be changed, but as no one wants to see 00 production take off, it's unlikely to happen.
2) It doesn't. It just increases the cost for other means.
3) Eventually... how many years is CCP talking about it now? Until then it's just a terrible system that should be used as little as possible.
4) This only increases my margins and profits it the market adapts, which it usually does not. Prices are constantly crushed by trolls or by patches. Even higher manufacturing prices only make these problems more severe.
5) These services are expensive. And you need them every time you have to anchor a POS, if you get wardec'd regularly, for instance. This increases the production cost even further, until you can anchor your POS on your own in high sec.
Which options are you talking about?
6) Every time their POS gets attacked, they cannot produce any more. Every time their POS gets attacked, they have to hire someone to protect them, in case they have the money (as if freighter ganking wasn't costly enough already). if you as a small industrialist gets wardec''d, you cannot produce for at least an entire week. This drives production costs even further and smaller industrialists out of the business.
What do we need high sec conflicts for? Is it not desired to drive people out of high sec and not bring those, who already left HS for LS and 00S back? This is flawed beyond being funny.

What about a simple "Nerf Highsec #52378"? Catchy and perfectly to the point.

The increased station line costs make POS manufacturing cheaper and more efficient to use. I've shown the math, it is pretty straight forward.

Defending a POS in highsec is not that hard, and when you learn how, you'll realize it is pretty easy to defend. You don't have to take it down everytime you get wardecced. Online some hardeners, put on ECM, put on some guns, and most people won't bother unless there is an ulterior motive.

What reason do you really have to oppose this?
Is it you think encouraging manufacturing at a POS in highsec would be bad for the game?
Do you think it is unfair that POS manufacturing be cheaper and more efficient than NPC station production?
I'm trying to understand why you think this is a bad idea.

I know it's not technically relevant to the topic of this discussion, but can I just say how much this argument irritates me?

Pretty much any change which would negatively affect anyone in either null-sec or low-sec is countered by a lot of people, most often themselves members of large entities such as Goonswarm or the greater CFC, N3, etc. saying "well we're a huge coalition, we'll just find a way around it because we have a gigabillion members. Smaller entities that have less members will be the ones who actually suffer." I don't doubt that Goonswarm and the CFC will easily be able to cover any hike in manufacturing costs. But at some point it feels relevant to note that they almost never suggest ways we might nerf the disproportionate power of larger entities, or suggest an alternative solution that will affect all entities equally.

Yes, Gizznitt Malikite's suggestion is basically just slapping a band-aid on a broken system, but it's still better than metaphorically letting blood get everywhere. Until we can find a way of attacking the root cause of the problem - that superblocs have grown so large and powerful that they're beyond the power of smaller entities to destroy or even seriously inconvenience - that doesn't unduly punish the coalitions simply for being too successful, we can't just ignore problems simply because the selfsame coalitions might find a way around the temporary solutions.

This isn't really a "buff nullsec, nerf hisec" idea. Its really just a straightforward means to push more manufacturing into poses (hisec ones). Its a great idea.

However, for science i would advocate only increasing the costs for ME and Copy jobs
Invention and PE research should be left alone.