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[Crius] Starbase feedback

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Bronson Hughes
The Knights of the Blessed Mother of Acceleration
#221 - 2014-07-08 20:03:56 UTC
Blue Harrier wrote:
I can answer your question 2 as I asked the same myself and it seems the code for a POS is both old and so convoluted if the UI was added it would cause grown men and women to cry and all POS’s in the game to implode and vanish in a puff of pixels.

So for the time being no it won’t be added.

Yeah, I saw that. I'm pretty disappointed. I'm just amazed that the POS code is so bad that they can't add the new UI for reprocessing, but it isn't so bad that they can't add the new UI for research and production. Seems like a convenient scapegoat to me.

Relatively Notorious By Association

My Many Misadventures

I predicted FAUXs
Velicitia
XS Tech
#222 - 2014-07-09 10:52:56 UTC
Bronson Hughes wrote:
Blue Harrier wrote:
I can answer your question 2 as I asked the same myself and it seems the code for a POS is both old and so convoluted if the UI was added it would cause grown men and women to cry and all POS’s in the game to implode and vanish in a puff of pixels.

So for the time being no it won’t be added.

Yeah, I saw that. I'm pretty disappointed. I'm just amazed that the POS code is so bad that they can't add the new UI for reprocessing, but it isn't so bad that they can't add the new UI for research and production. Seems like a convenient scapegoat to me.


probably has more to do with "POS refining worked completely different to station refining" than anything

For all intents and purposes, POS and station mfg/research work exactly the same, and already had the same UI ...

One of the bitter points of a good bittervet is the realisation that all those SP don't really do much, and that the newbie is having much more fun with what little he has. - Tippia
CCP Greyscale
C C P
C C P Alliance
#223 - 2014-07-09 11:43:40 UTC
Hi everyone,

Update on multiple-structure bonuses for starbases.

We've just had another discussion about this system as-implemented, and based on your feedback, the technical challenges involved in implementing it in a fully user-friendly way, and the somewhat limited upsides of the feature, we've decided to cut it from Crius.

Having multiple starbase structures of the same type at a starbase will no longer grant you any bonus above those inherent in the structure itself

The only substantial downside to this is that it makes it much easier to weaponize an industry tower, so we are considering upping lab/array fitting costs substantially in a later release. We likely will not do this in Crius itself as people will need time to reconfigure their setups.

We are looking into what we can do to mitigate the expected glut of labs resulting from this change; more info as we work through this process :)

Thanks for all your feedback,
-Greyscale
Calvin
Tritanium Forge Industries
#224 - 2014-07-09 12:13:09 UTC  |  Edited by: Calvin
CCP Greyscale wrote:

Update on multiple-structure bonuses for starbases.

We've just had another discussion about this system as-implemented, and based on your feedback, the technical challenges involved in implementing it in a fully user-friendly way, and the somewhat limited upsides of the feature, we've decided to cut it from Crius.


"limited upsides"? This feature is what was going to make production in a starbase worthwhile for me. Now I don't see a reason to produce in a starbase much at all, as the bonuses are now something of a joke.
Scout Vyvorant
Doomheim
#225 - 2014-07-09 12:22:42 UTC  |  Edited by: Scout Vyvorant
CCP Greyscale wrote:
Hi everyone,

Update on multiple-structure bonuses for starbases.

We've just had another discussion about this system as-implemented, and based on your feedback, the technical challenges involved in implementing it in a fully user-friendly way, and the somewhat limited upsides of the feature, we've decided to cut it from Crius.

Having multiple starbase structures of the same type at a starbase will no longer grant you any bonus above those inherent in the structure itself

The only substantial downside to this is that it makes it much easier to weaponize an industry tower, so we are considering upping lab/array fitting costs substantially in a later release. We likely will not do this in Crius itself as people will need time to reconfigure their setups.

We are looking into what we can do to mitigate the expected glut of labs resulting from this change; more info as we work through this process :)

Thanks for all your feedback,
-Greyscale


Why don't you create a structure that does nothing by itself but just give the bonus intended for the multiple structures?

Make two types, one for research/invention and one for manufactoring, and create a small, medium and large variant scaling the bonus in the same way the pos fuel is scaled, meaning a large one give -24, a medium -12 and a small -6. That is easier than nerfing the online cost of the existing structures.

Edit: the structure is intended to be max one, giving the bonus once, not addictive with similar structres, so anchoring 2 smalls wont give +12. If you want +12 use a medium.

In this way you have to choose between being cost effictive or weaponized, and choosing is at core of this patch
Jackie Fisher
Syrkos Technologies
#226 - 2014-07-09 12:24:49 UTC  |  Edited by: Jackie Fisher
CCP Greyscale wrote:
Hi everyone,
The only substantial downside to this is that it makes it much easier to weaponize an industry tower, so we are considering upping lab/array fitting costs substantially in a later release. We likely will not do this in Crius itself as people will need time to reconfigure their setups.
So you expect us to reconfigure set ups for Crius and then again in a couple of months when you change fittings?

I'd have thought arming towers was something to encourage as it promotes player interaction. The alternative route is a small tower that comes down at the first sign of trouble - not much fun for either the attacker or tower owner in that.

As has been previously pointed out attacking ships have had multiple buffs in recent years but defences have remained unchanged so unless you plan to make a POS defences balance pass it seems a little mean to deny them the crumb of needing fewer labs etc.

CCP Greyscale wrote:
Hi everyone,
We are looking into what we can do to mitigate the expected glut of labs resulting from this change; more info as we work through this process :)
What about the glut of large and especially medium towers that you have just massively reduced the demand for?

Fear God and Thread Nought
Talon Kadin
Cold Station 12
#227 - 2014-07-09 13:09:16 UTC
Well its a damn good thing tower defenses are so useful in this game, makes perfect sense to me

/s
Kenneth Skybound
Gallifrey Resources
#228 - 2014-07-09 13:22:51 UTC
Okay, so we wanted scaling to be in an interesting and reasonable manner.

Small tower: Light industry, light defenses, light bonus

Large tower: Light industry, other modules, medium defenses
OR
Large tower: heavy industry, great bonuses, poor defenses
OR
Large tower: Light industry, heavy defenses

By removing these stacking bonuses, the light/heavy industry option is gone. The whole point of these bonuses were to make up for the lack of slots - you've killed that.

To consider raising the fitting costs only then inhibits the choices within tower fittings too. If someone wants to do some industry, they have to cut out a lot of other stuff and/or be limited in concurrent industry options rather than having a fitting choice.

Seriously, just cutting your losses, claiming the bonuses would be too difficult to show in the new UI (really???) and thinking the best course of action is to just drop everything and go "we tried" is dismal.
Sentient Blade
Crisis Atmosphere
Coalition of the Unfortunate
#229 - 2014-07-09 14:03:59 UTC
What exactly is the problem in having a heavily armed indy tower? Especially when you're paying an extra 500m a month for the privilege. POS defenses are already woefully under powered.
Dirk MacGirk
Specter Syndicate
#230 - 2014-07-09 14:17:21 UTC
CCP Greyscale wrote:
Hi everyone,

Update on multiple-structure bonuses for starbases.

We've just had another discussion about this system as-implemented, and based on your feedback, the technical challenges involved in implementing it in a fully user-friendly way, and the somewhat limited upsides of the feature, we've decided to cut it from Crius.

Having multiple starbase structures of the same type at a starbase will no longer grant you any bonus above those inherent in the structure itself

The only substantial downside to this is that it makes it much easier to weaponize an industry tower, so we are considering upping lab/array fitting costs substantially in a later release. We likely will not do this in Crius itself as people will need time to reconfigure their setups.

We are looking into what we can do to mitigate the expected glut of labs resulting from this change; more info as we work through this process :)

Thanks for all your feedback,
-Greyscale


Heaven forbid an industry POS that has BPOs in it should not be able to increase its defenses. Because you know, POS defenses are so stellar anyway.
Gilbaron
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#231 - 2014-07-09 14:30:12 UTC
there goes my pos structure business :(
Olari Vanderfall
Perkone
Caldari State
#232 - 2014-07-09 14:32:29 UTC
Amazing. At least I won't have to figure out what to put in my POS. All that extra time saved will be useful for when I need to unlock and move thousands of bpos to a system with a research station.
CCP Greyscale
C C P
C C P Alliance
#233 - 2014-07-09 14:54:31 UTC
Jackie Fisher wrote:

What about the glut of large and especially medium towers that you have just massively reduced the demand for?


Reasonable question, we will look into this also. Towers have the relative advantage though that there are other things you can use them for, whereas a lab is just a lab.

Kenneth Skybound wrote:
Okay, so we wanted scaling to be in an interesting and reasonable manner.

Small tower: Light industry, light defenses, light bonus

Large tower: Light industry, other modules, medium defenses
OR
Large tower: heavy industry, great bonuses, poor defenses
OR
Large tower: Light industry, heavy defenses

By removing these stacking bonuses, the light/heavy industry option is gone. The whole point of these bonuses were to make up for the lack of slots - you've killed that.

To consider raising the fitting costs only then inhibits the choices within tower fittings too. If someone wants to do some industry, they have to cut out a lot of other stuff and/or be limited in concurrent industry options rather than having a fitting choice.

Seriously, just cutting your losses, claiming the bonuses would be too difficult to show in the new UI (really???) and thinking the best course of action is to just drop everything and go "we tried" is dismal.


There is no lack of slots, we killed those too. The reason we're considering revising industry structure fittings is to have more interesting choices, not fewer - do you put your labs and your build arrays on the same tower, or split them up so each can be better defended?

As to UI; no, not remotely related to the decision. We already have the UI for the bonuses working perfectly (it's a fairly trivial bit of work in the current structure). The problem we have is with user-friendliness, which in this case is manifested in the fact that we've not found a performant way to have industry know about offline/online states at a granularity of less than an hour, and having actions silently delayed for up to an hour is not a good user experience.
Airi Cho
Dark-Rising
Wrecking Machine.
#234 - 2014-07-09 14:58:54 UTC
CCP Greyscale wrote:
Hi everyone,

Update on multiple-structure bonuses for starbases.

We've just had another discussion about this system as-implemented, and based on your feedback, the technical challenges involved in implementing it in a fully user-friendly way, and the somewhat limited upsides of the feature, we've decided to cut it from Crius.

Having multiple starbase structures of the same type at a starbase will no longer grant you any bonus above those inherent in the structure itself

The only substantial downside to this is that it makes it much easier to weaponize an industry tower, so we are considering upping lab/array fitting costs substantially in a later release. We likely will not do this in Crius itself as people will need time to reconfigure their setups.

We are looking into what we can do to mitigate the expected glut of labs resulting from this change; more info as we work through this process :)

Thanks for all your feedback,
-Greyscale



Since when is having a properly defended tower a bad thing?
Aeril Malkyre
Knights of the Ouroboros
#235 - 2014-07-09 15:03:53 UTC  |  Edited by: Aeril Malkyre
CCP Greyscale wrote:
The only substantial downside to this is that it makes it much easier to weaponize an industry tower, so we are considering upping lab/array fitting costs substantially in a later release. We likely will not do this in Crius itself as people will need time to reconfigure their setups.
As the owner of a small Minmatar control tower, please take it easy here. One corp hangar, starship maint array, one lab, one ammo assembly array (for fuel), 2 hardeners and 4 small turrets and I'm already about maxed out. That's a pretty basic outpost. I was hoping to squeeze in a compression array after Crius. But if you go mucking about with the fitting requirements, us small-timers are going to be hosed. Tread carefully.
Rekkr Nordgard
Steelforge Heavy Industries
#236 - 2014-07-09 15:05:58 UTC
CCP Greyscale wrote:
Hi everyone,

Update on multiple-structure bonuses for starbases.

We've just had another discussion about this system as-implemented, and based on your feedback, the technical challenges involved in implementing it in a fully user-friendly way, and the somewhat limited upsides of the feature, we've decided to cut it from Crius.


Classic CCP; announce features A, B, and C which are designed to work in conjunction with each other, feature B is a poorly thought out bad idea and the players complain, but instead of fixing feature B, CCP simply scraps it entirely while moving ahead with A and C making the whole thing completely unbalanced now.

I'm glad CCP killed the stacking POS module bonus; it was simply awful game design, it should work like rigs or POCO construction where you have to add addition materials to a single POS module to upgrade its capacity and gain bonuses. But eliminating industrial POS bonuses entirely while moving ahead with the rest of features is almost even worse and even more unbalancing to an expansion already aimed at hurting highsec industry while buffing sov nullsec industry.
Bronson Hughes
The Knights of the Blessed Mother of Acceleration
#237 - 2014-07-09 15:25:14 UTC  |  Edited by: Bronson Hughes
When the new starbase changes were first announced, I was understandably excited about the prospect of vast swaths of hisec opening up for new POS users, setting up my own starbase without having to grind faction standings or buy an occupied moon, and doing some production/research. I even took the time to buy all of the equipment for a POS (and some fuel), pick a nice system to put one up in, and staged all of the equipment/fuel to be ready when Crius goes live.

Sadly though, between this latest announcement (both the loss of structure bonuses and the threat of increased lab/assembly array fitting) and the fact that the POS refinery UI will still be broken after Crius goes live, I've nearly given up on my planned entry into the realm of POSes because I just don't see it as being worth the time and effort.

I know that the POS code is supposedly a mess, but please stop using that as an excuse to avoid fixing it. Everyone knows they're broken and simply reminding us of how broken they are instead of doing the work to fix them is highly unprofessional in my book. There's a lot of good gameplay to be had there if you just fixed them.

Relatively Notorious By Association

My Many Misadventures

I predicted FAUXs
Sentient Blade
Crisis Atmosphere
Coalition of the Unfortunate
#238 - 2014-07-09 15:26:17 UTC  |  Edited by: Sentient Blade
CCP Greyscale wrote:
The reason we're considering revising industry structure fittings is to have more interesting choices, not fewer - do you put your labs and your build arrays on the same tower, or split them up so each can be better defended?


I'm afraid that "Interesting choices" is something I'm always extremely wary of when coming from CCP.

It usually comes along with artificially forcing debilitating penalties... like freighter hull upgrades, which nerf the very thing a freighter is designed for, but are necessary just to get you back to something reasonable.

A POS tower should be defended, and heavily, the notion that you can just take your things out is absolute nonsense. BPOs sure, but what about anything which is already building? There is no way to evacuate that short of pressing the cancel button and losing everything you put into it, and I'd hardly call that an evacuation.

A high value POS tower is not like a high-value ship, like a supercarrier, even though they may quite easily be comparable in value. A tower is constantly exposed, night and day, any timezone. Your suggestion is to force more value into them, and then make it even harder to fit defenses on? ... and don't even get me started on the mess of things like lock-downs and corporate roles.

Come the indy changes, every POS tower should be armed to the teeth, and rightly so. Hitting a major industrial complex should be a massive undertaking, with significant risk associated with it. The owner of the POS is already taking a huge risk using it; the destruction of a POS can potentially lose billions or even tens of billions when existing jobs are aborted.

"I'm going to base my factory in Baghdad, but once I've finished buying the machinery, I'll just have to go without hiring any guards because ~arbitrary limit~" -- Said nobody ever.
CCP Nullarbor
C C P
C C P Alliance
#239 - 2014-07-09 15:31:00 UTC
Bronson Hughes wrote:
I know that the POS code is supposedly a mess, but please stop using that as an excuse to avoid fixing it. Everyone knows they're broken and simply reminding us of how broken they are instead of doing the work to fix them is highly unprofessional in my book. There's a lot of good gameplay to be had there if you just fixed them.


Fixing POS code is next on our list after industry, as per the EVE Keynote at Fanfest this year.

CCP Nullarbor // Senior Engineer // Team Game of Drones
Sigras
Conglomo
#240 - 2014-07-09 15:33:33 UTC
the ROI on POS modules does seem a bit poor...

its probably a bit out of scope now, but a while ago i posted a suggestion that allows corps to grow the number of arrays organically as they can now; it also fixes the online/offline problem...

Give all POS arrays a 10% reduction to job cost then make the job 1% more expensive per job in that array.

the obvious FOO strategy is one array per job of that type you want to run, but this runs into CPU issues and requires more shuffling around of materials, so you have tradeoffs.

the other idea i had was to give each type of array a "job cost reducer" module with a long-ish online time to prevent online/offline shenanigans

the added advantage to this approach is that you can make it cost appropriate so the ROI isnt insane and youre not messing with assembly array's online timers...

thoughts?