Science & Industry

PI is an awful gameplay experience at present, particularly if you run factory planets. It is needlessly complex, obtuse, time consuming, comparatively un-rewarding, and brutally un-fun. It is a direct contradiction to CCP's current design ethos.

However, there are frankly more important and pressing concerns waiting for attention in the game right now. Sad but true: It's more important to address things like corp/alliance tools, sovereignty, and PvE, which themselves are going to take a ton of resources and time for CCP.

Meanwhile, a proper fix to PI might require more resources dedicated to the project than we realize. Not just to re-do the UI into something less soul-crushing, but to make the system itself in-line with CCP's current design ethos. This requires a significant re-conceptualization and re-design, a microcosm of the industry change covered in Crius. That's a huge deal. And very likely un-manageable with what's already on their plate, what's in their development queue.

What might be realistic in the short term, however, are a few kludge UI shortcuts, some band-aids. Like a planetary design template, or a command that slaves all factories to one instruction set. This might be a low-overhead patch that would make quality of life go up in the short term. But whether it's worth the development time, knowing that it's destiny is to be patched out as soon as CCP can manage, isn't a judgement players are in a position to make though.

While i agree something could be done about the setting up stage of pi i wouldn't like to see it dumbed down. They dumbed down scanner and exploration to such a point it became boring. I enjoy pi and make a good income from it and would hate to see presets for planet set up and the like

Perhaps a few things like if u link extractor to storage it automatically routes to it and an undo button.

Ditto what erg cz said. As we all know by experience large changes to career options do not often bring favourable results. Exploration and the drop in exploration loot prices was a notable cack-up. The introduction of high sec POCOs arguably had bad consequences as well.

What we need is either new content - an ingame fitting tool would be nice or an effective NPE experience.

We also need broken things to be fixed. There are too many broken things for me to list here. But notable ones are:

Corporation and Alliance Roles & Permissions in conjunction with safe and asset secure multiple pilot use of POS/Outposts arrays.
The NPE.
Null Sec Sovreignty.
Low sec.

Other things such as Planetary Interaction and Mining are not broken and do not need fixing.