Science & Industry

So a few general topics people are hitting on here:

Just do X or add Y to make them better

As mentioned in the original post to do Teams properly would require a not insignificant amount of work and the Development team wants to do this properly. At the moment however taking on such a project does not align with some of the priorities we are discussing for the next few releases. Unfortunately we are always choosing from a series of things to do next and we sometimes have to push things back.

Also as this thread expands a number of people are already raising numerous issues that we are aware of need tackling to really make Teams as good as they need to be, but this also highlights the scope of the project, as mentioned is not small.

Why not leave them in?

This is a complex question to answer and one we have been debating for a long time internally. The honest answer is that everything we add to the game is one more thing to support and maintain. Trimming is good for the health of the game both for it's players and the developers, we would not pursue this course of action if we did not believe it was the most valuable thing for the game in the long term and we'd rather not let the feature languish as this makes it increasingly harder to revisit in the future.

As a result the removal should impact a minimal number of players, and allow us to focus our efforts where it counts. To be clear, we are not never going to follow up on the feature, but this course of action will make it easier for us to do when we can. We want to be more flexible in how we react to features that are not meeting player or developer expectations and that should hopefully include sometimes removing a feature until such a time as it can be revisited.

TL;DR

In summary we can only realistically look at two options here:

• Leave them as is (yes it would be cool to do X or Y, but realistically we cannot)
• Remove them

Kind of agree here. If people aren't using them, there stands to be no benefit toward those people for removing them either. Much in the same sense the only thing that removing the feature accomplishes is penalizing those players who do use the provided teams.

I dunno, really, only thing I ever did was manufacture ammunition for myself (basically free with refined salvage). The one time I ever tried to use a team (reduced material cost) that was near my base location was when the team was apparently located in a system where none of the stations had any manufacturing services. That might have been from my lack of knowledge into how the whole system worked though.

But, yanno, if it works for people, let them use it. No sense in even spending the time removing the feature if at least someone is using it and there absolutely no benefit in removing the feature entirely.

I think the issue with them is that because the benefits are so low, and the pricing gets a bit high, they're only of use to full-time industrialists.

When you first started reporting about the crius industry changes you said that most people dabble in industry, and for that type of player there's no benefit to bidding on teams. If there happens to be a team available they might use it.

But when you've invented one blueprint you're not going to bother bidding on a team because there's no value in it.

Please dont just buff teams to make them more viable.

Their main problem isn't so much their efficiency. It is the complexity associated with calculating the potential gain in relation to the bid cost and added tax cost, and the burden of having to secure your team by being online for the last few seconds of the auction.

Add to that the fact of having to put a hold on your production as you wait for the auction to finish, the sheer amount of macro-categories and micro-categories, and you've got all the reasons in the world not to use them.

its akin too saying well Captains Quarters didn't achieve its goal so lets remove it even though some people still like too use them just too save resources even though we plan on putting it back in later..
so in reality what are you actually saving in the long term??

and you know if you take it out there is no incentive too put in back in as you will always have something else more urgent in priority too do it.

just take the hit and spend a little time fixing it now and then some later if needed..

For me personally, I like the idea of teams as a conceptual idea, but I found the whole auction system a huge turn-off.

I've never felt the need to attempt to bid, simply because I knew that I'd probably be outbid at the last minute.

The auction mechanism could REALLY use a re-think, also I think the teams selection is split up into a few desirable, and a whole heap of undesirable teams, with those who bother to use them only going after the good ones. With the other ones, people who would use them cant be bothered with the 7 day auction period, or understanding the savings.

Turning the auction system into a closed auction, where no-one can see any bids except the bid they specifically have placed in systems for a team would completely eliminate the sniping. You'd put up what you are willing to pay. If someone else was willing to pay more, you wouldn't get the team, so you'd put up what it was worth to you, or risk not getting it trying to save a dime. I'd also shorten the auction period to 3 days =/

Biggest problems with Teams for me was that you had no way to see on which teams you had bid and on which of those bids you where outbid. It made Teams such a hassle to use that acquiring them isn't worth the effort.

Hah, called it.

You only get more now if you got a Tier2 or Tier3 Minmatar outpost so thats a really wired justification. Highec refine you actually get LESS now.. Lowsec POS you get the same you used too....