Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Before this thread is interpreted as a "QQ Thread", let me clarify one thing:
What I totally agree: with the disappearance of the material waste system, it made sense to remove the "Material Efficiency" skill to maintain the average material cost for any production. However... This has generated a flaw needing correction, in my opinion: The time invested in specific skills is what makes your toon more fitted for a role than another without skills.

While all other specializations have "efficiency based" bonus when training skills that apply to both casual & hardcore gamers, industry specialization has no such skill anymore.

Let's take some very basic example:

A PvP/PvE pilot who likes to fight will have:
- A skill to improve it's efficiency in his favorite weapon (let's say small hybrid turret: +5% damage per skill level)
- An equipment to improve his favorite weapon (in that case, a magnetic field stabilizer II: +10% damage bonus, +10,5% rate of fire)

This simple model makes sense:
- Your efficiency is defined by the combination of being "well trained" and "well geared".
- Your efficiency is the same wether you are a casual or a hardcore gamer, once you have took the time to specialize in the weapon you wanted, and you will always an efficiency advantage over any player who chose not to specialize in it. That's exaclty what value the skill training.

Now going back to the industry case...

What you have is:
- Several skills to improve production over time: useful for the (very) tiny part of industry specialists who have the resources, the demand, and time to fill permanently their whole production queue. Totally useless for players who are industrialists who supply their corp, make a bit of ISK on their side, but haven't production to do on a daily basis.
- An item (the BPO) that can be improved in Material efficiency. Let's say this is the "gear" part.

Time efficiency is no real advantage against those who choose to not specialize in Industrial skills.
Obviously you can produce more in a given time, but that doesn't make you more efficient, more competitive than a player with no skills.

But there's another problem:
If all the efficiency improvement is on items you own, and for some reason you need to move it, and you're ambushed, that means you can potentially lose your only efficiency bonus and your agressor can stole it. Is it really right that all makes you more efficient can be stolen? I mean... sure, it might part of the game to lose BPOs. Sure, you have alternatives by producing BPCs and not moving BPOs. But that's still one more reason to have a skill improving efficiency about the amount of material needed for a production: After all, nobody can steal your "Small Hybrid Turret V" skill when someone pods you, even if you're not careful.

I don't suggest to restore the "Material Efficiency" Skill as it was.
The bonus would be unreasonnably powerful. But maybe having a -2% Material required per skill level, to a max of -10% from Skills would value those who took time to specialize in the Industry field... Even a -1% Material required per skill level would be worth it. Make it very long to train if necessary, but it's just common sense to give industrialists an edge against those who are not.

What do you think about this?

Any advantage on material required becomes a compulsory skill to train before even entering the market.
CCP have pretty much said they will not give any material discount skills ever again for exactly that reason. As they dislike compulsory trains to V before entering an activity.

Realise a lot of Industry the margins are under 10%. So a 10% material advantage means you can remove all possible profit from someone without the skill trained.
I.E. That 2% you are proposing could be 20% of the profit involved. Not 2% like you are thinking.

So, No, No & Hell No.

Except it would still be a compulsory to V train before taking part in that section of industry. Any ME skill will have that result because profit margins are far far slimmer than total cost.

This was the issue I had with ccp's line of reasoning here. If this the new thing at ccp....why are so many 5's out there for dedicated roles still around?

Astrometrics 5 to run covert portal on blops (among other 5's)
5's for a few areas of using caps
5's for t2 use


Lack of consistency here is what had me go a bit tinfoil and say sell that crap to the tourists....what's the real reason.

It's worse, as there are other compulsory skills. Just try bringing a Guardian (or Basilisk... for some reason) to a fleet without Logi V. Try an Armageddon without Battleship V.

I have been thinking that there has to be some way to improve your ME without making it mandatory. Perhaps tie it to Teams in some way. Like if you have a specific industry skill (ie advanced small ship construction) you get a bit more ME from a team that has that specialization. Not make it huge though. The most it would do at V would be to add 1% me to the team. So This would require you to bid harder on the better teams and/or move to match them and it would not be one skill to rule them all. You would only have that team for a short while so use it while you can. If you got a team with say 4% me for the specific area and your skills made it 5% you would not have an advantage over someone who was building with a 5% team and no skill bonus.

If every one who had the skill bonus rushed to the best team system the cost index would spike and may wipe out the improvement making it's use even more short lived.

But then again it may just end up settling to you must have this so I may be wrong here.

Because a noobie flying a t1 logi scythe is of benefit (far less than a logi V scimi, but they still help), but a manufacturer with less than perfect material efficiency skills can only be a liability in a market where the margin of profit on t1 is often less than the cost of materials saved by taking the ME skill from 4 to 5.

Since in order to compete you MUST have the ME skill to V, it had as much actual "choice" in if you should train it as the "choice" of choosing to not upgrade your medical clone.

It's probably because player saw the spreadsheets and arrived to the conclusion that there was no money in industry before the skill was at V because of the thin profit margins while a non all V pilot in space still give you more than no pilot in space. It's mostly a perception that CCP wanted to stop because they probably had feedback about people not even wanting to try because of it. S&I forum would tell new people there was no money in industry unless you were going deep with the skills so many people could not "just try" as they were told they would only lose money in the adventure.

Because t1 has traditionally been the entryway into manufacturing for new players.

T2 manufacturing gets far more complicated, and far more difficult for a starting player to understand, comprehend, and obtain skills and starting capital for.

Telling new players "Oh just do t2 prod, with the skills you don't have, with the capital you don't posses, and here's a metric fuckton of information to read and understand, especially since you have no prior manufacturing experience" is a good way to get them to run in the opposite direction as fast as possible.

To a point, and the opposite can also be true. You might get a nice discount producing 10 items, but then the cost per item goes back up when you try building 11 in a single run, and then decreases back down to optimal at 20. Then goes back up at 21.