Player Features and Ideas Discussion

This idea has to do with creating a new industry in eve online and hopefully creating more opportunities for specialization in industry as a profession. It boils down to creating a machine design/manufacturing industry that could feed other producers to optimize their factories based on their specific needs and how they want to compete in the marketplace.

Machine Design:
First, this would be an entirely new industry. Right now, some industrialists specialize in T2 modules, some in Rigs, some in ships, some in cap ships, and so on. Machine design and production would be another place for people to specialize. "Inventing," developing, and manufacturing machinery for use in other people's factories. These machines would be manufactured using existing raw materials and would depreciate (to make the industry sustainable). I think the new industry could be balanced around being highly specialized such that the barrier to cross train and vertically integrate machine design/manufacture with t1 production and t2 production and so on would not necessarily be prohibitive, but there would be very little crossover between each (as opposed to the high level of crossover in the current industry sectors). I also think the cost of these "capital investments" could be balanced by their benefits vs. depreciation rates, etc. How exactly, I'm not sure... but I think the pieces are there and smarter people than me can make it fun.

Like in RL industry, big machine houses and manufacturing facilities make huge capital expenditures to purchase the right piece of machinery to optimize the productivity/profitability of their floor space. This could be a mechanic in eve industry, too. Which brings me to the second part.

Factory Design/Industrial Engineering:
The ability to customize your factory floorspace so that you can compete in different ways (optimize for volume, optimize for cost, etc). Maybe instead of simply a flat tax/labor rate on your products, factory floor space (cool new engaging GUI for a factory floor??) is actually leased and you can customize that floorspace as you see fit. Maybe there are basic machines in place so that people with no cash can produce, but maybe with huge capital investments, you can buy new machines and even simply reorganize your floor space to optimize for your needs. Huge resources are spent every year in RL just to do that. New machines would be player made, purchased, and transported (pewpew, maybe). But they also depreciate just like in RL (to turnover assets and sustain the industry).

I think these ideas also lend themselves to new industry skills for the ship/module/rig manufacturers, too. A character could specialize in utilizing a super advanced piece of machinery as a means to gain competitive advantage vs. a different character who could generalize in a wide array of machines, to push huge volumes of a wide array of products.

I think this could be two potentially very engaging new mechanics that could feel very different from the current industry mechanics (unique GUIs, not like teams that simply felt like an afterthought or almost a redundancy with decryptors).

Improvements to production seem to be limited to two areas: Reduced costs and increased speed.

Increased speed only benefits the larger producers. Over the years I've made maybe 200 billion on industry, and increased speed would be of little use to me, I'm not big enough at only a few billion a month. Increased speed would benefit just a few.

Reduced cost is problematic. If this new profession allows just a small cost reduction, then most players will not bother with the added complexity. For example, teams gave a cost reduction, and CCP just announced they are being pulled due to lack of player interest.

If the cost reduction is large, then you virtually force every industrialist to participate. It's no longer an interesting choice. If you don't put up with the added complexity, you make no profit. Now you are just adding complexity for the sake of complexity.

So although I find your idea interesting, I'm not sure there is a place for it.

Interesting idea. Perhaps the machines would not only depreciate but degrade over time. They would initially give you a certain percentage improvement when you first install and that improvement would fall to 0 over time.

Maybe even something like there is a burn in period. Say when optimized you get a 5% improvement but on initial install you only get 4%. It would have to be used for a time to ramp up to 5%. Could be used to replace the improvements that teams gave and the costs of improving your plant would make it a significant investment.

The trick is to balance so that it does not become "everyone must do this before you even start to compete" kind of thing.

All of this does add complexity but I think if there were a way to add in some player controlled ME boost outside of ME research it would be a good thing. Just make it very specialized so that you could set your factory up to give a bonus to making one kind of thing but not another.

Yeah... the complexity would be a problem for a solo/passive manufacturer type player.

Maybe there's a way to make it even more distinct, then, compared to industry as it is now.

Something where a "factory designer" can prototype and develop factory layouts and market them to the builders who either don't have the personal time, or don't have the corporate manpower to do that legwork themselves (passive solo manufacturers??). They can lease the floor space from the station owners (npc or players), build the factory, then rent the factory to the manufacturers. These manufacture types can then rent the prefabbed factories (or some other type of royalties to the designer??), use red frog for logistics, and continue on with their passive manufacturing business. Meanwhile the factory designers could market their factories based on their purposes ("general build - build all the things", "drones - low cost", "light hybrids - high volume"). It may even be possible to make it so that the "default" factory just works as it does today so then the solo/passive manufacturer can just ignore the new mechanic altogether and keep doing the same old things.

If the cost of machine capital is very high (as it should be), then creating a factory may be a high risk activity, so there may have to be some kind of contracting mechanic for facilities design so that people actually do it... not sure exactly how this could work unless we would hope that it would be player driven content using "trusted 3rd parties" (similar to how supers are bought and sold)... hmmm.... Could probably try writing up a list of brainstormed ideas for how the machine capital could work to reduce risk without being cheesy... but not here.

The dedicated hardcore industrialists who have the time can set up their own factories that are potentially more optimized or specialized for what they need and save on the royalties.

Big corporate operations could have a chief operations officer responsible for making their factories as optimized as possible for all of their product lines while other roles in the corporation would be specialized related to what to the market analyses of what to build (like it is now).

Additionally, now there's a whole new market segment for the actual machine design and manufacture.

The whole idea is to add a dimension to manufacturing where you can have agility in operations to adjust to the business environment while staying in a single market (if you want). As it is now, manufacturing is pretty 1 dimensional where you optimize your business by only using marketing tools. For example, the ability to switch between profitable markets as the markets evolve, or be very diverse and ride all the waves, or be in a high barrier to entry market. Regardless, these options are all market driven, rather than operations driven.

It does sound like a more complex version of teams that will be removed soon.

Have you considered that slotting Machine Capital into a blueprint would be something like adding meta items in Invention, which was also removed?