Player Features and Ideas Discussion

TLDR: Offset the excessive salvage material requirements for citadel rigs with the NPC goods found in Data Sites

Currently salvage makes rigs. Bigger ship; more salvage needed. That's logical. However, a large number of rigs are rather pointless (e.g. Capital Gravity Capacitor Upgrade II). Few pilots are going to waste a vital slot so no-one builds the rigs and the required components are rarely used. As a result, after 9 years, there's a massive glut of Charred/Micro Circuits and Conductive Thermoplastic lurking in hangars across New Eden.

CCP's solution in Building Your Citadel One Block at a Time: introduce new rigs which require massive quantities of said components.

Seems conceptually sound, but I see three problems:
a) The amount required is unrealistic even for large alliances (caveat: I understand that the details supplied by CCP so far are only indicative).
b) The new Citadel rigs will require materials which are needed for popular ship rigs (same caveat), thus reducing availability, driving up the prices for normal players and consequently constraining ship fitting flexibility.
c) It will exacerbate the problem of Relic Sites being much more valuable than Data Sites.

• So, for example, on point (a), there are around 3,500,000 Charred Micro Circuits on the market at the time of writing. Enough to help build 14 X-large Reprocessing Arrays. Maybe that's how many Keepstars CCP expect. Maybe not. But jump up to the Tech II version and you'll need 228,000 Micro Circuits. Currently there are a mere ~215,000 on the market in Jita so it might be difficult to build even one.
• On point (b) the same rig will require 600 Intact Armour Plates. Those could be used to make 200 Medium Trimark rigs...
• And on point (c): Average haul from -1.0 data site: ~2-3m isk. Average haul from -1.0 relic site: ~50m.

CCP could change the figures so it is actually possible to build these rigs, but that will reduce the cost, and they want to keep the build cost high. Fine. So instead, why not reduce the amount of salvage required and replace it with the pointless NPC goods that one finds in data sites (e.g. 'High Tech Data Chips'). This will give players a reason to collect (what is currently) junk and sell it, going some way to equalising the different value of Data and Relic sites. Should be a simple thing to do.

[I would also suggest changing useless rigs so they do something useful, which might have been a good way to address the glut, but that seems a bit too revolutionary.]

I enjoy doing relic sites. I also enjoy hunting my competitors in relic sites. I think salvage and rig prices are in a pretty good place right now.

I wish data sites were not the ugly ducklings of Eve. I think the solution is to make them a more attractive source of datacores versus other sources, rather than making all the worthless junk in them suddenly useful. But that works too, I suppose...

The thing is that CCP just recently added these High-tech xyz things to the Data sites without giving any use whatsoever to them. Even the carbon in Data/Relics is more useful than any High-tech drops because you can sell it for a proper price to NPC BOs. Thanks to the added drops of sleeper and COSMOS module things, Data sites have become somewhat valuable (got an 85M item out of 2 recently), but it's a highly random and volatile value. Giving these High-tech goods an actual usage scenario (for instance in Citadel rigs, components, modules, upgrades) and make them drop in higher quantities would add value to the Datas without compromising or conflicting with other items.

Yes I agree with that. With this proposal they would still be super hard to make, but just with different materials. At the moment CCP's proposal is calling for unrealistic quantities of a resource which is (a) difficult to gather reliably, and (b) is also used for ship rigs.


As I said, I get the idea. But salvage is not something we can grind. Aside from regional/racial variations, relic sites and wrecks are random, so 'mining' the resource effectively is not viable. Also, in some cases there aren't enough components on the market to build even one rig, so buying the parts won't work either.


4 months? The market supply after NINE years is not enough to make one rig. How is giving pilots 4 months notice going to rectify that? Some large/old alliances might have a pool, but 1,597,200 Tech II salvage components... really?


What I am proposing wouldn't make it easy, but with the right proportions of materials, it would make it achievable. It would also reduce demand on components needed to build rigs for ships and give players a reason to explore Data sites.

Need I remind all of the people saying T2 rigs will never be built that CCP believed there would never be more than a couple of dozen supercaps at most?

Interesting thought on this. What if rigs were not built totally from salvage but also used common minerals (& T2 rigs used T2 components).
Then you could have the volume of salvage needed not scale as ships get larger, but instead scale the base minerals/T2 components relative to ship size.
So a Capacitor rig uses the same salvage for any size.

It would need careful introduction to ease the supply/demand into the new method, but it would make introducing new things a lot easier, as you wouldn't be needing massive amounts of RNG generated material.

You'd probably need to blow up every T2 ship in the game to get enough salvage to achieve that. Okay, so maybe that's a slight exaggeration, but we're talking about a struggle to build even one XL rig for one citadel.

I rather hope your second theory is more accurate... or that they'll just modify the amounts... or hey, adopt my proposal!