Player Features and Ideas Discussion

So I've been doing PI for a while now, and I've greatly appreciated all the changes CCP has made to it in the past. Recently, because I was the most experienced PI using player we have in the corp, I was designated the PI controller for my corp and made responsible for gathering enough materials through PI to keep our towers running. This was a big change for me, before now I was at best a casual PI user, no real output goals in mind with no consequences if I didn't meet a specific quota of materials per day. Now if I don't make a specific amount of materials per day at the end of the month our towers end up going offline and we need to buy fuel for them which is more costly than we'd like.

I run 10 planets across 2 characters and after my initial investment of 6+ hours for first setting up those 10 planets and because we're in hisec with no really rich planets in the area each day I spend at least an hour, sometimes 2, moving extractor heads or dismantling and rebuilding processors and storage facilities just to ensure I'm getting the maximum yield from my PI. My corp members have offered to help me out by supplying me with some of the PI materials we need, but many of them are far less patient with PI than I am and are unwilling to setup and check on more than a single planet once a week so it's not really making a dent in the effort I need to expend on PI everyday.

Over the past week I've realized that of the 1 hour or more I spend per day more than half of that time is spent simply moving extractor heads around to find the best yield in range. The rest of the time I spend is dedicated to tearing down structures and moving them when the local resources are depleted, which on about half the planets I use needs to be done every 2nd or 3rd day. Both of these tasks are extremely tedious and I can't blame my corpmates for not wanting to bother with them more than once a week. For example, dismantling a single building requires 3 clicks and about a second's waiting time for the 'Proceed' button to appear once you click Dismantle. When you need to do this for 10+ buildings it can easily take a whole minute of your time. This may not sound like much to some people, but that's just the dismantling process, to place the buildings at the new site requires another 2 clicks and a few seconds to find an optimal spot for placement, then add in another 7 or 8 clicks to complete setup of a processor, another 3-4 clicks to setup a supply route from a storage facility or extractor, all told you'll easily spend an entire minute and many clicks on a single processor when you need to move it. You'll spend significantly less time placing Spaceports and Storage facilities, and significantly more time moving Extractor Control Units since you need to replace all the extractor heads when moving. All of this time spent is tedious and uninteresting, it's not fun or engaging and it feels more like work than it does a game.

When I realized how much time I was spending on PI, and how much I was beginning to hate doing it, it occurred to me that the entire process would be far less tedious if there was a way to automate certain functions and a way to allow us to actually move structures instead of dismantling and rebuilding them. To that end I did some brainstorming and came up with an idea for 2 new skills to be added to the Planet Management school:

Extractor Automation (x6): Each level of this skill will allow your Extractor Control Units to automatically place 2 extractor heads at an optimal position for harvesting yield. (Pri: Int, Sec: Mem)

At level 5 it would automatically place all 10 extractor heads that a Control Unit is capable of controlling. The automatic placement would occur when the head is deployed and could be manually adjusted afterwards. In effect this would allow us to simply place the Extractor Control Unit within range of resources, pick which resource to harvest and then click to deploy as many extractor heads as we wish. Instead of the heads being deployed in a circle around the Control Unit they would be placed within the control area where they will get the best yield without interfering with previously deployed extractor heads. I suggest the skill be an x6 skill because at that rate most players will only take the skill to lvl4 and still have to deploy 2 heads manually and x6 would make it the longest train among PI skills.

Infrastructure Relocation (x4): Skill at moving planetary structures.
Level 1: Allows you to relocate Storage Facilities and Basic Industry Facilities
Level 2: Allows you to relocate Extractor Control Units
Level 3: Allows you to relocate Spaceports and Advanced Industry Facilities
Level 4: Allows you to relocate High-Tech Production Plants and Facility Group movement
Level 5: Allows you to relocate Planetary Command Centers
(Pri: Mem, Sec: Int)

The skill would allow you to unanchor planetary structures and drag and drop them around the planet without undoing the selection of schematics from Industry Facilities or the loss of stored materials within the structures. Each level of the skill grants you access to relocate more complex planetary structures. Before level 4 unanchoring a structure would automatically break any Links connected to the structure, deleting any routes associated with it. At level 4 the links would remain active along with any routes as long as the linked structures are also unanchored before the structure is moved. This way once you reach level 4 you'd be able to unanchor all your structures except the command center and drag the entire array of structures around the planet and drop it where you want it to be. You would still need to pay the fee for building a new structure when you reanchor the structure at its new location, but you would be able to save any stored resources along with schematic selection and routes and links which would save hundreds of clicks per day and a lot of time.

I think adding these skills would make PI a lot easier to stomach for a lot of the player base. It would make PI more popular, and would probably have some effect on the market prices of PI goods.

But the best effect I can think it would have in the long run is, because more players would be willing to do PI, it would mean more PI structures to fight over for Dust players in the future. More EVE players doing PI is going to mean more contracts for Dust players to look at for jobs for their Merc Corps. This benefits everyone!