EVE General Discussion

I'm well aware of what my research/science skills can be used for, however you seem to be missing the secondary effects of this change.

T2 Science skills are relatively high rank (5-8) compared to most skills in EVE.

Most datacore science skills have limited purpose.

Those science skills that do have another purpose e.g. starship engineering, have very limited in their scope.

Take T2 BPO research, the need for this has ended. There is little ongoing ME/PE research of T2 BPO.

Manufacturing T2 typically requires only level 1 in the science skill for Research the skills needs to be 4/5.

There will be a rapid rise in datacore prices, Invention will be crippled as increasingly uncompetitive against T2 BPOs.


That leaves, what uses exactly...?

I think you are just missing the bigger picture.

Sure people are complaining about the time spent training the skills. Even if they didn't train all to lv5 its a massive amount of time and ISK. It's just the same as if someones skilled for a capital, and then CCP cut the effective damage in half. Skill trianing = time = isk = subscription time/$$$. It's not just skills either, you spend a great deal of time grinding missions to get the standing in order to run the lv4 agents. The agents for a particular corp are not anywhere near each other, so you have incredible amount of time spent in running those missions. People with the mind to maximize their T2 industry obviously run alts for more RP generation, sure. You can't possibly get enough datacores from a single toon to have a very profitable T2 production. If these alts were not out there generating RP for datacores, just imagine how much more expensive your T2 mods would be.

Not only is it just the fact that they are cutting the RP in half, they are putting datacore access into the hands of players that have nothing to do with T2 invention, or production at all. These players didn't train anything, or spend any isk for skills, yet they will benefit from the T2 producers who need the datacores. So there is a logical basis for the all the complaints. Whether people are voicing them with regards to the whole picture or not, it's all relevant.

Some people are actually suggesting that this will lower the cost of datacores on the market, and it very well may. That is only up to the point that the lp conversion rate is more profitable than other lp rewards. Is this really a good thing anyway, the reduction of cost in datacores? This very well could also have the affect of enticing many more people into T2 production, because of the lower cost of the datacores. Thus driving down prices of T2 modules and cutting into profit margins. Now your talking decimating, not just my generated datacores, but the sole bases of what I have been training a character for over the last year and a half - T2 production.

The fact of the matter is... they are skrewing over one part of the population (the ones that actually use the datacores) in favor of another. The latter of which doesn't have any basis for generation of datacores. Where does datacores through an LP store fit within the New Eden model?

It's virtually all been said, and the complaints are all in this forum topic. Will CCP listen though? Likely not. Social engineering sucks in RL and it's just as bad in EVE.

Am I understanding it right? "Research" is not made an active gameplay venue, but datacores' influx from it is to be nerfed. And there's another way to get them by shooting things, not connected to any science?
I really don't think it's a good change.

All i know is this: I have two accts, 1 combat char on each, rest of the slots are RnD alts. If this change goes thru, my option is pretty simple... Transfer the second combat char to the first acct, and close the second acct

Sure ccp gets a plex outta me for the transfer, but theyll have to eat the second acct sub loss

Not mad... Shrug... Just sayin...

No, I didn't miss the bigger picture. I simply wasn't addressing the bigger picture. I was talking about SP refunds for Lvl 5 Research Project Management.

I'll repeat for the third time: You speculated on the value of Lvl 5; conditions changed. Why is that worth a refund?

As you say, the situation is quite comparable to training for combat skills. I might get excited about this month's FOTM combat ship. So I spend three months training to fly that ship. Then they release a new expansion, things get rebalanced, and suddenly the FOTM ship I trained for is last month's flavour. Do I get my training time back?

And we can even make a direct analogy within this expansion: Let's say in December some kid noticed that Incursions are paying out like crazy, and so develops the ambition to become an elite incursion runner. He tries to join a fleet and gets told: Go away, don't come back until you can fly XYZ. So he fires up his skill-queue and spends 4 months training XYZ. Then May rolls around and all of a sudden Incursions have been nerfed and all the cool kids are doing something else. Does he get his training time back?

R&D agents hand out datacores, not ISK. They are market commodities who's value is determined by the market. There was never a guarantee that you'd get X amount of ISK from your investment in Research Project Management 5. The market is always affected by rebalancing. The value of individual skills is always affected by rebalancing.


I was talking about SP refunds. How is this related to that? If you are bitter about how spread out R&D agents are, that sounds like a completely different discussion to the Inferno changes.

And in fact, my understanding is that Inferno will actually provide more opportunity to get datacores from nearby LP stores. If you don't like to travel and have been running missions for datacores anyway, this might benefit you.


I was specifically addressing the issue of SP refunds which some people seem to feel entitled to. This paragraph and the rest of your post engages in rebutting arguments which I didn't make.

There's a lot of us in that situation. I have recently started training this character for DC farming, and with the current changes I will simply not renew my subscription. Why invest over 2b worth of gametime/ISK into a character and wait 4 years to see a return on that investment, if I can just farm the datacores with my normal character, doing missions?

So basically all I got from reading this thread, CCP wants more players involved in PVP. Great. So they are taking all the reasons that the non pvp people, who like the industrial side, stay playing the game. Not Great. It takes all theses non pvpers to provide the ships and equipment necessary for the pvp people to play and not spend their time building their own ship. I, for one and not the only one, don't plan on renewing my subscriptions if that is the case. By making R&D items accessible to the FW only (or reduced prices), you just created yet another isk faucet. If anything you should have given it to them as a balancing factor to the R&D agents to keep people from abusing the passiveness of them. Additionally, actually make the research stop (as someone suggested) when you don't do the R&D mission.

No matter how you play it, there will always be people who don't want to pvp regardless of how you try and punish them.

I just don't get it. There are so many things that needs to be fixed and here they go brake something that is currently working. Isk is a passive income after you spent a lot of time and isk to get it. There is no need to nerf it again and again. DC prices have dropped in the past years. Nobody that is today getting datacore passive is suddenly going to start doing FW, and this is a FACT.

Worst part is that its to late to do anything about it now. How do this new ideas get approved when there is so much to do that is constantly left unfinished?

At this point I'd wished that i spent all the time I've spent on R&D in Incursions instead. I only feel empty thinking about hours and days I've spent getting level 4 agents to all my chars. Probably wasted 1 year on R%D on all char on my accounts. Wow its feels insane to say this. 1 freaking year on all my accounts. LOL just freaking insane. This is probably the first time i feel like rage quitting.

Also CCP Soundwaves i have a present to give you for all your HARD WORK, i KNOW it fits PERFECT on your head.

https://encrypted-tbn1.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSATomRud07FzIeCq2kyFHw89QOgS9N5iJcYsxLaA8EdBsLFseKcg

Urgg Boolean is spot-on.

But also, let's talk about demand generated for PLEX sold via in-game mechanisms in the context of Xython's example. Here, we have a player (aka, the farmer) with his datacore farming alts who sold his goods to a willing buyer for ISK. The farmer now puts up a buy order for a couple of PLEX or cruises the forum-based Timecode bazaar in order to fulfill his subscription.

Separately, some poor slob with disposable income IRL buys a bunch of PLEX and / or GTCs with RL currency from either CCP or one of their partners. CCP profits and gets currency to pay bills, attorneys to manage layoffs, etc.

The poor slob then sells those PLEX or timecodes to the farmer for ISK in order to buy bling ships and other ego-boosting hardware. The poor slob *also* pays for his subscription with RL currency because he can't be arsed to go ratting or manage a trade alt. His decision and a valid form of play, right?

You see where this is headed? CCP makes RL bank no matter whether a player buys PLEX with ISK or if a player pays a re-occurring subscription fee with RL currency.

If CCP management has some twisted notion that the farmer is magically going to pay cash for his subscriptions instead of buying PLEX with ISK, then they have their heads buried so far up Hilmar's ass that the next stop is his pyloric valve.

Instead, CCP needs to come up with far more creative and compelling ideas for its players to want to buy PLEX. Create some amazing new class of implants or ships that players *must* have. Re-jigger some existing aspect of the game that makes it full of awesome. Etc.

What about skins on ship? You can do it on Tanks for gold. Why not on ships for PLEX?

p.s. sorry for the thread hijack, but I read so many posts where people have no idea of how PLEX work.

I spent a SICK amount of time to grind the standings I needed to become independant in terms of Datacores. Now I have access to ALL agents and I swith around which ones (Yeah I got 6 research jobs also which took too much fricking time to set up).

Compared to the time spent on maxing out Learning skills, this time investement was huge.

Most of the corps have very few agents and some of them lack Lvl 3 agents. Imagine grinding lvl 2 missions to get your standings up so you can use a lvl 4 agent.


So if CCP and players like you THINK it took no player input and no loss of income during this time from my other endevours then please:


THINK again.

CCP: I (and I think more people also) am not "farming" Datacores for anything else then myself and my own science and industrial projects. So if you gonna nerf them, find a way to make them worthless in terms of isk but don't flust the investment in time and effort some of us has made down the drain. That would be twice as mean as when you nerfed my SP training speed.