EVE General Discussion

As I stated, the fundamental difference between an extraction/P1 planet and R&D agents is the temporary nature of the PI setup versus the perpetual nature of RP accumulation. You appear to agree with me on that point.

So the basic change required to make R&D "not passive" would be to switch to projects which will eventually stop.

Is that a statement you can agree with?

It is the same thing, silly troll. Research projects which need to be started, just like extractors need to be started. Projects which run for a set time frame, like extractors do. Projects which accumulate a bunch of value, like extractors do.

Now you get to tell me how they are not the same thing. Please explain carefully, since I am easily confused.

So if RP only accumulated through commissioning limited duration research projects, that requires no input? But starting extractors requires input? I am not sure what you are missing in this scenario.

YOUR ARE TEH DUMB

Moon goo is being reworked into the PI interface, you'll now have to aim your harvester at hot spots on the moon with a maximum 4 hour cycle time.

By focussing only on the part you wish to respond to, you deliberately excised the portions of my post that described what I was talking about. What I was talking about is the minimal change that would be required to make datacore farming just as interactive as PI extraction, as opposed to ripping datacore farming out of the hands of the players who have invested time and effort into the science skills required.

…because I don't care about how it could be done — I care about how it is done and how some silly people are trying to claim that it's not passive, even though we all know that it's exactly that passive nature that has made everyone+dog use it.

To correct the silly notion that some people are having about how RP accumulation is not passive.

Exactly, and it's not that mechanic that is being nerfed. It is R&D agent productivity that is being nerfed, while the perpetual accrual of RP continues. There is now even less incentive to interact with the agents more regularly than once every year or so.

To my mind there is a distinction between "passive" (meaning, no/little interference required) and "active" (meaning that interaction is required). There are already "passive" activities in the game such as most POS activities (stick a Titan BPO in to research, come back in a few months), PI (set an extraction + processing cycle to go for a week, come back next weekend to collect) and slow-sell market trading (pick a price point, set the orders, wait for orders to be fulfilled). The "active" activities are the ones that require the player to be logged on for the activity to continue: space combat, salvaging, mining, etc (the typical flying in space activities), along with scamming (though most scammers are actually chat bots spamming their scam contracts every minute or two).

The fundamental difference between PI extraction and RP gathering is that once you start RP gathering, it doesn't stop of its own accord. That's all CCP needs to fix. Moving data cores to FW is nothing more than "mining with guns". CCP Soundwave protests of course, because he wants to move T2 production to low sec and null sec, and using data cores as a nice shiny bauble to lure people into FW appeals to him as a "good thing" (I know I certainly feel safer knowing the people I'm flying with are in it for the LP, not the good fights).

Well, there are a lot of activities in Eve which are pretty passive in the sense of not requiring too much intervention.

The difference that I see with R&D agents is that they are so open-ended. All those other activities, invention jobs, PI, etc., are time limited. If you want to maintain your income, you need to come back to them periodically and start them up again, maybe having gathered some raw materials to initiate the process in the meantime.

I suppose you could argue that optimizing your datacore collection (whose value depends on the going market price for datacore types) also involves occasional tweaking. I haven't played that game - I always had the impression that the prices are stable enough that it is not worth the effort, but could be wrong about that.

But even without optimal adjustments, you still get a pretty good linearly increasing return on datacores, whereas PI just stops producing if you ignore it. It's a pretty low threshold of "activity", but still an important one, I think.

I agree that the current adjustment doesn't seem to accomplish much except annoy people. It keeps the broken system in place, and devalues it by moving R&D resource gathering to ... FW pilots?? It seems like an easily implemented solution to a couple of unrelated objectives, but one which doesn't solve any problem particularly well.

To my thinking, the best option would be to remove RP accumulation entirely and replaced with some kind of activity (like PI or other manufacturing) that requires some periodic intervention in order to continue to reap rewards. And the rewards should be at the same level or increased over current - I'm not looking to nerf industrialist's income, just the process of datacore farming. I assume this would require more dev time than they wanted to spend this expansion, so they went for something quick and dirty.

I'm no industrialist, though, and can't say what you guys would find fair or fun. I just don't see that datacore farming is particularly fun anyway, and guess it would not be missed if it were properly replaced.