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I don't see why T2 invention/manufacturing folks are complaining so much about the datacores.

The current R&D agent system strictly limits the number of cores you can earn per account. Once you've trained up everything to level 5, on all three toons (which takes a bloody long time, btw), you can't earn more cores unless you pay for more accounts. This has always been a bottleneck for T2 BPC invention.

Under the new system, you just join the winning faction, run missions to farm LP and stock up on the cores, at up to 4x cheaper than the base cost (since you are in the winning faction). More missions, more cores, no limit. As the tides of war shift, you quit and join the other faction, run missions to farm LP and stock up on the cores. Once again, more missions, more cores, no limit.

If you are worried about the standings, just put one alt in the Caldari/Amarr faction and another alt in the Gallente/Minmatar faction. Keep your main out of FW, and you don't need to worry about it.

Keep in mind, too, that you'll no longer need to train up a bunch of skills nor grind the standings to use the R&D agents, to farm datacores with an alt. You just need to be able to run the FW missions, which really aren't all that difficult, even with the risk of getting shot at by other players.

True, it isn't passive any more, but that's ok, since you should be able to easily farm a lot more datacores, in order to drive those T2 BPC invention crap shoots.

As for hauling them out of low sec, no BFD. Datacores aren't that bulky and a cloaky transport works fine. But, if you are too nervous to do it yourself, you can always courier contract it to the nearest high sec system, with someone like Black Frog.

And, finally, as far as losing out on all of the training time which you have put into those passive ISK generators, CCP Ytterbium stated:

"While our current intention is to turn datacore gathering into more of an active profession than it currently is, we will be following feedback closely to make sure players that invested time into Research corporations are not abandoned, most likely by making further changes to them in the next release."

Isn't this nice, esp. considering the fact that most of you (incl. me) have made back that original investment many times over already.... ;)

Rewards being proportional to the space each militia holds is the mechanism that makes the pendulum swing back.

As long as T2 ships are reasonably well balanced across races (which may or may not be true) and supply from R&D agents is relatively low (which will become true - those who have already paid the sunk cost of skill training will continue to farm but few will start new datacore alts) the economic incentive for each individual player should always be to join the losing side under the proposed system.

However, I would expect to see agreements between traders managing large stockpiles of datacores and militias regarding controlled sov changes - have amarr win for one month (buy cheap amarr datacores, sell expensive minmatar ones) and then let minmatar win for the next (sell expensive amarr datacores, buy cheap minmatar ones), ....

I'm deeply disapointed about the way you're get rid of R&D.



Did anyone here ever heard sucn words as investment or a passive income? Or there is only a working class?

Anyway, why don't just lower an RP/Day?

I agree that Mechanical Engineering datacores should be available in all factions' LP Stores. Here's a list of the total value of all datacores traded in The Forge (Jita) over the past year, sorted by the factions whose LP Stores they will be available in. Numbers are rounded to the nearest 100K datacores and billion ISK.

02.1 Million Datacores 0,147 Billion ISK Amarrian Starship Engineering
01.5 Million Datacores 0,180 Billion ISK Graviton Physics
02.7 Million Datacores 0,519 Billion ISK High Energy Physics
01.7 Million Datacores 0,364 Billion ISK Laser Physics
03.3 Million Datacores 0,820 Billion ISK Nanite Engineering

11.3 Million Datacores 2,030 Billion ISK Amarr Total

03.3 Million Datacores 0,217 Billion ISK Caldari Starship Engineering
03.6 Million Datacores 0,949 Billion ISK Hydromagnetic Physics
04.8 Million Datacores 0,954 Billion ISK Quantum Physics
03.2 Million Datacores 0,492 Billion ISK Rocket Science

14.9 Million Datacores 2,612 Billion ISK Caldari Total

01.6 Million Datacores 0,282 Billion ISK Electromagnetic Physics
08.7 Million Datacores 1,661 Billion ISK Electronic Engineering
03.1 Million Datacores 0,301 Billion ISK Gallantean Starship Engineering
01.2 Million Datacores 0,261 Billion ISK Plasma Physics

14.6 Million Datacores 2,505 Billion ISK Gallente Total

17.1 Million Datacores 3,710 Billion ISK Mechanical Engineering
03.0 Million Datacores 0,619 Billion ISK Minmatar Starship Engineering
03.0 Million Datacores 0,639 Billion ISK Molecular Engineering
02.5 Million Datacores 0,549 Billion ISK Nuclear Physics

25.6 Million Datacores 5,517 Billion ISK Minmatar Total

The changes described in the blog will obviously have an affect on supply and demand, and the prices of datacores, so the numbers above could change significantly, but it's a guide. Mechanical Engineering datacores are clearly a special case due to their being used in all T2 ship invention as others have pointed out.

Also, it seems a little strange that Graviton Physics has been assigned to Amarr, since most current Graviton Physics R&D agents are Caldari (37 compared to just 1 Amarr agent, 3 if you include Ammatar agents), and items with graviton/gravimetric in the name have generally been associated with Caldari technology (graviton smartbombs, gravimetric sensors, graviton pulse generator component etc.)

I also agree that the LP payout formula for ship kills looks like it could potentially be exploitable at the moment, though that depends on how the terms in the formula are calculated, which isn't explained in the blog.

As Kusum Fawn said, if the 'Market Value' term for fitted and transported items is based on averages of actual market values, then it would be possible to pick some low value, rarely traded item, purchase all the available units in every region (not difficult for a cheap unpopular item), relist them all at massively inflated prices, wait for the new price to begin affecting the Market Average (perhaps trading the item a few times between alts), and then put the item on a ship in a rival faction and destroy it repeatedly to farm LP. If this kind of trick would require large amounts of ISK and organisation then it could perhaps be ignored, but if the formula applies to the market value of every item in the game then this would be trivially easy to do. The problem could be lessened by making the formula more opaque or introducing complicated terms to exclude outlier prices, but as long as the price is in some way tied to actual market values and covers a broad range of items, there will inevitably be holes in it and people will find a way to exploit them.

An alternative would be to tie the prices to fixed base values (though obviously this worked poorly with mineral prices and led to the insurance fraud problem), or to calculate the item's value not from the market price for the item itself but the average price of the materials it refines to or are required to manufacture it. Those materials (minerals, moon materials etc.) will tend to be more difficult to manipulate and easier to monitor for exploits. Exceptions could be made for NPC traded items such as skillbooks and blueprints, which could have values fixed at the NPC price.

If these problems can be resolved though, or even if cargo and fittings are excluded from the calculation and payouts are based entirely on insurance values, I think this formula should form the basis for the new bounty system and the mercenary contracts that have been discussed. The presentations in Reykjavik stressed a desire to encourage PvP and use of mercenaries with changes to the war system and new features, so with that in mind I'd allow players to take out public and private contracts on individuals, corporations or alliances that would establish a fixed pot of ISK in escrow to be paid out to mercenaries and bounty hunters for destroying targets based on this formula. The FW LP formula could fix the upper limit of payouts to prevent gaming the system, and contracts could allow the flexibility to offer rewards based on a percentage of that upper limit, and to include or exclude certain ship types or fittings/cargo.

From what I read, correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I read everyone who gets datacores now will STILL be able to get datacores post-Inferno. In fact, they serve as a baseline, keeping prices from going too deep into the gutter. So if a side has crapy LP towards datacores atm, it will actually be cheaper to get them from non-FW people. Am I reading that wrong or is everyone just missing that?

Assuming that invention requirements aren't changing...

WTF with Winmatar getting Mech Eng?!?

Given how broadly those 'cores are used that pretty much gives everyone - including the 24th Crusade - reasons for wanting the Matari to win.

While this is a massive advantage in minmatar datacore LP store you need to look at this as a whole of the LP store.

If we looked just at electronics (cpu upgrades, ew modules etc.) we would see the LP stores are massively out of balance. In a view of the total overall balance of LP stores is this gonna unbalance them further?

I don't think so (though this may not help the situation with gallente LP stores).


If we wanted the races to be perfectly even for datacores then we'd want all LP store item types to be equal for all races and I don't see that happening nor do I want to.

I just read the DevBlog and I have some concerns regarding the "Research agents and datacore changes".
Getting rid of the field multiplier is a plus (as have been done in the past with Agent Quality). But charging a " small 10,000 ISK fee per datacore to ensure there is a small cost tied to their retrieval" has no meaning. Basic market tactics (even in RL) is to roll the increasing cost to the clients. Thus this will only lead to increasing datacores prices and datacore farming can keep on being passive.

Proposal:
You want to make researching more active? Disrupt the datacore production in random times and make the Research Agent send a notification to the player, that his attention is needed and assign the player a task (you have this already implemented) in order for the datacore production to continue. This will make even me (a station trader) to hop on my ship and fly to the system where I have the Research in progress.

Just my .2 ISK

Bah, just throw a 280mm arty II on your Scimitar along with the three large reps, load tremor for nice range, and whore away!

For Guardians, a flight of warrior II's will do the trick.

Oh yeah, datacores are currently free money, all right: I have 6 characters with 5 research agents each, each having to do 50+ jumps - some in lowsec - to exchange their RPs for DCs and then move them to areas where the buyers are, and with that, I don't make enough money to pay for even one of my 2 accounts.

If you want to balance DCs, how about changing agent locations around a bit? Caldqri R&D agents are in Caldari space, and naturally Minmatar R&D agents are also in Caldari space. Huh?