Assembly Hall

There are a number of pressing issues with boosters and why they simply aren't worth manufacturing/utilizing by comparison to simply purchasing them from an NPC manufacturer.

To begin, in brief, they are difficult to make and require a hefty amount of startup isk to efficiently produce even the weakest variants. To that end, their usage is largely dependant on the person using them and not the person who is manufacturing them. Further adding to the ailments that come with boosters is that the materials required for them can only come from Ladar sites - which requires a specialization in and of itself to successfully reap the rewards (minor as they may be) from.



Start off by buying or manufacturing a Control Tower that is capable of running all of the necessary starbase structures that will allow you to produce boosters. This can be as little as 200,000,000 isk just to get the base set up, not including fuel costs.

To add onto this issue it's not practical to set this tower up in High-Sec (if at all, not sure if you're even capable of setting up drug labs in high sec) what with the illegality of your product (unless it's synth). Tack on the cost of factional starbase charters (as well as standings with said faction).

Finally, to make the issue of high-sec drug manufacture even more difficult is that you simply CANNOT get past customs at the gates. Where-ever you set up your manufacturing starbase, that's where you'll be selling your product from now on.



Okay, so let's try Low-Sec. Now you have an entire entourage of other difficulties. There are simply no real restrictions preventing a pirate corp (or someone who's role-playing as a CONCORD lackey) from removing your starbase from the equation entirely, so now you have to defend it. How do you do that? Tack on the cost of turrets and/or have a sizable amount of friends who are willing to back your project up.

Now we've run into another issue - and that's whether or not risking ships/pods is even worth defending such a finicky project in the first place. Your only customer base is in Low-sec/Null-sec as you can't effectively get your product into high-sec and, let's face it, there's NPC drug production going on that is always going to best you.

Considering that all of this is going on while you're trying to find a (unreliable, mind you) source of materials and you'll probably wind up spending more isk, time and effort just making the boosters in the first place.



On the assumption that you're lucky enough to get a safe, consistent means of producing Boosters you're now going to have to find a buyer. This is a horrid process by itself as the high end boosters have side-effects/drawbacks which make their usage a little less rewarding. You have a chance, at random, of gaining one of four major side-effects if you botch it. There are skills to reduce the severity of these effects and to reduce their chance - but shaving a 20% likeliness down to 15% isn't all that rewarding, especially when the severity of such side effects are based on similar scales. For the record, those numbers are at both skills at level 5.

In today's world, products aren't made to revolutionize the world anymore. Innovations are made to make products more effective and efficient, money is spent to reduce costs and difficulties. So how do we do all of that to make Boosters viable in New Eden? Here's some ideas.

1.) We need a way to manufacture/produce boosters (at least low end ones) without needing a starbase.

2.) The chance and severity of a booster's side effect shouldn't reflect the users skill, but the manufacturers ability to craft it, or used in tandem with the user's skills.

3.) There needs to be a method of getting illegal products into high-sec with some manner of success that we, the players, can affect the chances of. See my thread on smuggling: [Proposal] Revamp Contraband/Customs Scans!

4.) Materials used to make boosters should reflect how powerful the booster itself is. Two ways we can do this is to decrease the difficulty in procuring said materials (such as alchemy with moon goo) or to increase the amount of materials currently in the universe.

EDIT: Spoke with another player about the Ladar Gas Clouds and a really good idea that came up was to have the gas clouds both more frequent and a bit more static in the form of actually acting as part of the nebula of the particularly region. Sort of like asteroid belts but not so much. This would incentivize the production and usage of boosters to a "I'm going into combat, I -need- this advantage" regularity.