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New dev blog: Starbase happy fun time

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Ethilia
Freelance Excavation and Resistance
#541 - 2011-11-07 23:42:04 UTC
I agree with the following sentiments:

0. I really look forward to short setup / tear down times for PoS mods!!
1. Failure to think of the obvious: A. the solution to switching fuel types, and B. the solution that makes keeping faction tower fuel bonuses is VERY hard to believe. My current hypotheses in descending order of likelihood are: a. you want to get rid of fuel bonuses for faction towers (to make large alliances who can't afford 100's of faction towers happy??), b. you spent 0 time thinking of a solution, c. you're gibbering idiot.
2. The variable usage of liquid ozone and heavy water for PoS that don't fully utilize their CPU/Pwr is a good thing and should not be removed. The extra time spent hauling this stuff is A. dull boring work and B. a lot longer than a simple calculation that at least keeps my brain active.
3. You're making it a lot harder on WH denizens. In addition to hauling the current fuel into a WH, we now need haul in extra heavy water and liquid ozone and dedicate time and manufacturing capacity to making fuel blocks. Alternatively, we could haul all our PI out of the WH and haul in fuel blocks (this is even worse).
4. Fuel blocks should either require no skills to produce at 100% efficiency or should be produced FAR faster.
5. Fuel blocks should have separate colors.
6. Fuel blocks are a good idea.
7. You should post the changes you are thinking of making well before you've started implementing them. It's like you people don't have a single software engineer on staff. The first thing you do is layout the design and implementation which REQUIRES community feedback BEFORE you start coding changes. The obvious result of failing to make proposed changes public before coding is that you will inevitably have to go back and change / hack / dump the code you've already written or ignore the community's wishes.
Louis deGuerre
The Dark Tribe
#542 - 2011-11-07 23:42:39 UTC
I predict problems in 0.0 with the lack of manufacturing capability.

Also, I curse the person who beat me to it with the transformers reference ! Lol
Doctor Ungabungas
Doomheim
#543 - 2011-11-07 23:44:13 UTC  |  Edited by: Doctor Ungabungas
Ethilia wrote:
The first thing you do is layout the design and implementation which REQUIRES community feedback BEFORE you start coding changes.


Ahaha.

If nothing else, this thread has proven two things: 1) Most pubbies don't even have time to read the whole post before ranting about how fuel costs are now 4 times as expensive for small POS and 2) you are all terrible people with terrible ideas and the day that eve is 'consensus driven' is the day we have a 'everything is free but only for mission running' game.
HelicoBacter
Pandemic Horde Inc.
Pandemic Horde
#544 - 2011-11-07 23:45:26 UTC
Spergison wrote:
First, I'd like to say one thing that really really worries me before I address the ideas in this post.

These types of market changing updates -however small they may be- need to be managed better.

This information needs to be protected and released at a scheduled time so that all players have a fair chance at being notified. Changing market mechanics can't be haphazardly discussed like this.

CSM members, or CCP players that may be aware of these ideas well before they are implemented may place orders for affected commodities and sell on the speculation bubbles these announcements create.

This is along the lines of Don't fly what you can't afford to lose...
Trust no-one, including CCP.

/Tinfoil Hat

Now to the meat of the idea, specifically the fuel blocks.

A lot of people have said this and I'm gonna have to agree. Most of the changes you've been working on make large alliance life easier or more interesting and seem to be focused on stirring up the big sov world. At the same time you're working on making the beginning-game enticing to new players. As a less-than-a-year-old guy what I see is that you're bringing sov mechanics to the game as a whole. Every noob corp that dreams of its own POS, or noob player who wants to delve in PI or moon goo now has to take into account the local PI market and taxes at customs. The cost of stepping out as a POS holding entity will be enourmously increased by the customs offices and now the fuel reqs. If you can't fuel a tower at fuel utilization, you can't play little empire builder.

As a WH resident and sometime fuel bay admin for a few towers, I am not happy with the recent changes in wspace PI and POS fueling. Both changes are perhaps nifty for large alliance kspace folks, but they make wspace more complicated and risky. You just took the math out of the logistics runs for people who don't make their own fuel and transferred it to the people who make fuel, which is 99% of all WH dwellers, and increased fuel use significantly. Our fueling is now more expensive and more complicated.

IMHO make a new product that has some tangible benefit besides 'math iz hard' so people can choose to use the new fuel or not. Smaller perhaps, or globally burnable (works with all faction towers regardless of 'tope type). Or make it so the POS always uses the same amount of fuel but can be fueled without this new 'convenient' product.
Otherwise the goals of self sufficiency in localized areas are not being served by this idea and the smaller enclaves of players are being penalized with yet more clicking and basically a barely simplified spreadsheet. Right now we stuff PI into the tower, sell excess occasionally for beer money, and make risky runs for ice products. Soon we will need to make and anchor customs modules, defend them, set up another array, and change our math to burn more fuel than we burn right now. that is not happy fun time. This is spend more to spend more to risk more to click more to get what we already have.

My idea of happy fun time involves addressing roles and rights for us content creators so we can work together better. One of the biggest barriers to player interaction is the levels of mistrust the Corporation and POS roles create. The ONLY way to assign any type of access control in a POS involves putting the entire station at risk. You need to make it easier for us to trust each other when we want to involve more pilots in our endevours. This is why WH corps require personal POS, New Eden has FTL travel but can't put padlocks on ships.

How about 'Dock for Self' and 'Dock for Corp' in the SMAs, with a corp role that can undock/pilot any ship in a given SMA?

How about repackaging things in a CHA, or swapping subsystems without having to go to kspace. Or anchorable personal hangars instead of a bunch of cans when you're hiking.

My crystal ball, dusty as it may be, shows me a future where PI products are the new technetium, regional production is monopolized by large alliances and coalitions, and the startup and maintenance cost for any corp wanting a POS is prohibitively high.



ccp loook at this :P and learn
Scrapyard Bob
EVE University
Ivy League
#545 - 2011-11-07 23:46:12 UTC
Raid'En wrote:
stocks of heavy water on high sec systems of all regions of new eden have been bought and relisted at 100-200 isk / unit...


Which will come back down within a few weeks as people find out that the sky is not falling.

If you're a POS owner, and you don't maintain a strategic stockpile of at least 3 weeks of fuel needs - then you deserve to be at the mercy of every whipsaw in the market. If you had maintained a stockpile, you could just ride out a short-term price spike and buy again when prices inevitably fall.

Heck, maintaining a 2 month stockpile of POS fuel has never been a bad idea. Buy when it's low, ride out the wave, maybe sell off a week or two of your supply at the peak of the wave, buy again when it drops. (I know a lot of corps that work with 3-6 month stockpiles in order to keep their fuel prices managed.)
Rek Esket
Sebiestor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#546 - 2011-11-07 23:48:44 UTC
Louis deGuerre wrote:
I predict problems in 0.0 with the lack of manufacturing capability.

Also, I curse the person who beat me to it with the transformers reference ! Lol


With Industry 5 and the 25% reduction in build time from an Ammunition Assembly Array, single run of pellets would take 6 minutes. With 5 assembly slots per array, that one POS module is capable of providing 200 pellets per hour.

This would power 50 control towers by itself, without the benefit of reduced cost due to Sov.
Esrevid Nekkeg
Justified and Ancient
#547 - 2011-11-07 23:51:03 UTC
Pretty good blog, I'm happy with most changes.

There is only one thing me and my fellow corp members really do not like.
We have a faction-pos in W-space. Some of the PI fuel materials we produce ourselves in system, the rest we import when there is a suitable exit.
Now, the very reason we decided to use a faction-pos is to reduce the amount in m3 we have to import to run the tower for X-time. Less m3 to import through a wormhole is less change it collapses on you before you made all the import/export runs you want (and often need) to make.

Many different (partial) solutions have been pondered upon in this thread and I have honestly no idea which one is viable to implement. You are the code wizards that effectively have to 'make it so'. So please at least look at possible solutions. And then implement one.
That would make me and the rest of the corp really really happy.


Please?

Here I used to have a sig of our old Camper in space. Now it is disregarded as being the wrong format. Looking out the window I see one thing: Nothing wrong with the format of our Camper! Silly CCP......
Smoking Blunts
ZC Omega
#548 - 2011-11-07 23:55:26 UTC
Rek Esket wrote:
Louis deGuerre wrote:
I predict problems in 0.0 with the lack of manufacturing capability.

Also, I curse the person who beat me to it with the transformers reference ! Lol


With Industry 5 and the 25% reduction in build time from an Ammunition Assembly Array, single run of pellets would take 6 minutes. With 5 assembly slots per array, that one POS module is capable of providing 200 pellets per hour.

This would power 50 control towers by itself, without the benefit of reduced cost due to Sov.


yeh might as well attach an ammo assembly at every pos now, your paying for the cpu/grid anyhow

OMG when can i get a pic here
Raid'En
#549 - 2011-11-07 23:56:40 UTC  |  Edited by: Raid'En
quick proposition from everything i read :
* change numbers to produce and consume 10x more unit, so faction / sov can be useful
* change volume of pellets so that ozone and h water almost don't count while compressed on these bucks, so that hauling issue on these is removed
* change required h water and ozone to what is the medium of all used pos (for example 66% of maximum), so that it's more fair for everyone, (and avoid the market manipulation :p)
* change production time to 1/4-1/10 so that it's not that much on an issue on null/w-space were slots are limited
* change the icones so that the 4 factions colors are used
Icarus Helia
State War Academy
Caldari State
#550 - 2011-11-08 00:09:33 UTC  |  Edited by: Icarus Helia
I would like to support the increased granularity idea, and suggest (or support?) the idea to make them refinable at 0 loss at pos refineries.

for those of you complaining about the heavy water and liquid ozone flat rate - unless you offline all of your guns this really wont affect you by more than a couple mil per month even on a large tower. The real benefit was in the reduction in m3 of fuel to increase fueling period, which has been compensated for appropriately by increasing fuel bay size.

At first I was unhappy with the idea of needing to assemble my fuel, as this adds extra hassle for me, but soon got over myself and realized that for most people this greatly simplifies the entire process (even for lonely highsec scientists). Soon after that I remembered that the new onlining and offlining times on pos modules are incredibly short, and will make onlining an assembly array for a few hours one day each month seem like no big deal.

TL;DR - increase granularity to preserve fuel usage benefits, otherwise great work CCP. Whiny people shut your pie holes and read this post.

PS - MODULAR POS IN THE PIPES?! no more bouncing around in a sea of giant invisible object radii? please make it so.

Why you no care?
Mara Rinn
Cosmic Goo Convertor
#551 - 2011-11-08 00:11:00 UTC  |  Edited by: Mara Rinn
Another option: have control towers use both types of fuel. If the tower sees a fuel block, use that first. Otherwise fall back to the old fuel consumption so people who can handle mathematics can run their non-100%-utilised POS more efficiently, and Sov fuel savings remain.

This also removes the "sink or swim" cutover of new code, so if something goes wrong with the fuel block code the smart people with component fuel can keep their industry alive.

(edit; just reiterating that faction towers are valued because they run longer on the same amount of fuel, not just because they "run longer between refuel stops")

Day 0 Advice for New Players
Zircon Dasher
#552 - 2011-11-08 00:11:51 UTC  |  Edited by: Zircon Dasher
Lets all be honest and admit that once they were no longer dropping everyone and thier mother bought faction towers because there was no real downside to using them (if you could defend or pull down). We got "cheaper" manufacturing/research AND knowledge that we could sell our kit for more when we were done with it. Win Win.

The win/win going away makes me sad.

That said: if CCP gets its math shiny, they have an opportunity to incentivize 0.0 industry.

I, for one, would rather see the cost spread between 0.0 and empire/wh increase significantly in regards to POS (and therefore anything that comes from a POS).

Nerfing High-sec is never the answer. It is the question. The answer is 'YES'.
Faelyn L'Darcassan
Imperial Shipment
Amarr Empire
#553 - 2011-11-08 00:14:13 UTC
Since I spent like an hour thinking of the related issues and then clicked POST only for it not to work, I will keep it short:

- This nerfs faction towers. Badly. This needs fixing either via better fuel block granularity or via increased CPU/POWER, requiring fewer / smaller faction towers to run the same labs/arrays/etc.

- This nerfs faction POS guns, which had shorter anchor times and should be compensated. Also, why should the construction of a large defended base be quick? In RL it takes months-years, now it should be significantly shortened resulting in many ninja POs attempts. Is this the desired result? The defenders lose virtually the whole advantage of being there first... why should onlining take 2 minutes (flip the switch already) while construction from a packed crate into a fully assembled gun 5 seconds? I agree that the current times are maybe too long, this though seems ridiculous.

- For god's sake, do not call them fuel blocks... think of something better... power cells? energy cells? Running my towers with cubes of translucent radioactive goo called fuel blocks just seems weird.

- This nerfs guys who build their own fuel, as it adds more chores with no benefit whatsoever (yeah, especially in whs). For me this would suck big time. More effort, more cost, more hauling for what benefit?
Snoodaard Thrasy
Yulai Guard
#554 - 2011-11-08 00:17:45 UTC
Great plans, expect for the faction tower effect.

Why not just do as proposed above:

'' * change numbers to produce and consume 10x more unit, so faction / sov can be useful"

Is there something we are missing here? Is this not a very obvious way to retain advantages for faction towers?
Rek Esket
Sebiestor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#555 - 2011-11-08 00:18:26 UTC
Zircon Dasher wrote:
Lets all be honest and admit that once they were no longer dropping everyone and thier mother bought faction towers because there was no real downside to using them (if you could defend or pull down). We got "cheaper" manufacturing/research AND knowledge that we could sell our kit for more when we were done with it. Win Win.

The win/win going away makes me sad.


You made an investment, presuming CCP would keep the thing they took out of the drop tables the same forever. EVE is all about gambles, and sometimes you lose.
Infinion
Awesome Corp
#556 - 2011-11-08 00:19:08 UTC
Is there a reason why faction towers can't have a bonus in fuel cycle duration?
Tercius
Sebiestor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#557 - 2011-11-08 00:23:43 UTC
Doctor Ungabungas wrote:
AkJon Ferguson wrote:
Leave POS fuel alone


No don't.

As for you retards complaining about the 'increased cost of liquid ozone and heavy water'. Suck it up and pass the cost onto your end users like everyone else will be doing.

Or you could just mine the ozone yourself, it's free right?



I love the stupid idea that so many people have that since you mine it, its free. I know some folks dont have any self worth but I kinda value my time so NO, just cause I mine something doesnt make it free.

Time = Money
Icarus Helia
State War Academy
Caldari State
#558 - 2011-11-08 00:25:29 UTC
Infinion wrote:
Is there a reason why faction towers can't have a bonus in fuel cycle duration?


yes - but i dont know what it is. apparrently 1 hour is important for some reason and cant be changed. increased granularity means no bonus changes are needed, and all functionality remains.

Why you no care?
Faelyn L'Darcassan
Imperial Shipment
Amarr Empire
#559 - 2011-11-08 00:26:44 UTC
Also, passing costs does not remove the hassle of having more to do, in this case more ozone/water to buy, use, build, etc.
Faelyn L'Darcassan
Imperial Shipment
Amarr Empire
#560 - 2011-11-08 00:27:22 UTC
Icarus Helia wrote:
Infinion wrote:
Is there a reason why faction towers can't have a bonus in fuel cycle duration?


yes - but i dont know what it is. apparrently 1 hour is important for some reason and cant be changed. increased granularity means no bonus changes are needed, and all functionality remains.


it is likely technically difficult or unsuitable to implement