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New dev blog: Starbase happy fun time

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Icarus Helia
State War Academy
Caldari State
#561 - 2011-11-08 00:32:02 UTC
Faelyn L'Darcassan wrote:
Also, passing costs does not remove the hassle of having more to do, in this case more ozone/water to buy, use, build, etc.



so you should charge more to make it.

you are seriously short sighted if you see only increased hassle for you, and not reduced hassle for the people who have to fuel thousands upon thousands of poses all over eve when they can just buy fuel blocks from a mass producer, or centralize their own production. If you don't see that then you should see an opportunity to get in early on a new industry. If you don't see that then you need to think a lot harder about the scale of eve before posting.

Why you no care?
Sassums
Dark Venture Corporation
Kitchen Sinkhole
#562 - 2011-11-08 00:32:26 UTC
I am quite torn by these updates, at face value, they look awesome, but once I did some digging, and some reading, I see a few problems.

The fuel blocks idea is quite nice, however it will now require any corporation residing in Wormhole space to have an ammunition assembly array, otherwise they will have to cart out their PI to High Sec to create the fuel blocks. Or on the flip side, we will have to continue carting in ice, create the blocks, and fuel the POS. Either way this really isn't any easier in terms of logistics.

We still have to figure out how much of each ice product we need and how much of each PI product we need to create the blocks for however many towers we have.

Would it be possible to create sub fuel blocks? For example could I make an ice fuel block, that was composed of just ice products, and bring that into WH space, to combine with the PI products and then create the final product?

The next issue I see is that the cost of faction towers does not equal the minimal bonus you are now giving them. A 50% bonus to fuel bay capacity hardly seems fair for their billion isk difference than the standard tower.

When will these faction BPC's or BPO's start dropping to reduce their prices? The last I heard was these tower's BPC's or BPO's simply don't drop at all. I find it highly annoying that instead of fixing a problem, you simply remove it. You pulled the same stunt in terms of the wormhole effects due to an exploit. Rather than fix the issue, you simply remove the bonus, and make the bonus pointless. I'd like to hear that these tower BPO's or BPC's will start dropping because right now, the cost for a tower is not worth the little bonus you are giving it.

Finally, in terms of implementation - why not release the fuel block BPO's and let us start creating these new fuel blocks that way, when the expansion releases it will simply require the blocks. None of this having to put half of the old fuel in, then half of the new fuel. This seems like a lot of work on your end.
Riey
The Phoenix Rising
BLACKFLAG.
#563 - 2011-11-08 00:35:30 UTC
HelicoBacter wrote:
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


enough said, I agree!
Tercius
Sebiestor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#564 - 2011-11-08 00:35:39 UTC
Doctor Ungabungas wrote:

WH corps can put up their own ammo arrays and keep doing what they're doing. Or they can outsource it to empire pubbies and just raise their prices.


Still, a WH corp, that imports ONLY its ice products will have to then install the ammo array if it does not have one, and add a step to the process. So that is not "keeps doing" at all. Its more expsense and work. Outsourcing is not necesarily the answer, even though it seems to be about your only answer.
Clama
Doomheim
#565 - 2011-11-08 00:38:48 UTC
Could we please have a fuel bonus for Faction tower.
Vigoth Ritic
Frozen Corpse Inc.
#566 - 2011-11-08 00:39:33 UTC
Really? All those great minds at CCP HQ cant figure out how to fix the faction and sov problem?

I want a job after this..

1. Faction give longer fuel times 25% bonus to fuel time

2. Sov. 35% longer fuel times

really thats was not hard, you can evemail me the info on the new job... Lol
Stralow
Caldari Provisions
Caldari State
#567 - 2011-11-08 00:39:39 UTC
A little Idea about it:

4 Sorts of Fuelblocks seems a litte too much. You have to handle four more sorts of stuff, 4 more types of BPOs, 4 tabs on the market etc. etc. If you are running different types of Towers, you aren't very flexible with you fuel blocks.

So why just seperate the racial Isotopes from the rest. You build blocks out of the PI Stuff every Tower consumes, so you could feed every tower with that. Isotopes just stay seperated like now. You need 2 sorts of fuel (or 3) with chartes, instead of one, but it keeps the whole system much more flexible.

Just my 2 cents...

i say we take off and nuke the whole site from orbit. it's the only way to be sure
TorTorden
Tors shibari party
#568 - 2011-11-08 00:39:58 UTC
Just ran some quick math (my teacher would be so proud)

one of our True sansha towers currently uses 140.2 m3\hr (at current load)
At full load same tower would consume 203 m3/hr with faction bonuses.

A straight up amarr tower consumes 228

Now with the proposed pellets as they stand at 200m3/hr we are getting the shaft for 59.8 m3 an hour.

Now I'm sure the 'pos maintainers' you spoke with either failed to understand your english or grasp where you wanted to go with this, or just blurted out the first thing that came to their mind.

The real reason people log off at night thanking god they spent the extra billion ISK on a faction tower is not that the tower saved them 50 mil a month on fuel cost or runs for a few days longer.

Those 60m3 add up, as things stand today this change alone means we need to bring in an extra freighter load of fuel every other month and every faction tower owner gets a blunt stick put where you really don't want blunt sticks.

This is why I realy think you should look into letting each pellet batch produce 100 units instead of four, as mentioned many times over if a standard pos consumes those 100 pellets\hr there will not be a problem working existing bonuses in.
Secondly, since a pellet can only be used for sale or to fuel a pos, is there any real reason to maintain such a large amount of volume. In short, I really wish for 100 units pr batch, and a pellet volume not just adjusted (0.5m3) but radicaly reduced to something like 0.1m3, and decrease tower capacity accordingly, Seriously I think an iteron should carry enough to max out a large tower.

Less time hauling = more time for pew
More pew = bigger market.
Bigger market = more profits
More profits = more pew
More pew = More fun

Less time watching some slow ass freighter do 30 jumps from jita, which only leads to burnout and canceling of subscriptions.
Icarus Helia
State War Academy
Caldari State
#569 - 2011-11-08 00:41:56 UTC
Tercius wrote:
Doctor Ungabungas wrote:

WH corps can put up their own ammo arrays and keep doing what they're doing. Or they can outsource it to empire pubbies and just raise their prices.


Still, a WH corp, that imports ONLY its ice products will have to then install the ammo array if it does not have one, and add a step to the process. So that is not "keeps doing" at all. Its more expsense and work. Outsourcing is not necesarily the answer, even though it seems to be about your only answer.



I live in a WH and am firmly of the belief that this will not change things much at all apart from us not caring how much CPU we use any more. the cost wont change much, the new offline and online times will make an anchored ammo array a piece of cake to use, and it will really only add something to do for 5 minutes once a month, and wait a day. this might make more work on WH dwellers, but its really blown out of proportion i think. It will be fine. don't act like you have to watch paint dry or else it will stop. the array makes fuel whether you're there or not - make it a week in advance or more, and get on with life.

Why you no care?
Faelyn L'Darcassan
Imperial Shipment
Amarr Empire
#570 - 2011-11-08 00:46:10 UTC
Icarus Helia wrote:
Faelyn L'Darcassan wrote:
Also, passing costs does not remove the hassle of having more to do, in this case more ozone/water to buy, use, build, etc.



so you should charge more to make it.

you are seriously short sighted if you see only increased hassle for you, and not reduced hassle for the people who have to fuel thousands upon thousands of poses all over eve when they can just buy fuel blocks from a mass producer, or centralize their own production. If you don't see that then you should see an opportunity to get in early on a new industry. If you don't see that then you need to think a lot harder about the scale of eve before posting.


I see all of that too, just need to point out that it is not the only side of the story. Also fueling thousands of POSes should be a hassle, at least if it is done by few people.

While a new market and new opportunities will be created, this effectively increases prices and thus inflation. I do not consider that a good thing as it basically devalues all savings people have.
Zircon Dasher
#571 - 2011-11-08 00:46:32 UTC
Rek Esket wrote:
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.



Which is why I am ok with having a larger bay as opposed to lower fuel consumption.

If I can approach fuel costs of normal SOV POS by using a faction in non-SOV, there isn't much reason to choose SOV over non-SOV space (except in situations that require it) for industry.

If CCP can get its math so that SOV effects fuel consumption considerably, I think it is better for the game as a whole. I am willing to trade new fuel "standards" for that.

Nerfing High-sec is never the answer. It is the question. The answer is 'YES'.
Black Dranzer
#572 - 2011-11-08 00:53:22 UTC
Well I don't touch starbases at all, but hey, good show never the less.

Walking in Stations as a Social Hub: Business vs Pleasure in Incarna
Icarus Helia
State War Academy
Caldari State
#573 - 2011-11-08 00:55:18 UTC
Faelyn L'Darcassan wrote:
Icarus Helia wrote:
Faelyn L'Darcassan wrote:
Also, passing costs does not remove the hassle of having more to do, in this case more ozone/water to buy, use, build, etc.



so you should charge more to make it.

you are seriously short sighted if you see only increased hassle for you, and not reduced hassle for the people who have to fuel thousands upon thousands of poses all over eve when they can just buy fuel blocks from a mass producer, or centralize their own production. If you don't see that then you should see an opportunity to get in early on a new industry. If you don't see that then you need to think a lot harder about the scale of eve before posting.


I see all of that too, just need to point out that it is not the only side of the story. Also fueling thousands of POSes should be a hassle, at least if it is done by few people.

While a new market and new opportunities will be created, this effectively increases prices and thus inflation. I do not consider that a good thing as it basically devalues all savings people have.



It will be fine. The sky is not falling. will the sales cost of pos fuel pellets be higher than the current equal fuel cost? of course, that is the price you pay for the convenience. otherwise you should anchor an ammo assembly array and churn out some fuel, and that gives you something to sell. this is why homes have kitchens - because most people cant afford to just go buy ready to eat food every day, or own a farm. if you anchor an array - you will likely see no practical change to your cash flow, or the overall process except having a small once a month step added. don't pee in everyone else's cheerios just because you don't like it.

Why you no care?
Ore Grinder
Star-Gate Command
#574 - 2011-11-08 01:02:34 UTC
Maaxeru wrote:


Letting all blues use all your JBs . . . . nice.

Letting all blues use all your JBs and not giving them some way to fuel the JB . . . . not nice.

Don't let them take fuel out or see how much is in there, but create either a setting that actually allows them to voluntarily fuel the bridge, OR, put on a setting that makes them (or anyone, even if in your Aliance) pay for their jump in liquid ozone.
[/i]



Why not just charge isk for using jump bridges? Kind of like using your debit card to pay for a ferry ticket. Alliances can charge what they want this way. They can charge a huge amount if they don't want traffic pouring through, or even wave the fees entirely for +10 blues. Maybe even allow neuts to use it for a HUGE fee? This could certainly be profitable in freeport situations.

To offset this the fuel bays for jump bridges should be absolutely massive with perhaps some reserve LO for +10 traffic on a ratio set by the alliance.
Kratar Mirat
Viziam
Amarr Empire
#575 - 2011-11-08 01:10:59 UTC
The faction towers using more fuel makes wormhole refueling logistics even more difficult.

Why not create a fifth fuel block... A faction fuel block which requires slightly less materials and is only 40m3, but is only usable in faction towers?
Or even a faction "fuel block compression" system that can shrink fuel blocks, which can then only be used in faction towers?

Help prevent the extra freighter load the increased fuel costs will cause.
Derath Ellecon
University of Caille
Gallente Federation
#576 - 2011-11-08 01:13:49 UTC
Tercius wrote:
Doctor Ungabungas wrote:

WH corps can put up their own ammo arrays and keep doing what they're doing. Or they can outsource it to empire pubbies and just raise their prices.


Still, a WH corp, that imports ONLY its ice products will have to then install the ammo array if it does not have one, and add a step to the process. So that is not "keeps doing" at all. Its more expsense and work. Outsourcing is not necesarily the answer, even though it seems to be about your only answer.



This is true of anyone who runs a pos and also makes some or all of their fuel via PI or ice mining. It just adds a step. You still have to haul everything to the pos or a station and make the fuel.

The only benefit is for those who just buy all of their fuel from the market. They now can just buy fuel pellets. Everyone else still needs to haul each item and then add a step.

At least have the option. Let me put the individual fuels in OR pellets.
Tahna Rouspel
Viziam
Amarr Empire
#577 - 2011-11-08 01:14:07 UTC
Just a crazy idea,

it would be amusing if Fuel Blocks exploded in a spectacular fashion when the ship transporting them was destroyed. I'm sure we can all enjoy a nice firework.
Sharlandra
Phoenix Naval Operations
Phoenix Naval Systems
#578 - 2011-11-08 01:14:11 UTC
Not sure if this topic was touched on, but I feel that faction towers should take less fuel block usage, maybe 1/2 or 1 block less than the non-faction variation, why else spend loads of isk on a fancy tower only to have a larger bay, doesn't really help smaller corps that live out of a single or very few POS's. The main reason somone would buy a faction tower, especially for a group that live in W-space, is that you don't have to re-fuel the Tower as much, thus reducing the number of trips need to take to K-space to get the Ice fuel for the block. Just somthing I tohught I should point out, and sorry if this had already been discussed.
Alekseyev Karrde
Noir.
Shadow Cartel
#579 - 2011-11-08 01:20:40 UTC
LOVE what's going on in this blog.

My only suggestions are:

1. When you tie JB to POS aggression, take a quick look at the POS aggro mechanics since they've been prone to shooting people they shouldn't. This might affect the jump bridges post-change.

2. I think the faction tower bonus removal leaves a lot to be desired. Definitely think cost is a big factor for small/medium sized corps and alliances running these towers. It will also affect reaction profitability.

Alek the Kidnapper, Hero of the CSM
Jiska Ensa
Estrale Frontiers
#580 - 2011-11-08 01:21:11 UTC
Given the volume has now considerbly gone up (I think) can we at least get the ability to transport them in an orca's ore hold? They look rather blocky and space-worthy...