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New dev blog: Starbase happy fun time

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Jack Dant
The Gentlemen of Low Moral Fibre
#781 - 2011-11-08 13:17:28 UTC
CCP Greyscale wrote:
We're going to allow component assembly arrays to build fuel blocks too because why not.

This is an awesome change btw.

The component array has 1 million m3 capacity, versus 150k on the ammo array, and 1.4 mil on a corp hangar array. Unless you are using your CHA to full capacity, the component array is a good replacement with lower fitting costs, and the ability to assemble fuel blocks.

What happens in lowsec, stays in lowsec, lowering the barrier to entry to lowsec PVP: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=476644&#post476644
Two step
Aperture Harmonics
#782 - 2011-11-08 13:25:40 UTC
CCP Greyscale wrote:
Hi again.

Changes:

  • We're going to kick the build time down to 5 minutes and see where that gets us to.
  • We're going to allow component assembly arrays to build fuel blocks too because why not.
  • We're going to kick the granularity up by a factor of ten and re-implement ~15%/~25% fuel use bonuses for faction towers (and remove the faction-tower-specific bay size increases at the same time).
  • CORRECTION: offline timers are not changed, that's still instantaneous; sorry for any confusion, I'm going to get the blog updated in a bit.


WRT the faction tower fuel use, we were hoping that what we were being told by various large-scale fuel operators that maintaining the high refuel interval was the main benefit for most people, as all other things being equal a 1/2/4 scheme is easier to work with than a 10/20/40 one. Obviously we didn't talk to enough small-scale users for whom the use bonus is a bigger deal; this feedback thread has established that this is still a big deal, so we're dropping to our first fallback position and doing 10/20/40 instead.

Things we're not considering:

  • Upping cycle times. It breaks reactors etc, and it makes the system harder for players to wrangle. We'd like to move away from designs that require you to memorize data tables to use them properly.
  • Making the handover (or anything else to do with this change) more complex/more automated. If for example we determined that we couldn't do this without some form of upgrade script, we'd have cut the feature, because it increases the workload and the risk of this change by a factor of two or three, and at that level we can't justify committing to it. This goes for putting fuel into towers, it goes for running two fuel types at once (which would require major code changes) and so on.


Other things:

  • You'll be able to reprocess fuel blocks in the normal way, getting back all the materials etc.
  • Currently they're configured to be researchable, with fairly short durations. I'm seeing some questions about this here - is there a strong reason why these need to be unresearchable? I don't have an industry designer on hand right now or I'd ask them :)
  • We'll keep an eye on the ice use situation and make further changes there if needed
  • WRT the changes to robotics use, assuming large towers are the primary use case then going the other way would kick global consumption up by a factor of 3-4, which would make them a gigantic production bottleneck. Reducing the demand on small/medium towers a little is believed to be a better option than significantly driving up the running costs of all non-small towers everywhere.
  • The handover isn't doing anything magic - it'll use old fuel before the switchover and new fuel afterwards. We're saying "half-and-half" because we're recommending you all put a mix of old and new fuel in your towers while the switch is happening, so it has old fuel available before the switch downtime and new fuel available after the downtime.
  • WRT talking to players earlier, we have to strike a very careful balance between getting feedback early and not getting people's hopes up. Ideally we'd get input from everyone as soon as we start design work, but our experience has been that bringing very vague designs to the community, and/or pitching designs that subsequently get cut due to being infeasible, creates more disruption than holding back until we're sure something is actually going to work. We do of course talk to subject-matter specialists (ie, people who play that area of the game regularly) within CCP, and the CSM, in the early stages of the design.


Awesome news, thank you very much for listening. The faction bonuses might be a bit much, right now the tier 2 towers are about a 15% reduction in cost, you might want to move to 20%/10%.

The problem with making the BPs have waste (not researchable, everything is researchable, the question is, is there waste?) would be that people might not have time to research them before the change goes live. Making them no-waste BPs, like the other POS BPOs would solve this issue.

CSM 7 Secretary CSM 6 Alternate Delegate @two_step_eve on Twitter My Blog
Ingvar Angst
Nasty Pope Holding Corp
#783 - 2011-11-08 13:28:39 UTC
Nicely done CCP Greyscale! Nicely done indeed.

Now if we could only have you work a bit with the PI team with the concerns about the PCOs and their insane idea to remove all the customs offices without allowing any transition time for people to make, purchase and/or plant the PCOs... they're going to break PI for quite a while there, which will drastically affect the availability of PI materials needed to create these pellets.

Six months in the hole... it changes a man.
Avila Cracko
#784 - 2011-11-08 13:31:23 UTC
why not researchable???
you all are screaming that CCP id dumbing down the game... and then you want the same???

truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Zio Yamamoto
Frog Morton Industries
#785 - 2011-11-08 13:31:56 UTC
As you now have redeemed the faction towers and Sov bonuses, it looks a bit more paletable.
Large scale operators that buy all theire fuel, will have a easier time of fueling their towers, because all the maths has been transfered to some other guy that produces the fuel blocks. And small time operators with 5-10 towers that prefer to make their own fuel, becasue you are doing PI anyways, and then dont have to be dependant on market to get your stuff, will get slightly shafted with more work.
A bit more work is not too much of an issue, I can live with that. Towers will for me use slightly more of one fuel type, and less of others, so that eavens out or goes with a profit.

But, and its a big butt, could you please do a more thorough inhouse debate on all future changes that will affect the core of the economy, ie. fuelprices and/or fuelconsumption / availability, before you release the information ?
It creates merry havoc on the market, and it is very bad for business when you dont have stability on critical resources.

Thanks for listening..Smile
Weaselior
GoonWaffe
Goonswarm Federation
#786 - 2011-11-08 13:33:59 UTC
This is a pretty flawless implementation (besides the upgrade script, but such is life), thanks. Please keep the UI issue in mind though and make the blocks different colors.

Head of the Goonswarm Economic Warfare Cabal Pubbie Management and Exploitation Division.
Weaselior
GoonWaffe
Goonswarm Federation
#787 - 2011-11-08 13:35:13 UTC
also there's no need for the bpos to be unresearchable, and it is a major flaw that pos bpos and the like are unresearchable (and you should fix that)

Head of the Goonswarm Economic Warfare Cabal Pubbie Management and Exploitation Division.
Iece Quaan
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#788 - 2011-11-08 13:35:33 UTC  |  Edited by: Iece Quaan
CCP Greyscale wrote:
Hi again.

Changes:

  • We're going to kick the build time down to 5 minutes and see where that gets us to.
  • We're going to allow component assembly arrays to build fuel blocks too because why not.
  • We're going to kick the granularity up by a factor of ten and re-implement ~15%/~25% fuel use bonuses for faction towers (and remove the faction-tower-specific bay size increases at the same time).
  • CORRECTION: offline timers are not changed, that's still instantaneous; sorry for any confusion, I'm going to get the blog updated in a bit.


WRT the faction tower fuel use, we were hoping that what we were being told by various large-scale fuel operators that maintaining the high refuel interval was the main benefit for most people, as all other things being equal a 1/2/4 scheme is easier to work with than a 10/20/40 one. Obviously we didn't talk to enough small-scale users for whom the use bonus is a bigger deal; this feedback thread has established that this is still a big deal, so we're dropping to our first fallback position and doing 10/20/40 instead.

Things we're not considering:

  • Upping cycle times. It breaks reactors etc, and it makes the system harder for players to wrangle. We'd like to move away from designs that require you to memorize data tables to use them properly.
  • Making the handover (or anything else to do with this change) more complex/more automated. If for example we determined that we couldn't do this without some form of upgrade script, we'd have cut the feature, because it increases the workload and the risk of this change by a factor of two or three, and at that level we can't justify committing to it. This goes for putting fuel into towers, it goes for running two fuel types at once (which would require major code changes) and so on.


Other things:

  • You'll be able to reprocess fuel blocks in the normal way, getting back all the materials etc.
  • Currently they're configured to be researchable, with fairly short durations. I'm seeing some questions about this here - is there a strong reason why these need to be unresearchable? I don't have an industry designer on hand right now or I'd ask them :)
  • We'll keep an eye on the ice use situation and make further changes there if needed
  • WRT the changes to robotics use, assuming large towers are the primary use case then going the other way would kick global consumption up by a factor of 3-4, which would make them a gigantic production bottleneck. Reducing the demand on small/medium towers a little is believed to be a better option than significantly driving up the running costs of all non-small towers everywhere.
  • The handover isn't doing anything magic - it'll use old fuel before the switchover and new fuel afterwards. We're saying "half-and-half" because we're recommending you all put a mix of old and new fuel in your towers while the switch is happening, so it has old fuel available before the switch downtime and new fuel available after the downtime.
  • WRT talking to players earlier, we have to strike a very careful balance between getting feedback early and not getting people's hopes up. Ideally we'd get input from everyone as soon as we start design work, but our experience has been that bringing very vague designs to the community, and/or pitching designs that subsequently get cut due to being infeasible, creates more disruption than holding back until we're sure something is actually going to work. We do of course talk to subject-matter specialists (ie, people who play that area of the game regularly) within CCP, and the CSM, in the early stages of the design.


RE: Researchable, I had a concern on page 4, don't know if it was addressed? At high PE/ME levels, will the blocks take up more volume than their inputs? It would be nice if they were a compression relative to the input volume. Maybe not much of a compression, but at least make it so that the blocks aren't bigger than the inputs :P
UGINSECOND
RSSCP Light Production
#789 - 2011-11-08 13:35:39 UTC
CCP Greyscale wrote:
Hi again.

Changes:

  • We're going to kick the build time down to 5 minutes and see where that gets us to.
  • We're going to allow component assembly arrays to build fuel blocks too because why not.
  • We're going to kick the granularity up by a factor of ten and re-implement ~15%/~25% fuel use bonuses for faction towers (and remove the faction-tower-specific bay size increases at the same time).
  • CORRECTION: offline timers are not changed, that's still instantaneous; sorry for any confusion, I'm going to get the blog updated in a bit.


WRT the faction tower fuel use, we were hoping that what we were being told by various large-scale fuel operators that maintaining the high refuel interval was the main benefit for most people, as all other things being equal a 1/2/4 scheme is easier to work with than a 10/20/40 one. Obviously we didn't talk to enough small-scale users for whom the use bonus is a bigger deal; this feedback thread has established that this is still a big deal, so we're dropping to our first fallback position and doing 10/20/40 instead.

Things we're not considering:

  • Upping cycle times. It breaks reactors etc, and it makes the system harder for players to wrangle. We'd like to move away from designs that require you to memorize data tables to use them properly.
  • Making the handover (or anything else to do with this change) more complex/more automated. If for example we determined that we couldn't do this without some form of upgrade script, we'd have cut the feature, because it increases the workload and the risk of this change by a factor of two or three, and at that level we can't justify committing to it. This goes for putting fuel into towers, it goes for running two fuel types at once (which would require major code changes) and so on.


Other things:

  • You'll be able to reprocess fuel blocks in the normal way, getting back all the materials etc.
  • Currently they're configured to be researchable, with fairly short durations. I'm seeing some questions about this here - is there a strong reason why these need to be unresearchable? I don't have an industry designer on hand right now or I'd ask them :)
  • We'll keep an eye on the ice use situation and make further changes there if needed
  • WRT the changes to robotics use, assuming large towers are the primary use case then going the other way would kick global consumption up by a factor of 3-4, which would make them a gigantic production bottleneck. Reducing the demand on small/medium towers a little is believed to be a better option than significantly driving up the running costs of all non-small towers everywhere.
  • The handover isn't doing anything magic - it'll use old fuel before the switchover and new fuel afterwards. We're saying "half-and-half" because we're recommending you all put a mix of old and new fuel in your towers while the switch is happening, so it has old fuel available before the switch downtime and new fuel available after the downtime.
  • WRT talking to players earlier, we have to strike a very careful balance between getting feedback early and not getting people's hopes up. Ideally we'd get input from everyone as soon as we start design work, but our experience has been that bringing very vague designs to the community, and/or pitching designs that subsequently get cut due to being infeasible, creates more disruption than holding back until we're sure something is actually going to work. We do of course talk to subject-matter specialists (ie, people who play that area of the game regularly) within CCP, and the CSM, in the early stages of the design.

Smoking Blunts
ZC Omega
#790 - 2011-11-08 13:36:07 UTC
Two step wrote:


Awesome news, thank you very much for listening. The faction bonuses might be a bit much, right now the tier 2 towers are about a 15% reduction in cost, you might want to move to 20%/10%.

The problem with making the BPs have waste (not researchable, everything is researchable, the question is, is there waste?) would be that people might not have time to research them before the change goes live. Making them no-waste BPs, like the other POS BPOs would solve this issue.


with the increase in HW/LO the over all % reduction would be close to current useage at the 25% reduction

OMG when can i get a pic here
CCP Greyscale
C C P
C C P Alliance
#791 - 2011-11-08 13:40:10 UTC
20%/10% works for me, and makes much nicer numbers to boot. Any objections? :P

WRT the blueprints, they're set up to do something like 3 hours/level for ME, I think (12000 seconds) with no skills, with a 5% base waste factor (it's kicking the isotopes up to 420).
Raid'En
#792 - 2011-11-08 13:41:09 UTC
that's way better now xD

a little something on heavy water and liquid ozone would be nice. either you reduce the consumption to 75%, either you lower the volume of the blocks, or the both ^^

high sec pos use almost only heavy water for research, deathstar use mostly liquid ozone for defense, and most of nullsec pos have almost no modules, as it won't really save them, and it help a lot the hauling.
Avila Cracko
#793 - 2011-11-08 13:42:39 UTC  |  Edited by: Avila Cracko
not bad, not bad at all... Big smile

truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Avila Cracko
#794 - 2011-11-08 13:46:18 UTC
p.s.

what about color of that fuel boxes???
they must all be blue???

truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Smoking Blunts
ZC Omega
#795 - 2011-11-08 13:51:14 UTC  |  Edited by: Smoking Blunts
CCP Greyscale wrote:
20%/10% works for me, and makes much nicer numbers to boot. Any objections? :P

WRT the blueprints, they're set up to do something like 3 hours/level for ME, I think (12000 seconds) with no skills, with a 5% base waste factor (it's kicking the isotopes up to 420).



if your gonna do 20%/10% can you set the hw/lo a bit lower on a perfect me bpo then. say 130 for both

OMG when can i get a pic here
Scrapyard Bob
EVE University
Ivy League
#796 - 2011-11-08 14:02:22 UTC
Two step wrote:

The problem with making the BPs have waste (not researchable, everything is researchable, the question is, is there waste?) would be that people might not have time to research them before the change goes live. Making them no-waste BPs, like the other POS BPOs would solve this issue.


Eh... so the first few days of fuel costs you 10-15% more until you have time to research it. And from the rumors, we'll have about 30 days between the release of the BPOs and the actual switch-over to using fuel pellets.

Assuming that the copy time isn't insane, you'll see researched T1 BPCs show up on the contract market very quickly. Or you'll see researched BPOs show up fairly quickly (as long as it only takes a few days to get to perfect or near perfect ME).

Most POS owners probably have access to a mobile lab... so waiting for a public research slot probably won't be a big deal. Other then maybe the moon-mining POS towers in lo-sec systems without stations or a corp office. Those folks will have to either run with an unresearched BPO for long enough to get a bit of buffer or buy fuel pellets off the market for the short-term. Or temporarily anchor a mobile lab, then repackage and sell the lab.

(Waste is good - especially since these can be reprocessed into their source components. Waste results in little inefficiencies which can be profited from.)
Takeshi Ryuu
Irrational Dimension
#797 - 2011-11-08 14:04:54 UTC
CCP Greyscale wrote:
It'll be rounding up in all cases I suspect. Not totally optimal, but the 64-block version doesn't deal with 15% well either and I don't want to go much bigger than that if I can help it. The fewer zeroes people have to punch into text boxes, the fewer times they're going to screw up their numbers.


Why using 40-based or 64-based arithmetic when most people would consider 100-based to be easier to calculate in?

From the server side it does not matter whether it will be 10/20/40 or 25/50/100, but from the user point of view calculating all kinds of percents and quantities is, probably, easier when the base "anchor" number is 100 instead of 40 or, gods forbid, 64.
Slade Nightstrum
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#798 - 2011-11-08 14:05:06 UTC
Looks much better with the 10%/20% thanks for saving the value of our faction towers.

Question, with regards to POS's not sure if I missed it but your adjusting anchoring times, fuel costs, etc..

Is there a change in here on access range? inside a POS it just seems to me having range limits on accessing the SMA/Hangers etc... at 3K is so very low. I understand you dont want people using this outside the forcefield, but perhaps at that if you have rights and are within the shiled can we not just have full access at any range?

Or some increase thereof beyond 3km?

Cheers
Ahrman Vanaheim
Chimaera Combine
#799 - 2011-11-08 14:05:55 UTC  |  Edited by: Ahrman Vanaheim
CCP Greyscale wrote:
Hi again.

Changes:

  • We're going to kick the build time down to 5 minutes and see where that gets us to.
  • We're going to allow component assembly arrays to build fuel blocks too because why not.
  • We're going to kick the granularity up by a factor of ten and re-implement ~15%/~25% fuel use bonuses for faction towers (and remove the faction-tower-specific bay size increases at the same time).
  • CORRECTION: offline timers are not changed, that's still instantaneous; sorry for any confusion, I'm going to get the blog updated in a bit.


WRT the faction tower fuel use, we were hoping that what we were being told by various large-scale fuel operators that maintaining the high refuel interval was the main benefit for most people, as all other things being equal a 1/2/4 scheme is easier to work with than a 10/20/40 one. Obviously we didn't talk to enough small-scale users for whom the use bonus is a bigger deal; this feedback thread has established that this is still a big deal, so we're dropping to our first fallback position and doing 10/20/40 instead.
.
[/list]


Really good news that you are leaving the faction tower bonuses in, thanks for listening.

FYI - smaller POS operators will often have a POS alt that is left in situ and logs on to fuel/whatever the POS and then logged out. That takes all of a few minutes, so the whole fuel interval thing was really just a handy side effect of a more fuel efficient POS.
Anyone who actually has to mine their own fuel/does PI will see the faction tower costs as being worthwhile to escape yet more tedium (in addition to WH operators to whom fuel storage and efficiency is of considerable importance).

Edit: I'm not trying to be offensive when I say this, however perhaps this may be a good lesson that you need to speak to more than just your nullsec/large alliance contacts when making decisions. Cost benefit equations for those with Trillion isk corp wallets are utterly different to the majority of players.
Dr Mercy
Imperial Academy
Amarr Empire
#800 - 2011-11-08 14:14:51 UTC
CCP Greyscale wrote:
Jackeroo wrote:
CCP Greyscale wrote:
Hi again.

Changes:

  • We're going to kick the build time down to 5 minutes and see where that gets us to.
  • We're going to allow component assembly arrays to build fuel blocks too because why not.
  • We're going to kick the granularity up by a factor of ten and re-implement ~15%/~25% fuel use bonuses for faction towers (and remove the faction-tower-specific bay size increases at the same time).
  • CORRECTION: offline timers are not changed, that's still instantaneous; sorry for any confusion, I'm going to get the blog updated in a bit.




Great news. I was just wondering what a 15% and 25% bonus on small towers means? Will you round it down? Cause 10 blocks per cycle -15%/25% (1,5 or 2,5) doesn't work.

And how does it work with SOV bonus. Will that count as well?

Anyways, good changes!


It'll be rounding up in all cases I suspect. Not totally optimal, but the 64-block version doesn't deal with 15% well either and I don't want to go much bigger than that if I can help it. The fewer zeroes people have to punch into text boxes, the fewer times they're going to screw up their numbers.


You could just use a 20x multiplier instead of 10x. Allows you 15% and 25% on all towers.

Also, is there a reason you have made the fuels racial rather than generic?

Make isk with PI: http://failheap-challenge.com/showthread.php?1207-What-to-do-PI-Processor-only-planets