EVE Information Portal

I believe the mistake many of the posters on this Blog have made, was the belief that CCP actually wanted to hear your input on the PCCO, so that meaningful changes if necessary could be made from suggestion from those who regularly play the game. I feel that the decision to go ahead with this, in my opinion erroneous change, was made long before the announcement was ever made. I am sure hundreds of man hours had gone into the implementation and programming of this feature and why would CCP want to lose that kind of investment simply by listening to what their subscribers felt was a bad move. All this posturing about listening to what people actually want is just that, posturing to appease the masses. By saying the inclusion of this is what some players at the Fanfest indicated they would like to see is just another attempt to justify CCP in their plans to put this in place. I wonder how many people actually attended that forum, and how does that compare to how many have posted their disdain for this change to the CO? After this change is implemented how much time will have passed and how many players will have left in frustration before we again get an apology saying sorry people we didn’t listen to you and realise we should have taken our player base more into account before making changes, or maybe it will be more like “We at CCP are constantly listening to our players and as a result we have decided to enhance the game by moving COs under NPC control to further improve the immersive game that Eve-online has become”, Hmm I wonder. I will continue to monitor this blog but I have lost any hope of major change occurring, but expect to see the odd tinkering. By the way this is not intended to be a Flame or Troll of any sort, merely my thoughts on this matter.

Bingo. Note that CCP has not bothered to respond to anything in this thread for quite some time. It reminds me of a saying I heard someplace.... "Customers are not an interruption of our work, they are the reason for it."

In the response thread to the first blog, Omen made statements clearly indicating he did not understand how Eve is really played (like post # 250 for example). In this thread, he states that rising prices of PI products are a big incentive and justification to put up PCO's, but fails to understand the developers own plan. The taxes have no relation to the market value of the product, but are merely a percentage of a fixed number tariff.

Most people really like the concept of PCO's, but the implementation is a festering rotten egg, even after the fixes they announced in the 2nd blog. Many people pointed out many problems, both in this thread and in the first feedback thread and even proposed solutions. The vast majority of both were ignored, citing either that developers disagreed with the ideas/problems mentioned, or didn't have time to implement them.

We essentially have a team of developers who don't understand the game. Sure they know the numbers, statistics, and the coding, but not how people play. I don't condemn them for this, I wouldn't want to code and discuss a game all day and then go home to play it for another few hours. However, they clearly don't have any desire to listen to people who do actually play and pay for the game, which obviously will cause problems in implementing a new feature.

It appears to me that the devs have taken the attitude of "let's do something with this concept, if it breaks something, maybe we'll eventually fix it. Since the players will adjust to market changes, we won't think about that end of things at all." CCP's record for implementing fixes is neither good nor speedy. Omen's statements about how the PCO will justify the expense of anchoring one clearly indicate that the economics were not thought through. Indeed, there have been many players who have done the math and pointed out that the economics don't make sense. This change affects much more than just PI producers and potential PCO owners, but POS owners, producers of T2 anything, the balance of PvE to PvP, basically everyone in Eve is affected to an extent. The dev's apparently do not appreciate how important PI is to the economy as a whole, and wading in with this massive change to it with such poor planning and forethought is just plain stupid.

If the CEO of CCP really does want to correct the wrongs pointed out with monocles, then he should be stopping this half-assed, ill-thought out implementation of a good concept, since a great majority of the players have expressed huge dislike for it. I suspect the CEO is either unaware of this mess or that things at CCP have not really changed. I wish I had his email address.

From the majority of posts on this topic, it seems that players like the concept, are ok with changes to the economy and such as long as the mechanics make sense. Tweeks are expected as well, I don't think that is a problem. A tweek is very different than a "holy crap, this is a disaster, we have to rethink this". The mechanics fail the make sense test miserably.

I, for one, am looking for another game. I like the PvP, the nowhere is totally safe feeling, the free form of Eve, but between monocles, ship spinning and this, the chasm between the developers and the players is just growing larger.

As of today on sisi Interbus COs still had a very small sig radius making them take incredibly reduced damage from stealth bomber torps, HAMs, etc. See my post in the "sieging custom offices" thread in the test server forum,
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=384584#post384584

That's gonna be a huge gameplay problem for SB or Caldari gangs and Interbus COs. All the small sigrad does is prevent fighter bombers and phoenixes from farming them, which really shouldn't be the main worry of CCP... give them some kind of workaround or modified sig if you're really worried about FBs.

edit: also please address my tax concerns,
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=33468&find=unread

OK, trollposts by Goons so I guess we know who's going to be "griefing" the CO's on release.

If it happens I'll stand corrected on my prior assumption that they wouldn't bother.

On the subject of defence, et al... I'm not sure what the time to anchor and online the POCO's is but I like to compare them to POS's in that there's an ISK investment, theyr'e a thing that can get trashed when you're offline, and they're a quasi-AFK form of income. I think people are just crying because they're worried someone will turn off their isk spigot or force them to move elsewhere. Rebuilding a PI chain is not the life ending thing it's being made out to be. I've done it a few times. Not only that but the PI in lowsec is many times more profitable than the PI in highsec and quickly pays for my setup and then some. If you're worried baout being shot get a blockade runner, and if you're worried about being camped out of a POCO... really? Has this happened to anyone? I've been concerned about it because I'm a special kind of paranoid but so far I have NEVER encountered anyone on a CO while I was there. ( My visits being a matter of seconds though this is probably a bad example. I don't hang about when people want to kill me ). Also, funny thing about lowsec... no warp bubbles. Easy mode :)
I encounter people camping gates and I assume this will not change because gates see far more throughput. As boring as camping gates is imagine you camp a planet. Suppose you pick a day no one is scheduled to pick up their PI? Not only that but which planet? I've heard wailing about Plasma planets being locked down and it's a serious concern. You know what... OK, I rescind my prior anti-whine. PLASMA PLANETS ARE THE NEW TECH MOON. Funny thing about Plasma planets though... they're used for Enriched Uranium I get that... you know what that's made of? Precious Metals and Toxic Metals. You know where else you can Precious Metals? Barren planets, a planet type you can't hit warp without bouncing off of they're so common. Toxic Metals? Plasma, Lava, and Ice planets. You expect Lava and Ice planets to be interdicted in addition to Plasma? You're asking a lot. So you can't then make your precious Enriched Uranium on a single planet, you have to do a little more work which is well worth it if the prices spike to insane-o-ville like everyone's worried about. These things will have a timer, yes. Who hates timers? Gankers, that's who. The price tag on them seems a bit steep for the payout, yes, much like the payout of datacores, or POS reactions, or manufacturing. Anything easy to do for ISK that isn't running missions or anomolies is done and it's done to death. That's what this game is about. You could complain the major alliances are going to make them miserable but it's about priorities. there's only so many wars they can wage simultaneously, only so many POS's they can attack and defend at once. They will trash the Interbus CO's, sure, but eventually, when you stop crying they'll get bored and move on and things will settle down. They're only going to do it for your tears... you're already supplying them. They'll continue to do it until there are no more tears, and when their thermos' are full, they will move on to the next harvest. They do it because they can... and because they hate you... and because you make it enjoyable to them to hate you. Go run a mission or something. I'll be doing PI, somewhere, and making ISk doing it.

Simple - leave this change out of the Winter Expansion. POCO's are screwed up as implemented. Period.

This is actually a rather important concern. As is, it's incredibly difficult to make a profit off P0-P3 item tax in low-sec (P3 almost works I think). P4 is fine and almost too high, but P0-P2 give very little revenue stream for the POCO owners, meaning it takes a long time to get an RoI on the 90m capital investment.

I'm getting the impression (based on SISI testing and some :math:) that the devs doing this POCO feature are not very good at :math:

Could you guys, please, spend the time to do the following math bits all yourself, just to see how this goes;

- "How much a POCO will most likely cost on the market?" (in the medium term)

The add up these:
- "How long would it take to pay off a POCO with various potential tax rates, based on average export volumes from lowsec planets (I'm sure your economist guy has minions that can dig up the export volume data)?"
- "How much would it save in taxes to own a POCO on a planet vs. paying Interbus tax? vs. playing highsec concord tax?"

...and then see what you need to do to make these figures reasonable.

I have a feeling that you guys have mistaken "tax rate" as a flat percentage of the profit the exporter makes off the goods he exports when in reality it is based on completely unrelated "value for taxation purposes" and this completely invalidates what little math you have done. Please take another look.

If it takes months and months to pay off a single POCO (100mil+) off the taxes (savings for yourself, tax profits from others on the same planet), who in their right mind would put that 100 mil+ piece of hardware in harms way for bored corps and alliances to blow up for lulz?

And it's not just one 100 mil investment. Realistically a single player doing PI "seriously" has installations on multiple planets (while "stacking" on same planets with multiple characters). That adds up.

May I suggest putting some smart guys figuring all this stuff out if you plan on building a whole game (Dust 514) out of these interactions with planets?

First of all I have never disrespected any particular person in eve. What I do not respect is typical whining like your quote above. You have no right to trade PI skillpoints. You have no right to free income, anything you do in eve or build can be destroyed by somebody else. Right now this is not the case for customs offices, but this will change.

If the cost of PI materials will increase, more people will be interested in building them. I fully expect alliances or individual corps to try and claim market share by setting up their own POCO's with taxes. Some of them will try to lure other players to work their fields by low taxes, other will want to own the planets themselves and tax more (up to 100%). This is EVE.

If Goonswarm wants to destroy all the interbus stations, build their own and then spend all their time guarding every one they places they will be very busy. If they just want to shoot structures like that they'll be very busy also. I am not saying they won't do it, but they can't be everywhere, all the time, forever. And even if they are, a smart corp/alliance will setup a tower, defend it when its attacked and set a small tax, and earn money with minimal effort in working the planet (but with defence fleets).

At this very moment PI installations are producing minerals and resources for players for free, non-stop, with minimal effort they get all kinds of fancy equipment they can sell on, build with or trade with. There should be a way to steal/extort/trade with them POCO's are that way. No serious miner in low, high or 0.0 has never been ganked, no serious trader has never lost a shipment in awful and annoying ways either. Just like every PVP'er has lost ships, been podded and even lost skillpoints.

Why would PI be the exception, loss is part of live, and it is certainly part of EVE.

I was at that roundtable and I'd say there were around fifty players crammed into the room for it. And two devs.

There was alot of ideas thrown about and I think that there was some interest expressed for players gaining control over customs office, so its not all coming from CCP. But what we don't know yet is how this will figure into Dust514, I made the comment at the time that PI as we know it is only half the feature it is intended to be and has suffered somewhat from that. We can and should expect PI to evolve and change substantially as Dust comes closer to its full scale launch.

I remember alot of interest coming from players at the roundtable for functionality like trading between planetary colonies and a form of planetary marketplace. Also requests for visual improvements to make PI more user friendly; sometimes its hard to see your translucent white extractor heads against the pale colour of a certain planet's surface (white on white is not all that clear..).

I'd like to see some more work going into that stuff now.

@ Ciar Meara respect includes being able to read what people write without infering. Few lines before i wrote i'll make far more isk with this, so this was not whining. I try to THINK you should try too, can help
and ... LOL you are the big boss so you decide if we have rights ? ROFL, wish you a long reign, little king.

@ Jack Dant : i fully agree with you, automated defences would be worse for smaller entities. Btw with or without defences they wont be able to make PI anymore in low/null sec. And they wont be able to crush large alliances PI in PC nullsec.

In a way, and this is a point i could agree with part of what Cia Meara said, the only thing POCOs will bring is "Eve is real" as the result will be to make strong organizations stronger. Some people will love this, some will say "i paid for a game and now the rules change, give me my money back". This is why i think CCP makes a mistake that could make them loose many players. Would make me laugh but not for long, as i consider "the more players there are, the more fun we'll have" (and the more customers i'll have for my PI ).