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New dev blog: Starbase tweaks: an update

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KayTwoEx
Di-Tron Heavy Industries
OnlyFleets.
#41 - 2011-11-23 15:17:43 UTC
So the tower fuel "problem" has been addressed and the upkeep of a tower is now easier. That is one issue with POSes done. What about the Moon Mining problem? A couple of month ago we heard some stuff about plans but nothing ever after that. To me that one seems to be a lot more important than this fuel block thing...
Lake
The Praxis Initiative
Gentlemen's Agreement
#42 - 2011-11-23 15:24:10 UTC
A suggestion to make the switchover less painful, and which doesn't require code changes to the Crucible release:

Run a DB script to convert the fuel currently in towers into fuel blocks during the DT.

This will alleviate some player concerns about producing enough fuel blocks in a reasonable time frame (and the resultant price shock) by providing a one-time buffer of up to roughly a month of fuel block production.

It prevents the inevitable player frustration with towers going offline due to mis-fueling (no matter how many blog posts or news items you make, this will happen, and it will be frustrating and they will blame CCP).

It's verifiable. You can check the results of the script before any code runs when you turn the server on.

It's just all around easier on the players. That's the whole point of this change right? Less frustrating non-gameplay.

It makes you look like the good guys. You already took the player advice on raising the block-count so you could do fuel bonuses sanely. This alleviates the remaining major concern.
Evelgrivion
State War Academy
Caldari State
#43 - 2011-11-23 15:24:12 UTC  |  Edited by: Evelgrivion
The 5 minute manufacturing time is still terrifyingly high; two manufacturing slot hours will be occupied for every individual large tower's operational day in Eve. There are an estimated 40,000 control towers up and running, which translates to 67 NPC stations worth of factory slots (50 slots each station), occupied 24 hours a day, 7 days a week just to keep up with the demand for POS fuel.

That sounds like a bit of an extreme, brand new source of demand for factory slots, don't you think?
Xeovar Stoner
V0LTA
WE FORM V0LTA
#44 - 2011-11-23 15:28:05 UTC
Lake wrote:
A suggestion to make the switchover less painful, and which doesn't require code changes to the Crucible release:

Run a DB script to convert the fuel currently in towers into fuel blocks during the DT.

This will alleviate some player concerns about producing enough fuel blocks in a reasonable time frame (and the resultant price shock) by providing a one-time buffer of up to roughly a month of fuel block production.

It prevents the inevitable player frustration with towers going offline due to mis-fueling (no matter how many blog posts or news items you make, this will happen, and it will be frustrating and they will blame CCP).

It's verifiable. You can check the results of the script before any code runs when you turn the server on.

It's just all around easier on the players. That's the whole point of this change right? Less frustrating non-gameplay.

It makes you look like the good guys. You already took the player advice on raising the block-count so you could do fuel bonuses sanely. This alleviates the remaining major concern.



QFE. Perhaps you could crowdsource the script if you really are overworked.... Blink
CCP Greyscale
C C P
C C P Alliance
#45 - 2011-11-23 15:31:25 UTC
Hiram Alexander wrote:
When will the bpo's go up for sale, so that we can start getting ready...?


On Crucible launch day, ie, around two weeks before the switchover

Chigger Troutslayer wrote:
Faction tower fuel savings was addressed. Does this mean we will also get a fuel use bonus for Sov?


Yes.

Maul555 wrote:
w00t... thanks for saving that faction fuel bonus and pushing back the deployment of the new fuel blocks... I was worried that there wouldn't be enough time to get ready...


We're still on the schedule outlined in the original blog, ie, blueprints on patchday, switchover a few weeks later :)

Scrapyard Bob wrote:
Note: They're only giving us 2 weeks to load the towers up with new fuel blocks. So by Dec 13th, you will need to have prepared at least a few day's worth of new fuel pellets (or buy off the market).

I suggest doing a few days of ME research on your fuel BPOs starting on Nov 28th, producing a week's worth of fuel pellets, then go back to ME research for another few days. Make another week's worth of fuel pellets, then go back and finish out a few more days of ME/PE research on the BPO.

By Dec 11th-12th - you will want to have loaded at least 5-7 days worth of fuel pellets into all of your towers, but leave the rest of the fuel bay filled with the old-style fuel types. This is the so-called half-n-half approach. After the switchover happens (supposedly on Dec 13th), go out to your towers, remove the old-style fuel types, fill the tower up with the new fuel pellets.


You get to almost-perfect at ME14 (401 units of isotopes rather than 400, everything else is perfect) and perfect-perfect at ME40. ME14 takes me 1 day 13 hours on our internal server.

Two step wrote:
The original blog said the block BPOS were going to be in Thukker Mix stations. Does that include their highsec/lowsec stations, or will it only be in 0.0 stations?


Should be all Thukker Mix stations everywhere, I think.
Jack Dant
The Gentlemen of Low Moral Fibre
#46 - 2011-11-23 15:37:00 UTC  |  Edited by: Jack Dant
Evelgrivion wrote:
The 5 minute manufacturing time is still terrifyingly high; two manufacturing slot hours will be occupied for every individual large tower's operational day in Eve. There are an estimated 40,000 control towers up and running, which translates to 67 NPC stations worth of factory slots (50 slots each station), occupied 24 hours a day, 7 days a week just to keep up with the demand for POS fuel.

That sounds like a bit of an extreme, brand new source of demand for factory slots, don't you think?

Evel, keep in mind, 5 minutes is the base amount. After industry V it's 4 minutes, and at a POS array, it's down to 3 minutes. Add in a bit of PE research, and you get it down to 2m30s easy enough.

So one hour to assemble a day's worth of fuel. And building at component arrays, you can fit 10 assembly arrays at a small tower, 100 lines total. Should be easy enough to manage.

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CCP Greyscale
C C P
C C P Alliance
#47 - 2011-11-23 15:38:16 UTC
Vyktor Abyss wrote:
Just to reiterate on what I said in earlier blogs; in principle I support this change and am glad you're making the sums easier for POS operators (although there is an extra step now with fuel block production).

Please consider iterating/overhauling POS VERY SOON though, especially by breaking up their functions into other structures, with differing fuel requirements. POS should not be the swiss army knife structure they currently are, IMHO and I'd like to see you have a range of structure with differing attributes for the differing functions (such as moon mining, reacting, T3 production, Labs, Capital production etc etc etc).

Cheers.


Doing a thorough revision is on our to-do list.

Brunaburh wrote:
Although I am glad you listened to the concerns about block size and faction towers, there still remains one significant issue, which is the fuel consumption.

Riptard Teg covered it in a blog post, if you aren't running a full grid/full cpu tower (as in probably 90% of towers out there) there are significant changes to cost since you aren't allowing for fuel variance in the ice products.

I want to say this again, I love the idea of fuel blocks.

I don't love the idea that fuel isn't variable based on CPU/Grid usage.

I mean really, you think after all these years it would be so hard to make a fuel block of all the static fuels and just have to measure Ozone and Heavy Water?

Fuel blocks should combine the PI materials and the Isotopes (all static measured fuels today), and then the ozone and heavy water should be variable (as it is today) based on usage.

It's not that complicated. It's also not 75-IQ stupid, which means it requires thought and planning, things that EVE is known for (in a good way).

Fuel blocks would still be racial due to the isotope inclusion.

Please?

EDIT WTF? I can't link the damn url. BBCODE failure??


We're of the opinion that the extra interestingness of the separate LOz and HW doesn't justify the increase in complexity. We understand your position, but we don't agree that keeping this extra complexity in this system is good for the game as a whole.

Jack Dant wrote:
Any chance we can get the BPOs seeded on Sisi?


I'm going to look into what the status is on this now.

Lake wrote:
A suggestion to make the switchover less painful, and which doesn't require code changes to the Crucible release:

Run a DB script to convert the fuel currently in towers into fuel blocks during the DT.

This will alleviate some player concerns about producing enough fuel blocks in a reasonable time frame (and the resultant price shock) by providing a one-time buffer of up to roughly a month of fuel block production.

It prevents the inevitable player frustration with towers going offline due to mis-fueling (no matter how many blog posts or news items you make, this will happen, and it will be frustrating and they will blame CCP).

It's verifiable. You can check the results of the script before any code runs when you turn the server on.

It's just all around easier on the players. That's the whole point of this change right? Less frustrating non-gameplay.

It makes you look like the good guys. You already took the player advice on raising the block-count so you could do fuel bonuses sanely. This alleviates the remaining major concern.




If we made this a condition of adding fuel blocks, we wouldn't be adding fuel blocks, because it pushes the complexity and risk to a level that's unacceptable for a change of this sort. We'd love to do an automatic switch-over script, but it's just not going to happen, sorry.

Evelgrivion wrote:
The 5 minute manufacturing time is still terrifyingly high; two manufacturing slot hours will be occupied for every individual large tower's operational day in Eve. There are an estimated 40,000 control towers up and running, which translates to 67 NPC stations worth of factory slots (50 slots each station), occupied 24 hours a day, 7 days a week just to keep up with the demand for POS fuel.

That sounds like a bit of an extreme, brand new source of demand for factory slots, don't you think?



If this turns into a major issue we'll do something about it, but with the ability to build in starbases etc we want to see how it pans out before taking action.
Neo Agricola
Gallente Federation
#48 - 2011-11-23 15:48:58 UTC
CCP Greyscale wrote:
Vyktor Abyss wrote:
Just to reiterate on what I said in earlier blogs; in principle I support this change and am glad you're making the sums easier for POS operators (although there is an extra step now with fuel block production).

Please consider iterating/overhauling POS VERY SOON though, especially by breaking up their functions into other structures, with differing fuel requirements. POS should not be the swiss army knife structure they currently are, IMHO and I'd like to see you have a range of structure with differing attributes for the differing functions (such as moon mining, reacting, T3 production, Labs, Capital production etc etc etc).

Cheers.


Doing a thorough revision is on our to-do list.


Great.
Please inform us bevor, so we can give you some imput.

CCP Greyscale wrote:

Brunaburh wrote:
Although I am glad you listened to the concerns about block size and faction towers, there still remains one significant issue, which is the fuel consumption.

Riptard Teg covered it in a blog post, if you aren't running a full grid/full cpu tower (as in probably 90% of towers out there) there are significant changes to cost since you aren't allowing for fuel variance in the ice products.

I want to say this again, I love the idea of fuel blocks.

I don't love the idea that fuel isn't variable based on CPU/Grid usage.

I mean really, you think after all these years it would be so hard to make a fuel block of all the static fuels and just have to measure Ozone and Heavy Water?

Fuel blocks should combine the PI materials and the Isotopes (all static measured fuels today), and then the ozone and heavy water should be variable (as it is today) based on usage.

It's not that complicated. It's also not 75-IQ stupid, which means it requires thought and planning, things that EVE is known for (in a good way).

Fuel blocks would still be racial due to the isotope inclusion.

Please?

EDIT WTF? I can't link the damn url. BBCODE failure??


We're of the opinion that the extra interestingness of the separate LOz and HW doesn't justify the increase in complexity. We understand your position, but we don't agree that keeping this extra complexity in this system is good for the game as a whole.


What about a lets say 20% reduction in LO and HW for construction of those Fuel Blocks?

And please for my hauling time: reduce those blocks to 4m^3

Thx

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Evelgrivion
State War Academy
Caldari State
#49 - 2011-11-23 15:55:02 UTC  |  Edited by: Evelgrivion
CCP Greyscale wrote:
Evelgrivion wrote:
The 5 minute manufacturing time is still terrifyingly high; two manufacturing slot hours will be occupied for every individual large tower's operational day in Eve. There are an estimated 40,000 control towers up and running, which translates to 67 NPC stations worth of factory slots (50 slots each station), occupied 24 hours a day, 7 days a week just to keep up with the demand for POS fuel.

That sounds like a bit of an extreme, brand new source of demand for factory slots, don't you think?



If this turns into a major issue we'll do something about it, but with the ability to build in starbases etc we want to see how it pans out before taking action.


I asked for some numbers for perspective and received these courtesy of Wollari Smile

There are 1,364 factory stations located in 639 high security systems and 571 factory stations in 302 low security space systems.

Using the high ball 5 minute time, that's 5% of available high security space manufacturing capacity that will be consumed by star base fuel production
Using the low ball 3 minute time, 3% of available high security space manufacturing capacity will be needed.

It's not necessarily unworkable, but I suspect these numbers will necessitate the creation of dedicated starbase fuel production alts, which spend their entire careers roaming between dead end systems, just to keep a sufficient number of industry slots open and available for an industrialist's personal use.
Scrapyard Bob
EVE University
Ivy League
#50 - 2011-11-23 16:07:55 UTC  |  Edited by: Scrapyard Bob
Raid'En wrote:

i think the biggest problem here is not the price, but the volume ; it will be a big change for people doing the hauling on nullsec, as ozone and water are close to 50% of the total volume of product needed currently.
so for tower having very few modules onlined, this change will almost double the volume needed to haul the fuel.
well in fact it would be more like 40-60% more, given blocks are a bit smaller than fuel items, but that's still a big change


m3/30d under the old system (assuming full PG/CPU):

68.2k / 133k / 257k

m3/30d from HW (if maxed out):

10.9k / 21.6k / 43.2k

m3/30d from LOz (if maxed out):

10.9k / 21.6k / 43.2k

m3/30d under the new system (10/20/40 blocks per hour, 5m3 each, 30*24 hours):

36k / 72k / 144k

So for a large tower, you probably had either CPU or PG maxed, with minimal of the other. So your haul volume goes from around 210-215k per 30d to 144k per 30d.

(I think... gotta check those numbers for the "after").
Iniquita
Perkone
Caldari State
#51 - 2011-11-23 16:17:15 UTC
You cant just make pos use both fuel types in series? If Fuel A exists then use it, else Fuel B?

The downside I see is that we're not only going to have go forth and toss fuel blocks in these pos, but then someone with starbase config will need to go around and take out the old fuel that is no longer being consumed. Having the pos burn both fuel types as long as they exist in the proper quantity in the tower would be an effective transition strategy imo.
Scrapyard Bob
EVE University
Ivy League
#52 - 2011-11-23 16:18:11 UTC
Jack Dant wrote:
Evelgrivion wrote:
The 5 minute manufacturing time is still terrifyingly high; two manufacturing slot hours will be occupied for every individual large tower's operational day in Eve. There are an estimated 40,000 control towers up and running, which translates to 67 NPC stations worth of factory slots (50 slots each station), occupied 24 hours a day, 7 days a week just to keep up with the demand for POS fuel.

That sounds like a bit of an extreme, brand new source of demand for factory slots, don't you think?

Evel, keep in mind, 5 minutes is the base amount. After industry V it's 4 minutes, and at a POS array, it's down to 3 minutes. Add in a bit of PE research, and you get it down to 2m30s easy enough.

So one hour to assemble a month's worth of fuel. And building at component arrays, you can fit 10 assembly arrays at a small tower, 100 lines total. Should be easy enough to manage.


At 5 minutes per batch of 40, you have a 12:1 ratio of production vs consumption (30.5 days of fuel can be done in 2.54 days for a large tower).

My estimate was that you could easily drive that time down to about 3 minutes per batch (down to 2.5 minutes/batch at a POS array). Which is closer to a 20:1 or 24:1 ratio. So that 30.5 days of fuel can be done in about 1.27 days at a tower or 1.5-1.6 days at a station.

(I'm pretty sure you meant to say "one day to assemble a month's worth of fuel".)
Lake
The Praxis Initiative
Gentlemen's Agreement
#53 - 2011-11-23 16:18:32 UTC
CCP Greyscale wrote:

Lake wrote:
A suggestion to make the switchover less painful, and which doesn't require code changes to the Crucible release:

Run a DB script to convert the fuel currently in towers into fuel blocks during the DT.

This will alleviate some player concerns about producing enough fuel blocks in a reasonable time frame (and the resultant price shock) by providing a one-time buffer of up to roughly a month of fuel block production.

It prevents the inevitable player frustration with towers going offline due to mis-fueling (no matter how many blog posts or news items you make, this will happen, and it will be frustrating and they will blame CCP).

It's verifiable. You can check the results of the script before any code runs when you turn the server on.

It's just all around easier on the players. That's the whole point of this change right? Less frustrating non-gameplay.

It makes you look like the good guys. You already took the player advice on raising the block-count so you could do fuel bonuses sanely. This alleviates the remaining major concern.


If we made this a condition of adding fuel blocks, we wouldn't be adding fuel blocks, because it pushes the complexity and risk to a level that's unacceptable for a change of this sort. We'd love to do an automatic switch-over script, but it's just not going to happen, sorry.


The suggestion I made is obvious, so naturally you've already considered it and rejected it.

The purpose of my post is to raise your awareness of the value of that extra complexity and risk, by giving other players an opportunity to support the notion. The hope is that given sufficient "likes" and posts chiming in with support (and perhaps a couple of CSM reps I know adding their own comments) you'll determine that the extra effort is worth the value to the players.

Though I contend that the risk and complexity of a one-off DB script is actually less than the complexity and risk than asking every manager of every one of tens of thousands of POS in the game to prepare for a hard switchover date. But then perhaps you have more faith in humanity than I do.
Rip Minner
ARMITAGE Logistics Salvage and Industries
#54 - 2011-11-23 16:20:28 UTC
I personly feel the fuel blocks and No longer needing the password for the jump brigesis full of win! Smile

Is it a rock point a lazer at it and profit. Is it a ship point a lazer at it and profit. I dont see any problems here.
Jack Dant
The Gentlemen of Low Moral Fibre
#55 - 2011-11-23 16:22:03 UTC
Scrapyard Bob wrote:
I'm pretty sure you meant to say "one day to assemble a month's worth of fuel".)

Actually, I meant "one hour to assemble a day's worth of fuel" (60/2.5 = 24). Edited in :)

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
CCP Greyscale
C C P
C C P Alliance
#56 - 2011-11-23 16:26:32 UTC
Lake wrote:
CCP Greyscale wrote:

Lake wrote:
A suggestion to make the switchover less painful, and which doesn't require code changes to the Crucible release:

Run a DB script to convert the fuel currently in towers into fuel blocks during the DT.

This will alleviate some player concerns about producing enough fuel blocks in a reasonable time frame (and the resultant price shock) by providing a one-time buffer of up to roughly a month of fuel block production.

It prevents the inevitable player frustration with towers going offline due to mis-fueling (no matter how many blog posts or news items you make, this will happen, and it will be frustrating and they will blame CCP).

It's verifiable. You can check the results of the script before any code runs when you turn the server on.

It's just all around easier on the players. That's the whole point of this change right? Less frustrating non-gameplay.

It makes you look like the good guys. You already took the player advice on raising the block-count so you could do fuel bonuses sanely. This alleviates the remaining major concern.


If we made this a condition of adding fuel blocks, we wouldn't be adding fuel blocks, because it pushes the complexity and risk to a level that's unacceptable for a change of this sort. We'd love to do an automatic switch-over script, but it's just not going to happen, sorry.


The suggestion I made is obvious, so naturally you've already considered it and rejected it.

The purpose of my post is to raise your awareness of the value of that extra complexity and risk, by giving other players an opportunity to support the notion. The hope is that given sufficient "likes" and posts chiming in with support (and perhaps a couple of CSM reps I know adding their own comments) you'll determine that the extra effort is worth the value to the players.

Though I contend that the risk and complexity of a one-off DB script is actually less than the complexity and risk than asking every manager of every one of tens of thousands of POS in the game to prepare for a hard switchover date. But then perhaps you have more faith in humanity than I do.


To be clear, I'm not saying "the complexity and risk of a switchover script makes a switchover script not worth doing", I'm saying "the complexity and risk of a switchover script makes fuel blocks not worth doing", at least for this release. We rejected doing this sort of upgrade because it would take so much QA time to test it properly that we'd have to cut a whole stack of other features to get it in, and while we like fuel blocks we don't think they're important enough to justify cutting all the ship balancing we're doing, for example.

If you want to argue that "no fuel blocks at all" is better than "fuel blocks without a handover script", then that's an interesting conversation (although only in a theoretical sense this late in the day), but "fuel blocks and a handover script" just isn't something we could justify considering for this release. We only have so many developer hours to work with in a given expansion so everything is a zero-sum decision - adding time to one thing means taking it away from something else.


Iniquita wrote:
You cant just make pos use both fuel types in series? If Fuel A exists then use it, else Fuel B?

The downside I see is that we're not only going to have go forth and toss fuel blocks in these pos, but then someone with starbase config will need to go around and take out the old fuel that is no longer being consumed. Having the pos burn both fuel types as long as they exist in the proper quantity in the tower would be an effective transition strategy imo.


Basically, no - see previous point :)

(Doing this would entail significant code changes to the way starbase fuel works, which would push the complexity sufficiently high that it would mean cutting the entire feature.)
Victor Valka
Insterstellar Mining and Manufacturing
#57 - 2011-11-23 16:26:33 UTC
My base of stars.
In it's tank of fuel,
there is not fuel!
There is Love!


Thanks for removing some unnecessary complexity, CCP! Big smile
CynoNet Two
GSF Logistics and Posting Reserves
Goonswarm Federation
#58 - 2011-11-23 16:45:05 UTC
CCP Greyscale wrote:

If you want to argue that "no fuel blocks at all" is better than "fuel blocks without a handover script", then that's an interesting conversation (although only in a theoretical sense this late in the day), but "fuel blocks and a handover script" just isn't something we could justify considering for this release. We only have so many developer hours to work with in a given expansion so everything is a zero-sum decision - adding time to one thing means taking it away from something else.


I feel like Captain Obvious pointing this out, but...

1) Go ahead with the November 29th as-is. No need to mess with code, no feature changes.
2) Let players build up supplies of fuel blocks from the newly seeded BPO's.
3) Cancel the fuel change-over 2 weeks after Crucible.
4) Take your time writing and testing a switch-over script. It's not exactly a complex task, just a case of iterating through each POS in the database and replacing X fuel with Y blocks.
5) Test it to destruction with QA time after the main patch is done and dusted. Deploy in the New Year.

Everyone now has nice stocks of the new fuel ready, doesn't have to rush around just before the holidays manically saving towers, and is generally happier.

You seem you determined to push out the entire change ASAP at the expense of forcing thousands of players to expend many hours in unecessary work. This isn't a trade-off between QA time versus other features - it's a trade-off between putting out a new feature RIGHT NOW, or pushing out a new feature properly in a manner that accomodates players.
There is little benefit in pushing this change in a sea of chaos before Xmas over doing it in a sea of calm after Xmas.

Take your time.
Katrina Bekers
A Blessed Bean
Pandemic Horde
#59 - 2011-11-23 16:48:46 UTC
Quote:
in the unlikely event that the patch runs into a technical glitch that prevents deployment

Hey, look, an understatement! Lol

<< THE RABBLE BRIGADE >>
Neo Agricola
Gallente Federation
#60 - 2011-11-23 16:48:47 UTC
CynoNet Two wrote:
Take your time.


Amen!

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