Player Features and Ideas Discussion

That's not actually true. In a sense, yes, the buyers pay for it. But when the production costs are a significant portion of the costs of the item, the manufacturers will be careful not to overproduce. The higher price of the modules means the customers will purchase less. This will free up slots.

Research slots especially will be freed up, as so many blueprints are getting efficiency research into oblivion. I see some at over 1000 runs, even though there's no significant benefit past 25.

I do agree with making the costs dynamic, however. I think the higher the system security, the higher the base cost of production should be, and then it could change very gradually over time also by how many slots are being used, with an attempt to balance it to around 50-75% usage.

In general you produce 25% faster in a POS, and there are NO material bonuses. There are some rapid assembly arrays that build even faster, but have a material penalty!

If you are in highsec, there is very little reason to utilize a POS for manufacturing:
♦ Station slots are normally abundant and available unless you are very close to a trade hub.
♦ Stations had negligible line costs, whereas POS's have moderate fuel costs.

I don't want to punish the new manufacturer, and I've been racking my brain trying to find a non-abuse-able solution to not charge them the line rate, but alas haven't found one. In truth, I figured that a budding industrialist needs a fair amount of startup capital anyway, and that the line costs will be a small portion of this.

It really depends where you are I think. I keep hearing people say that slots are abundant, but when I searched for slots, I searched 3 regions and found that two wouldn't have a slot available (of any kind) for over a week, and the third had 1-2 slots of some kinds available in lowsec but what I wanted wasn't available at all.

My manufacturing base is 3 systems from a major trade hub, and has free slots 80% of the time. Only when I go into overdrive (and use 30 of them myself), do I run into queues. And even then there are usually other stations in the region that have slots available.

I know the Forge has lots of queues on their station services, but I think that's primarily from players willing to sacrifice productivity for convenience.

I don't. Majority of new S&I players I see focus on making things like ammunition. So long as people travel everywhere, ammunition can be sold everywhere, it's just a matter of time. However, if the ammunition being offered at trade hubs increases in price significantly because of transport and manufacture time, while it stays cheap out in the backwaters where new players are getting the best manufacturing costs (which are necessary because they don't have maxed manufacturing, trade or research skills, so their costs are immediately higher right now, no matter where they manufacture.) Then you'll start to see actual trade happening. Big mission runners will start buying their own ammo in bulk elsewhere and hauling it, or getting a corp member to pick it up in passing. Savvy haulers will start checking markets while they move around, and buy that ammo or whatever other product in bulk to take to a trade hub and undercut the current price because it's on their route anyways. This already happens to be sure, but on a very small scale compared to the amount of trading that happens in the systems surrounding hubs.

A lot of the issues that people have with the high sec economy right now revolve around the fact that there is a lot of assets concentrated in very small areas like the systems around trade hubs. This is a legitimate complaint, in my opinion, even though a lot of people would describe me as a high sec carebear. It's natural for wealth in an open economy to concentrate in areas, but not to this extent. Spreading even a small percentage of assets that is in the immediate area of the trade hubs out to the edges of high sec space will benefit everyone because trade will be more mobile as a whole.

Think about it like this: In reality we have (as a very basic example that doesn't cover anything remotely close to the full spectrum) people who live in Urban areas and people in Rural areas. People in Urban areas tend to have more liquid assets such as cash, investments and small trade goods such as precious metals and collectibles. In Rural areas a person with an equal income and asset pool is more likely to have hard assets which can not be easily traded such as real estate, manufacturing, agricultural and industry equipment, etc... Because of contraints such as space, time and convenience Urban dwellers have to concentrate their assets, whereas Rural dwellers often have a relative abundance of all of this when it comes to managing their assets.

Right now in Eve it's the opposite, and because of that Urban dwellers have the ability to collect both liquid and hard assets. NPC stations have no storage limit, they offer the most convenience and are located in areas that allow fast travel to other parts of the Eve universe. A POS is the exact opposite of all of this. We can't give POS's unlimited storage and can't allow them to be placed indiscriminately in high traffic areas for gameplay reasons, but we can encourage players to consider their convenience for other gameplay reasons by spreading out the concentration of hard assets.

There are a lot more details to this that I didn't go into, but frankly I'm getting bored with this subject.

This is an interesting insight that I haven't fully considered. Thank you!

As a guy who does highsec S&I, I am in support of a large fee increase, perhaps even on the scale of 200% across all NPC station slot types (manufacturing, research, etc). I'm also in agreement that part of the fee calculation should be determined by how busy a particular station is.

As an aside, I also think that the advanced ship assembly arrays should be treated like the rapid equipment arrays, in that a material penalty is paid for more rapid manufacturing. I don't believe that the current system where it costs more to build T2 ships in a POS than a station is good for the game.

A manufacturer who cannot produce in a station at the same cost effectiveness that an older, POS owning player can produce at a POS is already in an inherently inferior position, where the extremely slim margins on most t1 items would result in station made products having a material+production cost+sales tax minimum profitable value higher than the POS made goods, resulting in an inability to at all compete with older players in a specific market.

This would have the effect of locking large sections of entry level manufacturing away from newer budding industrialists.

While his statement of Malcanis's Law was a poor choice, this is a change that would be of benifit to older established players, and of negative effect to new players, so It falls under the umbrella of the original "Malcanis Law" statement that was a more general observation that many changes benefit older players to the detriment of newer one, before other people people pared the saying down to the current form.

Meh. POS owners don't waste time producing most T1 items for slim profit margins anyway. Its really not cost-effective. If u go POS u go T2 or T3 (except maybe the occasional capital rig build job or other low volume product).

You can't stop a MFG job without losing all the materials in the job. This means if you are wardecced, there is quite likely loot to be collected from a MFG POS, thereby encouraging people to attack it. While a small POS can be configured to serve 2 or so players, doing so will result in it having very poor defenses, and becoming a loot pinata. The price point I suggested may seem too high, but I figured it is probably about right for a conservative POS operation with proper defenses.



I consider this your most valid and important point:

Fixing the POS UI should be a high priority when we encourage players to utilize POS S&I. I would like to see any POS hangar, including the personal hangar, be a valid target for MFG Input/Output. I have a feeling addressing the POS UI will come in the next major expansion or two, and when it comes, I'd like to see this change implemented to encourage POS usage over station usage.



I still think the change is a very good idea, but definitely see the unpleasantness in dealing with the POS UI. Fixing the UI should be a high priority.