Jita Park Speakers Corner

1. I think the refining/reprocessing change is ultimately positive, but have lots of collateral damage. The scrap refining change prevent players from being able to recycle T1 modules and ships, and this waste factor actually gives CCP some balancing freedom. However, the change makes loot melting much less valuable, something that primarily impacts newer players who loot rather than blitz missions, as well as raise overall mineral prices, which makes flying more expensive. With scrap refining less effective, this could be grounds to undo the meta loot nerf that makes them refine into far less minerals than T1.

Requiring greatly improved ore skills for "perfect refines" has the same set of effects. On one hand, it allows greater specialization and makes refining skills far more valuable. On the other hand, it greatly increases the barrier of entry to the refining business. This might not affect entry-level miners as much as the meta might change from selling minerals to selling unrefined ore for processing by skilled characters. Allowing outposts/POS to refine better than NPC stations is a net positive because outposts and POS's can be contested/challenged, and competition is never a bad thing.

2. While the whole details have not been released, I'm overall in favor of the Industry changes based on what has released so far. More interaction is never a bad thing, and slight uncertainties in the otherwise rote industrial/manufacturing field can make it more interesting. Not having to wait for station slots for an isk premium will be a huge boon to newbies in the starter systems. As far as the UI changes go, I don't have enough experience to comment.

What's interesting to note right now is that industry right now is an ISK faucet despite slot fees. Slot fees as it stands are so low that the insurance from a ship exploding injects more isk into the economy than manufacturing takes out. Increased slot fees can help slow inflation. Variable slot pricing allows players to further compete with each other in terms of prices.

3. I think this change is ultimately irrelevant. RIght now, players without standings can pay a service fee to a shell corp with standings to plonk down their POS anywhere. The only thing that this changes is removing the middle man and letting players do this directly. The only people being hurt by this change are the people with those services.

1: No real problem with the refining changes. Yes, it's changing things. Yes, null-sec can do better than a high-sec station. It's not particularly significant, and gives meaning to skills which were, basically, pointless, other than to get T2 mining crystals. The main thing I want to happen is for skills to come into effect for POS refining as well.

2: There's not enough information out there to give an informed answer to this. Anyone that does is knee jerking a response. There are points of concern, but these may be mitigated in later blogs. Change is good. A new coat of paint really wasn't enough, which is what a UI change would be. The inability to lockdown blueprints in a POS is a concern. Copy times may be sufficient to mitigate this, they might not be.

3: Standings for POS were always a reason to not accept newbies into corp, as their standings would bring down the corp standing to the point kicking would have to happen to anchor a POS. That's not good, and it just lead to people circumventing the mechanic. As such, it was a bad mechanic. Removal doesn't bother me.

I'd like to see the addition of a mechanic, other that wardecs, to remove truly abandoned POS. Run through charters at an elevated rate when there's no other fuel, then have it free to shoot when there are no charters there (The Empires say 'no charters, no protection')

Yup, wait until all the info is out before you decide that the sky is falling.

m

Right now I like and do not like some of the changes. I'm holding off until we have all of the dev blogs. Some things may answer others. I'm not against change. I just dislike having pieces when the whole is on the way. Once we have them all we can see what needs to be addressed.

"Nullsec alliances" could 'take over' hisec now if they wanted to. Of course if they wanted to take over hi-sec, they wouldn't be faffing about in 0.0

To expand on this:

There are two conceivable rational motives for "nullsec alliances" to do what you're worried about

1) To secure a scarce resource for themselves

2) To deny a valuable resource to competitors

Given the time=money expense of securing 13,000 new hisec moons, not to mention the tens of thousands of existing moons you can probably work out that neither is a viable stratgey. If it takes 50 subcaps pilots 40 minutes to defang and reinforce, then 20 minutes to kill a POS, then that's 50 man-hours per POS. Assume that those pilots could otherwise be making 50M ISK in an hour. Therefore it costs 2.5B per POS, assuming that the POS is undefended and the replacement POS is never attacked.

Since 0.0 alliances primarily care about competing with each other, their time is far better spent attacking a single CSAA POS building a super (value 50-100Bn) than 20-40 hi-sec POS.

i think that a mechanic that makes players do something that's so unrelated to what they want to do as a prerequisite is bad, especially as long and grindy as doing missions. and especially as missions and (pos stuff) require totally different skillsets

... that remark on fuel discount for pos owners with high standings is interesting, though. don't highsec starbases need special tickets from the empires to be run? is this a significant cost? reducing this particular cost for corps with high standings or even corps in factional warfare sounds cool

IIRC, the "tickets" (starbase something charters or whatever they're called) are consumed at a flat rate and are a minor LP/ISK sink. They're not a significant cost. And as a point of principle, I think it's desirable that the highest "cost" of running a POS should be the need to defend it against other players.

With respect to standings, They're a pointless arbitrary barrier to being able to use a POS at all. I can't think of any good argument for adding them to a system that didn't have them in the first place. Far better to have the barrier be "some other guy has the moon you want, why not try and take it away from him?" than "you have to spend a few hundred hours grinding missions that you have no interest in at all in order to engage in a totally seperate field of gameplay". How about requiring players to complete 5 billion in market sales before they can access mission agents? Or building items that use at least 10 million units of minerals before they can place buy orders? Or research 10 BPOs to "perfect" before you can change the security toggle from green.

I find myself agreeing with this. The idea is sound: if you want the convenience of using the infrastructure built by these large institutions, you must curry favor with them and you must scratch their back sometimes. It is not only plausible, it adds a cost to the decision. The choice to settle in a particular place becomes more meaningful. That is the pretty theory.

I hope the pretty theory is kept in mind! I do not want to lose the particular flavor of highsec to the deficiencies of an obsolete design. When PVE is redone, and if standings get a Crimewatch-style rethinking, I would like very much to see them return to their intended significance.

If i am correct elections ended:)