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Dev blog: Researching, the Future

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Loraine Gess
Confedeferate Union of Tax Legalists
#441 - 2014-04-29 04:05:48 UTC
Windspeed Khagah wrote:
Okay, I'm just a little disappointed. As a small time industry focused person, I've been doing research/invention/copying at public installations. Sometimes I have to wait 2-3 month before I can get my 30 days of research in.

I've been researching my bpo's for over a year and have a bunch where I can now begin to make marginal profits. Notice "MARGINAL" profits. Now, just about anybody to get to where I got very quickly.

My "general complaint" is that I used to be an Explorer. I trained long and hard for the Deep-Space Probes and spent many months learning and perfecting exploration. But, I guess CCP thought it was too difficult, so they lowered the bar that I finally reached.

This is happening again. You make an interesting / challenging game and when everybody works up on that challenge, you lower the bar because it is too hard.

Any ideas what is going to happen to the Market? Now that better BPO's and BPC's are going to quickly come online. The market prices of items will drop due to less cost and more availability.

Okay, I'm fine with trying to make the Math simpler. But there are cost/benefit tools out there that will do this for you. If people can't be bothered to study cost / benefit, then they shouldn't be able to profit that those that do.




Ok how do I put this


Ok


You suck at industry. I can count, off the top of my head, a dozen T1 prints with minimal startup cost that turn a great profit with 3d or less of research.


Just because you are bad at something, does not mean the bar will be set around you. I'm not sure how waiting a few days for astrometrics V to finish training is "working long and hard" for anything, but I think I can safely discount your awful opinion judging by the amount of badness contained in your post already.
Sizeof Void
Ninja Suicide Squadron
#442 - 2014-04-29 04:06:05 UTC
MailDeadDrop wrote:
Dramaticus wrote:
You can and will still be able to use a BPO in a POS with absolutely zero risk to the BPO.
Would you care to explain how you believe this is true? Because my & other people's understanding of the dev blogs do not support that statement.

It is not that complicated. All you need to do is join Goonswarm. No one will attack your POS. ;)
Sturmwolke
#443 - 2014-04-29 04:11:45 UTC
Kadl wrote:
Bad Bobby wrote:
Kadl wrote:
Perhaps we can settle for constructive arguments?

I'd like that.

Historically the nature of the argument between the two camps has been along these lines:

Person A: Remove T2 BPOs because they are ruining the game!
Person B: In what way are they ruining the game?
Person A: By ruining it!
Person B: Would you like to support that claim in some way? Do you have any figures, graphs, maybe a pie chart?
Person A: Just remove them already!
Person B: I see.

Once you have witnessed this display a thousand times, you get to thinking that the problem is less with T2 BPOs and more with players that don't think things through.


There is certainly a reoccurring pattern. I agree with Person B that the T2 BPOs don't feel right, but don't like the hyperbole. CCP responds to the argument that things don't seem right (different copy times for T2 BPOs doesn't seem right to Greyscale). It is also obvious that the T2 BPOs are not going away immediately. That would also be unfair to those who have purchased them as a productive asset. Given these conflicting interests I think that CCP can simply not improve the T2 BPOs or nerf them slightly over time. Either way addresses the twin facts that they were a mistake and that they are part of the game.

It's deeper than that. Whenever the sore point of T2 BPOs comes out, proponents will always pull out Akita's logic exercise to silence the naysayers.
However, the same logic exercise, when applied to various other aspects of EVE during these intervening years did not prevent CCP from ramming through changes or amendment.

Learning skills - removal of unecessary complexity.
Ship tiericide - removal of the old balancing concepts.
Multi character training - removal of old barriers.
Warp changes - fixing of what should have been fixed.
AU/distance sliders - fixing of what had been asked for years ... literally ... years. Yes, YEARS!
June expansion - controversial massive industry upheaval

It's time that CCP gather its will and put this age old T2 BPO argument out of its misery. Argument? Simplify the balancing landscape, removal of unecessary complexity.
When CCP missed noting its consequences when coupled with the outpost changes, it indicates failure in impact accounting.

Here's an exercise. Why must you waste time discussing the impacts of T2 BPO vs inventions with the upcoming changes to decide the course of action to take with regards to its ME/PE tweaking?
Why are you wasting time data mining individual T2 item profitability in order to determine the volume impact? (that goes for both devs and serious inventors).

Surely, all many of CCP's effort thus far has been to reduce unecessary complexity in the system. Why is T2 BPO an exception when the rest was mowed down like grass?
Tweet for CCP Diagoras mentioned circa 3.8K holders (unique or per character?) for T2 BPOs. Are these numbers setting CCP back?
Sizeof Void
Ninja Suicide Squadron
#444 - 2014-04-29 04:16:17 UTC
Loraine Gess wrote:
Confirming the goons have the time and effort to knock out thousands of large POS without dreads... before even thinking about hardeners.

I guess you haven't had a chance to use the upgraded marauders, in bastion mode. Also, dickstars don't work against them.
Loraine Gess
Confedeferate Union of Tax Legalists
#445 - 2014-04-29 04:51:10 UTC  |  Edited by: Loraine Gess
Sizeof Void wrote:
Loraine Gess wrote:
Confirming the goons have the time and effort to knock out thousands of large POS without dreads... before even thinking about hardeners.

I guess you haven't had a chance to use the upgraded marauders, in bastion mode. Also, dickstars don't work against them.




If miniluv is going to go around taking down large towers for the next [3+ years] with a bunch of marauders, they are going to find themselves short a lot of marauders...



and again: Who the **** has that kind of effort for no reward?



Marauders don't even get 14k+ DPS

Christ who do you think is going to attack a thousand towers with a squad of marauders
Scarlett LaBlanc
University of Caille
Gallente Federation
#446 - 2014-04-29 04:57:36 UTC
First off, for what little it is worth after reading all 21 pages, I generally approve of these changes.

The increase to T2 BPO copying should not happen, it seems pretty clear to me that would be "bad".

While most of my BPO's are researched past will will be ME10% in the new system, I feel it is a good change for the future of S&I

In the future I agree that reaching the last level or two on high ranked BPO's will require a serious investment of time that locks up the print for a long stretch. Perhaps a compromise would be to make it a 20 step system as opposed to a 10 step. This would cut the research time per current new level in half. Would make it easier to get a level in when you have a break in copying or building runs.

Overall it's going in the right direction. I'm really pleased with the direction the summer update is taking.
Xtraneous
Sam's Space Guys
#447 - 2014-04-29 05:22:35 UTC
Capital ship hull BPCs - apologies if this question has been asked and answered already.

A large part of my income comes from selling copies of Cap ship hulls (freighters, dreads, supers, rorqs etc) - after this change the copy time will be much shorter, so I can produce many more copies. Unavoidably there will be many more copies produced than market demand requires and the price of copies will crash.

For example:
Currently a Charon BPO sells for approx 2bil and copies (that takes approx 28 days) sell for 50mil, generating a 2.5% return on investment per month (not including the cost of a copy slot). Investing in super BPOs for the bpc market is very low return, but also low risk and effort - a great way to use an excess of ISK.

After the change there will be so many Charon BPCs available the price will likely fall to equal the cost of a copy slot. This will lead to a glut of Charon BPOs on the market, so their price will fall to NPC or probably lower. As has been mentioned the price of Jump Freighter bpcs will crash as a flow on effect.

In my particular circumstance, my BPO collection worth hundreds of billions accumulated over years will no longer generate any meaningfull return. In addition it will be very hard to sell the BPOs, and certainly not for a premium that recognizes the time spent researching them.

To summarise the problem:
- At the current copy times there are enough capital ship BPOs being copied to meet market demand for copies. Reducing copy times will crash the price of capital bpcs and bpos.

There are a few possible solutions to this problem:
- Leave long copy times for capital ship class blueprints
- Allow NPCs to buy back researched BPOs at (or just under) the NPC price. You'd loose the value of any research but get back (most of) your initial investment. Perhaps this could be facilitated throught the contract system and batch processed at down time?
- Suck it up and become a producer, spend hours managing buy orders and hauling minerals.

I don't even mind if selling cap ship bpcs isn't a profitable option in the future, but I'll be unable to use my ISK in another venture because it will be tied up in capital BPOs that everyone will be trying to sell all at once....

Also, thx for the small T2 BPO buff :)
King Fu Hostile
Mea Culpa.
Shadow Cartel
#448 - 2014-04-29 06:00:36 UTC
After looking more into this it honestly looks like the devs behind these changes haven't really been able to consider most of the aspects involved here.


Elizabeth Norn
Nornir Research
Nornir Empire
#449 - 2014-04-29 06:37:06 UTC
I like the changes, even if they work against my business. There are going to be a whole lot of 'perfect' BPOs out there though if all ME 10+ BPOs become 10%.

I wouldn't mind a research credit refund considering how average a lot of my BPOs will become (http://imgur.com/FtKS1x3) Bear.

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Buddy link w/ bonus 250k SP, you keep the whole PLEX upon subscribing
sci0gon
Kaira Innovations
#450 - 2014-04-29 06:51:48 UTC
personally im not in the same boat as a lot of other players in this game as I keep a small bpo library of what I need / use myself of which some of them are roughly about a years worth of research, however this is really going to sting players who sell bpc packs for capitals / super capital sets with me levels ranging from 100-250.


I can only hope for their sakes that ccp look at this closely and decide what is best overall for players in that boat
Bad Bobby
Bring Me Sunshine
In Tea We Trust
#451 - 2014-04-29 07:24:52 UTC
King Fu Hostile wrote:
After looking more into this it honestly looks like the devs behind these changes haven't really been able to consider most of the aspects involved here.

Indeed. It is quite shocking when such obvious mistakes get as far as a Dev Blog.

However, as disappointing as it may be, you do have to remember that Devs only work here and very few of them are going to be able to match the depth and breadth of knowledge that some of our players have. One assumes that's one reason why they ask for our feedback.

There is also a very small number of Devs compared to players, so putting it out for player feedback early (even before it looks ready) can be beneficial for the product even if it isn't beneficial for our opinion of the Devs. Unfortunately, one problem with player feedback is the very poor signal to noise ratio which makes it a real challenge for the Devs to digest.
Sigras
Conglomo
#452 - 2014-04-29 07:28:13 UTC
First of all, I have to say I respect what you're trying to do, and I understand why you're trying to do it, but I can also understand people's frustrations as they are either going to feel cheated, or theyre going to feel as though someone else got something for free.

Have you considered your system may just not have enough granularity to it? I imagine you've considered it at least a little bit because you chose a 10 level system instead of a 5 level system like the skills have even though you're modeling it after skills.

What you're essentially trying to do is take a system with 1000 levels and squash it down to a system with 10 levels and keep everyone using the system currently at the same place... This seems to be an almost insurmountable task.

I suggest you move from a 10 level system to a 100 level system. This is very simple and very relate-able, and it also allows you to move research along in increments of 0.1% because in industry 1% is a HUGE FREAKING DEAL. In PvP 1% does make a difference but rarely is it going to be the difference between life and death, but in industry, everything is a numbers game; there's no skill or "getting better" here. Everything in industry comes down to the math and getting rounded up to the nearest percent is completely unfathomable because it is such a big deal. Even 0.1% is a big deal, but it is the most reasonable number I could come up with.

This would allow you to round ME levels to the nearest 0.1%, so
OLD --> New
ME 0 = ME 0
ME 1 = ME 50
ME 4 = ME 80
ME 9 = ME 90
ME 20 = ME 95
ME 100 = ME 99
ME 222 = ME 100

You still have a few problems like the fact that researching from level 99 to level 100 would take like a year for some BPOs and nobody is willing to research their BPO for that long, but I think this system would be much better and leave people feeling much less ripped off.

I also want to put my vote in here for a time equivalent BPO conversion as the argument is that you spent X time researching this BPO, and you got X time with the new system, you lost nothing and you're still where everyone else is who researched for X time.

Also all of the above aside, I want to state that I thought the old system where you asymptotically approach perfect but never quite get there was better because you could spend years trying to get several of the BPOs to perfect if you really wanted to specialize.

Thoughts?
Sir HyperChrist
Persnickety Pilots
#453 - 2014-04-29 07:35:25 UTC
K, I'm in a hurry, can't read up all 20 pages of comments, gotta catch a plane to Iceland :)

Now:
1) building a T2 drone directly at a POS. And set.
The industry skill gives 20% buildtime reduction, The POS drone assembly array 25%, for a total buildtime of 0.60*Base
And I can leave the BPO safely in station, as right now even the cheapest T2 done bpo's (Acolyte) cost nearly 100B isks.

After this patch:
1) Copy the T2 bpo for a total bonus of 25% => 0.75* Base
2) Move the bpc's to pos
3) build the drones

So this proposal gets me 20% less drones at triple the micromanagement!

Not really an improvement of either "hassle" and value.

My 2 cents.
hajduk21
Pirate Club
#454 - 2014-04-29 07:39:24 UTC
Since major null sec alliances are currently holding monopoly on capital production lets shake them up too, not only hisec producers and researchers. Maybe you can implement 3rd factor (ME,TE) lets call it RE ( regional efficency) so for any capital ship built mineral cost is scaling depending on region of space its being built in.
Dirty Wrench
Royal Amarr Institute
Amarr Empire
#455 - 2014-04-29 07:53:29 UTC
gas guzzler wrote:
Lilliana Stelles wrote:
No no no no no.

The copy time buff (if I'm reading this correctly) will be absurdly powerful for T2 BPO owners. Powerful enough to the point that invention will be worthless. We're talking about producing 100 copies in the time it previously took to produce one.



look at the current copy time on t2 BPOs before you post something like this please



Read the BLOG before you post. The part at the top under COPYING.

The headline here is that, during EVE’s summer 2014 release, we're going to change base copy-time on all blueprints to be the same as base build-time.

See the all blueprints part. Yeah, "All" includes T2 blueprints.

So copying my T1 blueprint + inventing my T2 BPC from my T1 copy + manufacturing my T2 BPC will not be anywhere near equal to copy a T2 BPO and manufacturing from a T2 BP copy that has positive ME and positive TE.

I doubt T2 BPO owners are suddenly going to flood the market with cheap positive ME and positive TE copies for people to jump in on their market.

The big advantage a T2 BPO has is you can get positive ME and TE values on it FOREVER.

With invention you need to continuously consume datacores to get anything other than ME -4 and TE -4.

The real question is how many T2 BPOs are still being used and how much of the market can they satisfy?

CCP would be able to see but to players it's more a matter of looking at the market and making an educated guess based on sale volume and sale price.

Invention only ever really stopped absurdly high price gouging by BPO owners by introducing a mechanic whereby anyone could compete but at a price that a BPO owner can undercut anytime they choose to do so.
Hannah Usoko
Seles Deep Space Industries
#456 - 2014-04-29 08:04:52 UTC
I think this 10 level system is much worse than the system we curretly have.

If you see for exmple an ME 100 bpc on contract, you can be 99% sure that is a good level, and it is possible an ME 200 bpc is not worth the extra isk, and it is also possible even this ME 100 bpc is overresearched.
With the new system, you only get a solid cap but the other things will still stand. It will make the researcher life worse because -I bet- many of the buyers will buy ME 10% instead of ME 9% even if the second one is still perfect. So you will have to max out as many bpo-s as you can. But this one is the smaller problem.

The bigger problem is that you will have extremely long research jobs, and cannot do anything else. Long research jobs means you will pay a lot of isk (I'm guessing you can count at least 1 million/day/job in a congested system).
Right now you can do something like this: research 1 or 2 me levels on important bpo-s on weekdays and your jobs will finnish to weekend and then you can copy/invent on weekend. After the summer release you will have to manage more accurately your research jobs by picking a good mixture of long run and short run researches (me/te/copy/invention).

With pos it will get even worse. For example you start a research using frigate bpo ME 8% to ME 9%. You have to defend your pos or avoid war or pos destruction for 20 days (or few days less depends on the not yet announced changes). Tell me if I'm wrong but if you cancel the research job you could lose up to 20 days of research on that single research. (if you risk to defend the pos, you could lose even the bpo-s in the pos.)
If it would be pvp that would mean when you lose a battle you would lose skillpoints worth up to one level from 10 random skills. (or even up to 10 random skills completely)

So now we know the risks, and I can say I would not risk any valuable bpo-s and research time for more than few days. And I'm not sure it will worth the time and isk for a small industrialist to do me or te research .
Magic Crisp
Amarrian Micro Devices
#457 - 2014-04-29 08:31:08 UTC
CCP Greyscale wrote:
Magic Crisp wrote:
Regarding the maxruns, please do NOT change the current effective limits on BPOs. Currently we can install unlimited number of jobs from maxrun BPOs as far as it fits into 30d. If you don't know why, then think of things like nanite pastes. maxrun is 15, producers are manufacturing them in batches of multiple thousands. If you still fail to see this, please try to manufacture 10K runs of nanite paste per week, using 15run jobs.

Please take extreme care on whatever you ruin.


Can you explain more clearly what a bad change would be here? I think I understand the situation you're describing but I'm not sure what the thing you're worried about is. Would kicking the maxruns number up be a bad thing?



First, thank you for answering and caring.

To be honest the best would to keep it as it is now. That is, not enforcing maxrun limits when manufacturing from BPOs, the only time constraint is the 30d limit. Kicking maxruns is a nasty workaround. Usually builds from BPOs happen when maxruns way too small compared to the amount of product required. Such things are like the above said pastes, capital and supoercapital manufacturing, tech2 construction part manufacturing, most importantly.

Bumping maxruns would require going from the current 5-ish to like 1K or so. Having limits on BPCs is okey, even bumping them bigtime to support building from BPCs. Building from BPOs allow us to ignore the maxrun limits and install longer times.

So the tradeoff is something like:
using BPCs: shortening total manufacturing time by parallel builds
using BPOs: avoid vasting slots, manufacturing shittons of items in a single job.

So, multiple BPCs can be used to speed things up, or a single BPO can be used when time doesn't really matter.

And in a few particular case, like the nanite paste, currently it requires cycling jobs every 10-ish minutes when using BPCs, for a complete day or so.

Math, for nanite paste: to manufacture 4500 runs, with the current 15 maxrun limit. that'd be 300 jobs, let's say a toon has 10 slots for easier math. That'd be 30 cycling of the jobs, with a 10 minute manufacturing time it'd take 5 hours. Instead of this, people just take the BPO insert a 4500 run job, and forget about it for a week. Less hassle, less pain, more real life, less pain in the fingers.

I hope this explained the current usecases, their reasons and what we would prefer to avoid hassles with the new system. If not please ask and i'll try to explain some points with more details.
Muninn Ogeko
Republic University
Minmatar Republic
#458 - 2014-04-29 08:32:25 UTC
First of all, I'd like to say that I like how much more intuitive this system will be for new players.

Any chance of matching research times on ME 10 blueprints before and after the changeover? With the current dev blog suggestions, the time to get ME 10 for new players will be ~4.27x the amount that was required for existing players.

If you've spent the last 4-5 years (6 years,7 months unskilled) researching a titan blueprint's ME, after the change you will have a blueprint that a new player will need 21 years (28 years unskilled) to match. For the same 4-5 year investment, they can get a blueprint that is 2% less efficient. For smaller items, while the gap is less extreme, it is still the same ratio. Obviously, people are unlikely to care much in the case of ammunition, where 3 days is nothing, but for capital components or even battleships, it's a big deal.

I worry about changes that consolidate more power in the hands of those that already have it, and prevent new players from competing on a level playing field.

If you set the research time for rank 1 ME 10 to be 60000 instead of 256000 (and scaled the other costs down accordingly), you will have the same time to research ME 10 blueprints before and after the change (though you may be attached to the 256000 number for its obvious link to skill costs). You could also set the rank to be based on the current research time divided by 25600 instead of by 6000 (which lets you keep the 256000 seconds for rank 1 ME 10, but means that a lot of items end up in the rank 1 bucket).

You may also feel like without higher costs, the new system makes it too fast for players to finish researching a BPO. Many people sunk a lot of time into getting that last fraction of a percent out, and the diminishing returns kept them involved for a long time. The higher costs for new players aren't fair, but they may keep people involved and entertained for longer.
Vigilanta
S0utherN Comfort
#459 - 2014-04-29 08:47:27 UTC
Point of clarification here please,

If i read the devblog correctly i may have not, we wont be able to remote build off bpos in station in poses, but we will be able to research bpos in stations at poses in the same system, without the BPO's having to physically be at the pos?

If you are not allowing remote research on bpos at station in a pos lab and the BPO's have to physically be in the lab, isnt that essentially making the labs worthless for all intent and purposes?

I can understand the push to move to a copy centric system but it would be nice to be able to still reseach and copy from a pos lab without putting expensive bpos in the pos, so would be cool to get some clarification.

Thanks!
Magic Crisp
Amarrian Micro Devices
#460 - 2014-04-29 08:49:32 UTC
CCP Greyscale wrote:
Madfranco wrote:
Edit: Greyscale answered to the edited-out part while i posted it

Could you please allow batching (or some kind of stacking at BPC level) of invented BPC, or at least increse the minimum number of some classes of BPC (rigs for example, small ones especially)?

Having to log multiple times in the day to restart production of some T2 items even when you use the max run decriptor is imho a flawed mechanic.....

And this may even relate to some research jobs, i would really like the batching system used in the actual copy sistem to be estended to production and invention, at least for the shorter run items, as long as i frontload the components....


Blueprint stats are easy to adjust. You want longer max runs on T1 rigs?



If I may add a comment here. I would completely support somehow allowing invented BPCs for longer runs. Right now we had to train multiple alts to avoid logging in during daytime just to switch jobs, because some tech2 BPCs take such a short time to manufacture. And we're still wasting valuable slot times. Somehow being these BPCs able to be manufactured for at least 1d jobtimes would be nice.

Or even, we could install future jobs. Like "free slots" weren't counted as per total, but at a given point of time. So, if i install 11 jobs, each taking 8 hours, then i could queue on them some other jobs with the same toon, because when the first round of jobs finish, i practically have free slots. This would involve also jobs ready but not yet delivered not counting into the used slots.

On a separate note, with this fixed ME/PE stuff, we're losing the future possibility to have the tech1 BPO's research level to count into the invented tech2 BPC's stats. Dunno if this ever turned up at any of your brainstorming sessions, neither saying this is a bad or good idea, i'm just saying :)