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I have a Charon BPO at ME 9. Perfect is ME 19.

If I research them to ME 10 now they'll be upgraded to ME 10%.

The people that spent twice as long researching are penalized GREATLY.

Check your maths CCP.

Imo they should do it on a percentage basis.

So for example, if my BPO is level 4 and I want it to 5, that will in total take 30 days to research. If I want to research for just 20 days, then using the interface I can set it to research to 66% of the next level, and the interface will automatically calculate that it will take just under 20 days.

Not sure if that will be easy to programme in, but I think something like that is much needed.

Apologies if someone else has already suggested this.

Instead of trying to convert individual BPOs, refund people's time as "BP Points" equal to how how much time has been spent on researching that bpo to date, on both PE and ME

Convert existing BPOs to be zero researched

Then allow people to apply those "BP points" to any BPOs, on either TE or ME.

If you're feeling adventurous, allow BP points to be traded on the market, and let the market deal with it.

I think this'll save you a lot of bother.

Feedback:


- Generally I prefer the proposed system to the present one.

- Currently you are focusing on preserving present levels of material waste rather than preserving present levels of research time invested into blueprints. I think this is the wrong approach.

Take a BS BPO (research time to perfect under new system: 15360000 seconds, to make the maths easier I will call this 180 days although it's actually a bit more)

The present time required to research this to level 10 is 3600000 seconds = 41 days 16 hours.

In short it is much, much more efficient to do the research to level 10 now, and people who join the game later will wind up needing to invest more time into their blueprints to even come close to competing.

The alternative is the following:

- Current BPO level 0: 0 time invested, becomes level 0
- Current BPO level 1: Current time invested 6000 seconds per level of the BPO, becomes level 5 or 6 (depending upon rounding)
- Current BPO level 2-3: 12000-18000s/level invested, becomes level 6 or 7 (depending on rounding)
- Current BPO level 4-7: Becomes level 7 or 8 (rounding)
- Current BPO level 8-17: Becomes level 8 or 9 (rounding)
- Current BPO level 18-42: Becomes level 9 or 10 (rounding)
- Current BPO level 43 or higher: Becomes level 10 regardless of rounding (as this has more time invested in research than is required to hit level 10 under the new system)

As for which way to round - I don't care, just be consistent and transparent.

This approach ensures that future EVE players are on a reasonably level playing field to existing ones.

Personal interest statement: I personally would be better off under the original Dev Blog as I have a significant number of medium-value BPOs (cruisers, battlecruisers, etc) that are researched to levels that will really benefit from the proposed change (6 or so Vexor BPOs researched to 12-24 ME, etc) and only one BPO of significant value that is massively overresearched under this proposed change (an ME 67 Talos BPO). I do also hold a fair number of module BPOs that will be significantly over-researched under the changes (such as ME 150+ 1600mm Reinforced Steel Plate I BPOs) but they are much less of my overall wealth.



- The copying issue

As stated this will have a big impact on those markets where the mistake that is T2 BPOs are a significant percentage of overall production, particularly non-Damnation/Sleipnir Command Ships and almost all of the T2 EWAR ships. Any increase to T2 BPO throughput should be nipped in the bud by having T2 BPOs take 200-250% as long to copy from as to produce from (all BPOs that are still available in the game should stick to the proposed 100%).

- Personal interest: I own no T2 BPOs and run large numbers of invention jobs, largely avoiding the markets I perceive BPOs to have a significant effect on and totally avoiding the markets I perceive them to dominate.

Rather than worrying about getting the perfect ME baseline values to match what they were before the change, I think it makes more sense to worry about the low ME values.

As it stands with a 10/9 multiplier on the materials, the values for a "baseline" ME 0 blueprint will be going up by a 1/99 before the funky rounding. Why not just call the current ME 0 requirements the new baseline values (so have a increase of 10% to give the new baseline) . For ME > 1, you're going to have to find the appropriate match anyway no matter what the baseline adjustment is.

Assuming negative ME values correspond to -10xthe value in the new system, invention material costs may go up a bit. A ME -4 blueprint corresponded to a 150% multiplier under the old system, and would be at -40% ME under the new system about 10/9*1.4 = 155.56% which is likely to lead to increased material costs for inventors. With my 10% baseline change this would be 154% which is a bit better. Of course you can customise the percentages for each decryptor, but they would look a little funny.
Maybe it's time to remove some of the material advantages that the T2 BPOs and BPCs have over the invented copies.

[quote=MailDeadDrop]
Please have a look at the number of stations with laboratory facilities versus the number of stations with manufacturing facilities. They are severely imbalanced in some regions (perhaps all).

And dismissing the problem as "oh, you'll just have to fly around some more" doesn't give me confidence that you've thought the changes through. For example, copying corporate blueprints means you'll need to have an office in the station with the laboratory facilities. Possibly several new offices if you have to use a variety of laboratory services to react to congestion pricing. And corporate blueprints are frequently locked down. Do you begin to see how this is perhaps a problem?

The demand for copy facilities is going to increase, and that is intended. But if you don't look at increasing the number of copy facilities, the demand for offices in stations which have copy facilities is *also* going to increase. And you haven't said you're going to remove office slots, like you're removing copy slots. So I don't have confidence that this aspect has been noticed and examined by CCP. Please look at it.

MDD

I've got to be missing something here. It seems to me you have selected the most complicated way to "simplify" this system. The old way was less complex than what you are doing here.

This could have been a **** ton simpler if you would have just said that you are changing the way ME is figured and instead of getting half the distance closer to perfect with each ME now it will just reduce by a fixed percent with 10 ME being perfect and we are removing the term "wasteage factor" from the info tab.

It sounds to me like that is exactly what you are doing but just decided to take 20 steps to get there. I mean seriously you are taking **** out just so you can add it back in just so you can take it back out just to wind up back exactly where you were.

This dev blog could have been as simple as:
" hey guys we are changing the way ME is figured now ME 10 is perfect and here's the new scale:
ME1 = 1%
ME2 = 2%
ME3 = 3%
ME4 = 4%
ME5 = 5%
ME6 = 6%
ME7 = 7%
ME8 = 8%
ME9 = 9%
ME10 = 10 %
Thanks hand have a nice day. "

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.

If ME 10 in the old system is not equivalent to ME 10% in the new system when why are ME 10s being turned into ME 10%s.

Because we're being incredibly generous and rounding up in all cases, with the goal that no blueprint gets *worse* as a result of the transition.

No, we're rounding generously :) In Excel it'd be Floor() rather than Round(), IDK exactly if that works in google docs.

Greyscale, I have two major issues of concern with these changes.

The first you have already addressed, in regards to the T2 BPC copy time and further proliferation into T2 Invention markets. If anything, my opinion is T2 BPOs need to be nerfed, and certainly not buffed. It is not fun finding out a lot of markets for certain items are simply out of your reach when it comes to efficient T2 manufacturing if you don't have the T2 BPO.

The second thing, this issue with only 10 levels is far to much of a blanket approach. Did you consider increasing the level count to perhaps 100 instead of 10 as mentioned. This would allow for current BPOs to be much more accurately represented in the new system, which seem to be a source of much pain with this current 10 level blanket approach you are taking. And also, researching thing from level 9 to 10 could mean a BPO and research slot is locked up for years. Making this a 100 level system would massively alleviate this and make a lot more sense.

Thank you for clarifying CCP Greyscale. I have updated the spreadsheet to reflect this, using floor instead rounding.

At least one good thing came from me reading this devblog. It got me to check if I had any blueprints and I found a secure container with about 200 researched BPOs, that I didn't recall owning. The changes in general look positive. The current system is many things, but user friendly isn't one of them.

In being generous to current BPO owners you are raising an incredible barrier for entry in several markets. The value of ME10 BPOs is going to skyrocket as things currently stand.
People with researched BPOs currently have already benefited from them in whatever way they currently use them. They have time now to try and adjust for what things will look like after the patch.

Please however you scale the research times when you do the conversion just calculate research time currently invested in to the BPO and then apply that to the new BPO. Round up if you feel you must. It's the only thing that will make the long term balance reasonably fair. Given some of the extremely long new "perfect" research times it also means you cut down on the number of people with over researched BPOs and so reduces that problem.

If you are going to adjust by having the waste %ages be about the same before and after then round towards a bit of extra waste because again the new ME10 is going to be too easy to reach by rounding error compared to the research times now and later.

If you don't go with being reasonable then you also need to look at the edge cases where people are actually going to have more waste after patch than before which is mostly the capital ship hulls.

Using a Moros as an example, currently if I have a BPO at ME6 then I have no wasted capital components when I build the hull.
After the expansion I will have an ME6 BPO still which we'll call a 4% waste. Any component that has more than 25 parts in the current "perfect" amount will therefore have 1 unit of waste. That's 6 different cap comps.

If you are going to be generous to some people then you are going to be unfair to others, be it current losers or future generations who arrive to the game later. You are expecting new players still I assume. People will cry regardless of how you change things, do a proper long term fix, not something half ass in the hopes you'll get less roasting on the forums. You'll just get a different roasting.