Player Features and Ideas Discussion

you could have selected multiple slots with the shift button

Not specifically related to the settings themselves, but it solves many other issues that others have raised in this thread, and not just with assembly lines.

Allow us to define arbitrary groups and then provide permissions based on those definitions.

Alliance A has member corps Corps A-One, A-Two, A-Three, and A-Four.
Alliance B has member corps Corp B-Alpha and B-Beta.
Bob, the CEO of Corp A-One, has an alt named Chuckles in Corp A-Four.

Corp A-One owns a manufacturing facility.

They define a "Unrestricted Manufacturers" group that:

• includes Corp A-One
• includes character Chuckles
• restricts (the rest of) Alliance A
• includes Alliance B
• Everyone else is restricted by default

They define a "Taxed Manufacturers" group that:

• includes Corp A-Three
• includes +10 standings
• Everyone else is restricted by default

They define a "Restricted Manufacturers" group that:

• includes Corp A-Four
• includes Corp B-Beta
• includes +5 (and higher) standings
• Everyone else is restricted by default

They grant permission:

• "Unrestricted Manufacturers" = full access, no tax
• "Taxed Manufacturers" = full access, 15% tax
• "Restricted Manufacturers" = specific assembly line access, 15% tax, group may only run one simultaneous job

If someone is in multiple categories, such as Corp B-Beta above, whatever is first is what takes effect; so B-Beta receives the permissions from Unrestricted Manufacturers because that the earliest they are mentioned.

Wherever you might have used a role or title or alliance or corp previously, allow use of these custom-created arbitrary groups instead.

Install cost and cost per hour are taken care of by the new industry update, I assume there will be a taxation option.

Good/bad standing are irrelevant in high because nobody owns stations as well as in null because I don't think alliances set members too good/bad that doesn't make sense. So that option is pointless.

Surcharges or discounts for people that can actually use these slots (I.e. your corp or alliance members) don't make sense based on sec status. At all.

As someone already said, about the only situation any kind of settings like these are desirable or useful are individual settings for corps or alliances.

And they are better dealt with in a list with "set tax for copr/alliance [name] to x" entries.

I do agree with the sentiment that relative empire standings for hisec POS are fairly useless and should go away. One thing I really do think needs to be added is a method of hacking abandoned control towers; real estate is an extremely valuable thing in this game, especially in places like wormhole space. Adding that would actually help industry in a variety of ways because more real estate would open up, in all areas of space people like to base out of.

That being said, the entire system for starbases needs a serious overhaul. While the changes listed with increases manufacturing efficacy with starbases over stations are a VERY good step in the right direction, since it reflects the risk/reward schema, there are things related to that that need to be addressed.

The industry tutorial currently is extremely outdated and near-bogus. Revising it with the intention of including a detailed, in-depth instruction into PI and its uses, and then an expanded tutorial with the addition of an "advanced industry" agent, along the same lines of advanced military. This agent would teach advanced PI concepts, t2 production for components to build ships and t2 modules, and how R&D works in-game. The advanced industry agent would help teach you to build fuel blocks, a skill that would be extremely useful for all players in-game to know how to do.

Reducing fuel block consumption rate is ideal; solo or small-gang players don't necessarily have the funds to prop up their own starbase in wh space or hisec for that matter, and so for allowing the fuel costs to drop somewhat would help alleviate that. Empowering more players to do industry is a VERY good direction to be going, as it helps make the market a healthier place. Poor regional markets have the opportunity to open up more with reduced costs to establish and maintain infrastructure, which allow for smaller groups of players to have stronger returns to offset high market prices. You'd see regions like Ammatar and Khanid have their markets bloom into something beautiful and appealing to outside investors, and more people would move there.

The points listed in the ongoing dev blogs about the coming industry changes are fantastic in every way, and I hope that more will continue to be done to address the issues the eve market has as a whole with distribution inequality, flow of capital, and most importantly, inflation.

I think Penifsmash was on the right lines. Rather than trying to suggest specific changes to the existing UI it's probably better to define what we as station owners want to be able to achieve and let you decide what you want to allow us to do and then let the UI guys facilitate it.

So from the PoV of a corp that ownned a refinery and owns a Factory and a Research outpost.

For all of the types of permission bellow the ability to set them in the following ways would be ideal
By standings which creates rough tiers with scaling costs.
By White / Black lists of corps and alliances for precise lockdown.
Ideal case make arbitrary groups of corps and alliances which can have tax and costs applied to them.
Security status. (I was going to leave this out but Provi block might care. Nobody else will.)

Restrict docking.
Whitelist / Blacklist binary option.
Docking Fee set per grouping or by scaling with standing

Restrict services use per service which would include cloning, assembly, research etc.
Whitelist / Blacklist binary option.
Flat rate tax set per grouping or by scaling with standing

If it's too hard to impliment groups a possible alternative would be to support standing ranges in those boxes. Set station to use Corp standings rather than alliance standings and then give a specific standing like 9 or 9.5 instead of 10 to corps you want to be able to use facilites. We could then set "Instal Job" to require 8.5-9.5.

The end goal of any of these systems in broad goals.

Allow or deny docking from "deadzoning" a station to a "freeport"
Allow basic station services, Docking, Fitting, Cloning, Insurance etc to be used by anyone with docking rights.
Allow some assembly and Research capacity to be used freely by people able to dock and potentially profit from it in the form of tax.
Allow privately owned stations to be set up to allow only specific manufacturing and research corps to use the majority of the capacity and to use it for cheap / free. In an ideal world you could just give the station to that corp but with stations so heavily linked to SOV this isn't considered viable at present.

What about NPC nullsec stations?

I completely agree - a tower that is off line should be able to be "Hacked" we already have the hacking mini-game (which I hate - but it is a useful mechanic here) that could be used to "hack" the tower that is off line.

Say the strength of the security in the tower is infinite when the tower is running from the standpoint of hacking. Once off line the strength of the security decreases every 24 hours as the tower runs down - may be the strontium is used to maintain the security and runs for say 30 days?

I like Catherine's idea, I just don't have specifics on how to implement it.

Install cost and per hour cost from my understanding is being changed to a taxed % of the base cost.

The access and discounts on standings may be used by corporations in order to better manage their assembly lines. Having certain lines reserved for high ranking members which were set to high standings to the corp and vice versa. Personally don't use such system but I can easily imagine a large corp doing so.

Security Status parameters seem completely silly. I'm not sure if anyone ever used those for POS assembly arrays. Maybe for nullsec outposts.

Unless you have some major overhaul to the way POS works, allowing alliance usage is completely useless since corps will no longer be able to share any of the assembly lines with their alliance (grr).

Final thoughts, I'd get rid of everything except for allowing corp member usage, taxes (cost) settings and maybe standings settings if corporations actually use that method to manage their many arrays.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I'm referring to POS arrays only, I know stations use similar settings and they will probably need a wider variety of settings available.

I was going to ask same question, are you allowing/introducing feature to rent assembly lines to public and set fees for this ?

I see no point in adding public access to POS lines. With the removal of slots, no one would bother looking for a public POS as there will always be "room at the inn" of NPC stations for research and manufacturing.

The window the Dev showed and asked for feedback on I have never used aside from once, and that time I hosed things up and ended up preventing anyone from accessing the POS lines.

I would say just get rid of it. I agree with the post on the first page that the elimination of the need to give member access to a corporation wallet to access a line would be nice. It serves no purpose, but I'm sure that is tied up in the legacy POS code that seems to screwed up, I'm guessing that would be a huge deal to fix and is not on the table.

Two things that I think would make a huge difference:

1. Allow input and output of jobs come from a personal hanger array anchored at the POS. this would allow members to leave minerals, components and blueprints at the POS in a more secure manner (from corp theft) and ease the process. At the same time it would mean more shiny stored at the POS to encourage conflict.

2. PLEASE get the ability to set the slot workforce fee tax rate in for summer. The bottom up income stream would not only simplify corporation accounting, but encourage members to move thier industry to a corporation POS and out if an NPC station. This would support the desire too spread out, and naturally encourage group play.