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Dev blog: The Price of Change

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Steijn
Quay Industries
#501 - 2014-04-30 11:27:51 UTC
CCP Greyscale wrote:
Steijn wrote:
CCP Greyscale wrote:
We ALSO want to ensure that people who firmly don't want to move to nullsec, continue to enjoy playing in hisec.


The problem is, your making living in high sec very tedious so any 'fun' that there was, is rapidly disappearing.


To the degree that that is true, we're then failing in one of our design goals.


doesnt that then set the alarm bells ringing? or is it a case of its too far down the road to change much now so its tough?
Harvey James
The Sengoku Legacy
#502 - 2014-04-30 11:28:18 UTC
how about adding bpc's/bpo's to the market for buy and sell orders?.... contracts are awkward and hard too price right without any visible past price history

T3's need to be versatile so no rigs are necessary ... they should not have OP dps and tank

ABC's should be T2, remove drone assist, separate HAM's and Torps range, -3 HS for droneboats

Nerf web strength, Make the blaster Eagle worth using
CCP Greyscale
C C P
C C P Alliance
#503 - 2014-04-30 11:30:22 UTC
Steijn wrote:
CCP Greyscale wrote:
Steijn wrote:
CCP Greyscale wrote:
We ALSO want to ensure that people who firmly don't want to move to nullsec, continue to enjoy playing in hisec.


The problem is, your making living in high sec very tedious so any 'fun' that there was, is rapidly disappearing.


To the degree that that is true, we're then failing in one of our design goals.


doesnt that then set the alarm bells ringing? or is it a case of its too far down the road to change much now so its tough?


At this point in the feedback cycle we're still evaluating to what degree we feel that is in fact true :)
Magic Crisp
Amarrian Micro Devices
#504 - 2014-04-30 11:33:27 UTC
Another issue that popped into my mind.

Have any analysis been made on how the T2 production will change after this, in respect of the extramat changes and cost changes? I mean, there are a couple of categories there, as had already been pointed out, something is dominated by BPOs, something is by BPCs. If tech2 production's cost will significantly increase by the removal of extra materials, then for many items i expect it won't worth manufacturing them compared to BPO manufacturing. When the demand is bigger than the supply possible from BPOs, then you're just giving more money to the tech2 BPO owners, who are already just printing money with their exclusive tech2 BPOs, seems unfair.

Another aspect of this, with the increased tech2 material cost on invented BPCs, will there still be sufficient supply of moongoo in the game, or are we facing a gradual but constant upwind of moongoo prices? I think something like a 40%-ish increase on some moongoo materials in many tech2 BPCs is not something that can be ignored.

I know this last thing would require quite some effort from you, but maybe publishing a devblogs with these numbers would be a nice thing. It'd restore confidence in us, in many ways. Like we'd know that you indeed looked into the figures, you've seen the possible issues, we also see them, and maybe the most important things, economical issues could be avoided.
Miktek
Phoenix Connection
#505 - 2014-04-30 11:40:39 UTC
Was excited about these changes, and now I am worried.

All I want to know is costs now on a range of items, say Ammo, Drones, Modules Ships and the worst case high sec costs and best case high sec costs after this is implemented.

I don't use a POS, so I feel sorry for you guys, you may as well rip em down and sell em off (if indeed anyway wants them)
Vartan Sarkisian
Phoenix Connection
#506 - 2014-04-30 12:18:05 UTC
CCP Greyscale wrote:
Steijn wrote:
CCP Greyscale wrote:
We ALSO want to ensure that people who firmly don't want to move to nullsec, continue to enjoy playing in hisec.


The problem is, your making living in high sec very tedious so any 'fun' that there was, is rapidly disappearing.


To the degree that that is true, we're then failing in one of our design goals.


Perhaps then you need to go back, get together as a team and have a long hard look at your design?
LHA Tarawa
Pator Tech School
Minmatar Republic
#507 - 2014-04-30 12:56:44 UTC
CCP Greyscale wrote:
OK, let's talk about thinking!

For long-term games like EVE, one of the big challenges is to keep things interesting over multiple years. "Interesting gameplay" often, particularly in a more deliberative field like manufacturing, stems from interesting decisions. In order to have gameplay stay interesting for many years, therefore, we need a constant flow of decisions for players to make, which is a thing we feel to be lacking in current industrial gameplay.

In the case of industry, we feel this is (correctly) a slower-paced area of the game, so we want decisions that happen over weeks and months, not hours and minutes. We're also trying to balance the desire to have a landscape, which points primarily at decisions based on geographic differences, with the assumed desire of established industrialists not to have to move around too much.


You see the posts from people asking for API access to all the needed info?

Why is that?

Quite simply, they want to create 3rd party tools the tell them the exact, most cost effective method of producing goods at the lowest price. These "most cost effective" then set the market, and anyone using less than optimal will make little to no profit, so will be forced to use these same "most efficient" if they want to be profitable.

While you say you want to make industry easier to understand, all these moving variables simply complicates it.

More interesting game play? Crunching and re-crunching numbers every time the moving numbers move is NOT interesting game play. Packing up an moving a corps assets is not interesting game play. Copy-hell to protect BPOs from corp theft, becuase no we have to put BPO in a POS... oh wait, the cost advantage of a POS is not going to pay for fuel, sooo... nevermind on the cost hell.

(Actually, the "correct" way to use a POS will be to put a small tower in a system without any stations, in a corp of 1, with a bunch of copy alts. Perhaps add on a compression array and freighter in ore. The limited number of labs in stations is going to cause those places to have max copy/research prices. All other systems will l have virtually no research/copy cost. Get a war dec, create a new corp, put up a new POS, move the toons there, take down the old POS. Fun, Fun, Fun game play there!

Or, put it up for a few hours to run compression jobs or refine without grinding standings... then unanchor it and put it back away.)

While I accept the "intent", it simply tells me that you do not understand the mind of an industrialist.


What we really needed was:
1) stop crushing manufacturing with meta loot drops. Let us build everything rather than being forced into the few things that rats do not drop.
2) fix invention so that we can create BPOs rather than having to reinvent the wheel every run.
3) you should have turned manufacturing into more of a PI type UI. I put ore in and route it to a factory. Allow me to trigger the factory job based on how many are on my sell order (every time my Fusion L sell order falls below 100K kick off a factory job to manufacture another 100K) or hanger quantity (every time corp hanger "PVE supplies" falls below 100K kick off another job). The factory routes the output of the job to the hanger or the sell order that triggered it. OR, of course, I could just run an immediate start execution, and when it completes, it drops it into my hanger.

Then, the game play comes from managing my inputs and outputs instead of tediously re-crunching ever moving build cost factors.
LHA Tarawa
Pator Tech School
Minmatar Republic
#508 - 2014-04-30 13:03:20 UTC
CCP Greyscale wrote:
Steijn wrote:
CCP Greyscale wrote:
Steijn wrote:
CCP Greyscale wrote:
We ALSO want to ensure that people who firmly don't want to move to nullsec, continue to enjoy playing in hisec.


The problem is, your making living in high sec very tedious so any 'fun' that there was, is rapidly disappearing.


To the degree that that is true, we're then failing in one of our design goals.


doesnt that then set the alarm bells ringing? or is it a case of its too far down the road to change much now so its tough?


At this point in the feedback cycle we're still evaluating to what degree we feel that is in fact true :)


Honestly, industry in null is WAY more clumped than it is in high sec. I suspect the outpost systems in null will have very high cost, while there will be very cheap, and relatively safe systems all over high sec.

I just do not see how this change is going to crush high sec.
LHA Tarawa
Pator Tech School
Minmatar Republic
#509 - 2014-04-30 13:20:19 UTC
Magic Crisp wrote:

Have any analysis been made on how the T2 production will change after this, in respect of the extramat changes and cost changes?


There are so many factors, I don't see how a realistic analysis could be done.

How many T2 BPOs were in stations and manufactured at POS? How many of those will move to manufacturing in station to keep the BPO safe? What is the lost production from that?

The factors involving copy time further complicate this. Make sure you can't copy faster than the BPO used to be able to build? Okay, built at station, outpost or POS?

As for cost, a simple analysis of how much extra will be needed is insufficient. Extra demand could (should) increase costs, but there is no way to know by how much (unless, of course) the cost in the materials is set by planet export fees or NPC sell orders, which will not change.

Changes to max runs for copies? Changes to price of copies? These range from unknown to incalculable.

Magic Crisp wrote:

I mean, there are a couple of categories there, as had already been pointed out, something is dominated by BPOs, something is by BPCs. If tech2 production's cost will significantly increase by the removal of extra materials, then for many items i expect it won't worth manufacturing them compared to BPO manufacturing. When the demand is bigger than the supply possible from BPOs, then you're just giving more money to the tech2 BPO owners, who are already just printing money with their exclusive tech2 BPOs, seems unfair.


You have it backwards. The overwhelming factor of T2 manufacturing is the BPO supplied quantity and the demand quantity.

If T2 BPOs can supply more than demand, then the T2 BPO production price is set by the cost of manufacturing from BPO. For these items, T2 BPO profits are as thin as pretty much all other manufacturing. The sell price is so low, that invention is unprofitable.

If T2 BPOs cannot supply more than demand, then it becomes the invention and invented BPC build cost that sets the market price. Inventors receive the same thin profits as all other manufacturing, while the T2 BPO holders enjoy 50-100% markup (40% from lower build costs + the cost of inventing the BPC).

So, in this second case, IF changes to the extra materials increases BPC build price, then the sell price will rise to match that new build price. Inventors still get the same thin profits, but the profits of T2 BPO holders increases from the cost increase to BPC inventors.

Magic Crisp wrote:

I think something like a 40%-ish increase on some moongoo materials in many tech2 BPCs is not something that can be ignored.


The extra materials are all PI and NPC items, aren't they? It has been awhile since I bothered to do any invention, but I do not recall any moon goo produced items in extra materials.
LHA Tarawa
Pator Tech School
Minmatar Republic
#510 - 2014-04-30 13:26:03 UTC
Miktek wrote:
Was excited about these changes, and now I am worried.

All I want to know is costs now on a range of items, say Ammo, Drones, Modules Ships and the worst case high sec costs and best case high sec costs after this is implemented.

I don't use a POS, so I feel sorry for you guys, you may as well rip em down and sell em off (if indeed anyway wants them)



The stated design goal is to have cost constantly moving, so you can have the "interesting game play" of having to decide between constantly moving around for better cost or just sitting in one place and accepting ever changing costs.
zahter
Shayol Ghul Forge
#511 - 2014-04-30 13:40:46 UTC  |  Edited by: zahter
"CCP Greyscale" wrote:
We are totally open to suggestions for what to do with starbases as they relate to industry. In particular, if anyone who does starbase work can spend a few minutes outlining the *simplest* changes they think would be sufficient to keep starbases in a reasonable place for this release, we're very interested in hearing them. Yes, we know "throw it out and start over" would be great, but we're not getting that done between now and the summer release, no matter how much we'd like to.


There are some very good suggestions on POS issue but they are temporary. They are mostly relying on the existing POS industry system. I support them with all my heart. These solutions will look odd in a new industry system. The centre of problem is the old untouchable POS code. You want to get rid of them, we capsulers hate them but all of us have to live with them. The main solution relies on a gradual dismissal of starbases.

CCP already started doing something on the issue. Mobile structures are implemented. Why don't you extend the variety of mobile structures. Introduce mobile structures similar to POS modules; assembly arrays, labs, shield generators, mobile guns. You have absolute freedom to play with mobile structre code. It is not dangerous and scary like the old POS code.

Here is my long term solution for starbase industry.
Mobile industry hangar; every job runs here like a station. runs on fuel
Mobile assembly arrays and labs; giving bonuses for industry, minimizing production/research/copy/invention costs required in a station. A certain number of same structres may enable zero costs. Give bonus to ME, TE, invention success, copy time etc. They will run on fuel. As much as you can stand.
Mobile shield generator; protects our structres, runs on fuel. (shield generation needs to be close to (celestial bodies-plantes/moons) to prevent abusing it in other places). There is no limit to the number of shield genereators near a celestial body.
Fuel silo; stores fuel. Can form links to other mobile structures to deliver fuel they need. fuel consumption increases greatly with every added assembly arrays and labs of same type.This will mean the second assembly array will require more fuel than the first one.

When jobs starts on industry hangar, fuel usage will increase depending on the number of jobs.

This still feels like slots on a pos but whole system is completely depends on your limit of fuel expenses.

New "team" system also allow this mobile structures to work effectively. You can divide your big array/lab structures into small production nodes located in star systems which have good teams working on. your bonus/advantage level is dependent on your fuel usage.
Raketefrau
ConHugeCo
Rusty Stargazers
#512 - 2014-04-30 13:42:41 UTC
Woo! More complexity! More calculations!
Anonymous Trader001
Science and Trade Institute
Caldari State
#513 - 2014-04-30 13:55:39 UTC
Having sat down and gone through each of the blogs and running the numbers. I think CCP has pretty much achieved the "push" and "pull" they aimed for. Obviously, tweaks will be necessary to make sure the balance is right.

Manufacturing in congested systems will erode the profitability of manufacturing. My numbers show that the manufacturing cost in addition to base material cost gets pretty close to (sometimes exceeds) the sell price of the item in trade hubs.

Moving to "quiet" systems with relatively little manufacturing will negate the congestion multiplier, but you don't benefit from the facility reduction multiplier. These systems end up better off than congested systems, but marginally worse than relatively busy systems with lots of stations. There will be "Goldilocks" systems where the balance of stations vs. population will be just right. The office rental mechanic may need to be revisited to ensure that those systems don't just end up in equilibrium.

The teams feature allows the bigger manufacturing hubs to pool resources and buy teams that can restore the profitability of that hub. The Team Up blog indicates that CCP will use team seeding to keep the system in balance. i.e. potentially limit the ability of hisec manufacturing cartels establishing dominant manufacturing hubs.

Based on the information released thus far, it appears that POS manufacturing will fade away. The cost of fuel will just eat profit. Unless POS manufacturing gets some kind of boost, it just won't make sense in k-space.

Speaking for my own manufacturing operation, I should make more isk than I do now. Job installation and research costs will be 1/2 to 2/3 the amount I spend on POS fuel today.

It'll be interesting to see if the market accepts manufacturers simply passing on the additional installation costs, or if manufactures offset the additional job costs with the savings made on POS fuel.

This is definitely going to be different.
Trader Agent
State War Academy
Caldari State
#514 - 2014-04-30 14:06:51 UTC
...too many quotes

The problem is, your making living in high sec very tedious so any 'fun' that there was, is rapidly disappearing.[/quote]

To the degree that that is true, we're then failing in one of our design goals.[/quote]

doesnt that then set the alarm bells ringing? or is it a case of its too far down the road to change much now so its tough?[/quote]

At this point in the feedback cycle we're still evaluating to what degree we feel that is in fact true :)[/quote]

Honestly, industry in null is WAY more clumped than it is in high sec. I suspect the outpost systems in null will have very high cost, while there will be very cheap, and relatively safe systems all over high sec.

I just do not see how this change is going to crush high sec.[/quote]



If you don't see how this is going to crush High Sec, may I suggest that we also give a 20% bonus to all damage, shields, armor and structure hit points...to all members of null sec corporations. Its about the same thing, so that should make this issue clear.
Querns
Science and Trade Institute
Caldari State
#515 - 2014-04-30 14:19:29 UTC
CCP Greyscale wrote:
Matthew wrote:
The suggestion by Querns to scale by the number of organisation-owned arrays in the entire system sounds sensible - it's a much easier query to run, and is consistent with the approach taken of aggregating NPC facilities across the entire system. However, it doesn't get around the problem of gaming the system with rapid online/offlining of "secondary" arrays.

Yes, online/offline shenanigans is something we need to think about.

In this regard, perhaps use the online timestamp to "debounce" the calculation. Any array that has been online for <30 minutes, or some other time limit, does not count towards the total number of modules.

There's a lot of room for scaling the calculations up and down depending on how players find ways to exploit the formula. I feel like it could be something that's fluid and reacts to player ingenuity. The stakes are pretty small here, so there's not a whole lot of room for a Faction-Warfare-Forex-style resonance cascade scenario.

This post was crafted by the wormhole expert of the Goonswarm Economic Warfare Cabal, the foremost authority on Eve: Online economics and gameplay.
Kun'ii Zenya
Hogyoku
Goonswarm Federation
#516 - 2014-04-30 14:20:55 UTC  |  Edited by: Kun'ii Zenya
LHA Tarawa wrote:
CCP Greyscale wrote:
OK, let's talk about thinking!

For long-term games like EVE, one of the big challenges is to keep things interesting over multiple years. "Interesting gameplay" often, particularly in a more deliberative field like manufacturing, stems from interesting decisions. In order to have gameplay stay interesting for many years, therefore, we need a constant flow of decisions for players to make, which is a thing we feel to be lacking in current industrial gameplay.

In the case of industry, we feel this is (correctly) a slower-paced area of the game, so we want decisions that happen over weeks and months, not hours and minutes. We're also trying to balance the desire to have a landscape, which points primarily at decisions based on geographic differences, with the assumed desire of established industrialists not to have to move around too much.


You see the posts from people asking for API access to all the needed info?

Why is that?

Quite simply, they want to create 3rd party tools the tell them the exact, most cost effective method of producing goods at the lowest price. These "most cost effective" then set the market, and anyone using less than optimal will make little to no profit, so will be forced to use these same "most efficient" if they want to be profitable.

[snip]


Okay, no.

I work in the CA energy markets, and that is not the case. It is the least efficient seller needed to clear the market that sets the price. And this is for a good that is highly inelastic (at least in the short run, in the longer run there is more elasticity).

This is also seen in experiments (essentially games...like EVE) where economists try to simulate competitive markets. The result is a Nash equilibrium and again, the least efficient seller necessary to clear the market sets the price.

Those with the most cost effective set up earn economic profits...and it is that potential that invites new entrants to the market, and that it is no longer going to be static will induce people to move around. That latter decision will be factored in as a cost.

For example, a player might have a nice profit margin in the system he relocated too. However over time others notice that the system is good and start moving there, and the profit margins start to dwindle. At a certain point, the first guy in system may start looking for a new home and when he finds one he'll move. He wont have an actual isk figure here, but he'll make that decision sooner or later. After all how much isk do you put on packing and moving your stuff? Its in that nebulous area of opportunity cost, which rarely fits in nicely into an accounting spreadsheet.
Ekaterina 'Ghetto' Thurn
Department 10
#517 - 2014-04-30 14:31:13 UTC
Dinsdale Pirannha wrote:
Felicity Love wrote:
Jesterspet wrote:
I'm sorry, but saying: "As to starbases, we agree it's pretty terrible, but we don't want to delay the entire release just for this one factor." is a very poor excuse of an answer and just blows me away. This tells us that you really don't actually care about something that is quite central to the entire industrial complex.


All of which carries the unspoken admission that:

A) We want people to colonize Null space, so we'll make Industry more a more attractive "carrot" to lure them out there. Maybe.

B) Buuuuuuuuuuuut... we can't be bothered to give them a place to do it, so they'll have to live in Outposts controlled by other alliances that will simply gouge any possible profit margin out of the equation anyway -- thus making the whole effort pointless.

But that's "Okay" because we don't want to fix something that needs fixing.

SEEMS TO ME we went through the whole mindset a number of years ago, followed by profuse apologies... and then more profuse apologies.

Here we go again.

Roll





The fact that the dev's are openly soliciting for ANY ideas about how to handle POS's shows 2 things:

1. The dev's don't understand how POS's are used in the game, and frankly, don't have a clue about industry in this game, and this release should be delayed until it is complete, which includes POS's industry advantages.
2. The chief architects of these changes never planned on using POS's in their manufacturing strategy, other than for super-capital ships, so they focused on their stations, and ignored POS's.


Oh dear. A 'Dinsdale' post that may be correct. Sad

" They're gonna feel pretty stupid when they find out. " Rick. " Find out what ? " Abraham. " They're screwing with the wrong people. " Rick. Season four.   ' The Walking Dead. ' .
Weaselior
GoonWaffe
Goonswarm Federation
#518 - 2014-04-30 14:39:33 UTC
CCP Greyscale wrote:

Yes, online/offline shenanigans is something we need to think about.

calculate once at downtime, use that value for the next day

Head of the Goonswarm Economic Warfare Cabal Pubbie Management and Exploitation Division.
Kun'ii Zenya
Hogyoku
Goonswarm Federation
#519 - 2014-04-30 14:40:07 UTC  |  Edited by: Kun'ii Zenya
LHA Tarawa wrote:

(Actually, the "correct" way to use a POS will be to put a small tower in a system without any stations, in a corp of 1, with a bunch of copy alts. Perhaps add on a compression array and freighter in ore. The limited number of labs in stations is going to cause those places to have max copy/research prices. All other systems will l have virtually no research/copy cost. Get a war dec, create a new corp, put up a new POS, move the toons there, take down the old POS. Fun, Fun, Fun game play there!


You would lose the system facilities bonus to all your job/run costs. It still might make sense to do this for some items, but this is not a given. Of course we need to see the starbase multiplier as well, it is going to be a bonus so presumably this multiplier will be less than 1. So you could be correct here. We may see POS's moving from systems with stations to systems without.

And I don't think you will max out the run/job costs. Remember the equation is:

RC = (Price of Output)*[sqrt(Fraction of global job hours)]*(team cost)*(facility reduction)*(starbase bonus)*[0.99^(hours for multi-run)]*(FW Reduction)*(Outpost Reduction)*Taxes

In this specific case we can simplify this too:

RC = (Price of Output)*[sqrt(Fraction of global job hours)]*(team cost)*(facility reduction)*(starbase bonus)*[0.99^(hours for multi-run)]*Taxes

Further, lets assume you aren't going to use teams, and that the starbase bonus for now is 1, so we can remove that too (mainly to simplify). So we get,

RC = (Price of Output)*[sqrt(Fraction of global job hours)]*(facility reduction)*[0.99^(hours for multi-run)]*Taxes

With no stations in system I think we can set the facilities reduction to 1, further simplifying things to,

RC = (Price of Output)*[sqrt(Fraction of global job hours)]*[0.99^(hours for multi-run)]*Taxes

Okay, so we see that you still have the part dealing with the square root of the fraction of global job hours, but my reading of that is,

(Number of Job Hours in System)/(Number of Job Hours Universe Wide)

Since the denominator will be large relative to the numerator you may very well end up minimizing that cost multiplier. If the 0.0001 is used as the floor for the fraction of global job hours, your multiplier in this case would be 0.01 or 1%. So having a POS for copying and inventing in a system with no stations could very well make sense for things like modules. After all 2%*1% = 0.02% or a very low copy cost.

If invention works like copying (after all in invention you get a BPC, not an actual in game item), that is the run cost for invention also gets the 2% multiplier (i.e., 2% times the value of the T2 item) inventing would also likely have a minimal cost multiplier of 0.02%

So an out of the way system with no stations maybe a good place to set up a POS and do work in there. Yeah, you might do your building in a nearby station system (or not).

Note: Since this is a player owned facility, I'm ignoring taxes. At least that is how I read the Dev Blog.
Temenus Alexander
Alexander Enterprises
#520 - 2014-04-30 14:44:10 UTC  |  Edited by: Temenus Alexander
LHA Tarawa wrote:


What we really needed was:
1) stop crushing manufacturing with meta loot drops. Let us build everything rather than being forced into the few things that rats do not drop.


THIS! 1000x this!

LHA Tarawa wrote:

2) fix invention so that we can create BPOs rather than having to reinvent the wheel every run.


Not holding my breath. Seriously though, I've never understood why this wasn't instituted with Day One of invention.

LHA Tarawa wrote:

3) you should have turned manufacturing into more of a PI type UI. I put ore in and route it to a factory. Allow me to trigger the factory job based on how many are on my sell order (every time my Fusion L sell order falls below 100K kick off a factory job to manufacture another 100K) or hanger quantity (every time corp hanger "PVE supplies" falls below 100K kick off another job). The factory routes the output of the job to the hanger or the sell order that triggered it. OR, of course, I could just run an immediate start execution, and when it completes, it drops it into my hanger.

Then, the game play comes from managing my inputs and outputs instead of tediously re-crunching ever moving build cost factors.


That could add a level of interest.

Frankly though, I'd be happy if they'd just not break what people have worked hard to attain, i.e. "what the hell am I supposed to do with my labs now?" if I live in HS. I'm a small-scale operation, as I'm sure there are many others as well. Prior to these announcements I have effectively refrained from recruiting while grinding up empire faction (apparently the wrong/hard way) in order to place a research POS in HS. There were good reasons for this. Were fuel and maintenance going to be a burden on my profits? Absolutely, at least at the outset. However, in order to be competitive AT ALL it is imperative that ME be researched. This meant a POS was a MUST, as slots in HS are all but impossible to come by. In that light, I could absolutely justify the costs of onlining and maintaining a HS POS even as a one man corp. Once anchored, I would no longer have to worry about standings averages among corp members causing me to be unable to set up a POS in empire, and could merrily go about the business of recruiting and leveraging labor. Obviously the standings become a non-issue with the upcoming expansion. However, I now have a newer, larger problem concerning setting up a POS in HS: cost effectiveness. Let's be real here, is there truly a scenario in which paying the station costs for research and manufacturing, even at max values, while KEEPING the 300-500M I'd have to spend to fuel the POS is going to be LESS profitable than shelling out the ISK for fuel and saving 10% on taxes? I highly doubt it. The only viable reason I've seen mentioned thus far under the realities of the upcoming expansion for putting up a POS in HS is for mineral compression for sale to null. All very well and fine, and undoubtedly a profitable venture. That is NOT, however, why I've gone to the trouble of acquiring all those lovely BPOs sitting in my corporate hangars. Again, I'm the small fish, and am well aware of that fact. It's been said that "you aren't an industrialist" if you aren't turning billions in materials/products. This is elitist fallacy. All industrialists were startups at one point, and that's something the Dev's need to consider concerning the upcoming changes: they pose SEVERE obstacles on smaller/newer operations (which all newer players obviously will be) trying to establish themselves, and they make any non-compression HS POS not merely an "ISK sink" but a true ISK Pit.