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This is a discussion that's better served being in the UI blog thread rather than the research blog thread :)

Please cover PE. Guess perfect is when time improvement is less than one second.

Any change that does not SIGNIFICANTLY lessen the impact of t2 bpo's is fail. It is the one major thing that screws up the markets, especially for inventors.

http://k162space.com/2012/07/17/percentage-of-items-from-invention-vs-tech-2-bpo/ <- this blew my mind.

I thing these changes to BPO research is a good idea. To use the same system as skillig is logical. First levels of making things better are easy and with every step the things became much more complicated. I agree with that.

But I think the times of research to capital ships are a little bit out of range. Are you serious that for example complete research from lvl 0 to lvl 10 of frighter blueprint should take 7 years in base time ( 3,5 year from lvl 9 to lvl 10)? Are you sure of it. I understand that there will be modifications based on skilles and structure bonuses and teams, but it is still unreal times. Do you thing that somebody will put BPO in reseach from lvl 9 to lvl 10 in his high-sec POS for years ?

I realy hope, that ranks of capital ships blueprints you wrote here are mistakes and real ranks will be in real numbers. Now for example research of one ME lvl of frighter blueprint takes 33 days on High-sec POS with full skilled character, so get the BPO to lvl 10 takes something about 11 months.

So are you realy sure, that capital ships BPO research will be balanced after the change?

You want CCP to compensate you because you can no longer run the same scam under the new system? (nevermind that you still can with any blueprint that has a perfect state at less than 10%, since the new system still won't mark that blueprint "perfect"/"finished" until ME10).

Since it's been confirmed that it's 0..10, that means it's only a 4.3x time increase overall instead of a 7x increase. Still that's pretty insane. I'd prefer something under 2x.

Pirate's Bunny,

Don't imbibe the "over-researched" description. As your example points out, your BPOs aren't over-researched. Rather, they are researched beyond optimal for very good reason. (And deliciously slightly scammy reason at that!) Your BPOs become over-researched only when the transition knocks them down to optimal.

The question to ask is why is CCP about to declare what counts as over-researched and then adjust BPOs to match their declaration.

Yes they are at the moment not over-researched. And for saying it's a scam, let's look at a Hyperion BPC:

Hyperion Blueprint example:
Cost to build at ME 50 : 208,744,602.31 ISK
Cost to build at ME 100 : 208,542,694.20 ISK (-201,908.11)
Cost to build at ME 150 : 208,474,865.96 ISK (-67,828.24)
Cost to build at ME 200 : 208,439,375.13 ISK (-35,490.83)
Cost to build at ME 300 : 208,405,310.07 ISK (-34,065,06)
Cost to build at ME 500 : 208,378,112.94 ISK (-27,197.13)

You could say that ME100 is a high value for ME on a blueprint, but ME150 would still drop the cost with 67,828.24 ISK, this is a rather high amount if you're doing competitive BPC selling.

Even going from ME200 to ME500, which would be quite a lot of time and for most players it won't be worth it, but it still saves you another 61,262.19 ISK, a total of 96,753.02 ISK vs ME150.

But the point is that to be competitive and offer a high quality BPC for a low price, you need to have a high researched BPO/BPC.
Why would anyone buy your ME100 BPC if there's someone else who's selling one at ME150 for the same price or a few ISK more? No one will buy your ME100 BPC.

We're forced to research more, nearly perfect the BPC. Players who calculate the profits gained from buying a highly researched BPC will benefit.

When the new system comes into play the ME research will be capped at a certain level, which will bring all the highly researched BPC's to the same level. The market will be filled with identical BPC's and everyone will start to underprice eachother for 1 isk. It will be terrible to try and sell BPC's because everyone has the same values.
There is no longer any point in investing time into perfecting a BPO, we are willing to spent the time and produce high quality BPC's which players will appreciate because it drops their cost even more.

Increasing the base cost of everything by 11% and then letting research save you time and materials: This is a very good change and will make things easier to understand.

I even like the idea that the game recognizes "perfect" blueprints and will prevent people from researching past the perfect level. It always annoyed me that I had to calculate the perfect level on my blueprints outside game.

However, I don't understand why you want to change how ME and PE work. It seems like change for change's sake.

Both the current and future systems had diminishing returns for research.

Currently, each ME level takes the same time to research, but you get less benefit for each successive level. In the future, you will get the same benefit for each level of research, but each successive level will take more time than the previous.

The benefit of the previous system is that you had the option to get another level of research if you were not building. You could say, "I'm going to take a month off building Obelisks. Hmm, should I throw my BPO into copy to get a BPC to sell, or should I put it in ME research and get one more ME level?"

In the future it is going to be, "Whew, luckily I had an ME5 Obelisk blueprint so the patch changed it to ME 9%. But I'm going to take a month off building them. Maybe I could get another ME level and make it perfect? Ah nevermind. The quote says that will take over 4 years. I guess I'll make copies."

Then there is going to be the poor guy who has an ME3 Obelisk blueprint today. When the patch hits, he will be given an ME 7% blueprint. If he wants to research his blueprint to match the first guy, it will take him 2 years, 21 weeks. Very, very, very few people will do that. So congratulations Player A. You now have practically a permanent advantage over everyone else.

So you say the difference between ME 7% and ME 9% is trivial? Is it? 2% of a 1.4 Billion isk ship is 28M isk per unit extra profit. Permanently (for all practical purposes.)

How do blueprint ME levels interact with ME increasing POS Assembly arrays and ME increasing teams and ME increasing whatever else gets added to the game? There will probably be blueprints where the 8% and 9% ones have the same build cost on paper, but when you factor in certain build teams, the 9% one is better?

This situation is similar to T2 BPOs in that they are going to make more special items which can (practically)never be made again, and confer their owners with a permanent competitive advantage over everyone who started the game too late to get one.

Was the old system really difficult to understand? Did it break when they set slots to be unlimited? Why bother with these blueprint conversions and research changes? Was anybody ever hurt when someone over-researched a blueprint?

For a rank 854 blueprint (freighters, dreads, carriers)
ME Level Total Time
1% 1 day, 54 minutes
2% 2 days, 11 hours
3% 5 days, 21 hours
4% 13 days, 23 hours
5% 33 days, 5 hours
6% 11 weeks, 2 days
7% 26 weeks, 5 days
8% 1 year, 11 weeks 5 days
9% 2 years, 47 weeks, 5 days
10% 6 years, 48 weeks, 4 days

With all the other ME bonuses we are getting through teams and pos bonus changes, 10% cap looks far more reasonable. Miners have to make something, or who would we gank. Right?