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You have never researched a blueprint in your life, have you?



No. If you have a BPO that is ME 7 before the patch, you will get handed an ME 9% BPO after the patch. The thing is, if it was perfect at ME7 before the patch, then there will be no difference between the build cost of ME 9% and ME 10% blueprints after the patch... at least until you start factoring in POS assembly arrays and workforce teams that add to ME. Those will probably differentiate the two.



Yeah, we actually have the same opinion there.



No. Wrong. If you have a blueprint researched to ME 10 today, that means the wastage on that blueprint is 0.91%. That gets truncated to 0, and you will recieve a perfect ME 10% blueprint after the patch. Just the same as the person who had a previously perfect ME 20 blueprint. You didn't read the dev blog, did you?



Except that the current ME level on your blueprint directly determines the wastage on that blueprint, and from there you know exactly what you will get post-patch. Have you ever opened up the show info window on a blueprint before?

ME4 blueprints pre-patch all get converted to ME8% blueprints after the patch.
ME5 through ME9 blueprints pre-patch all get converted to ME9% after the patch.
ME10+ blueprints pre-patch all get converted to "Perfect" ME 10% after the patch.

So if you have an ME4 blueprint today, try to research it to ME10. If it takes too long before patch day to get it researched to 10, try to research it to 5. If you have an ME5 blueprint today, but cannot get it to level 10 before patch day, don't bother researching it anymore.

Far more reasonable compared to what? Optimal BPs in the old system reduced required material by 10%. Optimal BPs in the new system will also reduce required material by 10%. That 10% will soon be calculated differently and the currently proposed transition is creating winners and losers. In many cases the wins and losses are minimal but in many other cases the wins and losses are astoundingly large. To date CCP hasn't commented much on their creation of winners and losers beyond an initial "we're aware this will happen" statement.

remove t2 bpo instead

Use your perfect blueprints to make shittons of money??


I guess that's too hard for you, even though all you have to do is run an application and it will do it all the math for you...

I was thinking about the research changes and realised that it can be split up into a smaller changes which may help analyze the situation (incoming wall of text).

1) Recast the material and processing (time) efficiencies in terms of percentage savings
Each existing blueprint has specified ME and PE levels, which are really just a count of how of how many times it has been researched, and it takes some arithmetic to determine how it effects the materials used, and time taken to manufacture using the blueprint. For ME, the percentage of waste is currently reported, and there is no additional information reported for the processing time efficiency.

In the next expansion the blueprints will instead report the percentage reductions over the base unresearched blueprint. Reporting of the waste percentage will also be removed.

You can calculate the percentage reduction corresponding to the levels of research. For both materials and processing time there is a limit value that you can't go below. For material efficiency the limit is a 9.09% reduction and corresponds to zero waste. For time efficiency it is a 20% reduction. At each level the time reduction is 2.2 times the material reduction.

The step makes a lot of sense. The new system will be much easier for most people to understand, as percentage reductions are used in many other places in Eve.

2) Adjust the base values stored on blueprints that are used for calculating the requirements for each of the source materials.
In the static database, currently, the material requirements are calculated by adding the waste percentage of the blueprint to the base numbers.which are set for the so-called perfect efficency (without waste)

In the expansion all the blueprints will be modified to have the unresearched numbers as the new base, and apply a reduction based off those. Doing so also gives the opportunity to apply an overall adjustment to materials or even finer grade adjustments at the blueprint or even material level.

One issue with this is that the due to the calculations having to round values to integers, there will inevitably be small differences in the material requirements for some material efficiencies before and after this step even if there no deliberate change. In that sense it may be better for the material reduction to be display only and stll use the old way of calculating the requirements internally, you can always convert between the material reduction and waste percentages.

A bigger issue is that the current adjustment from the perfect base point to the unresearch base point adds 11.1% rather than the expected 10%, which means that the unresearched blueprints and thus all blueprints will effective have 1.1% increased requirements.

3) Simplify the research process and make it more like training skills.
Currently, research works by doing a fixed period of research no matter what the current efficiency level of the blueprint is. The level is then increased by 1 and the efficiency of the blueprint is adjusted. There is no theoretical limit to amount of research you can do but after a while there will be little difference, and eventually any additional research will make no difference to the efficiency of the blueprints. 90% of what can be achieved is available at the an efficiency level of 9, and 95% at a level of 19. The shape of percentage reduction curve over research time is a negative hyperbola, with a horizontal asymptote at the previously mentioned limits.

For the expansion, the system will be changed to resemble gaining levels in the skill system. This means that there will be a maximum limit to the amount of research you can do on one blueprint, there will be a limited number of steps (currently 10), and the research time between the steps (and the total time for each step) will increase as a power series. The shape of the percentage reduction curve over time is thus logorithmic (although with a limit). The material reduction will go up in steps 10 of 1% and the time reduction in 10 steps of 2%.

One issue with this is the long research times at the high-end of the scale. With skill training you can switch around partly through gaining an increment. Introducing more steps would ease the situation somewhat, but the power relationship means you'd have many small extra steps at the start. As the relationship between research time is known for the scheme you could in theory have a floating point material reduction and chose whatever research periods you like. Another way of implementing that would be to keep track of the total researched time and only update the percentage reduction when it crosses the threshold. That would make things more skill like.

A second issue is that the ratio of time reduction to material reduction has been reduced to 2 from 2.2, which means that material research gets better faster than it used to.

The big issue is how to transfer existing blueprints to this scheme, in fact, it's the major point in contention and so belongs in a section of its own. In fact it'll need a post of its own.

Sorry if I don't read 32 pages of thread... Has anyone mentioned the issue of low MR small cost bpos that are already perfect? Say for example all the small ammo bpos.

It would be a truly major PITA to go and research all of these back up to the new "perfect" status. Is it possible to have perfect status bpos moved to perfect status in the new system?

I don't even know if I'll be ALIVE for the next 6 years. But my character's research will still require to be ongoing. I don't even know what to say about that.

Yes, the small cost BPOs have been mentioned. For these blueprints, when they multiply everything by 1.11111 and then round to the nearest whole number they will end up right where they started. So your small rig BPO that was effectively perfect at ME0 is still effectively perfect at ME0.

But is it? They are adding teams that can reduce material costs by 7.5%. They are also adding 2% ME for building in a POS. But we don't know how those bonuses stack with blueprint bonuses. If they add, you can get 9.5% ME on an unresearched Blueprint. This yields nothing on the small cost blueprint in question. But if you research that blueprint to 10% and it adds to 19.5% the cost savings could be significant.


With infinite slots suddenly coming open in NPC stations, I think there will be a ton of ME research done in the first couple weeks of the expansion, followed by not much.

I understand not reading the whole thread, but at least read the blue posts...

and yes, grayscale said the way rounding works that if a BPO was perfect before the change it will be perfect after.

IMHO they should do it on time and not waste but thats a different issue.

I would have preferred something a little more player driven. Keep the slot limitations in the stations and the ability to remotely copy and research BPOs. In place of these changes it would've been nice to see a finer granularity for players to rent out corporate POS slots to non corporate or alliance members. That would be very much in keeping with the sandbox player generated nature of EVE while allowing competition to drive down the prices of copy and research slots through providing additional supply.