EVE Information Portal

They will still contribute to system research costs .... but fair enough.

The real issue, in short, is that in the current system, there is sufficient & reasonable granularity for managing research jobs & levels .... you can incrementally improve your bpo's (ME/TE) in ~1 mo increments.

It sounds like the proposed future system will destroy such granularity ....

I would advocate that some reasonable level of granularity needs to be retained somehow - granularity on the order of years is simply not manageable ..... so unless the goal is to make higher level research completely unmanageable, I hope they can put some compensating measures in so that we can all still have fun incrementally improving our BPO's.

Researching BPO's to high levels may not even be "worthwhile" in terms of isk going forward (since there will be no way for prints to compete on the market/contract system at higher quality levels anymore), but I know a lot of us at least really love the feeling of achieving "perfection" - it's not about isk, it's a game achievement mechanic. Doing away with the achievement means there is less reason to play the game ....

This!

For the sake of simplicity merge ME and TE into one type of level for BPs as proposed in this thread, so that we can get that level directly worked into the name as suffix.

To be fair, blueprint experience, a 100 point system, "granularity" over fixed curves of time locked research that locks you out of accessing said blueprint for YEARS at a time, has nothing to do with not having stackable BPCs and a proper blueprint trading system unless we get rid of ME/TE altogether.

Is that what we want?

We are just arguing that the design is poorly thought out from both a player perspective and a business model for CCP.

Why can't we have both? Granularity and presentation?
I understand some people only bother with mid range research and that's fine, and some people play it as an achievement and that's fine too. What does that have to do with not having stackable BPCs and an easier to read contract system?

It's merely a matter of development attention. It's not hard to create a BPC container of sorts that tells you how many blueprints are in the stack, and how many variations by what pops up under your mouse or something along the lines of a radial menu but in more of a squared, tabular format. When you hover or interact with the stack (as you would anyway from splitting a stack), you get to select from a modular popup showing the categories present in that stack (at a glance) and then clicking to remove the particular icon or icon set. Better UI design does not require extra art assets but the intent of the developer to actually implement the code.

A system like this would also allow you to sort copies in different stacks, based on what that stack is optimized towards. You don't need less gameplay, you just need to work on implementation of the UI. Look at the ISIS system for example, it's great. We didn't have to cut out ships in order to get better organization and delivery of information to the player.

And that's just one idea for how BPC containers could be done currently, without cutting out content. I'm sure a better one could be devised.

Why should we butcher ME/PE because some people can't be bothered with it? All who weren't bothered before, are going to be bothered even less in the future (see teams), but the proposed re-design is by design, much poorer than what we have currently because of its time based nature which, many have outlined, takes the player completely out of the process for an uncontrolled amount of time. We are talking years here. Think about that number. We're not talking days, weeks, or even months, but years during which you no longer interact with a game mechanic, a slot of your character's alloted skill slots, and the station/system/POS where it is housed.

And before anyone gives the answer to just not queue it, then why is it there as an option? Why bother on a design level for something that is never going to be used? It's like you design a system based on a metric scale, but only plan for the first 50cm of that scale to ever be used. So why not design that scale based on the 50cm you do plan on being used?

The assets for stacking BPCs are already there (icons), it's just a matter of better delivering the information to the player and this is all client side as well. It's not hard to add them into a list array of sorts and store them as one container. Think deck of cards, think Solitaire.

I guess CCP don't rate it high on their to do list to bother with it, in which case we should make our voices heard that we need such a system, not cut out chunks of content from other players and make the game redundant upon itself. Fact is, this is a sandbox, and people set their own goals when playing it. It's as unfair to say, you are not allowed to try to be an R&D specialist just as much as saying, hey you there you are not allowed to pvp outside of FW because it's pointless towards my game and *I don't like you doing it*.

Sure, we can "suck it up" (after all, even Titans have felt the sting of extreme nerfdom with the removal of AOE dmg)... but first, let's discuss and make sure it really is "for the good of the community" and whether there are even better ways to acomplish what CCP is trying to achieve.

A freighter BPO takes ~16 ME to differentiate itself and compete against more average BPO's/BPC's on the contract market. This change will invalidate 6 of those levels - that's ~8 months of expensive fuel/research time investment, that will simply evaporate from the EVE universe - talk about an isk sink.

We'll basically see a huge equalization of researchers (as defined in terms of their BPO libraries), with mediocre researchers suddenly having libraries of "perfect" BPO's, and researchers who spent time and effort to excel (to be able to compete on the contracts market), suddenly relegated to mediocre status. It's the equivalent of CCP coming out and saying that all Titans will suddenly be relegated to lowly Dreadnought status (a well researched BPO library I'm thinking can easily out-value a Titan?).

Except the proposed 10-level system results in too many permutations to fit into the current typeID-centric marrket system, a point that has already been acknowledged. Sure, 10 gallons is closer to fitting into a pint pot than 100 gallons, but neither actually fits.

The fundamental blocker is that the current Eve market is entirely centered around typeID, which doesn't fit with having differentiated properties on blueprints. What we really need, if blueprint trading is going to work, is a separate section of the market for blueprints, with a modified market engine sitting behind it. This would use an extended type of market order that incorporated ME, TE and runs of the blueprint as properties of the order itself (with multiple blueprints insertable into the same order if typeID and the three properties matched).

To make buy orders at all usable, they would need to change to match against the sells based on a "equal to or better than" basis rather than an exact match, e.g. "I want to buy a Moa Blueprint with ME>=X, TE>=Y, and I am willing to pay Z million isk for it)". Under the "lots of typeIDs" method of shoe-horning blueprints into the current market, you wouldn't be able to do this - you'd have to put up an order that said "I want to by a Moa blueprint with ME=5, TE=5 for Z million isk", and if someone had a blueprint up with ME=6 instead, for a lower price than you were offering, the typeID-centric market wouldn't be able to match that up, and buy orders would be nearly useless.

The "lots of typeIDs" method would also never work for copies, there are just too many permutations on number of runs for that to ever be viable. Whereas the "extended order" approach could accomodate that easily. And once you've gone with the "extended order" approach, it doesn't matter whether the extra properties in the order are 0-10, 0-100 or whatever.

The complication around the "extended order" approach would be how the blueprints go into and out of the order object itself, but I would think this would be surmountable.


The number of possible permutations on number of runs is also why the "lots of typeIDs" method could never give us stackable BPCs. Again, the fundamental problem is that the inventory is entirely typeID-centric.



While that sort of container is not hard to conceive of, and is not hard to represent in the UI, the difficulty is how it is represented in the inventory system itself. The inventory system does not directly know about any of the properties ME/TE/runs) of the blueprint itself - the only reason it knows the difference between a BPO and BPC is because of a slightly hacked use of negative quantity values. So the best you could do would be to create this display container that says "there are some Moa BPCs here", but as soon as you open up that container, you'd still have a whole pile of singleton BPC that could have vastly different underlying properties.

So what you'd achieve there isn't so much "stackable BPC" as it is a hierarchical "group by item type" view for the inventory window (which would be applicable across all items, not just BPC).

That link also explains nicely why the properties of the blueprint are not readily available to the inventory system, and hence why the client can't do any fancy presentational tricks in the inventory that rely on those properties, because it won't have the additional information about the blueprints, and going away and fetching it for every blueprint every time you use the inventory would be DBA suicide.

Now, all the blueprint detail is retrieved in the Blueprints tab of the new Industry UI - this is presumably achievable because it is an optimised "blueprints only" interface that won't be used nearly as often as the inventory system itself. It should therefore be possible for this view to "collapse" multiple identical blueprints into a pretend stack for presentational purposes (though they would still exist as seprate items in the inventory itself), and some drag-and-drop interaction between that view and the inventory might make life a bit easier.

CCP, please understand with these ridiculous research times you're just re-creating the T2 BPO lottery issue. There will be these perfect blueprints out there that can never really exist again. There may be a lot more of them, but still, you will create a permanent imbalance between the organizations that have them now and the ones that don't.

Currently you can get a titan blueprint to level 10 (or the new perfect) in about 600 days. My recommendation is that the time to research not be significantly higher than it is today to get to level 10. Otherwise you'll just come here every day and instead of hearing about T2 BPO issues, you'll hear about this.

I'm suggesting you cut your research time by a third. That would put it on pretty much the same level as the current blueprint system with a small increase.

I could deal with the T2 BPO because it didn't really affect invention that much because of the very few number of people who had these blueprints, but there are a ton of high-end T1 BPOs researched to ME and TE 10. This will have a huge impact on the market and proceeding with this in your expansion aimed at industrialists is likely just going to tick them all off. This expansion should be considered a win, but with this change I can't see how it could be.

Please reconsider these excessive times.

Everything across the board is 3.5x as long. So all research before June will be effectively multiplied by 3.5 to 4.5 compared to all future research. Titan BPOs are easy to see, but everything is effected.

Antimatter Charge M Blueprint goes from 16.7 hours to 3D. It's a big thank you to existing industrialists and a big FU to all new industrialists -- not something EVE needs right now. It's something that can never really be made up either.

So now instead of being a year behind someone or two years behind someone in researched BPOs, I'm four years or eight years behind them. CCP will be creating a class of permanently better off industrialists. It's the T2 BPO issue on a larger scale.

I also would like to know this.

It should be noted that ME is becoming /less/ important as it's no longer the only way to affect the materials needed for blueprints.

Manufacture in a POS, have -2% to the materials required, for example.

There is no 'perfect' any more. Just 'not worth researching under these particular circumstances'.

On the other hand, at 10, you've reached that 'perfect' level.

And it helps stop newbies wasting their time, researching medium rig blueprints to 200, when 4 would be enough, because they don't understand how the system work