Science & Industry

this is all true, but i believe it's more evidence that the proposed scaling for research on titans is obscene

the scaling may just be a little too harsh on the high end overall but it's only with supercaps that it goes from harsh to impossible

whats the formula on capital blueprints with me research ?

i see dif stuff around

but a me 6 freighter wil be ?

and whats the researchtimes after the patch

mynnna, you really need to learn reading comprehension.

Our problems with the new research system:

1) IT DOES NOT SIMPLIFY ANYTHING.
* The old formula 1/(10*(1+ME) was not difficult. You can even drop the 1+ for a quick approximation. ME 10 was approximately 1/100 inefficient. ME 20 was approximately 1/200 inefficient. Sure, the new way: ME5 is 5% worse than "perfect". ME8 is 2% worse than "perfect". Is slightly better, BUT, neither of those approximations really tell you the true story because of rounding. You use a discrete number of each raw material. Did 7% really save anything over 6%?
* So you still need to actually look at the bills of materials. Currently, if you want to build something and there are two BPCs in contracts, you can show info on them and compare. Otherwise, you can plug it into a spreadsheet or use a 3rd party tool to tell you what the quantities will be. The new UI change is even better. It allows you to get a quote for blueprints you don't even have. So the information will be available in game. Thank you! We all love it. But that is the UI change, and doesn't have anything to do with the research change.

2) IT REMOVES CHOICES FROM PLAYERS.
* Today, if I am going to go on vacation for a week, I can pick 11 of my favorite blueprints and get 1 week more research on each of them. I get a little warm fuzzy feeling when I deliver them, even if the savings are minimal.
* In the future, research levels will not be granular. If I want to research a battleship blueprint to perfect, it will tie up one of my science lines for over 4 months! I can't afford to do that on my main character who makes me a lot of isk by inventing.
* Today, I can calculate my opportunity cost for researching big blueprints. Researching a freighter blueprint one level would take 33 days. How much profit could I make building from or copying that blueprint instead of researching it for that time? What will the savings be on future freighters if I do this? I have that choice.
* In the future, research times will be so stupidly long that nobody will do it. Should I spend 3 years researching my freighter blueprint? Absolutely not. I'm not sure where I will be in 3 years. Also, in 3 years of expansions, CCP may do something that makes freighters obsolete.

3) NEW PLAYERS WON'T BE ABLE TO COMPETE WITH VETERANS
* If you have an ME 5 carrier or dreadnought BPO today, congratulations. You will have a practically permanent 2% advantage over everyone who ever tries to break into the industry in the future, because in the future it would mean 2 years, 2 months of research to get a blueprint to your level.

4) GHOST RESEARCH WILL BECOME A THING
* Locking away a science line for years on my main character will not happen. It precludes me from doing any copying or invention or anything else sciency. However, it is very easy to start a new account, train Metallurgy 5 and Laboratory Operation. Hand over a couple big ticket blueprints to research, and never log the account in again. If the research is done in an NPC station out of a corporate office, then I don't even have to re-activate the account at the end. Just have a director deliver it to get the blueprint back when it is done.

TL:DR
The new research scheme does not deliver on the promise of simplicity.
However, it causes lots of bad things.

It's the much longer timings that I'm not in favour of because as above if you need to stop the job for whatever reason, you've potentially lost a **** load of research time. I wouldn't mind so much if it goes the same way as skills. That by cancelling the job you simply pause that level of research and continue where left off when you re-enter the job.

genius

I think that would be quite hard to do to not be (ab)used by armies of alts mostly.

Here are my 2c: (see TL;DR: at the end if you're impatient)

1) CCP if you want to make ME/TE research more like skill training, go ahead but leave an option to do some kind of incremental researching for the last levels. As someone else already pointed out, the all or nothing model doesn't work well with POSes, who knows if a POS will stay there untouched for months... Even in null space the biggest player blocks may decide to abandon a region to move elsewhere, by their own will, so any long research job in a POS will become too risky, everywhere, no matter how strongly you control your space today, nobody knows what happens in 6 months or more.

I'm not asking for the same switch-on-the-fly behaviour of skill training (that would be too much) but at least give us an option to partially research a level.

2) If you implement that, there will be BPOs at ME7% (say), partially researched to ME8%. Conversion of the old BPOs becomes straightforward, with almost no loss, if it's based on time spent in the lab. Borrowing the maths from Shoogie, just take the time spent to get a - say - ME6 BPO (8 months, 24 days, old style) and turn it into a ME7% BPO (4 months, 21 days) partially researched to 8% (11 months, 5 days). If I'm not mistaken, it takes 6 months, 14 days to research from ME7% to ME8%, and that BPO it's been already researched for 4 months, 3 days, i.e. it's 63% done.

Do the same for a ME4 old BPO, you still get a M7% BPO, but it's only 18% done towards ME8%. Either case, not a single day of reseach is lost.

Now, efficiency is at 7% until fully done to ME8%. The old ME6 BPO converted won't be any better, in production, than the old ME4 BPO after the change (both are ME7%), but if would take much shorter to research it to ME8%. Extra time invested in researching it is not lost.

IMHO this is the only way to really preserve the old investments the players made in researching BPOs, and it's the fairest of the conversions, even towards future researches.

As proposed, if you convert BPOs based on current efficiency, players gain or loose a lot based on rounding... still borrowing Shoogie's example, what will ME4/5/6/7/8/9 BPOs in the old system get converted to? ME4/5 to ME8% and ME6/7/8/9 all to 9%? or ME4/5/6/7/8 to ME8% and ME9/10 to ME9%? either way, someone will be very happy, and someone else very sad (ME6 onwers get the same of ME9 owners? or ME4 the same of ME8?). Not to mention the poor guy who wants to research a brand new BPO, that would take now 2 years, 2 months, 8 days to just get the same result that before required only half (or 1/3) of the time?

TL;DR: research time is what players invest, and that's what should be preserved in converting old-style PBOs to new style ones; that requires partially researched BPOs (just like skills). Once we have partially researched BPOs, they can be used to implement shorter, manageable jobs just they are now even for the latest levels in research.

The stated goal was to remove unnecessary complexity....

Well, they could have done the EXACT SAME THING by changing ME from int to float, and hiding it behind the UI.

When you start a research job, you could be offered options:

9% waste ( behind the scenes it would be 0.11ME).
8% waste (behind the scenes it would be 0.25 ME)
7% (I forget what the number are, but I posted them in other thread)
6%
5% (1 ME)
6% (ME 1.5)
...
0% (base in on the perfect ME based on what you need the most of).
Final option would be to let you pick a time, then behind the scenes calculate what ME that will be, and what % waste it would be, to allow partial research between %s.


There is NO REASON they needed to do a complete redesign and round every 10ME BPO to perfect when they could have just changed ME to a float and hidden it behind the UI.

awesome thx

note to self, read the devblogs while not beeing stoned ;o

thats stupid and adds additional complexity while making the UI lie to you and is basically the worst idea so far