EVE Information Portal

Size matters & Standings

Will you be limiting the size of the tower in empire based on standings mechanics instead ?

If so, what happens to those Large CT's already set up?

There has to be an angle in there someplace.

Thanks!

I seriously wonder how many of the people posting about removing high-sec restriction on POS anchoring will be a boon to the small corp have even set a POS? Under the indicated direction of the expansion S&I is going to be a vagabond/nomad culture for the smaller groups, chasing the bonuses to improve the margins.

There is a significant amount of time involved not to mention the volume of the tower, lab, arrays, fuel, and stronthium. A setup for a small tower with labs and limited arrays would barely fit in an Orca. Then you need to load materials to do the actual work, which at least matches the volume of the tower and structures. The there is the tear down cycle...

People really need to research the POS operations process. CCP would be wise to limit the removal of restrictions to 0.5 security systems instead of a blanket removal. Security 0.5 systems are the fringe of high-sec offering all the "protection" of being in high-sec it also will give the "small" corps a foothold AND competition for moons. With the competition it would force novices to learn the mechanics better and give them a choice of working to increasing the standings with an empire to open more locations fostering a commitment (even if marginal) to the region of space they operate in.

Lifting the restrictions on only 0.5 space IMHO would be more pragmatic, logical, and balanced. Also it will allow more corps to "cut their teeth" on POS ops and maybe make them more secure in their abilities to pursue low-sec operations if that is the direction a corp decides to pursue

This is not a good idea... assuming that you also increase the max runs on all T1 BPCs as well, you're going to increase the time it takes to get a max run BPC, and therefore increase the cost inf invention.

i am only talking about T2 BPO's

and only to keep them usefull, i am pretty sure there will be some short commings if the T2 BPO's for drones and ammo suddenly arent getting used and all the ammo supply would be comming from inventions.

For items where T2 BPO is more than enough to supply demand, then T2 BPO build cost sets the market price. Removal of T2 BPO means prices will jump to invention cost.

For items where T2 BPO is not sufficient to meet demand, invention already sets the price (giving T2 BPO holders for these items FAT profits). In this case, price would only be effected by changes in invention cost.

And there is the great big issue!!!

If datacores and decryptors and such maintain a constant supply, but invention jumps because of T2 BPO removal, then the price of these items will jump, pushing up the cost of invention, and all T2 invented items. That will spiral until the supply increases (datacores, more people can grind skiils and standings to sign up with R&D agents), price hits equilibrium (decrypter so expensive no longer worth using) or demand declines to meet supply.


So... a big thing that I think CCP will have to balance with T2 BPO removal, is supply of invention materials.

CCP, can i have an answer please? The new industry UI is still not on sisi. You said it will be available within this week. You have an timeline about the other stuff or not? I read something about next week...

The reduction in copy times makes sense in so much as it seems odd that building the thing takes longer than making a copy of the bpo, but in doing so it does mean that certain bpc markets, such as capital ship / components, are likely to get flooded with the increased number of bpcs causing more work and a lot more clicking creating lots of smaller lower value contracts. Also the only reason I can see for reducing the copy time is to compensate for the massively increased risk of working at a pos caused by the mobile research changes, which as already stated I oppose anyway.

Industry UI

I personally don’t have any issues with the current UI although I agree its probably looking a bit dated now.

The new bpo info looks good, got no complaints with that.

The manufacturing screen...i personally feel looks more confusing and cluttered than the old. A number of things, like the picture of the station and output location could probably loose the pictures to make things a little less congested visually. Likewise, while the picture of the finished product does a good job of filling up space on the right hand side I don’t feel it adds much function – the person in question should know what they’re building regardless of the presence of a big picture of it.

I also don’t feel the connection lines help that much. Yes have a colour to show if all the things are ready or not – but I don’t feel the little dots around to tell me how many are ready helps, especially with items requiring a larger number of inputs.

No issues with the new activity icons. The input groups – I like the idea of grouping them by type, but think id prefer a drop down text list (guess I’m old fashioned that way...).

Again with the thing in the middle I don’t feel the flashing lights add anything for me, but they don’t detract either so no real issue. And as long as you keep the text box so I can type in how many runs I want rather than fighting with a slider I don’t mind that either.


The jobs tabs, some options could be nice here. For example having the activity name not the picture as an option. Being able to turn of some of the columns could be good as well (I wouldn’t use the sec status one for example). And being able to show the system location would be nice as well (seems odd this is missing?).

The BPO filter looks great, I look forward to being able to find things without opening so many containers.

Renaming PE to TE is a good change, glad to see it happen.

Overall I have no issues with most of this – but this especially will benefit from hands on experience, so I look forward to it being up on the test server.


Research

Copying changes, as stated earlier, does make sense to me but I do worry about the effect of greatly increasing the number of bpcs will have on the market for things like capital ships. The extra clicking to make the larger number of contracts certainly will be a downside.

The changes to ME/TE I’m broadly against. The changes at one and the same time punish newer player, causing a much enlarged gap between old and new for larger items and also punishes older players with higher researched bpos by effectively wasting a large amount of invested time. The only people to come out well from this are those with a broad collection of lightly researched bpos.

I don’t feel that the current system, one of diminishing returns for a consistent amount of time invested per level is that hard to grasp. By all means put info on what the perfect ME for a bpo is in the info screen, or even make it so you cant go above perfect ME, or improve tutorials to help better educate players, but doing this seems to an overly complicated and unfair change to a large group of players and I don't feel its needed at all. As others have pointed out, the chances of a new player catching up with someone who say has a current level ME10 carrier BPO is unlikely.

Also, while I appreciate that those with ME10/PE10 or above end up with max level bpos under the new system I don't really feel its fair to take away the time we invested and effectively wasted above me/te10 without any additional benefits over those who only took them to 10 in the first place. If you decided that skills were to complicated and cut them from all going to level 5 being the max to level 4, you wouldn’t expect those who had trained skills to level 5 to just sit back and accept they'd been idiots for training past level 4 and you'd find some way of compensating them for the time they invested, leaving them with some advantage over someone who only went to level 4 in the first place. At the end of the day the only difference here is the name – the point is time was invested for a benefit, with that benefit now being taken away.

With the remote research changes and the fact that the research time is going to be years for a single level in some cases, it will likely have to be done in a station, making it even harder to catch up in a sensible time frame. I feel that this attempt to simplify things also detracts from some of the challenges of industry. Currently while the benefits of higher level bpos are smaller they can often be enough to be worth it if you are making that item a lot. With the new system everyone being capped at level 10 leaves much less room for someone who really wants to make an item to invest more time in the bpo to give him an advantage of the competition (some items I know have low levels of perfect ME but most don't).

I have seen some people suggest the changes to a max level of 10 would help allow a cleaner bpc sale system. While it would be nice to have a better system, even with only 10 options for each you would still have the potential for 100 different bpcs even before you took the number of runs into account.

In short I feel the change punishes old and new players alike, admittedly in different ways.

Can I save on team costs if I let these guys Scientist or any of the other listed here work for me? That would finally make them useful.

A few things on this:

1. a POS gives you a 45% bonus to copying which is a huge deal for inventors (though I agree, I dont see much research being done in a POS unless they have extra CPU)
2. nobody ever looses BPOs to a POS bash in high sec. You get a 24 hour notice if anyone is going to attack your tower; you can even have your phone alert you to a war dec. This gives you 24 hours to get your BPOs out of the tower and put away before you can be attacked. If you cant be asked to log in after you get a notification that someone has war decced you, maybe POS mechanics arent for you?
3. Given that only the laziest of the lazy lose BPOs in a POS I dont think that they're going to be as common as you may think

As there was a question from the devs earlier, what could make POSes more viable for players. I just had an idea that may be worth something.


Let me start by comparing it to an analogy: We can set the speed of our ships. How fast they should be going. The same is true for nowadays ships, that have things like "Full throttle" or "half speed". How about adding this to the starbases, so its users have more options when it comes to burning through the fuel blocks, as sometimes you do not need "full speed ahead".

give a Starbase a few modes to operate in (using a large POS as example):

• minimum: just to keep the starbase shield up, everything else offline and unable to work, all arrays unusable, something like a standby mode, that also conusmes very few fuel blocks. Basically setting the tower to "self support only", without any CPU or power to spare.
• 1/4: only using a fourth of the fuel blocks, and getting only one fourth of the output, roughly putting a large tower to run in "small POS mode", running on 10 blocks per hour.
• 1/2: using half fuel blocks and half power, a large POS would have the same output as a medium tower at that rate, putting its consumption to 20 blocks per hour.
• 3/4: giving it a new "inbetween" power output of the medium tower and full consumption, for a large POS that would be running on 30 fuel blocks per hour.
• full: Operating at 100% with full output and full consumption, what means running on 40 fuel blocks per hour.

This would also open up the doorway for a new sort of gameplay that so many request on the forums. As every tower needs to at least run on minimum - you know risk vs reward. Currently putting an offline tower in HS has no risk attached to it at all, you need to open up a wardec. Use this super low consumtion rate as keeping up minimum operation of the tower. As it could be as low as consuming only one fuel block per hour, that should be affordable by anyone who runs a POS.

In return you could add additional gameplay for "truly offline towers". Whatever it may be. For example a truly offline tower cannot notify concord that it gets attacked, allowing free attack on it. Or... a truly offline tower has its mainframe offline, and cannot withstand hacker attacks. Or whatever else... there are so many ideas about that out there, that could be placed there.

I think this may add variety, may nullify the need to keep towers offlined (some corporations keep different sizes of towers out there, depending on what sort of demand may arise - if they can switch one tower in different modes, this need is gone).

Those modes should also be added to small and medium towers - so if someone just wanted to run an "ore compression tower", they could use a small one and set it to 1/4, running on the barest minimum just for the compression array. That may open the world of POSes to smaller corporations who were unable to afford them so far, but that may now be doable with a small POS that runs on the "one fourth" setting.

The current faction towers would need rework though, to give them a different set of "bonus" to still make them desireable. More CPU output... more power output... maybe bonus that adds additional time or other modifiers to its attached arrays. As those faction towers need to keep their "worth", but overall i feel that this basic idea would add a lot in terms of "making people want to use them", and also opening the doors for "possible offline tower gameplay" - as everyone can keep them in standby for very low costs. Nothing should be for free.