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New players always lose ISK on T1 ammo. The margin is so small that their low trade skills and low standings eat all of it. New players should look for longer build time, low material cost items that attract less competition because they are bad when considered on a profit per production line hour metric (but are good on a profit per unit of capital invested metric). In practice this means I always advise budding producers to get their feet wet with tech 2 ammo using purchased BPCs and have sold several newbies Void S BPCs for 1.5m.

My opinion is that you should keep modules intended solely for frigates to be fast to research. Modules for cruisers and universal modules (like Drone Damage Amps) could be longer, and battleship modules longer still.

I would have no objection to 100mm Reinforced Steel Armor Plate I taking 5 days to research to ME 10, 400mm taking 20 days and 1600mm taking 80 days.

Please consider that new players probably won't be guaranteed access to a POS and so it's probably a bad idea to calculate all the numbers with that in mind.

I would imagine you would want to take into consideration the time of the trial into account. Research that requires time beyond the trial for the beginner stuff is going to prevent them from fully testing out industry beforehand.

Read on if you dare:

Did you just really single out one post as a "good post" and then respond?

There are sooo many reasons why this is just horrible form. Let me point out a few:

1. No one has ever proclaimed the criteria a post requires to get a response, yet this "good post" rises to the top and is responded to fortwith. I would love to see an enumerated guide on how to get a response from the devs.

2. Why have so many other posts which bring up even more important circumstance gone ignored?

3. Is it required that one post in a way that rubs a dev the right way to be considered a 'good post'? If so, how do you like to be rubbed?

Yeah ok, this is a reasonable question.

Preface: I am British (as evinced by the fact that I spell my name the way the Queen intended when she invented the English language), so all my expressions of emotion are compressed around the midpoint. To translate into eg American, exchange "good" for "excellent".

1. Here's the general guide, in approximate order of importance from my personal perspective
- Be calm and reasonable. Angry posts are harder to process, both because the actually worthwhile bits tend to be broken up by the angry bits, and just because it takes additional effort to filter out the negative vibes while you're trying to extract the useful information.
- "Show your working". The single most useful thing you can do in a post is to explain, in as much detail as possible, why. Simply stating things you believe to be true is somewhat unhelpful, as it's incumbent upon us as developers to be able to explain why we are making changes, and also to filter out things that players are saying because they are true from things that players are saying that they mistakenly believe to be true from things that players are saying that they know are false but hope will sway development decisions anyway. For both of these reasons, an explanation of why you are saying what you are saying is the biggest thing you can do (in combination with the previous point) to get a developer to make changes based on what you're saying. A lot of people seem to be under the misapprehension that simply stating their opinion should be enough for developers to change their mind; this isn't viable for a number of reasons, but the most obvious one is that any given thread will generally have multiple players stating mutually contradictory opinions. We have to be able to pick between them somehow, right?
- Be specific. I love players who actually present numbers rather than just saying "that is too big", because it makes it very clear what they're actually hoping to see, and gives context for what they find reasonable.
- Consider the whole picture. It's very easy to express an opinion about things that affect you directly. It's much rarer for people to consider how the changes they're suggesting affect other players, particularly those of different playstyles or levels of experience. As developers, we have to consider everyone, and that often involves tradeoffs. Your common-or-garden post says "this is what *I* want", and we have to then synthesize all those different points and figure out how to balance competing interests. Showing at least an awareness of this, and better still actually accounting for it in your working, is a good way to make a post more useful to a developer.
- Have a good, short opening paragraph. If your post starts off badly, I will jump through it quickly looking for anything that sticks out, because I have lots of posts to read and other work to do. If you catch my attention with your opening, I will read it carefully. Note here that I'm not saying it has to make an effort to be catching or provocative, just that a clear, well-written paragraph which meets all the other points in this list suggests that it's a post that's probably worth reading slowly.
- Be novel. Posts bringing up things that haven't previously been mentioned in the thread are generally more useful than posts repeating the same thing that's been mentioned twenty times. I want to properly clarify this: I'm *not* saying not to repeat points, or even that doing so isn't useful. Seeing the same thing brought up multiple times is a good indicator that there is a broad concern about a particular thing. It's not as powerful as a single post laying out succinctly and convincingly why a particular thing is problematic, but it's still useful information!
- Be nice to read. If you can be gently witty, or format and punctuate your post so it's easy to read, that will always score bonus points.

2. Nothing in this thread has been outright ignored. With fifty pages I'm happy to hold up my hand and say that some posts I skim-read because, as above, I have other work to do too, but I have read every post for some definition of "read". I have not replied to every post raising an important point, for a variety of reasons:
- In many cases a reply doesn't really add anything to the discussion
- In some cases that you are considering important posts, I probably simply didn't find the points they were making particularly compelling. YMMV, obviously :)
- I can't reply to everything, both because it would take forever and because it would destroy the rhythm of the thread.
- What a developer does and doesn't reply to tends to, over time, influence the character of the forum. I am less likely to respond to a post which makes good points in a bad way, because while good points are good, bad presentation is bad. Conversely, people making really good posts I will go out of my way to reply to, because I would like to see more posts like that.

3. This is kind of repeating the first question, at least in the case where I...

More or less. ME100 and PE 75 is a crazy amount of research, but 10 makes a good middle ground. It is slightly under optimal for ships and way, way over optimal for a wide number of long-researching modules - cynos capital modules etc.

As a little tl;dr of the thread for people concerned by this;

Realistically speaking, the number of BPO's that can enter the game at ME/TE10 before patch day is limited by the number of slots / the number of research capable characters, so people trying to 'get in early' it isn't a massive problem even in the medium term.

10 has the advantage of being low enough for most people not to feel like they *have* to do anything to their BPO collections to not lose out, as they will be mostly perfect already.

The majority (read: entirety) of the tears in this thread come from people who have spent a ludicrous amount of time researching blueprints past optimal and feel entitled to some form of remuneration - despite the fact that in real terms they got nothing for all this research already aside from the satisfaction of levelling up their 'Pokémon cards'.

There is an argument for increasing the cut-off beyond current level 10's but each additional level increases the number of blueprints that would need to be researched beyond current optimal levels to be rounded to future perfect, creating more 'losers' and less 'winners'. 10 is as good a number as any to choose - personally I see no advantage in changing the scale for the rounding. It really doesn't matter beyond the first couple of months, get over it.

All this is basically short-sighted whining about what is basically a small detail of the broader changes. The future system avoids tricking people into thinking these research levels will be worth it. Combined with Teams and Slot cost scaling 10% ME reduction will only be even necessary in the busiest systems, smaller guys will be just fine with less ME in smaller systems with less cost scaling. Big guys are going to want 10/10 to shift the volumes they are working with in the busiest Hubs, little guys may be fine with 5-9% ME working in smaller hubs.

All in all, personally, I think it is brilliant.

TL;DR: THIS is a good post.
Bit lengthy though. The forum always truncates my text when I try to quote it in full length. But may maybe it is better that way for readability.

There's currently 2 very strong arguments against the flat transition Me10+->Me10 regardless of research time:

1) For a lot of important BPOs, notably battleships, the difference between ME10 and ME50 is non-neglectable, so the flat transition would reward 2 kinds of people there that are generally deemed undeserving: impatient/lazy people and those incapable of simple math.

2) AFTER the patch for a lot of BPOs researching to ME10 will take a lot longer than it does currently. That is especially unfair towards new players, but essentially again it rewards people that would normally be considered undeserving: established players that META-game the system by researching BPOs to ME10 pre-patch.


IMO it seems understandable that people affected by (1) feel betrayed by a flat change, and most of the affected people seemed to argue quite reasonably about that instead of creating a flood of tears. Also IMO ANYTHING that puts new players at a further disadvantage to the established players should be avoided at any reasonable cost. Especially if it can be abused pre-patch.


I'd still maintain, that the fairest and most transparent system would be one, where BPOs gain experience from research, which directly translates into a general BPO (ME=TE) level, 0-10. That would allow:

- stopping BPO research at any time, partially researched levels would simply be ignored
- full market integration of all BPO levels, partial research would simply be rounded down to the last full level when the sale is completed
- better transition of BPOs, since research time pre-patch could convert directly (there would still have be a cutoff at some point, but that could be a lot closer to reasonable research levels)
- for a change no advantage of established compared to new players

Copy times won't be affected by rank, that's only for ME/PE research.

The new industrialist is going to find that his production price is above market sell price. He'll go read blogs to learn that if you aren't building with the best teams, then there is no point to building at all. He'll then discover that all the best teams are in null, or in solar systems without station services where all the moons have a small POS of a mega alliance.

He'll then have the option of paying dues to belong to one of the mega alliances that have cornered the market on best teams, or just mining and selling minerals to members of the mega alliances.

Assuming this is feasible (its not), why is this a bad thing?