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AFAIK most datacores are FW now, so any market pressure from increased invention is nipped in the bud by FW's willingness to shift their LP payouts to datacores, instead of say... faction ships. Or whatever those people buy.

In my opinion and personal experience this pushes invention towards a side job for extra/vacant research slots. Then you can "burst" build through a created stockpile. This, obviously, has its own deficiencies. I agree that invention chances need to be changed, but perhaps not with why or how. I think invention should scale much, much more significantly with skills. Right now between the horror that is invention clicking and the (relatively) small difference in invention chance, which is a SMALL part of job cost, you are not required to skill up. At all. There may have been a time where IV was necessary, V preferred, but no longer. By drastically increasing the difference to invention costs from skills and absolutely increasing the throughput (via the UI improvements) I think manufacturers would be pushed to specialize in certain areas.

Four is needed to produce a lot of the invented BPCs.

I do not want to see invention become a 'you must have level 5 to bother' system like the present material efficiency skill is for tech1 production.

So basically make it possibe to get the ultimate manufacturing BPO, just make it really hard to get. Kinda like titans?

An interesting concept that provides a partial solution to the BPO conversion and compensation requests. This proposal doesn't eliminate the requests for compensation for high ME values. The existing system doesn't have an upper limit to ME so that the arbitrary use of a straight line conversion from ME1-10 to 1%-10% is unfair and unbalanced. Another approach is to eliminate the issue of highly researched BPOs requiring compensation.

1% at ME1
2% at ME2-3
3% at ME4-7
4% at ME8-15
5% at ME16-31
6% at ME32-63
7% at ME64-127
8% at ME128 - 255
9% at ME256 - 511
10% at ME512 or higher.

Use a similar conversion for PE/TE.

The results would be varied. For example a hobgoblin II currently takes around 4 hours to manufacture, 2 hours to invent, and 4 hours per copy. This is a major click fest. Almost certainly one of the reasons people don't manufacture so many is because of the effort involved. On the other hand there are plenty of other items which have a much larger manufacture time, large ammo for instance has a 7 day build time, so it is unlikely that will be affected.

That being said, I think it is good to have some variation between the items, as it makes the inventors choices matter.

Let me just give one example of why the obsession with having your manufacture slots always full is not something which I think gameplay should be balanced around. There are 4 aspects I have identified which add to interesting gameplay as a result of having a bumpy landscape when it comes to cop/inv/man ratios.

Considering the Overall Picture

Take the hobgoblin II, each BPC takes 4 hours 26 mins to manufacture. Then take Barrage M ammo, which take 3 days 15 hours to manufacture with a cryptic accelerant. The clever inventor knows that he only needs to que up one job per day of hobgoblin IIs and he will almost double the profit of the inventor building Barrage M despite the fact that his manufacture slots are empty for over 80% of the time. The clever inventor calculates all of this into overall picture when considering what to manufacture.

Different Jobs for Different Occasions

Another aspect of having a bumpy landscape, is it allows you to adapt your manufacturing chain to your own personal play time. Lets say if you can only come online at the weekend. Well then you know you need to put a long job in over the week, and when it comes to the weekend you can que up lots of the smaller more profitable jobs. If these smaller more profitable jobs are amalgamated into long 24 hour + jobs, then this niche will no longer exist, as the reason they are profitable is because they are inconvenient in terms of time (and at the moment in terms of giving you RSI, although that should not be the case with the new UI changes).

Keeping Flexibility in the Manufacturing Chain

On top of this you have decryptors. So lets say I decide refreshing jobs ever 4 hours 26 mins is a pain. If am not too smart then I make a big fuss and complain on the forums that manufacturing hobgoblin IIs is too much of a pain and that manufacture time needs to be increased to fit around my schedule. If I am a little smarter then I can use a Incognito Augmentation decryptor, which buffs manufacture time up to 7 hours 36 mins for only a very slight drop in overall profits. But because I don't like refreshing jobs every 4 hours 26 mins, this works out better for me as I only need to refresh it once a day and so am making a much better overall profit. This is why I think the importance of decryptors should be emphasised further, then we can rely on decryptors rather than simply amalgamating everything into one easy to process ratio that applies to everything across the board.

Manufacturing Chain Optimisation

Then finally you have manufacture chain optimisation. Let's say I decide to invent a Claw without using a decryptor. With max skills you require 6x invention slots for every manufacture slot to keep you operation running efficiently with no bottlenecks. So once again, either I could come onto the forums complaining that I want a 1:1:1 ratio for every item so it is easy for me to calculate and keep my chain running efficiently. Or I could find another item which can supply multiple manufacturing slots with only 1 invention slot. Small ammo for instance, which only requires 1 invention slot to supply up to 20 manufacture slots not considering decryptors. So having different items limited by either manufacturing time, invention time, or copy time, allows for more interesting choices, rather than simply having everything amalgamated to use manufacture time as the bottleneck.


Must admit that calculation with it's negative result confused me too. :) But the point I wanted to make, why is there really any need to align build, copy, and invent time? Would it not be much better to keep a bumpy landscape? A half way solution would be perhaps only categories could be aligned rather than every single item being amalgamated. For instance all drones and ammo have the same ratios, and all modules in another category having the same ratios, with ships in another category having differing ratios. That way we still have some variation, but it won't be completely random.

Basically, what I am trying to illustrate is that the current bumpy landscape, where everything is not simply amalgamated and blended into one easy to swallow pill, does allow for more interesting gameplay overall. And if the importance of decryptors could be emphasised, then imo that would be the right way to go about increasing runs and manipulating other aspects of the invented T2 BPC. That being said, I do agree that some tweaks could be made here and there, but I don't think simply amalgamating everything is the way to go.

In a sense, yes, but more possible for an individual to acquire alone. The real challenge would be balancing the blueprints/blueprint distribution to not hurt invention.

There's no problem with having two tiers or methods of manufacturing, as long as it's actually possible to break into the second tier. That's always been my problem with the status quo. That and lack of slots, but that one's being solved with the expansion.

For me, with frigates, a 20 copy frigate run takes me 25 hours which would turn into 12.5 x 20 invention jobs at approximately a .36 success rate (20 x .36 bpcs at 9 slots per 12.5 hours or 18 x .36 over 25 hours assuming a copy job is always running). My 10 invention slots lose at least 1 slot to copy jobs so the copy process keeps ahead of the invention process. As noted elsewhere, the manufacturing slots either use bpcs in a "burst" mode or have to dove tail with other more sophisticated approaches. The idle manufacturing slots mean I think in terms of producing additional T2 ship parts for an additional ROI on the ship based on opportunities in the parts market or some other opportunity.

As stated elsewhere, the benefit of a more balanced throughput is that it allows entrants into the T2 marketspace a chance to enjoy the gameplay without nerfing the benefits of more sophisticated insights.

Nope, not for me and my T2 module production. The skill threshold on copying is so much lower that it was trivial to train every character into Science V for copying. I then burst copy using a temporarily online POS or lowsec. My bottleneck has never been copies but rather the awful interface. I literally cannot bring myself to do a complete invention plus manufacturing cycle on more than two characters at a time because of clicks.

If this limitation is removed my bottleneck will certainly in the absence of other changes) be T2 BPCs, simply because the chance of invention mechanics resulting in less BPCs per iteration. The fact that invention takes less time to do than manufacturing is a false positive for invention rates simply because I only log in once a day. Sure, production might take 17h and invention only 2.5 but both are less than 24.

I disagree. Managing complexity, especially across multiple domains of knowledge, generally favors transparency and understanding (the significance of change). It is obvious from the varied responses and CCP follow-up re: feedback with quantitative examples that the scope of how invention is "played" in the game is NOT understood to the extent that wholesale change will increase the appeal or playability of the game. I'd say start with the clear cut wins like changes that result in less "clickiness".

The reason I mentioned metrics for measuring success in previous posts is because two basic models for success can be inferred without a reasoned statement by CCP devs: Improvements based on player feedback (less clickiness, queueing, etc...) or solving for problems observed on the "China server".

Setting aside my own preferences, rolling out limited changes to observe the impact and having those changes focus on the improvements for which there is anticipated consensus makes $en$e. Articulate what constitutes success and how it can be measured post implementation.