Science & Industry

Brilliant! Let's not fix invention - Let's bring everything else down its level! CLICKFESTS FOR EVERYONE!

how about no ?

SMA killmails were great, i can't wait for lab/array killmails with BPOs in them. expensive BPOs. i just hope that CCP is gonna find a way to make it happen :)

I took some time to really go through version 4 of the table, and re-read some of the older posts. I have to say I'm not coming away with a very positive feeling with how this is all going to go down for the not high-level T2 producer. There's been some positive stuff, I think, with the emphasis on the copy times, but I'm not sure what the goal of these changes are anymore.

The Major Issue

Closing up the flood-gates during a rain storm. We're in for a storm of people interested in production, and probably T2 production. I think this should be expected when you do a release focused on industry. Additionally we're removing the standings barrier to POS, so every single 5 man corporation out there is going to get a POS to pump up their advertisement on the corp forums. Should even a fraction of these folks decide to try to put random items into the POS to see what it spits out, they're going to be adding labor to the pool. Odds are their first project won't be a jump freighter, it will be a module.

Since we're taking the time to apply a "scramble function" to blueprint data anyway, why not increase the end to end build or TTM instead of decrease it? As it stands it's baffling the amount of other pilots I can personally supply with modules with my characters anyway. With the changes, presuming I don't get bored of clicking, I'll be able to build between 100-600x T2 modules a day! Per character! And when we finally get the ability to chain the jobs together it will get even worse.

So why are we even doing this?

I think its possible I might have lost sight of what somebody must have written on a white-board with a circle around it 6-18 months ago.

Industry is changing, certainly, but to what ultimate goal? Improvement is a pretty abstract term. And if that's all there is, then I'm not sure I see exactly how we're improving it. I think the UI team is doing a bang up job of making the interface more pleasant (though I'll still be doing a bunch of clicking), and I'm pretty sure we're going to be spreading out indy (though I'm not sure why bunched up indy was decided to be bad).

I think maybe what we're talking about in this thread would make more sense to me if someone could explain to me (perhaps as if I were 5) the big picture, and how what we're doing here in this thread is contributing to that vision. Right now it all feels very ad-hoc and improvised for a release just a few weeks out.

Posting error

Ah, you are asking about global strategy. Like for example "we (CCP) want more people producing modules and less people producing capital ship. We plan to do that with this, this and that change; we find these 5 things a problem and want to address it this way...." . Something along those lines, right?

Just considering the blanket 50% increase in base T2 materials.

The old ME -4 was 50% off perfect build materials whilst the new ME 0% is 9.1% off perfection. It seems like the 50% increase in materials was quite lazy as to account for the base change in invention you would increase material requirements by 37.5%. [1.50 / 1.091 = 1.3748]

The actual final adjustment that should be made is even more complex still as it’s a balance of the decryptors used in invention and a comparison of their material waste before and after the patch. Even then you can’t account for the changes in behaviour with usage of the decryptors so it’s pretty clear that the moon goo market will be up in the air for a while. Personally I’d expect to see moo material prices increase as a result of this change which isn’t optimal as moon mining is a completely passive income source.

As it's hard to take player behaviour into account as such a 37.5% increase in T2 materials rather than 50% seems more logical.

While 1.5 is an awfully nice and round number, I feel it is too large in this context.

I can understand dismissing the fact, which others have mentioned, that this raises material requirements of decryptor-less invention by ~9%, and that a better multiplier for that would be 37.5%. 9% is a small price to pay for such a round number. But on top of that, most T2 items are optimally invented with decryptors. And looking only at the measly +1 ME bonus of Symmetry, easily the most popular decryptor, you end up with ~15% extra material requirements post-Crius. ~23% for Accelerant and Parity, and obviously even worse for Process.

Yes a 1.5 multiplier means that you get almost no change at -6 ME (Augmentation; currently the lowest). But I don't think that justifies raising prices of all other T2 items across the board.


tl;dr: My market has fairly high price elasticity of demand. Its volume has already been hit by a separate nerf, and will get hit again by this change. And it's a lot easier to write a forum-post than look for a new blueprint library.

The big changes to industry gameplay are slot removal, dynamic pricing, teams and the changes to research. What we're doing here really is just "we have to update all the blueprint data anyway since we're removing waste, so let's make it a little more coherent while we're at it". This thread is not really about major "gameplay improvements", it's about fine-tuning work to just make industry more understandable. This is why, when I keep coming up with increasingly extravagant fixes, the rest of the department keeps reminding me to keep my scope under control :)



...yeah, good point, the math is "mis-based". I will fix this next week, at the same time as I fix the bit where I accidentally made everything T2 require 2x T1 items instead of 1x :)

You are making me start to think that I should give you a hint on how to find the perfect number. ;)

Since you have access to EVEs internal db and log engines (and everything else) you can run the follow queries that us players can not do:
1. First select a nice time period, say 3 months.
2. Find out ALL T2 manufacturing job during this period.
3. Sort them into buckets depending on ME-level; stick all ME 0-infinity in a separate bucket (we'll count them as perfect ME).
4. For each bucket find out the sum of ALL the T2 components used in that bracket. Use units for dimension, ignore price.
5. Sum all the T2 components across all buckets.
6. Find out how much % of the total T2 component consumption is done in each bucket.
7. Since each bucket has it's own "factor" to make it consume as much T2 components as before (after ME changes and waste removal); you then produce an average factor weighed by the % that each bucket contributes to the whole.
8. PROFIT!

While I like 1.5 as a factor (allows for some nice investments), it will not keep the T2 component consumption at the same level unless most consumption is done through manufacturing of ME -6, ME -5, and ME -4 BPCs.

I realize this database query is probably a PITA to do, but if it is to be done "correctly" this is the way it should be done IMHO. :)

Edit: Clarified step 7

So here we're walking into the interesting bit of territory between "try to match the current balance precisely" and "try to make the underlying system make sense". Matching current numbers as precisely as possible means minimum balance disruption... provided the balance considerations that are creating those numbers don't change. If they do, our finely-tuned balance tends to become very wonky (as any tuned system does when its parameters shift), and because we've fine-tuned it, the numbers may not make any sense in the new system.

What I have been generally trying to do with this work is create a coherent set of relationships between different stats, and then shift the relationships and their multipliers to approximate the current balance without sticking directly to it. In this case, yes, if we want to match old usages precisely we would want to do a very fine-grained pass over every item in game and match its materials new precisely to the exact balance of materials used historically, but we're expecting that balance to shift over time (not least when we revisit invention later), and at that point the tuning just becomes a mess. Instead I would prefer to keep things relatively simple but tune the multipliers so they ballpark the current values. In this specific case, I am trying to make the decryptor-less invention line up nicely before and after, and allow people to deal with the fact that decryptors change the math in whatever way they see fit, in the same way that we're matching build time to 2x copy+invent at base stats and not factoring in starbase bonuses etc for those purposes.

With regard to whether it's 37.5% or 5x%, I'll have another proper look at it when I'm back in the office and less tired; the tricky bit is just ensuring that it's accounting for the fact that we're building waste into the base materials. It needs to be +50% on the old base (the extra 2-3% doesn't feel significant enough to warrant messy numbers) or (I believe) +37.5% from the new base, and I just need to go check if I'm doing the T2 modification instead of or as well as the general rebase due to waste removal. Trying to visualize the Excel formula in my head, I *think* I did it as well as, which means using 50% was wrong, but I couldn't say for sure without the sheet in front of me :)