Test Server Feedback

Just finding out about the Material Efficiency nerf from today's devblog. And I HAVE been trying to keep up with all the changes by reading the industry articles, and this announcement still left me dumbfounded. Spent the last 2 hours reading up on all the threads and found this one. So take that as some feedback that the changes weren't clear and centralized since I'm still having to dig through Test Server Feedback threads to find the meaningful discussions. Thanks for linking this thread in some of the other discussions though - made it a little easier to find.



I am fine with having the weekend to have a meaningful discussion around the Material Efficiency change skill. Waiting a week after Crius release to change it is fine. Waiting until September to change this would be unacceptable. Thank for you committing to fxiing this quickly- as development time for promised changes "SoonTM" can sometimes disappear. For example, still waiting for CCP Rise to fix the Rapid Missile Launcher ammo type swap mechanic from the 200+ page threadnaught.

You've said clearly that the skill on Tranquility is currently too powerful, and needs to be brought back a bit, and that's fine. But lets approach the change clearly. From reading all this, I feel like we're arguing the Meta around a skill change, and not the change itself.

The final change needs to be considered in two ways:

1. The skill must still apply to material requirements/job cost reduction. Anyone who trained a character to Material Efficiency 5 intended to specialize the character to manufacturing with the least amount of waste. Material/Job cost reduction is much more valuable than a time savings, because we don't all play 24/7 and without being able to queue more than 11 jobs at once, the extra time is a significantly diminished benefit. The material reduction plays out in having to purchase and haul around less materials to build with - and that saves us time (and ISK) inherently anyway. I think most of us have expressed how poorly thought out this idea was, and you've heard us.

2. The skill must have an equal value as before and have a significant benefit to be attractive to train to Level 5, especially as a 3x skill. My problem with renaming "Material Efficiency" to "Advanced Industry", and then claiming it is okay for it to be have diminished value because it's an "Advanced" skill is framing the discussion (and poorly) from the start. Material Efficiency is a 3x skill, and most "Advanced" skills (at least in industry research terms) are 8x.

not a bad idea but when those of us with it already trained are getting force-fed that we have no option to decide wether we want the skill is an issue.

I am left after reading this thread with the opinion that we are trying to fit the square peg in the round hole.

We are taking what CCP agrees with is a 'mandatory skill' for any industrialist....removing its entire reason for existence....ie: no more artificial waste.

Then the next step has been to apply entirely new logic to this ... and say we dont want to have any mandatory type skills .... so we are taking the time and effort you 'had' to invest and repurpose this to some 'other' skill which will by definition not be mandatory or have the same value as the one it had before.

This is not a nerf of the existing skill...that would be leaving what it affected and then modifying the values. This is a direct and entirely new skill that CCP admits is not as valuable as what the old skill did before.

It seems to me that the easiest solution here is that since the skill is no longer required/needed that you simply delete it and refund the SP. When skills are removed from the game you have done this in the past ie: learning skills. You are doing the same thing here which is removing a skill from the game...we dont need to remove the waste anymore.

You could save soooo much time doing the simple refund here. Why try and repupose this artifically to something that many people will never accept as being equal in value? From a customer service and development point of view it is lose lose to try and force the square peg in the round hole.

For the record...the time saving of 1% is of little value to me or my alts....we talking about at lvl 5 saving me 3 minutes on an hour job which I will tell you is a joke, compared to the value of what the skill brought before.

So there is a choice right now to save time and effort here...refund it..and remove the advanced industry skill.

I can agree with the sentiment that the only way the currently-planned 1% time reduction per skill level would be even remotely relevant to most people is if we're allowed to queue jobs beyond our actual active-job limits of 11 per toon ... but think of the glut of products (especially T2's and T3's from mass-queued jobs) which would effectively drive people away from industry under the premise of there being zero profit to be made in a profession which would be overflooding the market within a week.

No, no that cant be allowed to happen. No queues beyond 11 per toon.

Instead, I think Greyscale's initial response of cutting fees has the most merit of all the ideas posted here. It's not a lot of cash the way he posted it, but we should also consider cranking that % up a bit to be around the 5%-10%/level area. The fee reduction should be scaled around with respect to just how much of an isk sink it's expected to be on EVE as a whole. None of us except one of CCP's economists can really say for sure how much that value should be, but I believe that it should for sure be more than 2% per level.

Everyone, eh? So the people whose lines only run for a few hours a day, a few times a week, are going to save all of 10 minutes per line, despite those lines sitting idle for a few days longer?

The TE bonus only works for those keeping their lines going constantly. In its current form, it amounts to 72 minutes per line, per day. If you have any more down-time on a line than that each day, you've essentially wasted the bonus for that day. Not every person who manufactures wants to do that, nor do all those who manufacture have the resources or RL time to do so.

Personally, I couldn't care less if my 6-hour line ends in 360 minutes or 342 minutes because it's the last thing I do before logging out for the night.

Since the original skill ultimately effected the cost of the item (reduced mineral needs = cost savings) it would make sense that the cost of producing the item is somehow effected. It most likely should effect fees as our skills and knowledge in manufacturing techniques lower labor costs by requiring less labor.

edit to add: the cost benefit in lowered fees should be proportional to the cost benefit we have been receiving from reduced mineral costs.

Taken in isolation, at 1% that equals 72 minutes * 11 (number of lines) = 13.2 hours of time saving per day.

If you bump that up to 3% per level, which is what CCP Greyscale seems to be looking at, then that would equal 3.6 hours saved per day per line. Much much better than a tiny job install reduction. If you are sensible you will stick with the PE bonus which is being offered.

Not to burst your bubble, but this would be on the other end of the scale of refunding SP's due to a skill multiplier reduction for what's perceived to be a lesser skill - and you just said that kind of thing is a no-go. You shouldn't consider one without being willing to consider the other in equal measure. So ... no. I'm sorry, but no.

So we don't want a skill that is as important to have as ME 5, but we want it replaced with a skill that is as important to have as ME 5, else we'll feel cheated. quite a conundrum.

As a player thats been training ME 5 on all his characters in anticipation of the patch, I strongly vote for a skill point refund. just hire some temp worker to do the gruntwork and yall check it when he's done.

This is pretty much exactly my position. Material Efficiency needed to be taken out back and shot. Meanwhile, it's actually sorta stuck in the middle of a skill tree, and there's even a precedent for this kind of whole-functionality transplant. (Did you know there used to be a racial-integration corp management skill? Now it reduces the cost of hiring allies in a war.) Whatever skill was going to replace it would be guaranteed to be less useful.

The installation fee approach seems pretty reasonable to me. Level 5 might not be very worthwhile anymore, but ME 4->5 used to be the difference between profit and not, often enough. I'm okay with it only increasing your profits by about 20% and only when you're doing high-intensity industry, even though I'm thinking about bringing my manufacturing alt out to the back of beyond where it will be useless. Besides, is there anyone out there doing high-intensity trading (for a point of comparison) who doesn't train Accounting V eventually for the last bit of tax reduction? I admit the casual industrialists operating in backwater systems will still get particularly screwed, but a cost reduction instead of a time reduction changes it from "never relevant" to "sorta relevant".

Frankly, the people who are complaining that now they'd only train it to 4 can throw a pity party with the people who just finished Anchoring 5 just to get access to POS gunning. The things that final level get you are a bit of a booby prize now, but it's not completely useless. Reducing installation fees would be better than time reduction, though.