Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I think I remember reading something in the minutes about you guys at CCP wondering why "nobody uses teams". I just looked at them and I can tell you why:

teams are like industry was before the change.

Now industry has this nice new window of " you're going to need this much at this station and it's going to cost you x and all your materials are worth y as you can see from the tool tip and you're going to make w of item which will be worth approximately z. "

We now know everything about this production run, most importantly if it's going to be worth it, by simply looking at aaaall the inputs and seeing if that number is smaller than output minus job cost. That's awesome. It's not completely brain dead, if I were doing the UI I would totally have a summary with a bright, possibly blinking, green or red "PROFIT" section. But that's beside the point.

Teams are the polar opposite.

First of all there is no tab for team hiring, which is weird because there is one for team usage by default. That hiring should not be a drop down/toggle thing.

You have to bid on them, which varies with distance? I think? Anyway you can't see the price tag from the hiring list. You can't see how much cheaper it will make your stuff because, yes it's decreasing the price but it's increasing the production cost as well and you can't see where the break even point is.

So now you don't have to perform

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" is input + job cost < output ? "

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You have to perform

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" is input * cost reduction + job cost * cost increase < output ?" and if yes

" how large is output / (input * cost reduction + job cost * cost increase) " , which is your NEW margin with the modification that you have to calculate to see if production is worth it at all, by itself.

and THEN you have see to look at

" marginGAIN = NEWmargin - OLDmargin " and THEN

" how large is hiring cost / margin gain ? " because that's the amount of items you have to produce and sell to BREAK EVEN if you hire this team, otherwise you could have stayed with the old margin.

THEN you have to look at your local market to see if it supports that and mostly it doesn't because guess what, with a margin of 5% on modules and hiring costs of upwards of half a million isk, making modules is never going to be worth it simply because the demand for so many modules isn't there.

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See the difference? It's like industry before the changes, you have to make a spreadsheet out of game because otherwise you're going to touch the system once and then never again because it's just so much effort. Simply looking up these things takes way too long to be worth it in the first place.

Teams only work at mind boggeling scales of either volume in isk or computational power. Teams are not for small corps or industrialists at all. They are for high sec multi trillionaires who build 10000000 modules per week anyway and for whom it's clearly worth it or people who write API apps anyway and have no problem to calculate this stuff because they're not using the game interface in the first place and can just iterate over every single system every team and every item in less time than I need to write my problem down on paper.

If teams are made to be the "end game of industry" then try to argue why industry monopolies are improving the game play.

Yes theorycrafting is fun, yes a little math in game is fine, but don't make me do the steps above every time I want to make a hundred target painters for my alliance or something.

I'm certainly not going to look at them again.

Oh and one more thing, it was a wise decision to make teams optional. Because making hiring a team mandatory is not so far off that you couldn't have thought about it. So, thanks for that.

tl;dr: provide computation for players, take out salary modifier and reduce hiring costs by upwards of 90% and they might be worth to perform the above calculation.

I think the intent was to make indy more team based since some were complaining it could be a one man show.
Problem is with this implementation....it kind of leaves one man even more desireable imo.


Rest though rates a this though. I just want to put my stuff in the oven and go on to other things. I get to play purchasing and contracting games (what this equates to me) at work and having vendors compete for my company's money. Then when picked...its haggle on quotes to send up to purchasing and contracting section.

I get paid for this "fun". I don't want to see it in my ofttimes so I avoid it. At least in real life after seeing a vendor trying to move us off our current solution (or if say dell or cisco they swing by sell moar stuff maybe) I get the small trinkets they give out even if just some cake/cookie thing from an airport in hawaii (seems many hq asia realm for US clients from hawaii anyway). In game....I don't even get a cheesy ass pen even if a virtual one lol.

Reason why I don't use teams: I forget.

They were put in game while I was inactive, so I never read patch notes about them. The first time I opened the Industry window after I came back I was impressed and everything made sense, except the Teams tab. Never did look into what they were, didn't see any easy way to determine their purpose or benefit. Until I read this thread I didn't know you had to hire them, and apparently that's not even what the Teams tab is used for. So how do you hire them? Maybe I'm just misunderstanding what I'm reading.

To be clear, I'm not an industry noob. I've produced modules and ships for years, mostly in small runs for my own use. Before the industry changes I started doing T2 Invention and production. Several years back I built caps for a corp I was in. So this isn't my first time looking at industry in EVE.

I would suggest somehow integrating teams with the top portion of the industry window, where all the other important parts of the process are shown. Since what I'm reading now is that they are mainly useful for large runs, they probably won't get used much by anybody who isn't doing a lot of mass production. So I would say, that should be something to focus on, or just accept that they don't get used much because their purpose doesn't fit with how the average person does industry.

Well I do use them, or more often try to, since the auctions seem to end always when I'm not online.