Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Before I get started I want to make clear that I'm biased in this topic since I do invention my self and don't own a T2 BPO. But I will try to stay as objective as possible and point out if I talk about my opinion.
If someone provides some solid calculations or correct me if I'm mistaken would be very nice

For those newer Players among us, T2 BPOs has been seeded through the R&D Agents and were provided to the player in some kind of lottery. Ship BPOs have been very rare. Followed by the Module bpos a bit more frequent and ammo bpos as the most often seeded. This lottery was cancelled and replaced with the buy Datacores (DC) for research points (RP). Not sure about the date but I think it was somewhere in 2008 when last T2 BPOs has been seeded.

Basics about BPOs:
They start with ME and PE at 0 and have a resulting waste factor of 10%.
If you invest time in ME you can reduce the waste factor to somewhere around 0.01% resulting in no waste at all. (Waste calculation is something difficult but in short: if you can produce one part without waste you can also produce 300 without waste)
PE research allows you to reduce build time. I don't know the exact formula here but keep in mind you can research it and you start at 0 and can push it up to 50 or even higher if you want.

Basic Invention:
You can divide inventions in 2 or 3 groups, respectively. First group are Ships which are invented with single run copies and without decryptor will result in a single run copy of the intended ship. Second group are modules which are made from max run copies (300 Runs). There are some exceptional modules like the cloaking device but i won't cover that. If your invention works you get a 10 run copy of said t2 item. Ammunition can also be invented but will result in copies with 10 runs but each run yields 1000 charges instead of 100 (t1 bpo).

In every invention you have a chance based on the related skills to get a successful t2 copy. The Skills needed is the Encryptionskill of the faction combined with 2 skills of the specific science field like quantum mechanics and mechanical engineering.

The default T2 BPC from invention without decryptors starts with
ME and PE at -4 which results in 50% waste
As I said before I don't know the PE formula but to give some insight
Medium Drones need 8h for manufacturing
100MN MWD II needs about 7 days

Input of Datacores depends on the module size, small 1 DC each, medium 2 and large 3.


Now i have covered some basics, hopefully I'm not too much mistaken there and haven't board the informed players by now.

If you invent module A without decryptors (which only become profitable by ships > cruiser class, so most likely this is default) you get a copy of 10 runs (by chance). If you invent 5 copies at the same time and got some luck you will get 2 or 3 copies. (With a med size Module you have used up 10 DCs of both science fields)

To produce the invented Module you need +50% material than there is in the module if you would reprocess it. if the module contains 50 sustain shield emitter you will have to put 75 into production.
As you can not research ME from a BPC you can't change this value after invention.

Producing from the researched BPO from the same module will cost you only those 50 sustain shield emitters (SSE) as you most likely don't have any waste remaining. (else you should really do some ME research ;-))

The BPC has 10 runs and if you are lucky you got 3 of them out of 5 inventions. This results in 30 Modules you can produce. For each module you produce you need 25 additional SSEs. Build 30 of them and you had 750 SSEs overhead.
If you had a BPO at your disposal this would have been 15 additional Modules you could have build. And the runs on the BPO are not limited. you can queue up 300 or more at one time if you have the resources at hand. Furthermore your production time is a lot shorter than the one of the bpcs.


so … hey why do invention? Buy a BPO. Right! well not exactly.
The BPOs are rarely soled at all and if they are it will cost you a little fortune and about 2 to 5 years of production to get the investment pay out.

---Personal opinion---
In my opinion it is about time to take the T2 BPOs out of the game. They are not traded anymore or at least not on reasonable prices and they are never moved so they won't disappear by getting shot carrying them.
The owners of the BPOs had plenty of time to produce stuff and print money with those modules. if they want they can always pull prices down to get below the margins needed to make invention worth the effort.

To make them run out more smoothly they could be replaced through some max run BPCs with their stats. After Those are used up, prices will finally normalize and bring up the modules to a point where invention is paying well.


There are a few items and ships they were no bpo is in game (Black ops, Marauders, new gang links) and none of this items suffer under this circumstance. The only thing is, that there is no one who is just getting a huge pile of isk for having the luck getting a bpo back in some ancient days.

Why keep things as they are when you can improve them?

You're such a conservative.

Oh look, it's this whine again.

TL;DR -- T2 BPO are not a problem.


You have to realise that yes, a BPO holder can make a handful of items cheaper than you, up to a point (that is, whatever the 30 day limit on runs is).


Assuming you own a covetor BPO, you can make 10x 1 run copies every 50 hours -- or 144 BPC/month
at max skills, using the best decrypter, one can invent hulks at a rate of about 45%. For the sake of argument, we'll say that you get 64/144 hulk BPC every month.

We'll assume that you start month 1 with 64 already (bought on contract, whatever).
The BPO owner has the BPO.

Build Time on a hulk is ~25 hours. Even if we argue that a Hulk BPO owner can get the PE to a point where it only takes 24 hours, he can make THIRTY in one month.

You can make 64. Well, you could really make more, since you can run 10 or 11 at any one time ... but you run out of BPC at 64/month.

"but wait" you say, "the hulk BPO owner can run copies". and you're right, they can ... but it takes TWENTY SEVEN DAYS to make a single 10-run copy.

Such a long post when all you could have said:

I don't think they need to remove t2 BPO's....

What they need to do, is to alter the decryptor bonus, such that the invented BPC has an increased ME/PE level that's a percentage of the base BPC ME/PE levels.

Different decryptors offer different percentages.
No decrytpors results in ME/PE = -4 + 0% of BPC ME/PE Levels.
Use calibration data.... ME/PE = -4 + 10% BPC ME/PE Levels
Use circuitry schematics... +9 runs, ME = -4 + 0% of BPC Level, PE = -4 + 2% of BPC PE Level.

The percentages, probabilities, and run numbers obviously need serious review and assessment, but something like that would more balance the field. BPO holders will still have the advantage of no invention costs... but so what....

Hey, thanks for those numbers and pointing out that invention is more flexible. You are absolutely right about that and I don't intend to argue with that.

In many cases a bpo owner can not dominate the market too much. At least not in part of ships. As mentioned above, the times are too long to flood the market. The thing I want to point at are the profits.

The numbers Frigg posted above look pretty solid and the profit made with the t2 bpo is quit impressive.
If you take a look at T2 Ammo the market looks like dominated by bpo owners in some cases. But as player it is hard to tell if it is really an bpo owner or just someone who never learned that even self mined ore and self generated dcs aren't for free.
(All of you who believe in that, just hand your stuff over to me. I will take care of it, for free of course )
But the good Dr.EyjoG should be able to get his hands on some numbers concerning this matter and can draw a picture for us or at least for the game design about the impact of T2 bpos.

In my opinion all of the advantage of those bpos would be ok if T2 bpos could be obtained by current game mechanics. But only through player trade the prices for those are far out of reach.
For my point of few there are only 2 ways to balance the T2 production and it's profits thats
a) reintroduce a mechanic to seed t2 bpos to players
b) let them vanish for good.

Making x times the profit the new player can get just because the bpo owner played the game 5 years ago and had some luck in lottery is not an appropriate way to make industries attractive to new players. The newer ones work pretty hard to get some profit out if it and those who already have more money than they can spend on get even more. (Sounds like the same problem we have in RL hm?)

The idea of making invention results dependent to the bpc ME and PE level sounds pretty good and could really help to increase competition and variety of bpc market.

@Emperor Salazar: wow. another troll. Obviously you didn't even bother to look-up something. Neither you seem to have any idea about industries nor did you notice that the time I'm playing is long enough to know some parts of the game pretty well. But hey, who would expect serious comments from TEST?

or, HTFU, drop a few hundred billion, and buy yourself some T2 BPOs?

Haha you got scammed by test. You know were terrible right?

Akita's Copy/Paste wins the thread once again.

Invention already allows for much higher profits than can ever be achieved by owning a T2 BPO, simply due to not being dependant on one (or a few) items .. diverse portfolio's wins every time. Only "problem" is that to realise said advantage one has to put in an exorbitant amount of effort.

Solution is to address the invention process: Add a post-process step where ME/PE of an invented print can be manipulated and expand on the alchemy system to allow abundant materials to be used in place of the bottlenecked (or move T2 material prod. to PI and be done with the moon crap!)

i just had a creazy idea on how to balance T2 BPO's without taking them out of the game

change them so they can not directly be used for production

you need to make copy's to be able to build the items with the reseurtched lvl's

how about that ?