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Industry Teams - Current Plans

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Aryth
University of Caille
Gallente Federation
#61 - 2014-12-04 15:59:58 UTC
Man, we had a whole targeting system in development. I liked teams. Ah well.

Leader of the Goonswarm Economic Warfare Cabal.

Creator of Burn Jita

Vile Rat: You're the greatest sociopath that has ever played eve.
Lquid Drisseg
KarmaFleet
Goonswarm Federation
#62 - 2014-12-04 16:01:48 UTC  |  Edited by: Lquid Drisseg
I have never used teams. If I sound dumb, that is why. Its totally not because I'm dumb.

Some problems with teams:

  1. They are the bad kind of randomness
  2. They are effectively double or triple taxed
  3. They broadcast your activities to the entire world


Some things to look into:

  1. Remove Teams from places like Jita. Make people who want to cost save move their stuff into a trade hub.
  2. Make some small subset of teams always available in each career agent hub system.
  3. Allow people to renew a team for a fixed-percentage price hike over their previous winning bid.
  4. Remove the lore about us supposedly killing these people when they are apparently never used. Do they die of boredom or are they just snorting too much Crash?


Some other comments:

You setup a bidding system for the improvements a team will give AND then you also tax on each job that is entered. Combined with the complete randomness of the benifits of teams and their low impact (4% ME max I have seen, in combination with 16% extra tax... wat? ), there is literally 0 reason to be broadcasting what I do in a system unless I am then ALSO paying for some kind of active protection for my assets. Most people would rather disregard 2% more productivity/profitability for the ability to make sure a giant crosshair does not appear on their wallet and preferred style of play. Teams encourage active players to "play" less, not more.

None(approaching 5% or less, I would guess) of your non-indy playerbase cares at all about TE. It's a massive waste of character job time for people who occasionally make things. If serious people need more thing faster, they roll a new alt for 2 months and skill up more slots, not spend their other alts slots and time into bumping a BPOs TE to max when those chars could be copying for more production. Rolling new characters is more effective then using in-game mechanics.
Vincenzo Arbosa
Locust Assets
#63 - 2014-12-04 16:20:19 UTC
I'd rather see "Teams" as an add-in to manufacturing that is a producible item via Planetary Industry.

A colony is added to a temperate planet. Fed things like Wheat, Cigarettes, Spirits, and Exotic Dancers ((college life yo)).. and out comes a team that when added as an optional add-in to a production line adds a bonus similar to the teams currently in use.

^^Being facetious about the inputs of course but something similar to that and perhaps inputs that use existing worthless commodities.

This would boost the use of PI a bit, keep teams in, yadda yadda.


"Leave the gun. Take the cannoli." 
Tau Cabalander
Retirement Retreat
Working Stiffs
#64 - 2014-12-04 16:22:55 UTC
On the largest job I've done, 3.5 billion research cost, a team would have reduced the time by a matter of few days, and added over 200 million in research costs.

Just not worth it.

I liked the idea of teams, but the implementation was highly flawed, from auction sniping to not really useful bonuses.
Bagehi
Science and Trade Institute
Caldari State
#65 - 2014-12-04 16:27:01 UTC
I tried to use teams a bit after it came out on TQ. The UI is putzy. It took a fair amount of reading for me to figure out how to use the UI. Then, it became apparent how teams work, which would require me to either be running a continuous production run of a specific thing, or do some pretty significant planning ahead. The benefits to teams are fairly weak for their costs, unless again, you are just constantly cranking out the same item over and over again. Lastly, using any of the capital production teams would effectively lead to your system/station being camped, because it doesn't take a lot of effort to find where those teams are being deployed.

Over all, I think teams could be good. I think the downsides need to be addressed, or CCP has to accept that they will only potentially be used by the few industrialists who are constantly producing specific things where the teams would provide them some benefit that would make it worth the effort.
Kenneth Feld
Habitual Euthanasia
Pandemic Legion
#66 - 2014-12-04 16:33:57 UTC
5% of the teams were awesome
10% were good

The rest friggin SUCKED

How many 2% ME from station component teams do you need. There were 9 listed 3 days ago.

Teams offset the rising cost of BPO materials as well as cost indicies

Teams are very useful and although, i would alarm clock at 4am to buy one, I also had a team of US/EU/AU in the same system so we would all go in on them together and decide what we would pay and the person awake bid on them

All that said, an eBay style system would be so much better, or even a SILENT bid system, where nothing is known about them until bidding is over

PLEASE don't remove them, just make them not suck
Maxwell Smiles
Exiled Kings
Pain And Compliance
#67 - 2014-12-04 16:52:37 UTC
1) Learn complicated Industry mechanic and create spreadsheets
2) Learn new slightly less complicated mechanic that now has even more complicated teams mechanic that requires new spreadsheet.
3) Learn new invention mechanics and update spreadsheets
4) Redo spreed sheets to remove teams mechanics
5) Figure out what will make a profit in the new year when there are no teams or isoboxer fuel/minerals

6) Redo spreadsheets when CCP introduce "Fairy Dust 514" into the manufacturing process in Feburary.
Callduron
Dreddit
Test Alliance Please Ignore
#68 - 2014-12-04 16:58:06 UTC
There's a Tragedy of the Commons effect.

We all recognise it would be good if someone paid for a team at the places we make stuff.

We all recognise it would be best if that person were someone else, not me.

I write http://stabbedup.blogspot.co.uk/

I post on reddit as /u/callduron.
Rocco Grawe
Umm put name here
#69 - 2014-12-04 16:59:24 UTC
The research and copy teams are ok at the present time, A small buff would be nice. I haven't used manufacturing teams yet and from looking at their bonuses. They need a buff to make them worth using.
Mackenzie Nolen
Doomheim
#70 - 2014-12-04 17:05:15 UTC
Kolb wrote:
Why remove the functionality and penalize those people that are using them before you have a chance to revisit them?


I think there is a bit of "missing the forest for the trees" issue going here.

Teams were originally envisioned as a counter-balancing force to the "spread out and move around" pressure being introduced in Crius with "lumpy landscape" industry vis a vis escalating system cost indices. Remember back to the original discussion on the meta behind the industry changes?

The important question here is not whether teams are well-implemented or not. The important question is whether teams are accomplishing the original mechanics goal of balancing pressures to "stay put" over "chase the best system indices". Even perfectly implemented teams would be a BAD IDEA and should probably be removed if they don't meet this purpose.

And realistically I think we all agree teams are not accomplishing that goal at all and NEVER WILL. The real pressures that keep us from chasing the best system cost indices are "moving all my materials and BPOs is annoying, time consuming, and incredibly risky", "setting up my mfg POS again makes me want to kill myself", and "how many more jumps to JIta is this going to add"?

In short, there are already a lot of natural pressures to stay in one spot as it is. We don't need an artificial/mechanical one on top of them in the form of teams. As a result I'm happy to see teams go despite being a capital producer that actually has benefited from the margins teams can provide.

IF CCP decides that more "stay put" forces are needed to balance things out down the road, I would much rather see it take the form of POS revamps (easier to evict offline ones, etc.), real mechanics-based benefits in working with other PLAYER industrialists, and other gameplay along those lines.
Paradox Draco
SergalJerk
Test Alliance Please Ignore
#71 - 2014-12-04 17:09:21 UTC
Awwwwwh, I would love to see em stay. I mean, I haven't used them much, but I do like the tiny extra dimension to industry they added.
Mac Chicovski
Capts Deranged Cavaliers
#72 - 2014-12-04 17:27:11 UTC
CCP RubberBAND wrote:


TL;DR

In summary we can only realistically look at two options here:


  • Leave them as is (yes it would be cool to do X or Y, but realistically we cannot)
  • Remove them


I'd suggest leaving them in, normalize all teams to have a static, average buff to whatever they do (that is, make the worst teams better, make the best teams a little worse, decide what to really do with it in the future), which I would think ought to be a smaller and less impactful change than removing them altogether.
Lady Zarrina
New Eden Browncoats
#73 - 2014-12-04 17:31:25 UTC
For me, the numbers rarely worked. And the few times I seen something interesting, I was not prepared to sit on the team auction screen. I put in a bid and that was it. So obviously I never got any the low-ball bids I placed the few times I checked it out. Mind you I am more of a generalist when it comes to manufacturing.

But I do like the idea and intent.

EVE: All about Flying Frisky and Making Iskie
Jalebi
Tata Space Industries
#74 - 2014-12-04 17:32:13 UTC
Wowowow are you serious?

Teams are the BEST feature of Crius and is one of the new features that makes industry an actual game to play. They are a vital part for large scale industry -- namely capital production and above -- and removing them from the game would be terrible! Just because the rest of the player base is too dumbo to realize the value of teams doesn't mean you should penalize the smart industrialists.
zyathussi
message number 5
#75 - 2014-12-04 17:49:34 UTC
as the margin that my production is earning me is to be seen in relation to other players, i don't care if they are or not, but as a somewhat nomadic industrial player (i don't bid on teams but relocate when the team in the current location expires) i somehow enjoy the need to relocate my pos every two to three weeks, do the math, indu.index + team.bonus vs distance from tradehub etc pp.

maybe it's my imagination, but i think i start to whitness that indeed there are some systems (around jita) developing into specialized indu centres, and i think that it would be sad to kill this so soon - let the sandbox evolve, plz.


also, if you plan to revisit the feature someday, wouldn't it be best to leave it and collect the data/feedback to make better development decisions?
Kenneth Feld
Habitual Euthanasia
Pandemic Legion
#76 - 2014-12-04 17:56:34 UTC
Lady Zarrina wrote:
For me, the numbers rarely worked. And the few times I seen something interesting, I was not prepared to sit on the team auction screen. I put in a bid and that was it. So obviously I never got any the low-ball bids I placed the few times I checked it out. Mind you I am more of a generalist when it comes to manufacturing.

But I do like the idea and intent.


Then you didn't build enough....

The more you build, the more the numbers worked.

We paid 2.7 billion for a team and it was worth 10 times that amount in savings.
Dirk MacGirk
Specter Syndicate
#77 - 2014-12-04 18:06:33 UTC  |  Edited by: Dirk MacGirk
CCP RubberBAND wrote:
So a few general topics people are hitting on here:


Why not leave them in?

This is a complex question to answer and one we have been debating for a long time internally. The honest answer is that everything we add to the game is one more thing to support and maintain. Trimming is good for the health of the game both for it's players and the developers, we would not pursue this course of action if we did not believe it was the most valuable thing for the game in the long term and we'd rather not let the feature languish as this makes it increasingly harder to revisit in the future.

As a result the removal should impact a minimal number of players, and allow us to focus our efforts where it counts. To be clear, we are not never going to follow up on the feature, but this course of action will make it easier for us to do when we can. We want to be more flexible in how we react to features that are not meeting player or developer expectations and that should hopefully include sometimes removing a feature until such a time as it can be revisited.

TL;DR

In summary we can only realistically look at two options here:


  • Leave them as is (yes it would be cool to do X or Y, but realistically we cannot)
  • Remove them


If you leave them in and do nothing, what is there to maintain? How much actual work is there in doing nothing? If some people are using them, but most aren't, so be it. Unless its actual work and not just, "Hey, that thing is still there," why not just leave it even if in languishes. It doesn't seem like its game breaking, if in fact it only relates to a minority anyway. I think the bigger issue is whether or not it is an eyesore for the majority who don't use teams, and perhaps the New(er) Player Experience in learning about industry. But v0v
Mirkali Maricadie
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#78 - 2014-12-04 18:09:52 UTC  |  Edited by: Mirkali Maricadie
I'm not really an industrial guy, but I know the industrial honchos in our coalition were excited about this feature, and how to leverage it against our opponents. They're really on-board with features like this that were able to allow them to give a competitive edge to the development of our budding industrial complex in Null.

Now, with that said, I do applaud this type of decision making. Proactive management of the game's features is a great thing. But... I find the explanation given currently lacking. It's a "The reasons are complex, but we need to save dev resources" explanation. I can accept that you guys have good reasons to get rid of it, but I want more info. The nitty gritty. We're EVE Online players afterall.

Considering the time that went into designing and coding this system, and the attempts to explain and promote this system... perhaps we can get a devblog, sometime around the end of 2014 or early 2015 near when you begin to wind down and remove the system. The devblog can explain in more detail about how the system failed to do its job, how the quick fixes really wouldn't fix the real problem, and how you guys projected what a real fix to the system would look like. Y'know, throw in some metrics and graphs.

Of course, I'm a guy that reads a fair amount of game industry post-mortem articles. In fact, it'd be great if EVE Online Feature Post-Mortem devblogs became standard procedure with the removal of a system. Something we can all learn from.

Is that a thing we can have, CCP RubberBAND?
Ravcharas
Infinite Point
Pandemic Horde
#79 - 2014-12-04 18:14:16 UTC
Dirk MacGirk wrote:
If you leave them in and do nothing, what is there to maintain? How much actual work is there in doing nothing? If some people are using them, but most aren't, so be it. Unless its actual work and not just, "Hey, that thing is still there," why not just leave it even if in languishes. It doesn't seem like its game breaking, if in fact it only relates to a minority anyway. I think the bigger issue is whether or not it is an eyesore for the majority who don;t use them, and perhaps the New(er) Player Experience in learning about industry. But v0v

Code and design depreciate over time. Any future designs and implementations must factor this into the equation, because it doesn't exist inside a glass bubble - it's connected to the game at large. You have to test how new features interact with it, and you have to make considerations with an obsolete system in mind. And the older it gets, the more stuff will break, and the harder it will be to fix it.

See also; POSes
Bakkhai
Talking In Stations Corporation
#80 - 2014-12-04 18:15:52 UTC  |  Edited by: Bakkhai
Steve Ronuken wrote:
It's a shame that the feature is being removed, but with the low usage, and the problems with it, it's better to remove it until a team has the time to work on it properly, rather than leaving it in a half working state. Sad

Are there problems with it?

I read somewhere someone assassinated a competitor. That's emergent. Actually - anything CCP can do to make Industry have some gameplay is great. Otherwise it becomes a "baking things for PVP" game. which is done as a necessity rather than an way of entertaining yourself.

Market and Indy need to have gameplay too. There's a lot of unseen PVP in those worlds.