Science & Industry

Some important questions that I feel need to be answered:

Were blueprints balanced around the use of teams at all? The margins for manufacturing certain BPOs are razor thin right now. Obviously the market will fluctuate, but is this the case with all items?

Have you considered just buffing them instead? That would definitely increase usage.

Will teams make a return?

I liked and hated the concept of themes. It made my production spreadsheets an absolute ***** because I had to factor in the cost of the team and the impact it would have, and then spread that out over a month... assuming I had 100% efficiency in installing jobs, which I definitely did not. However, the bonuses gained from the few teams that were actually worth bidding on were quite enormous (4+2% on capital ME was HUGE when combined with a component blueprint that took off 2.5%).

Easily the two worst parts about teams are the auction system and the fact that 90% of teams are not worth using (5%+ or bust, at least in terms of the capital production I do). I feel like experimenting with buffing them might not be a terrible idea, but the auction system is probably the worst thing in Eve because it forces you to do stupid things like wake up at 3AM for a video game.

I'm kind of glad they're going because it has not been profitable for me to produce what I make without them, and I can't win auctions half the time, but are BPO requirements going to change at all? Perhaps my case is very niche, but perhaps not.

Yeah, I do hear that. They must be thinking it is entirely busted and need reworking from the ground up. And it does really need to be re-evaluated from the ground up. Teams aren't for the casual industrialist unless they are riding the coattails of those who will benefit on a large enough scale to warrant the time and ISK to acquire them. And why should anyone be able to ride those coattails? Teams are a higher-level industry construct, which is good for those who want to take it to the next level of analysis and competitive advantage. Those players, along with some who don't know what they are doing, are probably the minority using it. Makes sense. I don't expect they will ever be a major factor on a per-player basis if they are done in a way that is both challenging and effective.

I don't understand this line of reasoning.

Leaving teams in game forces you to keep this feature compatible with the rest of your codebase even if you don't change any functionality. One would think that this would make it easier to revisit it in the future.

Whereas very soon the prospect of merging 2-3 year-old code into your then-current codebase might very well be daunting enough to drop the idea of revisiting teams altogether ("... until we have time for a full rewrite", aka never).

If I may ask: Which standards have we come to and should expect from you? You left the Sov System untouched for years, you left the Corporation system untouched for years, you left the Alliance as a Non-Entity in the game, you left the Type sorting of items broken and untouched for years, you left the POS system untouched for years and even pressed more players into the hell the POS system is. You add new stuff to the game while stuff is broken. You are expanding the NES while stuff is broken. You do not focus on fixing stuff that is broken ... and yet we should expect a "standard of quality" from you?

Why is it being removed? Because it is not used as much as you'd hoped to? Because it is confusing to Newbies? Are you kindly kidding me?

The Team system, while broken and in need of improvements, is getting removed just because it is not used enough and because it is slightly suboptimal? While I said in the past that I would not use it, I actually found some nice uses for the teams to improve my industry. And now this is being taken away from me and others just because not 100% of all industrialists use it and because Newbies are confused about an advanced game feature?

So, what kind of "reasonable comments and feedback" do you expect when you remove a feature but leave all sorts of other broken stuff in the game untouched?

What would you do with the UI if you remove the current one? Please do not go back to that horrible UI from before.

I hope you realise that the consequence of removing teams and leaving in index costs is that you make medium - large scale industry unprofitable. Your options with industry will now be limited to producing one tormentor and going home or face losing isk. sigh

While i appreciate that the feature wasn't going to be fixed anytime soon (this was the only time since 2003 that industry has had any real improvement). Removing teams (the only way to compensate for index costs) and leaving index costs will leave it more broken than ever.

I fully understand the x or y decision. My vote would be to keep them in as is. Even though apparently a small number of people are using the teams they do add a layer of player interaction. I understand and support the need to spend development resources elsewhere.

There are null sec alliances that bid up the premium teams; and the decision for smaller corp builders is to decide if it is worth it to bid against a major null block.

Yes, the issue of sniping teams is a concern but it is part of the game play. You can always bid what you think the team is worth and let that stand. Additionally you can throw low bids on marginal teams to see if you get them. The team pricing does get very astronomically high on the premium teams; with that last additional percent or 1/2 a percent drawing a large premium.

The teams do add a pull to the push created by the installation cost for busy systems.

If they get taken out then, shrinking the header to the UI would be an improvement.

This post was good; please give us as much advance notice as possible once the decision is made.

CCP RubberBAND, your current problem with Teams is freeridership. The largest problem with the auction system is the amount of investment a single person or corp has to put in to purchase the right to use a team in a specific system said corp or person has stationed themselves in. Due to teams having those cost reducing bonuses, they are supposed to be balanced when other people and corps migrate to said system in order to utilize the team. However, that still leaves the person or corp who originally ordered the team with the invested cost while everyone else is raising the build index without contributing to the auction itself.

In the current system, if you want to get around the freerider problem, you'd have to talk and organize with your community in order to get everyone to contribute. This requires people to socialize and organize at a level that can't be properly expected in Highsec, which is where you're obviously drawing your metric of success from. In CFC space, it makes sense that we're organizing teams in such a way that we're making a profit on them. That's why you see a lot of CFC guys saying that at least 85% of their industry jobs have a Team component to them.

It's not in my taste of posting to repeat slogans that have been uttered repeatedly before, but don't nerf organization. If you want solo industrialists, of which the major market share is composed of in Highsec, to have a great amount of input in purchasing teams, you need to fix the freerider problem. Here are a couple suggestions you could look at to help the situation make it more open for everyone and desirable for purchase even on a small scale:

• Using an Opt-In program, have the initial auction continue to be a single or corp purchase. Instead of a direct payment that immediately goes into the ether, have that value stick around as an initial deposit. If more people wish to use a team in a system, they could Opt-In to using this team by paying a deposit of their own, which would reduce the deposit cost of the first person or group that bought it. At the end of the month, everyone pays their fair share which reduces the initial cost for team use for everyone.
Pros: Reduces the freeridership, helps alleviate problems caused by the production index when more people come to use the teams.
Cons: Will require a look at what can be done to stop people from joining into a large megacorp so that there's a reduction on what they have to pay as their "fair share".


• Have the initial investor for the auction recoup some of their costs by adding another small percentage on top of the regular team usage. If it's a busier system, they could potentially earn a profit by providing teams to denser production areas while reducing the risk of being the only person or group investing into said team.
Pro: Turns teams into a gamble for initial investors rather than a sunk investment which, in turn, can earn them profit or remain a sunk cost. Should drive up team leasing
Con: Making money on a system designed to be an isk sink. It should technically still remove money from the system, but I obviously don't know enough about the math behind it.

Maybe it seems biased to advocate for a system that has obviously benefited the larger corporations, alliances, and coalitions in the game to continue to remain in the game, but outright stripping said content because it didn't work the first time is a rather defeatist way of looking at it. I understand that it may have to leave now because you might be considering one of these suggestions that got listed. However, the true nature of the problem needs to be understood:

Teams, for small corps or solo producers which likely make up the majority of the market, cannot justify the auction cost to lease a team only to have freeriders jump into their production system and raise the production index. Larger groups are working outside of the game to organize in such a way to reduce freeridership, which gives them an inherent advantage even while dealing with higher production indexes.

Thank you for reading this.

While the auction system can be annoying to use; I would still say keep the teams in the game. While they might not be used if people are only doing small production runs; due to the cost savings of using a team might not be enough to justify their price. I feel that most large scale industrialist are using teams; due to the cost savings that they can provide; when you ramp up production and build in larger quantities.

Psy

I was always using Teams when they were available in the systems I was building in, and it did adjust my decision making based if they were available. We had multiple corporations bidding for teams in our alliance sov space and we organized to obtain them. That said, I was fairly casual at doing Industry so I didn't commit a lot of resources for obtaining Teams for every planned set of manufacturing runs.

I do think there is a lot of work that needs to go into Teams to make it a better feature, and if you aren't willing to commit the resources to it right now, then you should disable the feature until you are ready to revisit it. You can't just ignore the feature and leave in problems like auction sniping, and lack of in-game features to collaborate on bidding on teams. This especially impacts capital ship builders where the scale of industry makes teams almost a necessity.

The downside of this is that you planned for this level of complexity in Industry, and removing it and adjusting for the loss will probably take quite a bit of work. If you didn't realize how much additional work was going to be committed into maturing the feature, that is pretty disturbing as the original goals for revamping industry was even more aggressive. I am glad that rather than leaving an unfinished feature in-game, we are discussing better options however.

TLDR: If you are removing Teams,then you need to rebalance Industry based on the variables Teams were designed to fill:

• Teams are the only way to reduce ME requirements. General build ME/TE requirements should be reduced by 2-5%.


• Adjust System Index costs down to offset for the loss of teams, as this was the whole purpose of the "push/pull" mechanic they introduced. Otherwise large scale manufacturers get punished with no way to reduce down the costs, or having to pick up their Industry resources and move once the index gets too high.


• Teams were planned to be the replacement for using Meta items for adjusting success rates for invention. If this isn't being implemented then revert back to allowing Meta items to be used in the Invention process, or rebalance appropriately. Adjust success rates to make inventing T2 ships more balanced without Teams as well.


• The Invention process changes was already scaled back on release to not include multiple outcomes. The Invention process that did come out didn't adjust success rates to adjust for this (to my knowledge). Make sure this is accounted for.


• The removal of Interfaces in the Invention process still hasn't been adjusted for in Data Site loot drops.