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LOL - think that your response is the hallmark of EVE. There is always some small number of people who can exploit the worst features for nice profit...often in ways that 99% of the players would demand RL money to do. This feature was not that bad really - just not great for most EVE industrialists.


Yes a few very rich individuals can profit much more than the average hi sec player mining-industrial corp with lots of members (ones that spend more time mining than they spend market trading for minerals). But yes if you are big enough those tiny team changes can be big in absolute value (3% on 10B is nice if you turn that over quickly and reliably all month).

Limitation of significant team profitability to the hands of a few big trader-industrialists with big pockets would mean that only a few teams need to be hired...which is what happened.

I assume these folk stockpile mineral first or freighted in all the minerals then concentrated on just building a relatively few massively expensive hulls. Thus minimizing the number of people and sales locations involved to keep from having to divide up that nice lump sum gain across many corp members or spend too much time selling. Almost more a lone or small trader's corp market game than full industrial...except of course you are manufacturing one class of big ticket items.

So you are 100% correct if the intent is to effect only a narrow area of industry and few people with a very specialized approach to accomplishing that manufacture. However most those CCP teams (modules etc) do not apply to that most profitable area.



Bottomline: Most hi sec player corps are not big enough to mine and build that many ships etc to realize the full potential of team gains. At least not doing the full industry cycle including mining. Plus of course other corp can flock to teams system and drive up costs. And even nice big lumps of absolute profit can turn out to be not much change when divided across 100+ corp members.

And where is the problem here? I do my industry alone, occasionally and when I feel like it. I buy my minerals, in case that I want to build T1 ships, with buy orders and haul them to my preferred production plant myself. I do buy stuff for T2 production with sell orders. I do, against my posts prior to the release of teams, use them every now and then for my production and in particular in the T2 market they give me the much needed extra percent of profit to make the lengthy production of the T2 components, the lengthy production of T2 modules/ships and the lengthy logistics and sell process actually worthwhile. I do produce in a system that is not particularly interesting for the big industrial conglomerates as it is a bit more remote and would require them to put more effort into logistics and thus reduce their margins. There is no need for that all people can reap the full advantages of a feature equally. Some profit more from it because they invest more effort, manpower, time and braincells into it than others. That is perfectly fine, and actually beneficial if it happens. There is no need that everyone benefits equally from everything by approaching these things from different directions. Forcing this on the players is a big mistake.

But I see CCP's and the CSM's main reason behind the removal of teams: They allow players to make money without being in space. That is apparently something that neither can allow to happen anymore. The only ways to make money should be in missions, anoms DEDs/exploration. Sitting in station and making money does not put players into enough risk. /s

*looks back at his last Team'd job*
17 *4 different Assault frigs, 15*4 different bombers, a couple of EAS, 10*3 various HAC.* And I sell this in the Amarr Empire regions, markets that are not necessarily known for their large volume revenue. That is "large enough volume" for you? Because that is where I use teams on and where they give me a bonus to the meager margins. What are you talking about?

*To make it clearer: I think it was like 15 Enyo, 15 Ishkur, 12 Retribution and 16 Vengeance, 15 of each Stealth Bomber type, 10 Sentinel and 9 Keres, and 12 Ishtar, 11 Deimos or so. Something along these lines. That's not "big volume", but it is what makes me money.

IDK that is a actual problem at this time. Except that it serves only a relatively few players for CCP's coding/maintenance effort.
CCP just doesn't want to t keep pushing rope uphill to benefit a handful of players. Even unused code can have bugs and needs watching for exploit activity. And this is being used a little.

CCP may also feel that those rare few major exploiters of teams will gain too much influence as time passes for too little risk and limited diplomatic skills. Limited diplomatic skils on the theory that you only need 1-2 friends in right place to become major supplier of goods to a null sec alliance and make 10s or 100s of Billions per month.

I suspect involving more players requires more cooperative ISK/planning between small fry corps than players are willing to put up with. The market would probably glut if everyone did what the current small group of mass exploiters are doing.

You're making a mistake blaming just him (whoever); they approved the changes at management level, QA'd them, and pushed them live, it was a conscious decision by the entire company.

I also think you're all looking at industry from the wrong point of view. CCP cares about industry because it's part of their game and they care about their game, but they probably don't give a **** how much profit you're making or you could be making.

The teams were supposed to dislodge you and your trillion ISK worth of blueprints from your high-sec stations so that you could participate in "risk vs. reward" PVP. Which, for CCP, always means ship combat. And, as always, they are not willing to put up the reward that would match the risk of moving a trillion ISK worth of blueprints, so you get anemic changes like this which fail. It's like when they tried to push highsec PVE people into lowsec PVP.

It would be interesting (to me) if we could have industrialist vs. industrialist PVP, within the industry sub-game (because they'll never get industry people to jump into ships and pew-pew). But it's not possible because the industry system is a black screen - there's no scanner to tell who the competition is (manufacture, not selling), how much and what they're making, what values are stored in research POS'es or stations, etc., and there are no tools to affect someone else's production (you can declare war and shoot POSes but if they just hole up in stations they can keep producing).

Good riddance to bad rubbish, although it was one of the lesser annoyances of it's expansion.

The teams overall in their current state are mostly worthless, and in most cases the bonus wasn't very much or were way to specific in the 4 separate areas they specialized in. Further if you really wanted to take advantage of teams usefulness you had to get half a dozen or more teams just to cover 1 manufacturing process. Since you had removed the variance to how well people could build (and instead just making them build faster, ooooo wow, real helpful there), we need something to help spread out the industry tasks.

Overall it would cost less dev time to just leave them in place until they can be replaced or improved.

Several ideas here that would probably see a greater use of teams:

1) An auction system that doesn't soley rely on sniping the bid at the last second. A max bid feature or even maybe a delay after the last bid to give others a chance to counter bid a snipe.

2) Since many auctions ended at very bad times for me, I was not going to alarm clock it just to take a chance I could snipe the bid, since actually putting up a bid really did nothing in the grand scheme. (would be an interesting metric on how many auctions were sniped as compared to those that held a low final bid through the end)

3) Make the teams more generic. Even the task of just finding a team that does something that helps what you are doing is probably a stopping point for people looking for teams to use. But most definitely make them far less specific in what they do.

4) Give them more meaningful boosts. Too many of the teams out there are at best 1 or 2%, and there are entirely too many .5% bonus teams that are very much useless. Heck I could spend a fraction of what it costs to snipe a team auction and buy a generic implant that does better than that. Yeah, occasionally there would be nice teams in the double digits, I've even seen a few upwards of 20% I think (though the sniping system in place discouraged me from even trying to bid).

5) Make the teams either last longer or have a wider range of influence, constellation maybe? Possibly even have way fewer teams, with better more generic bonuses, so that way if you don't get the team you want, you might not get a team at all. There were entirely too many teams on the market to begin with. If you missed one you could always get another.

6) Or institute any number of requested changes to teams when they were first put out. This is what happens when feedback is ignored, features fail.

7) My corp had actually stopped building when Crius hit. Stopped. Why? Because it was poorly implemented and needed refinement, some of which it got, so we almost got back into it but had realized our costs were now nearly double what they were before and market value for what we were trying to sell was actually lower than before, so we mostly stopped again, save for new items from patches like Bowheads, holy Bowheads making me quite a bit of ISK.

8) There was no way to tag a team auction you wanted to keep an eye on or to see what teams your system had already bid on. Your concept was that systems full of industrialists would work together to bid on teams for their system, except you gave them no means to do so. Even if your system had already bid on a team, you had no way to know who it was to coordinate more bids.

9) There was no notifications when you were out bid on an auction, not that it mattered anyways as whoever out bid you would usually get sniped at the end by someone else entirely.

So, you freely admit that the counter to cost scaling is being removed from the game

Are you going to monitor the costs of items that CANT be put on the market?


I am not going to put anything else in public here, but if you reply and want details, I will email you details

I can tell you why they were not used. It was confusing not in how to use it, but in how it was worthwhile to use.

After looking into teams i got a much better understanding, however my first impression was the two things below.

Is it best that i move where they are or do i try and throw isk at the solution thus need to do more spreadsheet math?

The result is most people will not do more work to figure out cost vs reward if the cost and reward is unclear.

Clean it up to present what the reward for a team is. EVE is in THE FUTURE, so let computers do the math and let the players reason the rest.

Considering that with all the changes that were added for T2/T3 production; the higher component requirements; the system cost index; the lowered skill requirements to build the hulls; it really makes me wonder if CCP has looked at the numbers.

Margins on most T2/T3 hulls or T2 modules are terrible with most profit now coming from a) trade profit due to the difference between buy and sell orders on the composites/minerals used; b) building on scale at a POS and using teams or if building at a station then using teams.

Thinking that producers would be able to pass on the increased costs of production to the buyers; was a pipe dream on CCP's part. This is EVE where there is a ton of people who are bad at math and believe that the minerals I mine are free. So even when they build at a loss (which they don't see that they are doing); they will still put the ships/modules up for sale at the lowest price in the various market hubs which require other producers to follow suit; and the downward spiral of pricing pressure continues.

Building an Orca as an example; a ME 10 Orca BPO and the lowest Jita sell order price for minerals needed to build the components; will give you around a 21 mil profit on the hull (building at a station and in a system with a cost index of 1.14). Building that same hull in a system with a cost index of 2.98 gives you a negative profit of 4 million (I used the eve-industry.org building calculator for the numbers). You would think that the sell price of the hull would be higher to offset the new added install costs; but that has not happened. Based on pre-crius profit margins; Orca's should be selling in the 750 to 770 range; which if you look at the markets is not happening.

Teams were the x-factor that could offset the costs added due to the system cost index and also increase the profit on the item being built.

If anything needs to be looked at it is the system cost index; in which 4 alts at a POS can spike the cost index from a .09 to almost 2.0 in a few weeks if they are building 24/7.