Player Features and Ideas Discussion

gee, sorry, I guess I should have established the context better :(

Anyway, you seem to be completely misunderstanding my OP, the problem is not that people queue the copying jobs, but rather that they can keep doing this indefinitely. Maybe I should reduce my posts to one paragraph or a line so people actually read them and understand them properly because that seems to be the only way to get your point across on this forum.

a single toon can run up to 11 simultaneous jobs (though that last slot takes ages, so most people have 10 slots) -- this includes jobs stuck in queue waiting for a slot to open. NPC stations have 50 slots available. 5 toons can lock up a station for 30 days. But once these five pilots have installed their jobs, they have to wait for them to complete before they can do anything else.

You can come along when there's an hour or two left on their job, and throw your own 30 day jobs in ... now they're stuck waiting for your job to complete before a slot frees up. Personally, I think this is what you're getting hung up on -- it looks like "someone" is continuing to queue jobs to lock others out... but that "someone" wasn't the original 30d installer, and you're just the unlucky one who missed the opportunity of installing your jobs with a relatively short wait.


To put things into perspective:
1. There are 300,000+ active subscriptions, with up to three toons per account (900,000+ toons).
2. There are ~5500 K space systems, with about 1900 of them being in empire (1.0 to 0.1 sec).

Not every system has a station (but some have multiple stations), and not every station has lab facilities. Let's say that overall, we end up with 1425 NPC stations that have research facilities (i.e. 75% of empire has at least one station with lab slots).

1425 * 50 = 71250 slots ... or about enough to handle ~8% of the eve population (assuming 300k accounts with 3 toons that do research in empire) in a given month.

Now, we all know that there aren't 900k toons clamouring for NPC station slots, as there is a fair number of nullsec types who don't research at all, or if they do, they're using local nullsec stations. There are also those in empire who have a POS for research, further reducing the load on NPC stations. Because of this, the ratio of slots to researchers probably climbs to 10% or better.