Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hello all. This is my first ever attempt at a suggestion, so if you think this is ********...well, maybe I just am at this kind of thing. :)

I'm wanting to get into industry more and am constantly annoyed at trying to figure out what things might be useful for. In the game, there seems to be no DIRECT way to do this. Yes, I know Tritanium is used in building basically everything, but what are Tangled Wires for?

So, what if there was a "Used By" tab? Something that basically says "Here is the list of things built using this item you have."

I recognize the list would be prohibitively long for certain items (Tritanium), so having some open/close collapsible submenues would probably be a good idea (it could be broken down just like the way the Market expands/collapses, and using the same categories that BPOs do for ease of navigation, especially since it would basically be linking to BPOs with the exception of the lower tier PI materials and Moon Reaction materials, up until they get used to the point they're used in "general" Industry builds.)

I'm not sure if this would best be placed under the Show Info tab or somewhere else, but it would just be NICE to have. Because there's a fairly straightforward way (getting moreso as the game ages) of finding out what you need to build something, but there's no real good way to find out what you can build WITH various things. If that makes any sense.

That is, you can check the Industry tab to see what PARTS you need to build SOMETHING, but there's no way of telling, if you have a PART, what SOMETHING you can make WITH it.

Thank you for your time.

Not necessarily. Particularly for players just wanting to get into Industry.

Suppose you have a lot of a material or resource (for example, a ratting pilot that salvages a lot). You didn't have any particular objective in getting those parts, but you want to know what you could make with them (obviously, Rigs.) However, you don't know what Rigs you can make with those parts, and you don't know what other parts you need - maybe you already have them all on hand.

You have a player that could easily become part of the Industry side of the game, but they are confronted with an unnecessary barrier.

Basically, there's a wall between "Industry pilot" and "non-Industry pilot" that doesn't need to exist.

The Industry pilot is finding what they want to build, the material requirements, then going to procure the materials (through harvesting or the market) to build the thing. The top-down process makes this easy - BPOs list the required materials, but NOW, there's even a **CONVENIENT** tab on **EVERY ITEM** (get the emphasis?) that tells them "If you want to build this, collect these materials."

However, the non-Industry pilot already has the materials, but has no idea what to build with him. There's no counter path of finding out what those materials are for, either - which also makes the non-Industry pilot a weaker Trade pilot as well (they have to go out of the game or dig around through BPO material tabs to find out how much their loot is actually worth - though the EST ISK does help more on this than in the past.)

There's not a corresponding "I have this, so I can make these things? Cool, I think I'll give building things a shot."

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I get that you see it as somewhat counter-intuitive, but that's only if you start from the perspective of "I have nothing, I want to build X, what do I need to make it?"

If you start from the perspective of "I have Y, I can build something, what is it I can make with it?", then it's not counter-intuitive at all.

The bigger question, however:

What are the DOWNSIDES to having such a tab?

Let's do a cost/benefit analysis here. The cost is some programming time. The benefit is that pilots can more readily get into Industry (or "lite Industry" activity). The only other cost is that could cause a (very slight) increase in supply of some goods, but this is countered by a slight increase in cost of parts (since people will know if their Tangled Wires are actually worth something or not.) So another cost is to pure Industrial pilots...except the reality is that this wouldn't be a huge chunk of the market.

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So, it being counter-intuitive to a rigid spreadsheet Industrialist isn't a negative, since if it's not a useful tool to them, they have the option of simply not using it.

The question is, what NEGATIVES does this introduce (if any) and are those negatives great enough or breaking enough that the thing shouldn't be done?

That.

@Rena'Thras: But i understand wherever you way of thinking is coming from. One of my corpmate asked more or like the exact same thing. Yes, it would be potentially interesting, but the real question is, would that be technically feasible?

The answer to that part is most likely, no. And that part is related to how relational databases work. The fact is that, an item in database include a link to it's BPO. Said BPO include links to all items needed to produce from the BPO. All that is already linked together, thus easily accessible when you want to know what do you need to produce something.
What if i want to know if item "A" is used to produced item "B"? Well, there is nothing linked in "A", so you need to lookup "B", and search for "A" in "B" BPO. It's slightly more complex because you need to know "B". Now, what if i want to know all the items "A" is used to produce? Well, that's simple: you look at each and every items of the game, then search in every related BPO, if there is a "A" occurrence. Simple, isn't it? Except that it is going to generate really heavy database load.
Now imagine that being done by multiple players at the same times, for multiple minerals/salvage/T2 parts, and you pretty much find yourself witha self-DDOSing database. A technical solution would be to have relations in the database going both ways, by including all produced items on every components, but that would bloat the database, making it slower. Which is also not exactly something we would appreciate.


EDIT: It would still be interesting as an out of game tool, but as far as i know, no one ever tried, because most of the time, the top-down approach is more efficient.