Science & Industry

The blueprint problem I speak of as many of you know is the effect on prices that influences a particular blueprint when too many of its type are brought into the system from players buying off the npc seeded market.
From my experience the best example of this comes in the battlecruiser class BPO's.
Many times throughout the past half decade I have seen situations where 10-20 bpo's could easily be nabbed for their seed price or just below. This destroys the player driven aspect and profits of the BPO market.

What if it were possible to sell your blueprint back, researched or not, for 50% percent of its seed cost at the npc location in which that particular BPO was located?

Even if a small percentage of BPO holding pilots, say 5-10% decided to sell their blueprints back to npc buy orders I think this could have a significant impact on the value of researched BPO's.
Since there is no current solution to get rid of the BPO faucet and make it purely player driven at this time the least CCP could do is add this counter balance.

I post this here because you folks are the ones that this change would effect most.

Any input pro/con and why would be much appreciated.

I'm actually rather shocked that you haven't seen this problem and it made me laugh. They can be sold on contracts but there is SO much competition that prices get driven even below seed price. I've seen it many times.

I am curious as to why you think I might make this up but I'd much rather keep the thread on-topic.

Pour moi, laissez-faire est tres bien.

It's taken me almost 9 months to break-even on a very expensive BPO but now I'm doing very well (thanks for asking).

laissez-faire

Says who? There's no "mechanic" at play here, it's a simple function of free market supply and demand. It was certainly never the intent to guarantee that buying something, performing what is literally the single most passive value-adding process in the game, and then reselling it should guarantee you a profit.

And you do understand that, in many cases, that blueprint HASN'T depreciated for the person actually selling it, right?

The prices have been increased substantially on at least one occasion. Want to guess how many battleship and BC BPOs were purchased when some of us noticed, just before patch day, that the NPC price on Singularity had increased substantially over the price on TQ?

Hint: It was a lot. Tier 1 battleship BPOs went up something like a billion ISK overnight. If you had a lot of idle ISK lying around, you're quite happy taking today's NPC price for your BPOs. ;)

And, no, adding another ISK faucet to the game would not be to the benefit of anyone at all, even if no sensible person would ever make use of it.

Totally possible. I compete with that outfit(usually undercutting them). This is not to say that it doesn't work. On the contrary it's a good system that I care about simply because I profit from it. Most blueprints don't have this issue thankfully.
This is more of a way to fine tune what is a mostly effective system.