Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Situation:

Your industrial element does a lot of invention. You do multiple day crafting runs of t1s and other materials before using the t2 BPCs to craft your final T2 products. Because your research outpaces your input/output stream of physical goods (because you want to overproduce invention BPCs to safeguard against RNG failure ******* with your assembly line) you end up with a hangar full of identical 10 run BPCs that don't stack, can't be locked down, and take up pages and pages and pages.

Solution:

Allow players a dragdrop/rightclick "Combine Identical" to simply smash BPCs with the same me/te values in to a single BPC.

So, two 10 run 2/4 BPC, combine, now you have a single 20 run 2/4 BPC. Drag a third on on to it, now you have a 30 run. rightclick it in hangar "combine all identical" now you have a 300 run BPC and don't have to scroll until the heat death of the ******* universe to get to the rest of your hangar or make separate cans just to organize massive stacks of invention BPCs.

This wouldnt advantage/disadvantage anyone as its usually less efficient to run a single 200 run job than it is to run multiple 10 run jobs over and over. It would however make industrial hangar management a lot less annoying and save me a shitload of wear and tear on my scroll wheel.

Because, you know, if I know my production setup runs 15 ques of tech 2 production... I can just smash all that **** down in to exactly 15 BPCs.

Now that you have the ability to create massive run count BPCs, it may actually be worth the voting time to secure and lock them down, allowing a single locked BPC to have runs appended to it with the new function after being locked.

It would also be pretty dope if we could just add runs remaining and me/te numbers to the BPC icons with little numbers in the upper left/ lower left corners in blue and red numbers respectively so we don't have to info a hangar full of ******* blueprints to find the one with 5 runs left in a sea of ones with 10 runs left.

Discuss.

Stacking BPC has issues with number of runs left, because they could be different.

While you wait for CCP to solve this may I suggest the use of cargo containers in you hanger areas and then extensive use of inventory filtering.

It could be done, just not as a stack.

As a new type of lab job that allows combining two (or more?) BPCs with identical ME/TE into one object with more runs, though, that would be totally doable.

Not sure I love the idea, but it doesn't have the technical problems of actual stacking.

Curious what you find problematic about the idea in concept.

Is there some sort of economic or balance impact you see that I don't? Far as I can tell its just a QoL change.

I'm not convinced that people would be willing to give up a research slot just to smash two BPCs together. They're not getting a whole hell of a lot out of it, and the people most likely to need such a feature (people inventing t2 BPCS) hold those research lines at a high premium because they're constantly running through multi-day RNG jobs. The opportunity cost of leaving a line open just to combine BPCs seems like too high a price to pay when you factor in copying and inventing.

You'd be losing production efficiency for something that doesn't actually increase your production efficiency, and if used improperly can actually be used to accidentally decrease it in stead (by over-combining BPCs)

Note that I'm not suggesting the ability to SPLIT a BPC because that would actually have a huge economic impact. More BPCs means more simultaneous production lines after all. Less BPCs at higher run counts just means less hangar interface taken up by duplicates.

I'm also unclear on how this would in any way effect the need or lack therof for decryptors, since decryptors are consumed in the invention stage, when the BPCs are being created, not per job cycle time when they are being built. Am I misinformed about producing said rigs?

As for balance via tedium, I'm not sure how valuable that is as a general concept. Sounds suspiciously like cost-based balance for supers which was a notoriously bad idea. That's why the faction fortizar has that crazy hard universe limit. because it doesn't presume rarity. It enforces it directly. The idea of balancing around expected player behavior rather than possible player behavior is a balancing lever that doesn't usually work very well.

@slots - no I get that, what I'm saying is that in most/all T2 production schemes, research slots are most commonly reserved and constantly running multi-day jobs. Now one could argue "well, just do the combines before starting the next job" and that would certainly work well for a single player, the whole things gets a bit messy when you have an operation (as I do) that comprises multiple people logging in at different times doing different parts of the production chain.

I'm not even sure how you'de implement it as a job though. you'd either have to adjust the jobs interface to add a combine button, or, hilariously, add a blueprint... to combine blueprints in to other blueprints. Seems like a largely UI-less system (text dialogues and rightclick menu) would be the most direct route.

@decryptors - That's an overall problem with decryptors that could be its own topic. Decryptors kinda fell off, which in turn impacted exploration a bit, but this does in fact replace decryptors for that use, yeah. I think decryptors could use some functional overhauling but its sort of beyond the scope of this. That said the purpose of decryptors, at least in theory, is massaging invention RNG to increase profitability. Impacting their use as a QOL enhancer while replacing them with a better QOL enhancer seems OK to me I guess. Provided we make them great again at the same time (again, its own topic)

@tedium - Well yeah, but super balance via cost wasn't completely ineffective either. Point is its not future-proof, and sits around begging to be broken and replaced with something else the moment someone decides to break it. As a guy that has had to re-re-re-re-re-engineer software myself, I'm not sure "it has visible potential for failure, but it hasn't failed yet" is how I, personally, would sign off on a system.

@blizzard - That's more a patch on the fundamentally flawed nature of trying to balance a progression based system that is designed around consumption and abandonment of content and rationalize it with the need to bring in new players. EVE doesn't really share that design problem. All of EVE's content is either designed to be sustainable, or if designed to be consumed, designed to be consumed efficiently without the neew ofr large groups of other players around to enable that consumption.

It would allow some ME benefits that are not currently possible on items only available as single or very low run BPCs. Admittedly, it is probably not a huge net impact.

I can think of a few items I'll take a look at when I get back to a proper computer.

The biggest use case I could think of is light drones. Those things are so ******* annoying to build in invention batches that I could see a real benefit there. For right now I just don't bother.

I must say i agree to this simply because needing to put the bpc's into containers simply because they are over 1k of each type is annoying.
then having to have 2 or more cans for a certain type of bpc's that are EXACTELY identical.

A new indy job to combine bpc's or something sounds like a good idea.

2 years ago or so when i was at my hight of bpc production i had over 100k bpc's and it was a nightmare to maintain a good archive structure for all the bpc's.

p.s. +1 for OP post

That is possible with the current BPO's so we should be able to do it with those that exist t2 bpo's of ?