Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Contracts are impractical for distributing fitted ships on an open market and as wonderful as multibuy is it leaves a gap between ship fits and buying the parts for them. New and old players alike can occasionally be overwhelmed with having to design ships and operate the market to acquire them.

Sharing fits is easy enough, and distributing ships among allies isn't a terrible hassle, but for anyone who has no friends and is in a hurry to make new enemies there could be a better solution; All we need are shrink-wrapped ships.

A new market category could be created providing a place for people to list multiple instances of a specific fit.

To add a fit to the market, the player has to specify a fit as a new entry. That fit now exists as an item on the fittings market, and buying that item gives the player a shrink-wrapped version of the ship with the same volume. That item can then be activated to yield the fitted ship as normal.

In order to add instances of this ship to the market escrow, a player must submit an identical, undamaged ship as specified in the fit. This allows fitted ships to be bought and sold by anyone and still exist at the mercy of the market itself.

To mitigiate how many ships are submitted, a token could be sold on NES that entitles a player to add an entry to this special market. Entries expire if they're underutilized.

Ratings and comments could be added to these fits to give players feedback on their efficacy. Rewards could be offered to maintainers whose fits sell well to encourage competition, perhaps aurum tokens.

This market could be independent from the traditional market and computed separately, offering special CREST data to interact with zkillboard and such.

Branding could be applied to ships bought in this fashion, indicated in killmails or something.

This could be relatively easy to implement and relies on existing market factors. Balancing would unlikely be an issue.

This can actually reduce stress on the traditional market and server inventory. Now that these collections of items and such are tokenized as a package, serialized instances of each item can be deleted and recreated when a player redeems their ship.

Special locations could be specified for this market to operate, perhaps any already successful trade hub. This would force better grouping and keep instances low and stacks high.

Interestingly this would benefit Bowhead traders most.

No changes need to be made in the way pricing is calculated because all the items composing the fits are already bought and sold on the market as before.

Other collections of items could be added to this market in this fashion, such as skill and ammunition packages. It would only be necessary to create a new ship that just acts as a container for the contents of a fitting sheet. It'd just be nice to have a spaceship version of a station container that can't undock. I'd never have to worry about repackaging it on accident.

I believe this would be an excellent resource for new players in general, especially with upcoming alpha clones. It would aid significantly in casual gameplay and provide a new activity and market avenue for EFT warriors.

Thank you for evaluating the entirety of my idea based on your limited experiences and implying your narrow application of contracts for groups of seasoned players in remote areas has anything to do with what I'm suggesting.

The fact is what you're doing already works for you and does not work for, say, high volume low value fits. My proposal does nothing to interfere with what you do and does not add any complexity to the end user over having to try reading through a list of contracts hoping any of them are aren't a terrible fit or a scam.

What I offer is tracking the popularity of fits and making their trade and understanding simple for the inexperienced, impatient and the incompetent.

I mistook you as being snide and I just can't help but to be snide back. I overreacted, I'm sorry. Now let's please just agree that I'm right and this is an awesome idea.

Multibuy combined with multi fit makes acquiring and instantly fitting ships very simple and quick.

I can't really see what the benefit of this proposal is based on the current information. Not saying there perhaps isn't one, just that it's not really clear how this improves anything based on the current explanation.

Instead of no changes to the pricing mechanic I would get behind the ability to sell fits as units for a set price via a market system, since contracts are slow and creating 200 contracts of fit ships can be incredibly annoying. This was at the time the unit is created the prices that go into the fit are aggregated and a surcharge is added (and not shown to the buyer of course) of whatever profit margin they set.

This would mean, if someone took 300 Thrasher fits and put them on the Amarr market as single entities, that the price would be what was charged on the market for that fit based on the costs and the surcharge (if any) added at the time they were put onto the market, and wouldn't have the volatility that can plague multi-buy where one part of the fit could be dramatically inflated due to market manipulation.

Corps that created these sorts of orders could hedge against said volatility, and since when the fits would be put up on the market all of the parts would go with them, i.e. 200 thrashers removes 200 units of warp disruptor I from the market to package them in that fit, there would never be a chance that the order could fail, as the current multi-buy feature has the orders get paid for at the end of the cycle and piecemeal, where as this would take the individual items off the market, package them, and then sell them at a discrete price in that it is not necessarily analogous to the current price of the individual orders that compose the fit.

It seems like a sort of way to simplify contracts by creating a market essentially, and you could do it at a corp, alliance or miltia level to prevent mass spamming of terrible fits, named as if they were something else.

I refuse to accept the "EVE must be hard" argument

If you've tried out the new fitting simulator on Singularity it will let you import a fit, tell you what skills (if any) you need to fly it, buy the ship and all components with a single click and then you can assemble and fit the ship with a couple more clicks. I used it to test the rebalanced Orca a few days ago - it's excellent.

Anything listed on the market requires an entry in the database and will show up in the market browser. The number of possible hull, module, rig, cargo combinations in Eve is vast. However nice it might be, it simply isn't possible without creating a hierarchical market with nested bill of material - and how would you search it!

Industrialists currently offer fitted doctrine ships on contract for most (if not all) alliances. Others offer BPC kits on contract for building capital ships or structures - in combination with the new fitting simulator with integrated multi-buy I don't see a need to reinvent the market - it's a solution looking for a problem.

I am on the fence with the idea but I cannot understand your objections. Nothing in the OP would affect the contract system you currently use, it would only offer you an optional way of selling your stuff.


News flash EvE is old enough that there is nothing you can fit that someone else has not tried so you have nothing to loose by your fits becoming known to others. However going with your paranoia that someone may discover your secret fits how about you simply do not sell them in this section of the market. You better not fly that secret fit because you never know where someone may be lurking with a ship scanner and steal you fit, and then there is always the risk that you will lose one in a fight and then your fit will be plastered onto kill boards for anyone and everyone who cares can see them. Of all the reasons I have ever seen to object to a proposed idea this one ranks right up at the top of the worst ever.

Now to your concern for the new players, there are entire sites filled with fits that players can simply copy and run with. If you are truly concerned for the new players and their ability to fit ships then where is your ongoing campaign to eliminate all fittings from the internet? I understand your concerns and I battle with teaching new players the art of fitting ships but in the context of EvE and it's player community as a whole I find this a rather baseless reason to reject an idea.


You can store a ship and all of the fitting pieces into the existing containers so the new container idea is not needed.
But going with your idea how would you set it up so that players could not put empty containers on the market, advertising that they were X ship with Y fittings included?

Well, the idea would be that the container is actually "the package" or wrapper. In order for the person that wants to sell the ships to fill it, they would load the fit into it;s fitting computer, then the computer would pull in X amount of each item in the fit and into the container, then the container auto locks and is ready for sale.

If the computer is unable to get all the needed parts from the player inventory, the operation fails, error pops up and container stays open. It would be the equivalent of running our "auto ship buy and fit" with any missing item on the market causing the entire operation to fail.

With the existing system, you could say you are selling 10 Navy Ospreys then try to sneak in normal Ospreys to see if you can catch people that don't read the entire, LONG cargo listing.

I could actually see this work for standard ship fits.

Say 1 ship of each class that alpha clones can fly with a standarized fit

An NPC market thing primarily, but obviously available if players match the fit and put it on market.

A crutch for alpha clones mainly.

As a general thing custom builds? It sort of goes against the flow of tiericide and making the market a little bit simpler.

I can see where to OP is coming from, but market simplification (reducing the number of individual things for sale) is more important to me than moving contract items to the market buy-sell system.