EVE General Discussion

So after watching some of the fanfest videos I took note that CCP Fozzie wants to stop npcs dropping meta items and instead get them to drop components for us to build the meta items as part of their vision to have the players build all items. This doesn't make sense to me for a few reasons.

First off it feels just like its adding in an arbitrary layer of complexity without really providing any benefit, you just have to go through an extra step before you have the item to use or sell.

Secondly it removes the ability for the market to control the pricing of the items based upon their usefulness; instead as (I assume) each item will be built from similar components to each other, their pricing will be arbitrary set by ratios defined by CCP in the BPCs.

Thirdly it doesn't quite make sense from a "lore" / practical standpoint. Player ships drop their equipment when they die; why now for NPCs should they behave different and drop components instead of modules, unless of course the intent is for the same to be done with player ships ?

As a general side note is this change expected to affect faction / deadspace / officer items as well or just the basic meta 0-4 modules from standard rats?

They want to break down what works.

The reason will be to increase the T1 market, as the meta items will be like T2 builds, but with loot components rather than moon goo, adding onto a T1 module.
It also reduces the mess that ratters collect since they will be collecting a range of maybe 50 components rather than 1000 different modules they'll never use.

The market still has the ability to control based off usefulness though, since the margins on an item are dictated by how good it is, but the fact that meta modules were in some cases cheaper than T1 items was a reflection on the fact they came from thin air,

So all in all, a good change if they go that direction.

No. Provided the meta items have the same usefulness having components drop, then players can build based on what is going on in the market. For example if the 1400 'Scout' Artillery I currently have a high price the components will be moved into producing those guns. In other words, "the market" will be more able to respond to a surge in demand.

Lemme see if I can explain why this isn't just arbitrary complexity.

First off, this is something that's been talked about among players and CCP for years now, ever since they removed most of the Meta 0 loot from the NPC drop tables to remove "gun mining" as a significant source of minerals.

That's the first thing, a lot of these Meta items aren't actually used much, they just get reprocessed into minerals. This hurts miners and industrialists by, very slightly, increasing the supply of minerals and pushing down their price.

So, what does changing these drops into components get us?

Right now, we have several hundred different Meta modules that are dropped by rats. What this could be replaced by is a smaller set of components similar to what we have with Rigs and Salvage currently. I would imagine some components only get dropped by some rats under this model and others get dropped by most or all rat types.

So someone ratting or doing missions gets these component drops, sells them on the market, and then these components get turned into meta modules by industrialists. This helps both parties. The industrialists get something new to make and sell, and as a result the mission runners get more stable loot drops. Since this smaller set of components get used to make everything almost everything dropped should get used and turned into valuable modules instead of having a small set of valuable drops and everything else being more or less worthless.

Some components will probably still be more valuable than others, but if it's balanced right so that everything has at least one useful module that it goes into both parties should benefit.

I don't think anyone's talking about this affecting Officer/Deadspace/Faction loot but it easily could, just instead of dropping a module it drops one or two components that get fed into making one of these modules, which could help normalize the value of some of these modules, raising the value of lower demand ones and dropping the price for the more in-demand items.

From a lore perspective this just gets explained as the differences between pirate/NPC and capsuleer ships. Capsuleer ships are more durable and perform better so their systems survive intact better, as opposed to pirate vessels whose guns and other systems are more tightly integrated and less well isolated from a catastrophic disassembly incident.

Agreed but 'done right' being the key to that. Instead we will get gluts and a bottleneck component that is exclusive to regions resulting in another monopoly scenario. Why? Because that's what happens every single time.

and to further build on this..........
Even my own mission running alt has nothing better to do than grind the loot down into minerals, so (and i assuming especially in null) "Gun Mining" is not quite as dead as some people think.
Doing this will promote mining by someone as someone else like me will need the rocks to turn into minerals.
AND, missioners will provide the new components that I as a manufacturer will also need to build the meta-modules.

No more gun mining.

When I do mission/rat in NS, I pretty much do this too. That we can get away from this, another reason to like this change.

I am also on the "for" side with this one. Nice clarification for those who contributed. A few +1s for you guys.

I think you are right to express these concerns. After all, they did create the technetium bottleneck. However, I don't think this will be quite as bad...or at least it wont be as bad so long as components are not rat specific like how technetium was region specific. And hopefully CCP will be quicker on the response if there is a bottleneck.

And to be fair "this kind of stuff" can be hard to spot ahead of time...but that being said CCP would be very wise to leverage the player community. IIRC AkitaT noted the technetium bottleneck before they implemented and posted about it here on the forums. Make the changes known ahead of time and make use of the hundreds even thousands of players who will look at it and analyze it and do projections, forecasts and so forth. Listen to what they have to say. Yes, 99.9% of the responses will be errant nonsense, but still...look for that one player like AkitaT who will see the problem....