Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hello everybody!
So I figured I should post something constructive once in a while.
I am going to elaborate on an idea by VJ Maverick that was posted about 5 years ago.

So, what is the state of industry right now?
Tech II modules have become pretty much standard for all ships, with the tech I modules only being placeholders until the required skills are learned to upgrade to tech II. Tech II is created via the ominous invention system, basically harvesting datacores to upgrade tech 1 BPCs into tech 2 BPCs- I am going to disregard the T2 BPOs for now, since they only account for a small part of the T2 stuff that hits the markets.
All T2 items of the same type are 100% identical, resulting in a relative oversupply; the only difference is price- wich leads to those ridiculous 0,01 ISK price wars. Furthermore, you cannot really see who you are buying from, the description of the item offers no clue about its producers.
The cost of T1 and T2 items is largely determined by the cost of the primary ressources (minerals and moongoo), the process of inventing and manufacturing only adds small percentage of value to the items (just imagine computer prices today would be dictated 80% by silicone prices- kind of silly, isn't it?).
If people seek to upgrade their stuff beyond T2, they can use faction mods, wich are technically not T2 (lesser skill requirements, but cannot for example shoot T2 ammo). Most factions mods happen to be so expensive that they are rarely used, furthermore they are not player produced.
So, once you established yourself in T2 production, it is pretty much endgame for you as a manufacturer/inventor if you are not interested in capitals.
I always loved the descriptions and design philosophies of NPC corps, like the well-balanced LaiDai ships or the lots-of-guns Boundless Creation approach, so why can't very influential player alliances have their own design profiles, too?
Overall the picture is pretty sad for a sandbox game that has always been proud of its 100% player controlled industry and markets.

The solution? Please take a look at exhibit A (brought to you by the magic of GIMP). Take a close look at the (possible) future of EvE-Online. And no, you are not weird if you get sexually aroused- just a regular EvE player.

edit: link to old forum is broken, sorry

Research Missions
If you have looked at exhibit B you may have realized that the progress bar consists of two colours: green and blue. So what’s up with that? The green bar shows the RP progress by RP regularily (passively) accumulated by your research team. The blue bar represents the bonus RP you got from missions. Those bonus RP are free in every sense of the word, so the increasing research costs will only consider the green bar to determine your daily research costs. Remember that the RP costs were ment to increase every day based on how many you have already accumulated? So research missions will not only speed up your projects, but also lower the total cost by billions.
So where’s the catch?
First of all, all research missions will be located in lowsec, no exceptions.
Secondly, those missions will be harder than regular missions.
They will all follow the same pattern: once per day, every member of the research team will be offered a research mission by an npc research agent. Usually this will only include the name of the lowsec system where some ancient pirate research post was located. You will have to travel there, scan down the location, eliminate the enemies and use a codebreaker or analyzer module on the mission structure to retrieve your “free” RP (effectively doubling your daily research points). Those missions are not meant to be soloed and will be intended for small gangs of 5-10 ships.

Branding
You will have to chose a name for your products that is reminiscent of either your corp or alliance name or -ticker. Your hard work shall not go unnoticed in New Eden.
Furthermore, in the item description your corp name will be mentioned, even if you lose (or sell) the patent to another corp. With every patent you get, your corp will get a small speciality bonus to research similar items (items that would need the same decryptors for t2 upgrades), thus your corp could gradually specialize into certain techs and develop some kind of “corporate identity” via their product lines.
Identifying those brands in the market will help you to promote your items (the Eve universe is centered around capitalism and with distinguished brands there will finally be a reason for corps to advertise their goods) and can be used for economical warfare like trade boycots.

Product Piracy
Well, this wouldn’t be Eve if we didn’t include a feature to ruin other’s hard-earned work and laugh into their faces while doing so. With 5 ranks in reverse engineering you will have a 50% chance to make a 10 run bpc out of any of those new modules, although at ME -8. Those items will have the term “Replica” in their name and item description but generally perform exactly like the original.
Unfortunately, all 4 empires have signed some kind of interplanetary ACTA and do not tolerate counterfeit items within their highsec borders. You may not sell conterfeit items on the market. Nobody will give a crap if you use those items in null or wormhole space, but should you enter highsec that stuff will be treated like drugs and concord will ask you to surrender them or die a horrible death. Whatever you do, Concord will notify the patent holder of your transgression. Should you be unhappy enough to be killed in lowsec while having counterfeit modules fitted, concord will send that notification as well. Chances are good that some representative of the patent holding corp will contact you and ask you politely about the source of those replicas.
Since NPC corps collectively comdemn product piracy, members of NPC corps will not be able to reverse engineer patented items.


Oh, you are still reading? Sorry for this wall of text, have a cute bulldog puppie for your efforts. Bulldogs are awesome.

Ships and Ammo
To be quite honest, while writing this I mainly had ship modules in mind- maybe because those are my focus for invention ingame. Of course we could apply similar rules to ships and ammo. I just don’t like the idea of boosting T2 ships, personally. T2 ships are already highly focused and specialized in their intended roles, any further customization would likely ruin game balance.
So I would advocate to only make T1 hulls researchable. A Hurricane with an additional 5% RoF Bonus? Yes, please! 
If possible, it would be nice if those ships would already come with a custom corp paintjob, maybe someday....
Similar considerations for Ammo. NPC faction ammo is widely used in PvP, and I would like to see more PC corp ammo instead. Since T2 ammo is extremely specialized, there would still be a demand for beefed up T1 ammo, so improving T1 ammo (phased plasma for example) should also be allowed.

Yeah, that’s it. Thanks for reading.