Science & Industry

contemplative: I remember, having read something a while ago about improving the materials needed.
Like melting three broken something into one intact something.

Neutral: if CCP tinkers anything, prepare for a decrease in profits - everyone will try it in the beginning.

Any number of changes to type/amount of build materials for T2 rigs (assume std sub-cap rigs) towards mass availability will do two things :

1. Increase the power creep (it'll change the PVE/PVP landscape, skewing the balance a little).
2. Increase demand for the components involved (good candidates to speculate on are broken salvage and PI products ... or even WH stuffs) - though it depends on what sort of ratio*

*anyone fitting T2 rigs will mean they're not fitting T1 rigs. If it's a 1:1 ratio with some extra PI/WH materials, I don't think there will be much impact to salvage at all .... only PI/WH

Anything non-niche is bound to have lower profits, but on the flip side, usually greater volume.

If they really want to be evil about it, they could even change the T2 rig building requirements to a POS array in lowsec or below.
It'll put a damper to the availability, preserving it as a niche industry as few would go through all that trouble.

You'd probably want to check SISI now and then to see if they've been making any changes to it (though they're not always final).

You mention the fact yourself that generally only moms and higher use the t2 armour rigs and this is because all armour rigs are massively over priced compared to the shield equivalents even then you don't see many t2 rigged bs's so imo ccp will be fixing the building requirements for t2 rigs to make them more affordable for the ships they were meant for

Howdy!

Im currently looking into the whole issue of the rigs. Going through the various loot tables and such I've already spotted quite a few problems, errors and so forth which I would like to fix, but I'm stepping lightly as I don't want to just go with guns blazing on this.

But I am interested in any sort of general feedback on what the situation is with T2 rigs from all angles. The salvage (difficulty, is it worth doing, is it too much of a nice?), to Mag. sites (are they worth doing?) , production and invention.

From our standpoint, we would like this to be a bit more commonplace, a bit more profitable for more people and less expensive.

We are also looking at a very short time-frame, so major changes might not happen. But I really like the idea of melting together T1 components into T2, so i'm gonna write it on a post-it and hang it on my monitor. It might be relatively easy to do, but the ratio might be a bit tricky to get right.

Any thoughts, ideas or suggestions are welcome!

Our PvP fleets generally stop and salvage all T2 wrecks because the possible ISK to be made there is nice. I'm not sure what proportion of T2 rigs comes from player wrecks, but if the prices drop by much, we'd likely stop bothering (we do not salvage T1 wrecks in general, say).

In exploration, mag sites are probably the most profitable mini-profession ones. Doesn't make them very profitable, though. I have so far never done them for the money, always because I was bored and didn't have anything else to do.

There's an interesting problem there: T2 rig demand is so low that the invention chance really hurts possible profits and the rig prices, so we generally shy away from it. High capital invention, high risk, low profit is just not a good combination. Should T2 rigs become more commonplace, this would change already, so even a small change might have a larger-than-expected effect.

Some thoughs.

As with T1 salvage, the differences in prices for the different salvage materials is extreme. Intact armor plates are traded at over 30m ISK each, while Lorentz Fluid struggles to hit 4k ISK. Excessive rig prices are based on a few extremely rare T2 salvage goods. If you want to reduce T2 rig prices, making those more common might already be the key (though see above for the averse effect when salvaging in PvP).

But more importantly, some of this is heavily based on basic rig balance. Some rigs are absolutely useless, making the salvage for them useless. A major factor here that drives prices up for some specific salvage materials is that there are only a handful of rigs that really are worthwhile to use. And some of that imbalance is even T2 rig specific - for example, the probing rigs for a covops frigate are worse in T2 than in T1 because you can't fit two of them, and one T2 rig is worse than two T1. Looking at some of the calibration costs might be a worthwhile "small change" rebalancing effort.

Be careful with the price rebalances now, though, as a general rig rebalance is on "the list" somewhere, and that will drastically affect rig prices again.

Seriously, the whole profession site thing needs to be revamped as all of the things that were intended to be the reward for those things is worthless (interface bpcs and parts, salvage that's worthless unless you get a single t2 i-beam or cap console, rig bpcs that are only larges meaning only trimarks/cdfes are even worth looting, encryption skillbooks). They're **** and we tell our newbies not to even bother getting the skills for them in 0.0: if you want to explore it's unknowns or nothing.

Oh, and tower mod bpcs don't drop anymore

This sound like a nice way to kill several problem with a single mechanic.

Issues I have with salvaging/T2 rigs:

- T2 rigs too expensive to fit on anything other than a high-sec carebear ship or capital ship.

- Some salvage is worthless. Lots of salvage components are at less than 15 isks/unit.

- Salvaging isn't worth it, except maybe on a handfull of npc factions, when you could use the same time to farm bounties and LP.


Creating a sink for T1 salvage junk that would just happen to lower the price of T2 rigs seem like an attractive answer to that.

Salvage can't avoid bottlenecking with the currents system: you're always going to have scads of worthless crap and the one key thing that has all the real value, because you can't specifically mine for valuble salvage. In general, salvage will be produced in a somewhat constant proportion and that means it'll bottleneck on the good stuff just like moon minerals do. I wouldn't overly worry about that because you can't fix it.


However, that there's so few bottlenecks is a reflection of the rigs being poorly balanced and that should be looked at - only four types of rigs are expensive (+hp, +cargohold, +cap, +powergrid). Some of this is market inefficency: t2 laser locus rigs were stupid cheap back when pulse apocs and laser apocs owned, but nobody used them because they just assumed all t2 rigs were hideously expensive instead of a build cost of ~10m or so. I expect some of this inefficency will be remedied by the increased attention they may get by rebalancing. However the bigger problem is those four types of rigs are so generally popular that with their bottlenecks dropping the same amount as the bottlenecks for rarer rigs, you're always going to see those four hideously expensive, or the rest basically worthless. You would need to adjust the bottlenecks to make the bottleneck parts for those four drop more, or other bottlenecks drop less to equalize rig prices.

You can increase the value of worthless stuff by having an alchemy of sorts, but since t2 rigs that are popular are almost always the t1 rigs that are popular just doing t1->t2 will never help (the only exception, of course, being the worthless t2 scanning rig that should have its calibration reduced). It'll just tamper with the prices of the bottlenecks for cargohold optimizations, CDFEs, trimarks, and ACRs/CCC for both t1 and t2. Allowing you to alchemize certain types into other types is the only way to add real value everywhere but would probably end up botched and just making everything pretty much worthless and rigs basically free.

Increasing the drop of t2 salvage from mag sites is a good start since the loot table assumes all t2 salvage is immensely valuble, rather than mostly crap. There is already an ungodly glut of regular salvage since medium/small rigs dramatically reduced demand. It's a band-aid on profession sites though and they fundamentally need something new and rare to make doing them fun (obviously averaged out, it shouldn't be worth doing for old vets as opposed to unknowns, but should provide the same sort of rare reward it used to provide for newbies. It also shouldn't be avalible equally in highsec and 0.0)

First off, the man above me is entirely correct. I'm not going to quote his post line by line, but he summarized the issues in a nutshell.

Second, you should be aware that the initial iteration of what you just did (all sizes of t2 rigs now drop) is actually a nerf. The reason is that the only really valuable t2 rig bpc's (CCC's, trimarks and CDFEs, + maybe a handful of others) are hugely prized due to saving people 100m+ per run on a supercarrier rig. Analyzing a can hoping for a 150-200m large rig BPC only to find a small sized BPC instead is going to suck. This isn't a reason not to do this, but you should be aware that, -right now-, this makes the valuable rare drops even rarer.

Third, because as Weaselior said the bottleneck will be there no matter what, what you really want to do is to give them some rare drops that make them Worth Running. The last faction tower BPC dropped when, 2009? Faction POS mod BPCs stopped dropping in...2010? I don't really mind that neither of them does now because POS are dumb and faction POS are even dumber (yay a more annoying structure to shoot wooo so excited) but these drops should be replaced by something equally valuable, even if the drops themselves are rare overall. A low effort way of doing this is to replace some of the more useless t2 rig drops off the loot table with faction or C to B-type deadspace mods depending on the sec status of the system, but I'm throwing that out without thinking it through - anything would work as long as it makes the site have a higher isk/hour ratio than ratting, which they currently don't.

Right now, cost wise, certain rigs like T2 weapons rigs (and a few others) are very affordable. Many can be built at less than 10mil cost, inclusive of invention cost.
What these rigs have in common is : a) they're not very popular due to high calibration or limited usefulness b) their raw materials are cheap/abundant

The obvious solution of course is to fix the production bottleneck. Simply increase the amount that drops from PVP kills or by having more mission NPCs or belt rats drop them. That'll solve the issue more or less, but it's rather inelegant imo as you're still going to have a pile of worthless intact salvage for the other less popular rigs. It's like the T3 BPC lottery - you've got stockpiles that goes nowhere because no one in their right mind uses them (CCP really should address this issue).

The more refined solution is to come up with a system that allows the recycling of ALL salvage into base components. Let's say for example: intact armor plates recycles to 10 titanium bars, armor plates recyles into 5 titanium bars, burned logic circuit recycles into 1 titanium bar and 1 copper bar . These metal bars can be traded as base commodities. Intact armor plates can be re-manufactured, but at a cost of 10 titanium bars and 1 copper bar. It's a closed loop, nothing is wasted - part of the demand can be filled by breaking down the useless salvage. Hopefully you get the idea. It's really a math problem and I'm sure some of the math wizards can build a construct for simulation to ensure nothing gets wasted (or have very minimal waste).

The above will get both the market and production people scrambling as there are probably massive stockpiles of useless salvage lying around in people's hangar. You may not even have to tweak any drops until the market rights itself. Implementing it however, isn't a cakewalk.

With regard to rig invention, it's hell annoying. You need datasheets for copying and the run is limited to 1 run (which mirrors ship invention). Since datasheet costs is negligible and you can get them from the NPCs, I'm failing to see the point for such things in terms of gameplay value - unless you count teeth gnashing and hair pulling as critical to gameplay. The no. of run needs to be looked if you're planning to bring T2 rigs to the mainstream audience. Last I looked, the invention cost per T2 large was in the ballpark 5mil each and T2 meds was somewhere around 2-2.5mil each.