Science & Industry

I don't see this as particularly negative, but it could be in a healthier combination.

It is relevant to point out that, just with everything that "collects" it should have SOME value SOMEWHERE. Recycling is a natural instinct for people (gee there's 5000 tons of iron nails sitting there, let's melt them down and do something with that iron!)

So, you take iron, you melt it down, you recombine it for something else. In that way, the ability to take "random bits of wire" and re-use it for something should be very plausible. I'd like to recommend the following : Instead of adding MORE parts and MORE combinations, you should look at providing blueprints which combine some "junky" bits and let you make other better bits (not necessarily T2 salvage).

So, let's say you take Smashed Trigger Units and Charred Micro Circuits and you can make Broken Drone Tranceivers - Still T1 bits.


It kind of becomes like the Moon Alchemy, it becomes a cost over value decision that can be implemented. I think the major issue is all the different combinations that would become a ton of new blueprints.






I don't know if I'd call it brilliant. It's just easy to calculate what you're going to get. The issue is Salvage isn't a rock in space that you can analyze and predict what you're going to get out of. Salvage is retrieved from a horribly mangled and imploded wreck that has suffered massive damage probably from Megatons of Energy being applied to it.

Some form of predictability is fine, totally predictable is not only not fun, but also more importantly not sensible.






Boost in the components? That's vague, I thought you said there was a surplus already? or do you mean by increasing the drop rate of the more rare drops?

My only comment is finding an expensive and rare drop is FUN! I don't see it as a negative thing. Predictable isn't fun.

I recommend that you find ways to use the surplus materials on the market and allow them to be combined and used into something that is useful, much as my comment about iron nails being melted to base iron. That will increase supply and keep the rare find still fun and worth doing. Reducing the value of items and making it more accessible doesn't improve the market or make it healthier, it can lead to lack of interest and too much supply which eventually makes it too easy to flood the market.

Time and time again, the major thing the players have proven to CCP are : ISK is not a barrier, Skillpoints are only a matter of time, and Time will not stop us. We will do anything to accomplish the impossible if we want to do it. The only way to stop or slow us is to control the supply at the supply point and to control demand at the consumption point (BP material requirements, fuel costs, etc).

2% increased drop rate can be a massive influx of material when you have 300,000 players doing it.


The healthiest thing for the economy is destruction of our assets. It happens quite often. As player volume grows (which it has been shrinking lately, online) the market is going to slowly drop until even a 5% increase in consumption from more players online will set things back on track.


I recommend reviewing the rig requirements of salvage material, and spreading the need for salvage components a bit more healthily with a few more salvage items needed , and fixing your anomalies in the drop rate. Adding some sensible PI materials into the rig requirements probably won't hurt that market either.

When you do the rebalance, please keep the newbies in mind. Right now scouring the belts for wrecks to salvage is something brand new newbie can do with just a few hours training. Some zoom around in a frigate that can only manage 1 or 2 salvager modules, it is adorable. The money is not very good, but it is one of the few things that brand new players can do for money right away, while they are waiting for skills to train so they can do the good stuff.

Please don't nerf newbies.


For example, when PI came out, my alliance started giving newbies a "PI kit" with some skillbooks, 3 standard command centers, a mining frigate and an optional industrial ship. They could learn to use everything in the kit well enough to run a single advanced factory on each planet to manufacture a small amount of P2 goods in about 2 days. Then the second iteration came through, and made PI much better in general, but destroyed our newbie PI kits. The only size CC was now 1000m3 (instead of the 400m3 of standards) so they could not be launched from a mining frigate anymore and newbies NEED to train for an industrial before they could even launch a single CC and try it out. 2 days training is no longer enough to have 2 types of extractors on a single planet, so they couldn't manufacture P2s on a single planet at all (you can just barely manage it with all 4s-5s on a PI character). They now need to train for a week or two (plus spend more isk on upgrades and more hassle flying around every day) to get the same value they could have gotten with 2 days training before the change.


When you go to make things better for players in general, keep the newbies in mind. Please don't take away the tiny isk streams they have just so established players can make isk a little faster.

I think the major issue with T1 to T2 alchemy is why not EVERYONE make T2 rigs!!


WOOO!! I don't know what ratio's you'd use to get the Goldilocks effect, but there is tons and tons of T1 material that someone could in theory just make a crap ton of the T2 stuff and crash a market easily. The alchemy from T1 to T2, if you do this - would require some kind of "control" item that you can seed.

The control would drop from salvage and would and could be relatively common, but simply be controlled in drop amounts that it doesn't overwhelm the system. Alternately, you can have the control item be an ISK sink through NPC sell orders. (This is old school EVE philosophy, not saying I recommend it, just listing the option.)

Best correlation would be the Nexus Chips used as turn ins to get the faction blueprints from LP stores


That control would be able to manage the amount of T2 salvage that gets produced without it going absolutely insanely crazy. I think these kinds of production controls are things CCP needs to look at while determining the future of the EVE Economy overall. As has been stated, ISK, Skillpoints, Hassle and Time are no obstacle for EVE players. Thinking that we are going to be deterred, fazed or discouraged from doing the insane to make a quick buck or to be successful is incorrect.

This would have been a good way to control Supercap and Titan production (rather than sheer volumes of minerals). Imagine if you needed a specific item that was only available in specific situations/quantities/chance to produce a Titan. Average drop rate was 1 a month for the last 5 years.

That would mean at MAX we would have about 60 or more titans in the game. Instead of the 400? 500? 600? Titans that are currently roaming the void. Am I saying this is the BEST solution? No. But obviously telling the players that 80B ISK in raw minerals is a challenge that EVE players would rarely be able to accomplish clearly was a flawed outlook - add on top of that the sheer quantity of Supercarriers roaming around now - and ISK, Minerals and Time are no thang!

I'd agree. Scripts are unwieldy and the current implementation (needing a physical script to be present) has little gameplay value.
The function it serves however, has gameplay value - it's better to just have a simple toggle with different modes of operation mode by flicking a toggle/switch.
Exploring the concept further, you even can automate the toggle and have different meta level mods vary in terms of automation level & mode capability. The best being fully automated, multi-mode.

Mining crystals are just as annoying to manage, but it's substantially more tangible than simple scripts. So, that's fairly acceptable.
Still, what would make it less annoying is a proper ammo magazine stowage for ships and a proper ammo management sub-window (which is offtopic).
Infact, all ships would benefit from that.

Re-doing the salvage sourcing from the vantage point of mining risks making them too similar, good in familiarity sense, but bad in terms of creativity.
EVE imo, is getting way too homogenised (in general). Things work, but they're bland.

I think what really makes good gameplay is to give players more powers towards making their own customization. That's the core idea.
In the context of salvage sourcing, how do you do this? Enter the Salvage Computer

- it can be installed as a new ship Special/Avionics/Computer slot (not the std Low/Med/High)
- it has multiple slots for AI/range/power/etc upgrades
- it scans wrecks within range and highlights which ones you should salvage (if you're looking for armor plates for example)
- it has the ability to interface with different kind of salvage drones (get the idea?)
- it will be affected by space conditions (e.g nebulas), so you'll need to increase its power/resolution by the proper slot-ins
- ect etc.

The above will complicate the salvage operations to a certain extent, the tractor + salvager combo mechanics will need to be simplified/streamlined.

On the strategic setting, the current racial salvage drops (e.g. Blood/Sansha drops more armor plates) tends towards a regional aspect - closely following the NPC trending. It's fine to begin with, but the issue there is uneven distributions, requiring more logistical effort. EVE is already a game that requires a chunk of your free time to get anywhere, minimizing the logistics to the absolute necessity is always preferable.

Homegenizing the type of salvage drops and leaving it to the players to "mine" the appropiate salvage is not a bad idea. Drop mix or salvage type distinction can be achieved through hull size. The volume can be aggregated with system sec or location specific (WHs, exploration sites etc) or both as a multiplier to the hull size. It'll address many of the issues with the current system, while at the same time provide interesting choices for the players - assuming of course the right balance is struck.

One more thing, ideally, there needs to be a clear time/effort vs value/profit curve during the salvage tactical phase. The current system does this, but in a round about way with the salvage difficulty level and random chance. I feel the distinction between effort vs reward should be notched up a bit, mainly to encourage selective salvaging - over "carpet bombing" them. There are a few cons that I could think of, but that can be mitigated with proper balancing.

Salvage and Mag site drops should remain random, based on an intermittent reward system.

The simplest definition I can come up with for intermittent rewards would be “unpredictable random rewards in response to repeated behavior.” A perfect illustration would be gambling in general, and slot machines in particular. With a slot machine, you do the same behavior over and over again, put in a token and pull a lever, but you never know when you’ll actually be rewarded for this behavior. This creates an incentive to keep repeating the behavior, because you are chasing the reward, and you become convinced that if you just do it one more time, that may be the time you get the reward. All gambling works like this to a degree, which is what makes it such a compulsive addiction.

You start messing with salvage scrips and such you will be turning it into an earned reward system. The earn-reward system, which is where you make people earn every reward before you give it to them, is powerful enough in its own right, but the problem is that it’s predictable, and over time people even get desensitized to that eventually. Or they take the rewards for granted. Or they start figuring out ways to game the system. You have no drive to be consistently excellent because you know you can just make up for it later by doing extra.

Salvaging wrecks and running Mag sites should be just like pulling the lever of a slot machine. Most of the time you will get junk, but sometimes, not often, you will hit a jackpot.

I have the same impression.



As a 0.0 player i dont really have that option.

This would also destroy inter-regional trading from supply/demand imbalances - see post #65 of this thread (by bloodpetal). It still leaves the 0.0 problem though, as those folks just don't have access to all types of salvage, which obviously is a serious issue...

edit: forgot to paste this part into my reply



Oh I totally disagree... I like the chance system of any exploration site of course, but there needs to be a better baseline. If I've spent 30+ minutes on pinning down the site (after fruitlessly searching a few systems), getting in some ship that can actually handle the NPCs, killing them and then accessing the containers there NEEDS to be some base reward. Like I mentioned already, less than 2 million reward for this effort in low-sec is just not OK. There still needs to be the chance for something great and exiting, but in any case the time spent should be rewarded with enough salvage parts (it can be just a lot of T1 salvage across all types) to justify the effort. Also finding more than half the containers empty will stop people from doing this ever again!

Also this is the perfect example of something that someone can do who doesn't have much time to play EVE. The casual gamer, just logging in for an hour or two. If he can't be sure to make some amount of money with it, he will chose something that will, like mining Veldspar

I'm not sure I'm keen on the idea of making things more complex. I think that salvaging should be a newbie friendly profession, something other than mining trit for starting cash.

I admit there are problems with the current system (mudflation?) and from the point of view of a long term vet something new to do / build appeals. I'm just not sure its the right direction to take the salvaging profession.

JQ

It's certainly a valid concern from the regional trader's perspective - I agree.

Though I don't really agree on the impact assessment (specifically on salvage), atm there's roughly perhaps ballpark 2-5 types of heavy volume broken salvage dropped by the NPCs that can be considered as truly regionally sourced. Armor plates, melted cap consoles, trit bars, ward console and tripped power circuit (to a lesser extent). Even in the worse case, there's not more than 38 types of salvage involved (including T2) ... and that's being generous by ignoring the universal salvage types and low volume salvage.

When you consider this number against the hundreds of other items/commodities (available for inter-region trade) and various other perspectives, it's a minor tickle.

These are really high level concepts, with aims, refer to post #48.
The devil's in the details, which hasn't been fleshed out by CCP.

So i am forced into hi-sec , and that is your solution ???

You sound like goon ... oh wait ...