Science & Industry

What I would really like as a statement from CCP is what price they hope to settle on with T2 rigs (and also T1, if they are to be revamped as well). I personally feel that T1 vs. T2 should be similar to the way T1 and T2 ships are priced. So a T2 rig should be a no-brainer to be put on a T2 ship (you wouldn't fit T1 modules to it, would you?). Currently the price for more common and expensive T1 rigs are roughly as follows:

Battleships: 30% to 5%
Battlecruisers: 15% to 5%
Cruisers: 130% to 25%
Destroyers: 230% to 60%
Frigates: 2300% to 140%

Price of 1 rig in percent of price for ship. Just a quick sampling based on prices of Capacitor Control Circuit and Auxiliary Nano Pumps of the appropriate sizes (CCCs are relatively cheap compared to some but common, ANPs are quite expensive) via cheapest/most expensive T1 ship of each size (in this case Gallente, but those prices should all be more or less level I guess...)
Obviously the smaller the ship the more expensive the rig in proportion (except battlecruisers), do you want to keep a similar relationship with T2 rigs vs T2 ships? What price relationship do you want to achieve?

Please give us something more concrete as a target

Please note that most of the same concerns in this thread were raised when CCP introduced "sized" rigs. Prior to the availability of small/medium rigs, even T1 rigs were prohibitively expensive and primarily used on large and/or T2/faction ships. Sized rigs lowered the cost and increased the availabilty of rigs for the smaller T1 ship classes, thus inarguably improving game play for everyone.

With specific regards to the concern about T1->T2 alchemy "crashing" the T2 rig market, this is silly. You cannot "crash" a market, in which an entire class of items, in total, have such a low volume of buy/sell orders. For many of the items, there are actually no orders.

There was a great blog from two years ago - http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=670

To bad, work on this whole "Rigs 2.0" project" has stopped after multi-sized rigs where introduced and as CCP Chronotis probably left to work on other CCP projects.

But why there is suddenly an urge to change something about salvage and rig manufacturing? And why there is only a lonely dev trying to brainstorm whole issue with not enough time on his hands? As i understood - CCP Fear is going to boost drop rates of some most expensive salvage parts and it`s the only change to rig manufacturing what is coming in winter expansion. Well, maybe more of balancing like that but still nothing special.

On the other hand you could put this project on the next summer expansion release, get a team of devs and develop something complex and troughout.


And as a T2 rig manufacturer i can only wish that every T1/T2 rig could be a valuable option for the players to fit on their ships. Adjust calibration cost and drawbacks, boost bonuses on some of them, introduce mining rigs. I think that would be closer to idea of making T2 rigs more affordable for everyone as demand will spread and prices even out to certain levels - not too cheap, nor too expensive.

Is it even possible in EVE? I wonder. Though i like it as it is right now - margins are good.

This thread is about T2 rigs, but it does really point out the overall issue with salvaging in general. T1 demand driven by a few rigs and the randomness of it doesn't allow players to control the supply for the market well. T2 is non-existant and requires more opportunity for players to get T2 salvage. T3 items are dominated by melted nanoribbons. This is the majority of the cost associated with T3 production.

I still like the salvaging script idea because it can be used for not only T1 and T2 but also T3 salvage. Too much of the process is dependent on one item (nanoribbons) and nothing else. By allowing players to choose what is in demand that day, the market will be more fluid and interesting. The same is true of T1 and T2.

So IMO:

1. Add Scripts for Salvagers
2. Normalize salvage tables so all salvage can be found from any faction
3. Increase T2 drop rates either by only allowing T2 to be gotten from T2 salvagers, or add it to a single table for T1 and T2 salvage
4. Decrease the copy time on making BPC's to allow 10 run invention runs like modules
5. Change mag sites to work like wrecks with new script and T2 salvager requirement for getting T2 salvage
6. Allow T3 scripts

As far as carrying around a bunch of scripts, I really don't see how this is an issue. Even more if you are arguing for a alchemy like process. At first I liked this but it's going to be far too confusing and adds way too many variables that will screw up the market. Moon mat alchemy is a pretty good example of what did not happen when it was added and what it was originally intended to solve.

I think you have it right with the analogy to mining - if mineral A is in demand, I go mine rocks with mineral A. With scripts, you pick what you want to go salvage that day (one or two scripts?) or trip based on market demand. As far as skills to use them, just make the requirement the Rigging skills in Mechanic. Maybe T2 scripts in a T2 salvager require level 4 of those skills. Add the fact the code already exists for scripting, it looks like a better idea.

In short, go for a market solution instead of a overly complex mechanical one.

Scripts are probably a bad idea.

A while ago I mentioned scripts as a possible implementation of an idea, I don't believe this is the best implementation because the number of salvage types would make this a pain to use and to design for (gotta consider thems CCP duders).

There are however other alternatives that yield the same effect;

Having different settings on the salvager module,
having different types of salvager module (that are specialised for a particular salvage),
using a salvage scanner to scan for particular salvages on a wreck and those being attempted (with each attempt having a chance to destroy the wreck),
having a specialised loot window where you play some lottery game with the salvage loot... etc.

Ideally the method should be streamlined for the user, easy to implement for CCP and allow for expansion to t3 salvaging as well.

I really don't like the idea of broken rig -> completed rig alchemy because this would seriously, seriously hammer the completed rig prices. While t2 rigs are too pricy, this makes finding containers/ wrecks that drop the good stuff less exciting.

That being said CCP don't have time to overhaul rigs.... so we'll need to settle for something nice and simple that will gel with future (hopefully not too far off) changes to rigs.

So assuming no changes to existing rigs, a modification of the drop tables should be sufficient. Possibly the bottle necked items should be dropped more often than the none-bottle necked (this might be a catastrophically bad idea from an economic perspective).

To summarise:
Salvaging should give the player some way of biasing the type of salvage that gets retrieved, this should also have relevant trade-offs.
Salvage scripts are not really a good idea.
Common to Rare salvage alchemy, IN MY HONEST OPINION, is a no no, because it makes the rare loot less exciting.
Common -> Common & Rare->Rare alchemy would be cool beans though.
I +1 CCP Fears assessment that a change in loot tables is the best course of action for the Winter Expansion.

Please iterate rigs though!

No. I should flame you but i won't. I will grit my teeth and explain.

An isk faucets (the magic flow of isk into the game) are when isk magics into your wallet from concord or an NPC.

Isk from players is not new isk in eve.

Ergo, more t2 salvage loot is not more isk, it's more stuff, which actually makes the relative value if isk vs stuff less. That is another debate though, for people smart who are snappier dresses then myself. Also people who care and who get decent sleep. or not. Beer.

The t2 (edit- rigs) market is a bit fail because, on the production side, it takes a month of sundays to sell your produce, and from the consumer side, it's shintaht expensive (on the most part). Generally, t2 rigs aren't used except on fancy boats and supercaps (and 'cursion baots). CCP and, well, us (me at least) would like to see more use from t2 rigs, CCP have limited time to do this (winter is coming!) so they need a low hanging fruit to make life better for all. Ergo the changing the loot droppings.

CCP Fear is quite aware that rigs needs some work and I'm sure he's taking our ideas to heart, or maybe the dustbin by his desk, and at the very least he has it all in hand, or had it before it went to the bin. My point is this he is handling the situation.

For me, the T2 rig market suffers the same issues as the T1 rig market.

That is the drawbacks of the actual rigs.

It is very interesting that the energy rig market is actually quite healthy (for several rig types) compared to say weapon rigging.

I'd say one easy fix would be to remove all the drawbacks from T1 and T2 rigs. Make the rigging skills actually improve the bonus of the rig and you have yourself a very quick and easy boost to all rig markets. I'd also contemplate removing the stacking penalties of rigs with modules - make rigs only stacking penalized with other rigs - this should include trimarks etc. Stopping whacking on 3 of the same type of rig would boost the other rig 'areas'.

The actual bonus of the rigs need looking at since practically all T2 rigs have a 5% boost over T1, which is okay, but often the T1 effect is relatively useless (see warp optimization, or a lot of the fitting cost rigs) so the T1 rig has no real advantage (or specific use) over fitting say a powergrid rig or tanking rig.

I'm glad to see you're dropping Small and Medium rig 0ME BPCs now too, but the build quantities do need balancing. Intact Armour Plates for example are a huge bottleneck, and rather than just dump a load more of them into game, I'd suggest you consider first if you want every damn ship in game using T2 trimarks?

Proliferation of T2 rigs (especially the good ones) will have dire consequences on PVP of all types, so I'd suggest you act very carefully before just doing a huge boost to tanking rigs (increasing plates drop or introducing some alchemy). You've fundamentally changed the pvp game from gank to tank over a serious of tanking boosts over the years : PVP is now a wasteland of baiting with supertanked ships and the fine art of gank and GTFO is falling by the wayside. I'd personally prefer to see boosts to speed/ganking/damage/ewar rigs much more than any increase in drop rate of tanking rig salvage.

Leave salvaging alone right now. It works (albeit slowly) in terms of sometimes you get REALLY lucky, sometimes not. turning it into a bunch of farming spreadsheets [Farm X rat to get Y salvage :( ] might suit some players, but not most players. The drop rate is fine; it is the numbers used and the rig balance tha is out.

One last suggestion: Invention is aweful. You really need to split up decryptors for ships, modules, rigs etc so that all the decryptors aren't priced out because they are needed/only cost effective for jump freighter production.

Cheers.

I actually think you've summarized the problem(s) quite well, but since you asked let's summarize the actual issue again. What we have form CCP (as a mission statement for this if you will) is this (talking about T2 rigs obviously):

I can fully get behind that, it is basically just common sense. For most ships a single T2 rig costs a multitude of what the ship itself costs (with the exception of faction BS maybe). This is far away from any other type of T2 item that has a comparable effect. It is maybe similar to high-faction or even officer gear, but it's still T2 and can't even be removed once it's on the ship.
So bringing the production cost down means there will be more items sold meaning the resulting smaller profit margins per item will still result in (probably much) bigger profits over all. Also more people can take part in that profit, and additionally you won't have to wait for a week or two to actually sell something, meaning less capital bound meaning more opportunity to make more money.
Having the lower price will mean that using T2 is an actual realistic choice like it is using T2 items is over T1, and not like using officer mods instead of T1.

Now asking how this can be achieved yielded a couple of basic ideas, some of which attempt to solve serious problems with T1 salvage materials that exist. Most importantly the drop rates do not reflect the demand of rig types, leading to incredibly skewed prices. You pay up to 200,000 ISK per armor plate at times, while many other T1 items go for a couple dozen ISK. Those are 4 orders of magnitude in difference! So by using some of them to create T2 variants and increasing the T2 drop rates the supply problem would be solved.
To be able to accommodate the new volume of T2 rigs demanded by the market the runs from invention would have to be increased and/or copying time decreased.
But there will be a resulting higher demand for the corresponding T1 salvage parts. Since the same rig types tend to be popular in T1 and T2, the already expensive T1 parts would become even more expensive. To compensate for this (and to reduce their already too high price in the first place) some adjustment would have to be made here as well. Multiple ways have been mentioned (script-like function for salvagers to set a preferred result or just increasing drop rates and so on).
I personally think the best way to go with some mechanic that balances itself out. Adjusting drop rates doesn't for example. Scripts could do that to some extent, it could even create a new market by depleting the scripts over time (like mining crystals) and create an incentive to actually use T2 salvagers (only they would be able to use those crystals).

Also an important notice to all who are so worried that T2 rigs will become infinitely cheap and they won't make a profit anymore: It's just ridiculous. First of all IF there will be an alchemy-like possibility to fuse T1 salvage into T2, it will cause those T2 prices to basically have an upper limit to how high they can go as a function of the base prices of the T1 base materials. This in turn creates more demand for those items, causing their price to rise as well. Rig prices will adjust, you'll still make a nice profit on each sale (be it a bit smaller per item) but you will be able to sell much more without waiting a week or 2 for someone to finally buy the damn thing...

It was the choice we made, to live out in 0.0 space, and we have to live with the consequences of that choice.

We can agree on the salvage alchemy tho, it is a teribad idea. Increase drop rates, lower copy time, increase the number of runs for an invented BPC, reformulate the recipes. Any one of those or a combination of those would help make T2 rigs more prevalent.

I though new CCP policy is to buff for 0.0 industry and make it more sustainable



Look at the current salvage prices and take an educated guess.

Lv4 + noctics + stuff i salvage is free crowd = every one pvp in t2 rigs.