Science & Industry

Read the first half of the thread, adding to favorites and will continue reading tomorrow. I'm seeing some seriously good ideas, but one thing that stands out:

I think, as a whole, people are seriously underestimating the amount of junk salvage currently laying around, as well as the time it would take the market to stabilize if an 'alchemy' solution were implemented.

Off the top of my head I really can't think of any useful solutions to this, as the first idea that comes to mind is to treat it in a similar fashion as ore. (T2 salvage refines to good stuff, T1 salvage refines to bad stuff) This doesn't solve the problem though, except in the fact that it would balance individual prices in the T1 and T2 groups along set ratios, as bad T2 can make good T2, and bad T1 can make good T1. The prices in both groups would crash though.

The solution of "make the ratios huge then when the stockpiles go away change them to something more reasonable" doesn't work either. If that's the case, people will just hold onto their huge stockpiles because if they wait a year it'll be worth 50x as much.

As much as the alchemy idea sounded like a good plan to begin with, the more I think about it the more I'm opposed to it, as there are so many ways it can go wrong (never a good idea to implement something like that in a game with players as resourceful as those that play Eve).

Also: I thing scripts would be a bad idea.

To conclude, CCP Fear, I do not envy you your job right now, though I do hope that with your willingness to listen to the community you're able to come up with a solution that fixes (or at least begins the fixing of) the current salvage/rig problem.

WALL OF TEXT INBOUND - YOU ARE WARNED

Good evening everyone:

I have read the above posts and have done some reflection. My main's primary business in New Eden is the manufacture and marketing of T2 rigs. I have been doing this VERY succesfully for about a year and a half. In most cases, the rigs I build and sell are the only ones of their kind anywhere in the galaxy. That being said, it can be done better, and profitability can be maintained, all the while increasing usability. Let me offer some ideas:

1 - rig upgrading. Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe T2 rigs are the only T2 anything that doesn't require a complete T1 in the recipe. Kinda hard to build a Prowler without a Wreathe In conjunction with lowering the material requirements a step for rigs, why not require a complete T1 version in the mix as well. This kind of creates alchemy, well, without alchemy. (ie 2 armor plates in t1 + intact armor plate = T2 armor rig).That helps a bit, but doesn't get to the root of the problem, which is getting T2 parts down in cost to make rigs more attractive.

2- salvage upgrading/refining/alchemy. Ive done soul searching on this....I never wanted T2 salvage to be more easily available, but I want T2 rigs to sell a bit better. I actually like alchemy, but it must be done carefully.. I propose a PI salvage refinery. This planetside installation should use a salvage reaction BPO PLUS a PI-harvested catalyst to induce a T2 salvage part. The thing to really focus on here is TIME not material. Make the upgrade process VERY SLOW, like:

Intact Armor Plate reaction BPO : 4 x armor plates, 10 x catalyst + 24-48 HOURS = 1 x intact armor plate.
- BPO ME research can lower catalyst requirement SLIGHTLY, PE lowers reaction time SLIGHTLY

In effect, this gives a Wow-style alchemy cooldown without the cooldown. Nobody in Wow gets rich converting 20 mithril to 20 truesilver over 20 days. Also, last time I checked, many of the low end moon minerals are catalysts on planet Earth....thats another thought entirely.

Also, make catalysts racial. You want to upgrade armor plates, you need catalysts farmed from Blood Raider space planets.This would allow the PI enthusiast to set-up pure catalyst farming planets, increase regional movement, and stimulate more cross-regional trading.

3 - faction spawns. Somewhere back, faction spawn salvage got horribly nerfed. I mean the T2 salvage drop rate is stupid low...Ive salvaged 10 Dread wrecks and gotten 1 T2 chunk. EASY FIX - LOOK AT COMMANDER SALVAGE DROP TABLES ASAP, FFS CCP! Minimum: each commander spawn should yield at least 1 piece of T2 salvage every time, unless the salvage table rolls empty.

4- skills. This one seems obvious...am I the only one seeing it? Have the appropriate rigging skill lower the drawback AND THE CALIBRATION in increments. Give us a reason to get Electronics Rigging V so we can fit a dual-t2 grav cap Buzzard. Right now, rigging IV is plenty for almost everyone....most people never even go that far. Doing this allows players to control their rigging experience wihout going in and changing the ship calibration limits. FWIW I like ship calibration just like it is.


- I *don't* like reduction of copy time....copy times on single runs are short at best. Single runs are pretty much all I use.

- I *do* like the mag sites dropping ME: 0 copies of all sizes of rigs. Also, why not have random complete rig drops. That
*might* get some folks running mag sites. You have to figure some percentage of these whole rigs could be reprocessed, which will increase supply a bit. I will tell you right now I actively hunt the rig markets for seemingly useless rigs I can reprocess...for a time it was a great way to get cheap power circuits...

- I *dont* like any salvager modifications. No scripts....

My $0.02 folks - asbestos suit is on. Thanks for reading and stewing along with me. The ideas offered by everyone are all excellent!

- K't

As someone who's done a fair bit of T2 rig production and uses them with some regularity on both PvP and PvE ships, I don't really agree with a lot of the things being held up as problems here. In particular, the pricing/availabilty of T2 rigs doesn't seem problematic at all; they range from highly affordable (I routinely put t2 damage rigs on hurricanes and suchlike) to moderately expensive (T2 shield resist rigs at ca. 20m apiece can make a lot of sense on T2/faction hulls, same goes for medium ACRs at 30-40m) to just plain expensive (trimarks, CDFEs, cargo expanders).

The bigger issues, IMO, are that a lot of T2 rigs are either useless or have calibration costs that are too high to make them worth using in a lot of cases. The existence of useless rigs contributes to the massive spread in the values of T2 salvage - no one wants drone speed augmentors, so the components used to make them languish; loads of people want trimarks, so Intact Armor Plates are 30-40m apiece. A comprehensive review of rig types that are basically never sold (T1 and T2) is long overdue; the ones that are universally considered useless should be buffed, removed, or replaced with things that would be useful and popular. For instance, you could scrap every single drone rig type bar sentry drone augmentors and replace them with a combat drone damage upgrade rig and a drone repair bay rig, at which point the value of drone-related salvage would skyrocket.

Second, cap the calibration cost of individual rigs at 200 units. Many otherwise good T2 rigs (notably gravity capacitor upgrades, burst aerators, collision accelerators, bay loading accelerators, and calefaction catalysts) have calibration costs that are excessively restrictive. 300 calibration means you can't fit two gravity capacitors on your tricked-out covops, can't use all three rig slots on a faction ship if you fit a t2 damage rig, and are highly restricted in what you can do with your remaining rig slots after fitting a t2 damage rig on a regular T1 or T3 hull.

Finally, mag sites should certainly be buffed, either by restoring faction POS BPC drops or by significantly increasing the T2 salvage drops; as everyone else in this thread has noted, they're rubbish atm.

edit: if mag sites do get rebalanced with the aim of increasing T2 salvage drops, this should be paired with either a shift in racial salvage distribution such that Serpentis sites drop at least one of the 'good' T2 salvage items (i.e. Enhanced Ward Consoles, Intact Armor Plates, Capacitor Consoles, and Single-Crystal Superalloy I-beams) or a rebalancing of rigs that use Serpentis salvage. At the moment, serpentis salvage is terrible. Also, consider shifting Rogue Drone combat sites' loot tables to include more T2 salvage. As it stands, the bloody things are worthless and almost invariably skipped over by explorers.

IMO simplest thing in the world to fix.

Adjust loot tables to allow all wrecks to give t2 salvage, obviously very rarely, but the possibility should exist, and actually then do away with the tiered salvage idea entirely. Salvage, get loot, sometimes it's good, sometimes it isn't.

I would caveat this by ensuring that the really good salvage can only be aquired by a t2 salvager, but that's just me.

In my experience, salvaging is actually one of the best ways to make ISK, esp. for new players.

I've said this before, so apologies for the repost:

A Minmatar AF wreck drops an Intact Armor Plate, currenlty worth 30M+ ISK. Larger T2 ships, ofc, drop more.

On average, salvaging a T2 ship, with a rigged, all-salvager-fit frig/dessie and level 4 Salvaging skill, only takes a few cycles (each cycle is 10 sec), so the limiting factor on ISK/hr is how many T2 ship wrecks you can find. But, even assuming that you can find & salvage only 3 AF wrecks, or 1 T2 cruiser/BC wreck, per hour, you'd be making around 100M ISK/hr. An alliance/corp battlefield or Incursion site is a pure latinum mine, for the T2 salvager, pulling in hundreds of millions of ISK/hr.

How does that compare with income from 0.0 ratting, these days?

In addition, consider that skill training for T2 salvaging requires less than a week, even without implants, and a salvage frig/dessie, with rigs, is very inexpensive. Compare this with the skills and ship required to efficiently kill 0.0 BS rats.

Salvaging a wreck is also usually much faster than killing a BS rat (unless you are ratting in a supercap), and you are always on the move, not hanging around in a belt - so the chances of getting dropped on by even a fast scanner is pretty low. But, even if you do get popped, who cares? A one-week old salvager noob or alt would lose a no-cost Alpha medical clone, no implants, and a cheap ship.

Let me just say that this is my favorite thread that i have read...

And for the love of god i almost died when i saw a CCP dev actively back and forth discussing with the player base especially the industrial player base for ideas on things to change ...

Honestly i'd love to see more t2 salvage hit the road on more ships i mean t2 ships even frigates should be able to actively run with t2 rigs without it being a "oh whats the use this is gonna double the cost of my ship!"



That said... i L-O-V-E the idea of refineable salvage... Especially into something like copper, gold, titanium and silver bars that you can rebuilding using standard bpo's into salvage (throw the bpo's on the concord LP shop :) ....

someone was complaining that this would crash the market, no it wouldn't it just takes balance, yu have to make it so that you can't just refine a bunch of crap into 40 intact armor plates, you need to say refine 100 crap salvage, and 5-6 good salvage to make 10 other good salvage...

thats why its a good idea to have variation in the "bar types" that the salvage refines down into...

Alchemy like the pos's is interesting but for the love of god its so hard and time intensive no one really does it... just let salvage be a nice easy refining...

Yes t2 rigs will fall and t2 salvage price will fall initially, but once t2 rigs become common price there usage should increase as well and thereby increasing the salvage prices again....


Also for the love of christ get CCP Tallest to tweak the rigs a bit to make the less used ones a tad bit more useful, and not so frigging annoying to fit to a ship the calibrations are epicly annoying.

Mining crystal size has always been an annoyance, but not huge since the crystal can last for quite a long time. That said, I would train mining crystal efficiency if it was an available skill. Are there plans to simplify mining crystal usage?

If the exhumer cargoholds were much larger, I would not complain. They are tech 2 barges after all. IRL, power barges are used for bay, port, and inland waterway freight, holding 1500 tons.

Hmm, what if rats had no normal loot drops? Meaning, you can only obtain salvage from NPC wrecks but the rare/officer spawns drop their normal loot table (plus wrecks are also salvageable). So on the rare occasion loot does appear, you know it will be good. The "sea of loot cans" is what I am thinking of avoiding, as well as giving nul miners more of a reason to mine.

Nope, it won't work. First of all mag sites can't do the required volume and it makes very little sense fluff wise. If CCP wants to buff mag sites, then they should get something that is unique to them and that fits their current volume. I think that mag sites should be the only source for capital rigs (T1 and T2).

Number of wrecks able to be salvaged is not the problem; most people do not waste their time salvaging since the inflated NPC bounty prize amounts make salvaging comparatively almost worthless. The only solution I can think of is reduce bounty prize amounts and loot drops from npc rats to give ratters a reason to salvage.

Almost every time I hear of someone ratting in nul, the next thing I hear is "Does anyone want to salvage the sanctum I just finished?" Very few actually take the time to salvage. Part of the problem is while salvaging, your ship (usually a noctis) becomes vulnerable to attack. If you are busy with a "sea of wrecks" and not paying attention, you can easily be caught and killed.

Nul pilots would rather focus on getting ISK from bounties than trying to loot and salvage, and then go through the hassle of trying to sell it it all. Part of that stems from most ratting pilots can not reprocess scrap (loot) or build rigs, since most of them have nothing to do with industry and manufacturing.

This is true in low sec and null sec, but not in high sec, where salvagers are not vulnerable to attack by players. And, please, do not confuse mission salvagers with ninja salvagers, or looters.

The vast majority of T1 salvage comes from mission NPC wrecks, which feeds the T1 rig production and market. Thanks to the introduction of sized rigs and the large amount of T1 salvage available from L1-L4 missions, the T1 rig market is very healthy.

But, the majority of T2 salvage comes from player T2 ship wrecks - not NPC wrecks or mag site drops. Only faction NPC wrecks drop T2 salvage - and CCP nerfed the drop rate of T2 salvage from those wrecks several years ago. But, even if the drop rate from faction NPC wreck were much higher, the low spawn rate of faction NPCs would be another limiting factor.

So, currently, we're actually comparing the number of NPC wrecks (mostly in high sec) to the number of player T2 wrecks (mostly in null and low sec), as the sources of T1 and T2 salvage, respectively. I doubt that anyone would argue that the total number of player T2 wrecks, salvaged each day, will always be a tiny fraction of the total number of NPC wrecks salvaged in high sec, probably much less than 1%. Thus, the available supply of T2 salvage is relatively minute, as compared to T1 salvage, and overly constrained.

If you want to bring T2 rig production/market up, say to 20% of the T1 rig production/market (ie. an availability/cost ratio of 5:1 for T2 rigs vs T1 rigs), then you need to make T2 salvage dramatically more available, up to 20% of the current T1 salvage in high sec. This is a pretty damn big increase.

You cannot do this in null sec or low sec, alone. Period.

As pointed out, the risk of salvaging in null sec (and low sec) is very high. So, even if every NPC wreck in null/low sec dropped T2 salvage, the number of salvagers would still be too low to supply sufficient T2 salvage. And, even if the T2 salvage quantities were available in null/low sec, the number of inventors (for the T2 rig BPCs) and manufacturers (for the T2 rigs) in null/low sec would still be too low to produce enough T2 rigs to create a 5:1 ratio vs T1 rigs. Again, I doubt that anyone argues that null/low sec invention/manufacturing is a small fraction of high sec invention/manufacturing.

Thus, a large high sec source for T2 salvage is required.

Mag sites are not the answer, unless you propose to have each mag site drop thousands of Intact Armor Plates. Not very likely.

T2 salvage from faction NPC wrecks could be made more available - by increasing the spawn rate, and increasing the drop rate of salvage. This might be a solution, but you'd have to change the mechanics of the L1-L4 missions to make 20% of the NPCs into faction NPCs - this would make the missions significantly more difficult, to say the least. (Note: belt NPC spawns are also too low in quantity, as compared to mission NPC spawns, so buffing only the existing belt faction NPC spawns would not provide enough salvage.)

T1->T2 salvage alchemy is another proposed solution, which would be viable, due to the sufficiently large amounts of T1 salvage already available. The conversion rate would need to be higher than the desired T2:T1 rig availabiility/cost ratio, in order to prevent 100% of T1 salvage being turned into T2 salvage, but this is just a matter of tweaking to get the right balance.