Player Features and Ideas Discussion

The concept of "Extra Materials" on some blueprints (frigates, as the example in this case) could do with some adjustments - as it is, some things don't make sense, and furthermore, some mechanisms to avoid the extra cost must exist (can be inferred from prices), but could be made a little more documented and accessible, as I have so far found no clue at all to how that can be done.

The "don't make sense"-list includes:

• That the extra materials required are not influenced by skills and research. They should be. There is very little reason to research on blueprints with extra materials. On a Burst frigate, for instance, researching form zero to perfect ME will reduce cost by only 1.2 percent, or appr. 3,800 ISK out of about 315,000 ISK. (Prices calculated from Jita mineral prices today, according to EVE-Central, see later) On the contrary, in real life you would often be able to find substantial savings in production, not only in the material content of the final product.
• That the extra materials do not appear as "100 % waste" in the manufacturing quote you get when installing the blueprint. This would clarify the real meaning much better
• That only a few items are affected (but affected very much). You should consider moving a part of the material requirements of ALL produced items into the "not recoverable" portion (even if that would bring down the immense wrath of all who transport materials by "compressing" them into finished products - a mechanism wich by itself is so mindblowing insensical that it belongs in a different topic). A bit like that you can bring down taxes by training Accounting, but you can't eliminate them altogether: There is ALWAYS waste where there is production.

The "Hidden mechanism" assumption comes down to this: I found this old, forgotten Burst frigate BPC from way back in the tutorial days and decided to manufacture the remaining ships to get rid of it. I checked market prices:

• A Burst frigate sells for appr. 50-70 kISK, depending on market - fine.
• Production cost from "list of materials", appr. 40 k - fine (Prod.Efficiency skill lvl V, raw BPO: 2928 trit, 311 pyer, 508 mex, 1 iso, for a total of 38728 ISK at Jita today low 5% sell, according to EVE-Central). Until I scrolled down and found the
• Extra Materials required (13,338 trit, 2717 pyer, 3538 mex, 149 iso, 20 nocx, 3 zyd, 1 mega).
• Total cost of materials: well over 300 kISK. NOT fine. Does not compute.

At any one day there are tens of thousands Burst frigates on the market, and daily trade is on the order of several hundred if not thousands as well. That this should take place at prices that is one fifth of production cost, apparently, is very, very odd. There can be only five reasons:

1. Either these boats are all produced before the frigate changes (almost a year ago) and have been stored since
2. Or they are produced and marketed by "Manufacturing bots" that have not yet discovered the 8-fold increase in production costs and adjusted prices accordingly (otherwise you would just sell the raw materials)
3. Or they are not produced at all but are injected by players through a hitherto unpatched bug allowing copying of items
4. Or they are injected by CCP like skillbooks (to keep prices down - but the idea of extra materials was to raise prices?)
5. Or there is a way to bring down the amount of unrecoverable extra materials wasted in the production

Reason 1-4 are all very, very unlikely. So - what am I missing? How do you bring down the amount of extra materials? And more importantly, how do you find out? It is too well hidden, as it is

At some point "Extra Materials" were introduced into blueprints. First, I think as ships to be rebuilt into tech II hulls, which makes sense - you do not get the original ship back when you reprocess the tech II variant. Sort of. Then , I believe, CCP started using the "Extra Materials" to increase prices of some ships (and containers, when production was transferred to players) but didn't wan't to risk said ships etc. to become mineral faucets post patch, which makes sense too. However, using the "Extra Materials" concept was perhaps the easiest way to do it but perhaps not the wisest. At least it appears a very "patchy" solution.

Duplicate post - please remove

You are basically saying that option 2) is the correct one: That those MIMAF players (something was crossed over, I couldn't quite read it but it seemed adequate), are still mindlessly mass-producing and selling frigates at a fifth of the raw materials' price? Like robots without an update - it has been about a year now? And that they still exist in numbers large enough to define the average market price of the old tier 1 frigates? The anti-botting team of CCP ought to look into that. I find it hard to believe that industrialist players, who presumably will buy the needed high-end minerals in the market, can't bother to look up prices of low-end minerals and do a quick, off-hand calculation. But if you say so.... I was hoping for option 5)

You are right - there is this bug, only it does not appear to my (skilled) main but only to my unskilled alt. I bought an Atron BPO with an unskilled alt, and the numbers came out like this (isogen as the example):

Materials: (Required/Missing/Waste)
Isogen: 71 / 313 / 88,7 %

Extra materials:
Isogen: 242 / 313 / --

This adds up like you say - the BPO Bill of materials says "Isogen: you: 11, perfect: 9", and then 242 units in extra materials. 11, not 71, with the difference of 60 being 25 % of the 242. I think the 60 should not be there at all, according to CCP. It is explicitly stated that the "extra material" requirements "are not affected by skills". My initial point was that the extra materials are 100 % wasted, in the sense that you can't have them back by reprocessing, and that this ought to appear in the third column in the Sci & Manuf quote.

My point was also, that it is downright silly that the "extra" is not influenced by skill and research.



Yea, I am aware of that (and said as much), and I appreciate that CCP had to avoid turning the tier 1 frigates into mineral faucets. However, the "Worst case" you state is not nearly that - in fact, that happened A LOT with all these ships - frigates, Retrievers and many more. Entreprising players built or bought huge numbers pre-patch and sold them post-patch, this is not worst case, it is someone seeing a business opportunity and acting on it. And it is shortlived, the effect being that prices don't jump 500 % in a day but rather more slowly, while player stocks deplete. If there are still players out there with zillions of frigates stocked, they have had quite a lot of capital invested in this for really many months now.

But can we agree that a) it does not make sense that "Extra materials" are not influenced by skill and research? That, at least, must be quite easy to change, and I can't see any ways of exploiting it - in fact, I can see no reason at all why it was not made so in the first place, except for pure oversight. And b) that it would make more sense if all production had some wasted "extra materials", at least form a "first princples" standpoint? Which could be achieved by moving some of the regular "Required materials" into the "Exrtra" category, while keeping the total unchanged? This, however, would probably create substantial amount of rage.