EVE Information Portal

TL;DR: Do you agree with the principle that the expansion should not make it harder for new industrialists to compete with those who established themselves before the expansion?

I'm concerned that you appear to have your priorities backwards here. Some owners of well-researched BPOs (especially those with high ranks) and tech II BPOs will gain an even greater advantage over newcomers from this change. Industry should be designed to allow newer players to make a profit if they're smart; instead you risk further entrenching the dominance of rich older players. The fact that they will squeal should not be a distraction from what's best for the game.

An example: Peter Plutocrat has a Raven BPO researched to ME 14, which took him under two months, cost next to nothing, and translates to a perfect ME10% under the new system. Along comes Natalia Newbie wanting to break into the Raven market, and decides to start by researching her BPO to ME10%. Not only does this cost her a fair chunk of ISK, it takes her nearly six months to achieve the same result. Meanwhile Peter is laughing all the way to the bank.

A solution: calculate the time invested in research, and re-apply it under the new system. Some BPOs will get worse as a result; too bad. They may squeal, but those owners still have the advantage of having done all that research at a lower cost under the old system, and there's still a level playing field for them to research further if that's what's required.

Similarly, the copying changes give an increase of several percentage points in the throughput (and hence profitability) of tech II BPOs; you're right that it's not a disaster for invention, but that's beside the point: it makes the gerontocrats' advantage greater when you should be working to reduce it.

A solution: find a way to increase the cost of copying tech II BPOs. You could require additional materials for copying (e.g. datacores as well as data sheets), require the use of expensive expert teams for tech II copy jobs, change the copy duration on tech II BPOs, etc. The aim should be to ensure that tech II BPO profitability either stays the same as it is now, or goes down.

TL;DR: Do you agree with the principle that the expansion should not make it harder for new industrialists to compete with those who established themselves before the expansion?

I'm concerned that you appear to have your priorities backwards here. Some owners of well-researched BPOs (especially those with high ranks) and tech II BPOs will gain an even greater advantage over newcomers from this change. Industry should be designed to allow newer players to make a profit if they're smart; instead you risk further entrenching the dominance of rich older players. The fact that they will squeal should not be a distraction from what's best for the game.

An example: Peter Plutocrat has a Raven BPO researched to ME 14, which took him under two months, cost next to nothing, and translates to a perfect ME10% under the new system. Along comes Natalia Newbie wanting to break into the Raven market, and decides to start by researching her BPO to ME10%. Not only does this cost her a fair chunk of ISK, it takes her nearly six months to achieve the same result. Meanwhile Peter is laughing all the way to the bank.

A solution: calculate the time invested in research, and re-apply it under the new system. Some BPOs will get worse as a result; too bad. They may squeal, but those owners still have the advantage of having done all that research at a lower cost under the old system, and there's still a level playing field for them to research further if that's what's required.

Similarly, the copying changes give an increase of several percentage points in the throughput (and hence profitability) of tech II BPOs; you're right that it's not a disaster for invention, but that's beside the point: it makes the gerontocrats' advantage greater when you should be working to reduce it.

A solution: find a way to increase the cost of copying tech II BPOs. You could require additional materials for copying (e.g. datacores as well as data sheets), require the use of expensive expert teams for tech II copy jobs, change the copy duration on tech II BPOs, etc. The aim should be to ensure that tech II BPO profitability either stays the same as it is now, or goes down.

Greyscale: I point out that having the training job run for excessive lengths of time [148k training units from level nine to ten] is so long for some BPs that virtually no BPs bought after the change will ever be trained to ME 10%. Example, that training time for a T1 cruiser would exceed 68 days and for a battleship would exceed 135 days. At some point [capital BPs??] the training length required to reach ME 10% is so long that virtually no new BPs will be researched to that level, thus cementing the cost advantage of those already at that level when the proposed change occurs.

It is already too late to buy and train any BPO with new difficulty level beyond that of a battleship to [old] ME 10 before the potential patch date. [T1 battleship would require 55.6 days]. Thus, the advantage of everyone who already owns a capital BPO and has at least ME 10 by "summer" is now virtually permanent.


The workaround for this is to adapt the skill point training scheme to BP research. Keep the records in very small units but only allow translation to production [of items or copies] at the ME percent level the cumulative underlying time indicates,

AND allow research times to be added in less than full percent level increments.


Thus, that hypothetical Titan BPO could be reasonably researched to ME 3% in a few months, and then researched piecemeal [in multiple separate smaller than 30 day steps] to ME 4% or higher off and on over the next months. A copy made in between the small steps would have ME 3% until the cumulative training time required for higher ME % is reached.

Hm, somehow i must have missed this thread or maybe i focused too much on the industry UI..
Anyways, after having only skimmed the first few pages, i need one question answered:

Is the fact, that current ME/TE 10 (or 11+) results in future perfect value, set in stone already?

The cost will be highly variable depending on where you choose to do it. For a BS you should be able to get it at a pretty reasonable price.

160 days does not seem like a long time period when you're talking about a billion-ISK blueprint. T2 BPOs change hands for decades' worth of profit; EVE industrialists, at the high-end, play a long game. On top of that, either the 1% is a big enough difference that it matters and people *will* research it, or it's a small enough difference that people won't bother researching it, at which point it doesn't matter.

It would make no difference to the barrier to entry as can be seen in the posts below.

its not just that its any ME5 or PE5 is going to be turned into an ME9% or PE18%

This means a ME5 titan bpo now has been researched for 1185 Days then turns into ME9% which takes 7336 days to duplicate in the new system.

PE5 titan BPO (these may not exist, ME5s do for sure) 1777d before turns into PE18% which would take 11003 days after.

The current system is fine, this redesign of the ME/PE system is unneeded, just fix the copy times.

It would seem the logic of the 10 level system is to simplify it for new players or players new to industry, but at the same time it penalizes any new industry by excessively harsh research times compared to existing blueprints.