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CCP .....


Stop. Stop what you're doing right now. You don't have decent solid plans for Kronos and it's going to blow up in your faces.

Like many of us, we know the game has it good areas and bad ones. You're not even applying a decent break/fix plan for this.

You don't know how to fix POS'es, or corp roles, and now you're screwing over the industry guys trying to find a way to fix corp roles and POS'es?



What kind of hillbilly, backwoods, thought process is this?



Find a group of players that PLAY this game and would like to help you fix it. I'm willing to do that, and you won't have to fly me to Iceland to help either!

I wouldn't read so much into the brevity, just take it at face value that he agrees they need to be looked at but can't say when at this point. Let's get what's on the table now onto TQ and then take more bites at the other pieces of the apple.

Noting this here...




And thus brings me to my post:

I'm wondering why the fee structure to install jobs is based off the market price of an item instead of the build cost of an item. In other words, wouldn't it be simpler to base the build fee based off the base build cost of the item?

In other words, figure out the base build cost of the item based on current market prices for the inputs that are required.

Aka amount of trit times 5.5isk or whatever it is at the time, etc. and once you do all the math to get a base build cost in terms of isk, use that to determine how much the install job would be. While I understand you guys want the build costs to be high for the push pull mechanic, I'm still really concerned about the grave affects these new prices are going to have on the already rampant inflation we face today.

I know you've stated that you aren't really worried about infinite feedback loops in terms of item price affecting build price, but I don't know that you guys have really done a great job of explaining why you aren't worried about it.

I would think my idea would be less prone to market manipulation just based off the sheer volume of the goods involved in mineral/ comp trade. I would also think it would be less prone to an items price being artificially high due to speculation from future/possible changes due to patches. (AKA Ishtar receiving that buff in the t2 rebalance and then their price skyrocketing). I know that prices don't stay high for what some people would say is long term (aka past 6 month) period, but I would think that these price spikes would last sufficiently long to affect the build fee calculations in rather negative way. But on the other hand if you base it on the build cost of the comps, while these are still subject to price spikes, they tend to last far shorter than the item you are creating does. (Look at how short the trit spike lasted after that major cap battle)

Provided it's the estimated value being used, keep in mind:

• The cost for a job is calculated based on a 28 day rolling average linking to gamewide build volume of everything. This will tend to minimize the effect of any given item coming in or out of demand.
• Estimated value itself is calculated back over three months worth of market transaction volume gamewide. This will definitely have a flattening effect. To significantly move it takes a continued and significant price change (or one massive set of massively overpriced transactions, but they fixed it to filter those out...)
• It's been awhile since I monitored it carefully but estimated value never did seem to change more than about once a week, maybe even longer, so daily price fluctuations usually will get lost in the noise as the moving average is moving one week worth of data in and out at a time. For a death spiral to happen it's require everyone in eve paying higher enough prices that they don't compete themselves back down. Which leads to...
• Costs are going to be low once people start spreading out, even in highsec. Nearly 38% of highsec (currently) would have near zero cost, another 10% would have no more than 1%, and another 15% above that, no more than 2%.

Taking all this into account, a death spiral is unlikely. What probably happens instead is margins open up a little bit due to the diversity in cost, and people compete within that larger margin, with increased competition for those higher prices serving as a check on things getting out of hand.

Doesn't matter what release its going to be in, its a bad idea overall.

Since the product is low volume too its theoretically at least as likely to get manipulated as the materials its produced from.

+ since the individial Materials usually make up only a part of the total Materials needed and its a lot harder to manipulate all Materials, it should reduce the risk of Manipulation. (and if manipualtion happens it effects get dampened)

Also, this approach with the addition of metamaterials, arguably, did not work. Now the metamaterial costs comprise 70+ % of some some T2 component costs. These changes have the impression of fixing broken things with more broken things. Changing a broken system that has achieved some degree of homeostasis by introducing new breaks isn't really a fix.

p.s. a lot of the upcoming changes *do* look to be promising

Part of the problem with your install costs being based off of total price of the item, is that it is not a realistically simulated formula. If you build a Ford today, and it sells for 100k currently, do you pay 10% of that to your workers before making it? Are they shareholders in your company? If they participated in building the Ford, why should they take cuts based on wholesale value of the item? That makes no sense.

In a simulation, you are expected to treat your formulas with some relativity. For example, you wouldn't juke up the physics values in EvE used in the combat simulation with some arbitrary values just because you are going for flashier effects.

So there is no reason, not to use a proper base formula for install costs. Let me give you some ideas of what I mean.

A real formula would look something like this,

(Difficulty in making item) x (time to make the item) x (scale of the item)

Finally, to incorporate your landscape, you would then add facilities bonuses into the mix, for representing efficiency, or lack thereof, and lastly location, location, location. Use your system wide "busy" factor to indicate that worker production is being overused here, so producing an item in this location currently will be more expensive. But base that off of the actual simulated cost of building the item, (which is not simulated anywhere in your industry overhaul) - not the final value of the item.

As I said, your workers and station load should have no bearing on how much you intend to sell that item for, your workers are not shareholders in your corporation. They are not entitled to a base cut of the sale value.

If you are not deadset, please at least try to simulate a proper calculation, not just trying to come up with one at the drop of a hat - 'sure it might cause a death spiral, but we don't have much time to work out a proper formula, and we're so confident that it won't cause one, that hey we might actually get away with it'.

It doesn't exactly encourage confidence from your readers either, hearing statements like that - yeah, hey, a death spiral, we've thought of that, but we really don't think that will happen, people will have to be utterly stupid to continually pay higher and higher and higher prices for something. Right? Surely they won't do that.

Uh-huh, they will. When they need something, they will pay a higher item tax, especially when the nearest item available is not cheaper by much.

CCP will realize the profit because this is a game mechanic move that favors the purchase of PLEX. Think of the additional cost as a ship component like R.A.M. Starship TECH because the additional cost (isk) is destroyed, ie, removed from game play. Whereas other increases in final purchase cost usually also reflect an increase in the value of the components of the items that constitute the product, this increase is merely inflationary. In the short term, CCP is the winner because isk is devalued. But, long term, the genius of having PLEX to offset the appeal and hyperinflation effect of OOG gold farmers may be negated. NASH index dynamics aside (most expesnive producer sets the market price), this mechanic becomes a disincentive to produce items. This disincentive plus hyperinflation becomes an incentive to drive players to use illegitimate isk sellers.

Some of that data is already there - what I mean, is things like when you browse Isis, you have hull sizes, medium and large. Things like that could account for scale and not having to create separate considerations for things like ammo.

Difficulty in making the item could be as simple as T1 - T2 - T3, or the meta equivalent.

Scale of the item represents how much space you need to rent in the facility in order to assemble the item. For example, you would need to rent out a very large space to accommodate building anything with a large hull. Medium modules would be something in the standard range, and small would give you a discount.

It's like when you build a ship, you need to first build the hull, and you have to keep in mind that its volume will never change, so you need to rent a much larger space to assemble that, than say, an ammo production line. That's what I mean about scale of the item, and how it would relate into the landscape and the "busy" factor of the systems.

All that stuff they already (kind of) have, for most items, at least ships and modules and could be extrapolated for any items that don't fit any particular part in those chains - but that is work they already had to do - if you watched the keynote, the industry revamp had them create production chains for everything in the game to make sure they got it right. This is stuff they could have done along the side with creating this industry landscape, if they started out from a proper formula in the first place.

It doesn't have to be complex, but it does need to be consistent across all industry items affected by this revamp. The formula I suggested is pretty simple in design, and you really wouldn't have to take it much further than that.

Ammo, for example, would draw most of its cost reduction from something like a 0.05 cost multiplier per unit.
I think that would make more sense.

Things like that, it just saddens me that they didn't try to create a basic, underlying formula to creating this cost mechanic and instead went for the easy route of, let's just take the estimated value of the item, and hope it doesn't blow up in our faces kind of thing. EvE is a simulation, and none of this is work that the player has to do, so why not present this idea to the user? Show them there is something else happening behind the scenes, give them an insight to the inner workings of the EvE universe without demanding their input or attention, just knowing it is there and most of all, functioning correctly in a simulation of the EvE world itself.

Later on, you could get a concrete idea for the cost of building an item on your own, taking into account - am I building a small or large item, and is this a difficult item to make (meta, tier). You could then, much more easily figure out how "busy" you can afford your system to be because you are already working from some concrete information before choosing a location.

All the stuff in Isis when you mouse over ships, that could have meant something - given a value in production - by giving it an associated cost.

Otherwise, taking an arbitrary, changing value like 440k for a Venture, hack that into pieces, and scale it to the "busy" factor of the system, is just fluff. It doesn't mean anything in that simulation context, and it leaves me asking 'where's the beef'.

Where is the robust factor in this system. This is something that is meant to go for years and years, and they are launching it without a "ceiling" from "estimations" and guesses that it cannot be exploited because of what they have witnessed in FW. That is just not going to end well. Has FW even been tested against major shocks like we can have in EvE? Fleets and systems can be decimated overnight.

They are planning for everything in the game to be destructible - this is from the game designer lead, yet they are running the industry revamp without a "ceiling", no baseline to work from whatsoever. "Trust the killmail system, it hasn't failed us yet!" I'm sorry, but I don't trust that and I foresee disaster.

They needed to implement a much more robust system underlining this -huge- industry revamp. It's such an important part of the game. If it does go into a death spiral, it might be all but impossible to stop, and that is because it was not built from a good design foundation.