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Material Efficiency skill changed to Advanced Industry

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afkboss
Imperial Academy
Amarr Empire
#101 - 2014-07-16 16:37:45 UTC
CCP Greyscale wrote:
Hi everyone,

Here are some bullet points:
- Sorry for the delay in keeping up with this, we've been busy :/
- We're aware of the unhappiness being expressed here
- We don't want to have skills that are as in-practice mandatory as the old Material Efficiency skill in the Industry skillset - skills are supposed to be about specialization, not about jumping through hoops
- We are very keen to avoid doing refunds *wherever* possible, hence the desire to repurpose this skill rather than delete it (reasons: we dislike skillpoint reassignment as the act of reassignment incrementally devalues the perceived value of skillpoints accumulated over time; and deleting and refunding requires a fairly substantial investment to write the necessary DB scripts, run upgrade tests and correct any errors, and time we can reduce for work on things we don't want to do allows us to spend more time on work on things we do want to do; this is an imperfect statement of our position as I'm writing it on the fly to give you an approximate idea of *why* we don't want to do a refund here, but the statement that we don't want to do a refund *is* essentially perfect and out of scope for discussion in this thread, much as you may unfortunately disagree with it.)
- We are in any case too close to the release to implement a refund at this time, and that is a non-disputable statement of fact precluding us from doing so even if we wanted to (which we don't)
- We are aware that you're are unhappy with how far the new skill is moving from its original value proposition, and we'll have another look at it this week. *If* we decide to make changes, they may not be viable for the initial Crius release, but would be unlikely to trail by more than a week or two
- We're not delaying the release for this issue; I assume everyone understands that but it's always better to be explicit :)


"- We are very keen to avoid doing refunds *wherever* possible"

Can you not see that you have just changed a skill that i paid money through subscription to get then made it completely useless.
Ranamar
Nobody in Local
Of Sound Mind
#102 - 2014-07-16 16:38:26 UTC
Bocephus Morgen wrote:
I trained Material Efficiency V on several characters in anticipation of these Industry changes. If I had known this change was happening I would have not bothered training it all. That is several combined weeks of wasted training, I believe asking for an SP refund is only fair here.


I hate to say it, but, if you were reading the industry blogs because you were excited about the industry changes, you should have seen the statement that ME was being changed. It was pretty clear that, since the skill was a stupid barrier to entry, they were going to nerf it into the ground... and speaking as someone who has trained it on two characters, I'm delighted to see it gone, because it was a really stupid barrier to entry.

As I recall, the original proposed implementation was going to be some sort of reduction in job installation cost, something that would mostly benefit people doing lots of building near trade hubs. Personally, I thought that was kind of interesting, although, as noted, almost certainly not going to save you very much money.

If I have a complaint, it's that 1% *feels* small. I'd rather have -5%/level installation costs over -1% time, even though, with the setup I'm expecting to be using, I'll almost certainly make more money with an extra 5% stuff than 25% less ISK flowing out for manufacturing costs. Call it "workforce management" or something... I'm not quite sure what jobs are actually going to cost, though, so I may be off on my numbers.
Bam Stroker
The Graduates
The Initiative.
#103 - 2014-07-16 16:38:33 UTC  |  Edited by: Bam Stroker
I'll begrudgingly accept the technical and resource reasons you cited for ruling out the SP refund but this part of your explanation has me scratching my head:

CCP Greyscale wrote:
We are very keen to avoid doing refunds *wherever* possible, hence the desire to repurpose this skill rather than delete it (reasons: we dislike skillpoint reassignment as the act of reassignment incrementally devalues the perceived value of skillpoints accumulated over time

This entire issue here *is* essentially about the perception players have that their skill points are being devalued.

Ok, so refunding the SP is in the "too hard basket". You still need to find a way to make players feel as though the SP they invested in training ME has value because as it stands they're being short-changed.

By all means please take another look at how you're approaching these skill changes and find a solution that preserves the value of our SP which is your own stated priority.

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Throwaway Sam Atild
Republic Military School
Minmatar Republic
#104 - 2014-07-16 16:41:44 UTC
My miffing is partially from how the change wasn't communicated, like many Crius changes have not been.

I've been playing long enough that a few million SP here or there isn't the end of the world for me, but I also have a bunch of new players in my corp who have one skillset to their name at this point, that being production.

Should barriers to entry be removed to most things? Probably. Should people be able to fly capitals right out the gate too?

Is this specific case being handled pretty badly? Absolutely. I'm pretty sure this could have been addressed during the 10 week extension on the industry changes had it been communicated clearly earlier. Here's hoping that the response to this doesn't remain as, 'well it's too late to do anything about now'
Owen Levanth
Sagittarius Unlimited Exploration
#105 - 2014-07-16 16:42:53 UTC
afkboss wrote:
CCP Greyscale wrote:
Hi everyone,

Here are some bullet points:
- Sorry for the delay in keeping up with this, we've been busy :/
- We're aware of the unhappiness being expressed here
- We don't want to have skills that are as in-practice mandatory as the old Material Efficiency skill in the Industry skillset - skills are supposed to be about specialization, not about jumping through hoops
- We are very keen to avoid doing refunds *wherever* possible, hence the desire to repurpose this skill rather than delete it (reasons: we dislike skillpoint reassignment as the act of reassignment incrementally devalues the perceived value of skillpoints accumulated over time; and deleting and refunding requires a fairly substantial investment to write the necessary DB scripts, run upgrade tests and correct any errors, and time we can reduce for work on things we don't want to do allows us to spend more time on work on things we do want to do; this is an imperfect statement of our position as I'm writing it on the fly to give you an approximate idea of *why* we don't want to do a refund here, but the statement that we don't want to do a refund *is* essentially perfect and out of scope for discussion in this thread, much as you may unfortunately disagree with it.)
- We are in any case too close to the release to implement a refund at this time, and that is a non-disputable statement of fact precluding us from doing so even if we wanted to (which we don't)
- We are aware that you're are unhappy with how far the new skill is moving from its original value proposition, and we'll have another look at it this week. *If* we decide to make changes, they may not be viable for the initial Crius release, but would be unlikely to trail by more than a week or two
- We're not delaying the release for this issue; I assume everyone understands that but it's always better to be explicit :)


"- We are very keen to avoid doing refunds *wherever* possible"

Can you not see that you have just changed a skill that i paid money through subscription to get then made it completely useless.


The skill was useless before. You just couldn't notice this because CCP tricked you with extra waste added to the material requirements.

Reading this thread and weighing the number of people who want the skill to change and those who just want skill points, no matter how flimsy their demands, makes me depressed. So many dishonest people.

Please people, CCP isn't stupid. They know exactly what you express when talking about how you want that skill reimbursed with loads of skill points.

Not dissent, but pure greed.
Querns
Science and Trade Institute
Caldari State
#106 - 2014-07-16 16:52:35 UTC
Given that the skill is required at 5 to inject Capital Construction, I am even less convinced that a refund is a good idea. The utility of the skill goes from "a hard requirement to compete in industry, period" to "the thing you need to train in order to get into capital construction."

This post was crafted by the wormhole expert of the Goonswarm Economic Warfare Cabal, the foremost authority on Eve: Online economics and gameplay.
afkboss
Imperial Academy
Amarr Empire
#107 - 2014-07-16 17:04:39 UTC
Owen Levanth wrote:
afkboss wrote:
CCP Greyscale wrote:
Hi everyone,

Here are some bullet points:
- Sorry for the delay in keeping up with this, we've been busy :/
- We're aware of the unhappiness being expressed here
- We don't want to have skills that are as in-practice mandatory as the old Material Efficiency skill in the Industry skillset - skills are supposed to be about specialization, not about jumping through hoops
- We are very keen to avoid doing refunds *wherever* possible, hence the desire to repurpose this skill rather than delete it (reasons: we dislike skillpoint reassignment as the act of reassignment incrementally devalues the perceived value of skillpoints accumulated over time; and deleting and refunding requires a fairly substantial investment to write the necessary DB scripts, run upgrade tests and correct any errors, and time we can reduce for work on things we don't want to do allows us to spend more time on work on things we do want to do; this is an imperfect statement of our position as I'm writing it on the fly to give you an approximate idea of *why* we don't want to do a refund here, but the statement that we don't want to do a refund *is* essentially perfect and out of scope for discussion in this thread, much as you may unfortunately disagree with it.)
- We are in any case too close to the release to implement a refund at this time, and that is a non-disputable statement of fact precluding us from doing so even if we wanted to (which we don't)
- We are aware that you're are unhappy with how far the new skill is moving from its original value proposition, and we'll have another look at it this week. *If* we decide to make changes, they may not be viable for the initial Crius release, but would be unlikely to trail by more than a week or two
- We're not delaying the release for this issue; I assume everyone understands that but it's always better to be explicit :)


"- We are very keen to avoid doing refunds *wherever* possible"

Can you not see that you have just changed a skill that i paid money through subscription to get then made it completely useless.


The skill was useless before. You just couldn't notice this because CCP tricked you with extra waste added to the material requirements.

Reading this thread and weighing the number of people who want the skill to change and those who just want skill points, no matter how flimsy their demands, makes me depressed. So many dishonest people.

Please people, CCP isn't stupid. They know exactly what you express when talking about how you want that skill reimbursed with loads of skill points.

Not dissent, but pure greed.



CCP forced us to train it, we had no choice in the matter and then they make the skillpoints we had no choice to spend 100% worthless.

Yeah totally no reason to be mad
Ravcharas
Infinite Point
Pandemic Horde
#108 - 2014-07-16 17:09:39 UTC
Querns wrote:
Given that the skill is required at 5 to inject Capital Construction, I am even less convinced that a refund is a good idea. The utility of the skill goes from "a hard requirement to compete in industry, period" to "the thing you need to train in order to get into capital construction."

Actually, the hoop you have to jump through to get into capital construction.
Querns
Science and Trade Institute
Caldari State
#109 - 2014-07-16 17:12:38 UTC
Ravcharas wrote:
Querns wrote:
Given that the skill is required at 5 to inject Capital Construction, I am even less convinced that a refund is a good idea. The utility of the skill goes from "a hard requirement to compete in industry, period" to "the thing you need to train in order to get into capital construction."

Actually, the hoop you have to jump through to get into capital construction.

Pretty much every skill in the game is like this, though. If having to "jump through hoops" to get to a particular skill is distressing, how did you cope with training basically anything of interest before?

This post was crafted by the wormhole expert of the Goonswarm Economic Warfare Cabal, the foremost authority on Eve: Online economics and gameplay.
Phoenix Jones
Small-Arms Fire
#110 - 2014-07-16 17:13:35 UTC
CCP Greyscale wrote:
Hi everyone,

Here are some bullet points:
- Sorry for the delay in keeping up with this, we've been busy :/
- We're aware of the unhappiness being expressed here
- We don't want to have skills that are as in-practice mandatory as the old Material Efficiency skill in the Industry skillset - skills are supposed to be about specialization, not about jumping through hoops
- We are very keen to avoid doing refunds *wherever* possible, hence the desire to repurpose this skill rather than delete it (reasons: we dislike skillpoint reassignment as the act of reassignment incrementally devalues the perceived value of skillpoints accumulated over time; and deleting and refunding requires a fairly substantial investment to write the necessary DB scripts, run upgrade tests and correct any errors, and time we can reduce for work on things we don't want to do allows us to spend more time on work on things we do want to do; this is an imperfect statement of our position as I'm writing it on the fly to give you an approximate idea of *why* we don't want to do a refund here, but the statement that we don't want to do a refund *is* essentially perfect and out of scope for discussion in this thread, much as you may unfortunately disagree with it.)
- We are in any case too close to the release to implement a refund at this time, and that is a non-disputable statement of fact precluding us from doing so even if we wanted to (which we don't)
- We are aware that you're are unhappy with how far the new skill is moving from its original value proposition, and we'll have another look at it this week. *If* we decide to make changes, they may not be viable for the initial Crius release, but would be unlikely to trail by more than a week or two
- We're not delaying the release for this issue; I assume everyone understands that but it's always better to be explicit :)


Then don't refund it, reimburse it. Hand out skillpoints equal to the persons current material efficiency level as unallocated skill, but don't erase it from the char sheet. Keeps the skill, and the person doesn't feel like they got slapped in the face

Yaay!!!!
asteroidjas
Rothschild's Sewage and Septic Sucking Services
The Possum Lodge
#111 - 2014-07-16 17:14:35 UTC
Luscius Uta wrote:
This is like changing Rapid firing or Surgical Strike to give 1% bonus to Turret Falloff per level Sad

This. Sooo this.

Also, i would probly be more okay with this change if it didn't also mean that all items will increase by 25% in material costs (atleast), on top of it only saving 72 minutes a day, trained to lvl 5. Only saving 14 minutes a day more than it would at lvl 4. (at a cost of how long to train it to 5?)

How many industrialists actually keep all their lines running 23/7...? I know i sure don't. If this was changed to a more substantial bonus, then maybe i could get behind it.

And about 'specializing" through skills. How exactly does this accomplish that? Explain please. How is one more "specialized" by having trained this skill from 2% to 3%?
Thoren Vaille
American Federation of Musicians Local 148-462
#112 - 2014-07-16 17:17:01 UTC
Actually, I'd prefer it if this skill ended up integrated into recruiting better manufacturing teams or reducing costs. Obviously, time is probably the least efficient way to convert SP into benefit in this case.

The problem for the most part, I think, is that the time invested in training ME5 doesn't really correlate to a 5% reduction in build time. So why not a 5% reduction in job cost? That solves two problems: there is no longer a week-long barrier to entry in manufacturing and the new skill would give you added leverage to NOT move your production from a system that suddenly has gotten quite a bit more active and expensive because the 5% reduction in job cost offsets some of the increase in team/slot cost.

Or you could make it so that people with the higher levels of the skill can recruit better teams or the same teams at lower cost. In any case, with all the emphasis on teams and slots, why not work it into one of those mechanics?
Querns
Science and Trade Institute
Caldari State
#113 - 2014-07-16 17:17:20 UTC
asteroidjas wrote:
Luscius Uta wrote:
This is like changing Rapid firing or Surgical Strike to give 1% bonus to Turret Falloff per level Sad

This. Sooo this.

Also, i would probly be more okay with this change if it didn't also mean that all items will increase by 25% in material costs (atleast), on top of it only saving 72 minutes a day, trained to lvl 5.

The benefit currently being conferred by this skill is being "baked in" to the existing blueprints. Post-Crius, it will be as if everyone already had five ranks in the current implementation of the skill without having to train it.

This post was crafted by the wormhole expert of the Goonswarm Economic Warfare Cabal, the foremost authority on Eve: Online economics and gameplay.
Chris Winter
Bene Gesserit ChapterHouse
The Curatores Veritatis Auxiliary
#114 - 2014-07-16 17:20:07 UTC
Was the manufacturing rebalance done by a completely different team than the refining/reprocessing rebalance?

For the manufacturing rebalance, it's all "it's too hard to be competitive and we're reducing the barrier for entry."

For the reprocessing rebalance, it's all "it's too easy to be competitive and we're INCREASING the barrier for entry."

I'm fairly certain that the train to get perfect refining in highsec was longer than the train to get no-waste manufacturing, but now manufacturing has a 0-day train to be competitive and refining has a 6-month train. How does this make sense?

EVE is hard and should stay that way. It's perfectly fine for there to be skills that are very beneficial, if not required, to have at 5 in order to compete, as CCP is proving with the reprocessing changes.

Honestly, just leave the ME skill as-is. I'm fine with that solution too.
Poison Ivy Rorschach
The Surfin Dead
#115 - 2014-07-16 17:22:01 UTC  |  Edited by: Poison Ivy Rorschach
CCP Greyscale wrote:
Hi everyone,


- We are aware that you're are unhappy with how far the new skill is moving from its original value proposition, and we'll have another look at it this week. *If* we decide to make changes, they may not be viable for the initial Crius release, but would be unlikely to trail by more than a week or two
- We're not delaying the release for this issue; I assume everyone understands that but it's always better to be explicit :)


I am mostly bothered by the fact it's going from something I would train for (and had to at the time) to something that's only useful to dedicated no-lifers who watch their industry jobs all day.

If it was changed to a skill that saved me 1% mats per level or if it added 1 to the max number of jobs per level, I'd be much more OK with the change. I know 5% sounds big but let's face it; the cost of lowly cruisers has more than doubled in the last couple of years and insurance has become all but worthless since it doesn't adjust upwards as the cost of ships climbs.
Retar Aveymone
GoonWaffe
Goonswarm Federation
#116 - 2014-07-16 17:22:52 UTC
Ripard Teg wrote:
CCP Greyscale wrote:
- We don't want to have skills that are as in-practice mandatory as the old Material Efficiency skill in the Industry skillset - skills are supposed to be about specialization, not about jumping through hoops


CCP Greyscale wrote:
- We are aware that you're are unhappy with how far the new skill is moving from its original value proposition...


These two statements are fundamentally incompatible. You want people to have to choose specializations... then you're choosing one of the specializations for us... so that you don't have to do a SP refund. That's just forcing players through a hoop whether we want to go through it or not.

no they're not

skills are about specialization, not jumping through hoops. an old hoop was changed to a specialization in the area its hoop used to be in. this is entirely compatable with "hoops are dumb kill them" and there's absolutely no fundamental incompatability here whatsoever
Sven Viko VIkolander
In space we are briefly free
#117 - 2014-07-16 17:45:14 UTC
The amount of pressure against making the ME skill useful but no longer a sine qua non of even reasonably doing industry strikes me as a common problem in EVE where veteran players who have vested interests resist changes that will benefit new players. Just like the resistances to having standings for placing a POS, these sorts of barriers keep new players from having a fighting chance at making profit or just not wasting their time, while veteran players are not actually losing anything because they benefited for years from having already jumped through these hoops.

I don't personally see a lot to complain about.
Wolf Kraft
Underground Smellroad
#118 - 2014-07-16 17:50:29 UTC
mynnna wrote:
5% faster building is 5% more isk per time, 5% faster that you can pivot and make something else based on changing market conditions.


Mynna, your example (and this skill) are functionally useless because of all the other changes coming in Crius. There is very little point in having a 5% time reduction because you will literally be able to set up as many jobs as you want (though I'm sure there is a technical/code limit somewhere) in a single station since the production/research line limit is being removed from the game. Capital producers may enjoy getting products out marginally faster, but everyone else likely won't notice the difference.

However, I fully agree that the skill, in its current iteration, needs to be changed. Unfortunately, the proposed change is far from being a proper specialization skill that CCP is hoping for.
Claudius Dethahal
Amarrians for Tax Reform-Kador
#119 - 2014-07-16 17:55:03 UTC
Sven Viko VIkolander wrote:
The amount of pressure against making the ME skill useful but no longer a sine qua non of even reasonably doing industry strikes me as a common problem in EVE where veteran players who have vested interests resist changes that will benefit new players. Just like the resistances to having standings for placing a POS, these sorts of barriers keep new players from having a fighting chance at making profit or just not wasting their time, while veteran players are not actually losing anything because they benefited for years from having already jumped through these hoops.

I don't personally see a lot to complain about.


Why don't we remove prequisites across the board and only have skills offer bonuses to performance. That would help the new players out as much or more (since it would let them specialize into something very quickly).
Querns
Science and Trade Institute
Caldari State
#120 - 2014-07-16 18:02:30 UTC
Wolf Kraft wrote:
mynnna wrote:
5% faster building is 5% more isk per time, 5% faster that you can pivot and make something else based on changing market conditions.


Mynna, your example (and this skill) are functionally useless because of all the other changes coming in Crius. There is very little point in having a 5% time reduction because you will literally be able to set up as many jobs as you want (though I'm sure there is a technical/code limit somewhere) in a single station since the production/research line limit is being removed from the game. Capital producers may enjoy getting products out marginally faster, but everyone else likely won't notice the difference.

However, I fully agree that the skill, in its current iteration, needs to be changed. Unfortunately, the proposed change is far from being a proper specialization skill that CCP is hoping for.

I suppose, in your world, you have an unlimited number of characters.

The number of concurrent jobs per station is being removed, but the number of concurrent jobs a single character can run is still limited to 11. Reducing the time that a job takes allows you to cycle your ISK through the market that much faster.

This post was crafted by the wormhole expert of the Goonswarm Economic Warfare Cabal, the foremost authority on Eve: Online economics and gameplay.