Test Server Feedback

Oh, I get it! You're saying it's the Advanced Spaceship Command of the industrial field.

Over the course of those 5-7 days, you are saving a whopping ~6-8hrs. Presuming your industry jobs aren't already sitting idle for that amount of time during the week, under what circumstances is that marginally faster build time going to make or break your industry character(s)? How does a quarter of a day faster production time during a week give you an advantage that can't be easily done done by some other means? Going a step further. With that amount of time saved, for the jobs you run, you only gain 2-3 extra completed jobs over the course of a year. You could train basic industrial skills in a day on a PvP character, jump clone to your industrial station to run a single job a month for a year and receive a much greater return on the SP invested.

To touch back on your previous comment though, just because you can get products to market marginally faster doesn't mean the product itself is actually going to sell faster.

If you can't think of anything better to do, a possible compromise solution might be to lower Material Efficiency / Advanced Industry's rank to 2 and refund the difference in SP. You wouldn't even need to do it at Crius release, just announce it as a planned change for an intermediate patch or the next 6 week content patch. It would be some sort of sop for the players who trained it recently in anticipation of playing with the new industry. Still not at all worth the SP for many of them, but they get a little something.

The other possibility would be to swap out the bonuses from Industry and Advanced Industry (maybe 2% and 3% respectively), because that 1% per level is kinda insulting. That one you'd need to get into Crius immediately though.


This is the first Crius Complaint (tm) that has some real weight to it, not just the fretting of players who never dealt with change before. You may hate giving out SP refunds, but this is a case that comes closer to Learning (giant rebalance of old systems, a skill left with no real purpose or value) than anything since. It deserves consideration.

TLDR: CCP has got to fix its communication problem on this expansion.

In my opinion, CCP has lost sight of the importance of clear communication. This expansion has experienced poor communication from the very beginning with the two+ week series of staged proposals that served to only to frustrate a very large number of people. The most recent example is this 11th hour change to the Material Efficiency skill.

Yes, there have been several Dev Blogs that glossed over the upcoming expansion, but they have not touched on the root CHANGES that are being made, instead concentrating only on the shiny new interface. Don't get me wrong, I love the new UI, but the dev blogs have barely touched on these core game play changes in any detail.

A quality big change dev blog should be like this: Quality Dev Blog by CCP Fozzie in 2012. It should be posted early, updated when changes are made and always posted in the DevBlogs section where the information can be easily located.

Instead we've had:

• Yo-yoing on stacking of labs and arrays only to say "nah it's too hard." Its buried on page 12 of 18 here.


• Material Efficiency - people are right to be upset about this change. Its a radical change to a long training time skill that confers no value to 95% of those who are being stuck with it. This one wasn't even announced, just quietly slipped in and noticed by an astute player.


• Scientific Networking - This skill change makes little sense based on the devs on statements of intent. According to the devs plan, high value BPOs (battleships, capitals, etc.) are not expected to be researched in a POS lab, yet these BPOs are the very ones that most benefit from the time bonuses conferred by a POS lab. While this was communicated upfront in April, its implementation conflicts with the devs stated goal.


• Arrays/Labs/Large Towers - there's going to be a glut in this market of epic proportions, the devs realize this and yet we still have not seen a solution or even a proposal to deal with this. The devs recognize a solution is necessary as stated here.

I was around for the Learning skills reimbursement. I don't recall a single player feeling their skills were devalued by the reimbursement, there were several other small reimbursements later on and the same can be said for them. If anything, reimbursement communicates value to the players. This draconian, live-with-it attitude does not. In my opinion reimbursement is in order in this instance unless you intend to provide a meaningful benefit to the re-purposed skill. I can accept, we don't have time to fix this before next week. I get that, if so postpone the reimbursement for a later date, do what needs to be done and communicate it up front.

The rationale of "we don't want to do that" and "it's too late" is not going to go over well. It's been my observation over six+ years of playing this game that less than 10% (an uneducated guess) read the forums and even fewer read the F&I sub-forum. When the changes hit Tranquility there are going to be a lot of dumbfounded players.

I love this this game, and I miss the open communication we had as recently as a year ago. Go back to clear communication, quit hiding changes deep in one of the overly-abundant Crius threads in the Test Server sub-forum. Communicate upfront with us, stop waffling on issues and then saying, 'its too difficult so never mind' or 'live with it.' I really liked the Inferno era CCP that communicated clearly and consistently with its players, stop drifting into Incarna territory.

This is like saying: "We don't care much about what the community thinks, we are going to-do what we want to-do anyway. Maybe, but probably not, we will fix it or if we wait long enough the problem will go away" I also understand deadlines and the pressure it brings (I have an IT job). But if something is fundamentally wrong, and I would just go ahead and release it anyway.... Well lets just say my boss wouldn't be happy to say the least.

No SP refund. Their was no refunds during ship balancing. HTFU*Snip* Please refrain from personal attacks. ISD Ezwal.

I agree, at least make it more substantial like 5 to 10% time reduction per level so that we end up with NPC station production times lower than we actually have, not higher.

Hi everyone,

We're throwing around ideas for better bonuses for this skill that we can get implemented for the initial Crius release. How does say 2%/level install cost reduction feel? It ends up being most advantageous in major industry hubs or when using teams, but new players can still compete on price by building in less busy systems.

It is of course not as powerful as the current TQ version of this skill, but the whole point of this change is that it's currently *too* powerful, so we're deliberately trying to tone it down a bit.

Tough to say without the numbers at my fingertips.

Am I close to right if I were to say:

1. The busiest hubs would see a 10-15% * price = install cost
2. Price is tied to market value and is very loosely comparable to 1.4x mat value
3. Salary for teams gets up to 10%

So a 10% reduction of the 10% increase in cost works out to ~ a 1% reduction in total cost?

Fix me if I'm wrong here. Seems very thin.

I'd say just remove the skill entirely from the game if you can't figure out what to do with it? Deciding how to repurpose the skill to appease the masses doesn't seem like a great way to go, even though you're taking tons of flak a the moment.

I'd have to say that for the SP put into the skill I'd also say that 10% total bonus is too low. I know that the skills are different, but for the base Industry skill (1x) you get a 4% per level reduction and for the Advanced Industry (3x) you get a 2% reduction per level. Doesn't quite make sense. I would say it should be at least 4% per level.