EVE General Discussion

Yes, they do. We had a straight-up trade-off: we could make the blueprint economy more stable in the long run, and nerf everyone's blueprints in the process to varying degrees, or we could accept we're giving a lot of people a leg up but ensure that people are generally getting a good deal in the short term. Our general tendency is towards the longer-term play, but in this instance we were already making seismic changes to industry gameplay, and we were concerned that a straight-up blueprint stats nerf would cause enough additional negative sentiment to discourage large numbers of industrialists and prevent the feature as a whole gaining momentum out of the gate, which could have significant negative consequences for anyone who likes to buy things. We don't like doing short-term-oriented changes but in this case the risk of "damn the torpedoes" was that they might actually sink us.

So you are artificially creating inflation, forcing consumers to grind more ISK in order to pay for stuff and devaluing ISK in the process... and all that is accomplished not with player actions, but with bad balancing of the new game mechanics. I'm not saying there shouldn't be taxes, I'm saying that there shouldn't be insane taxes of hundreds of millions of ISK just to research a blueprint (and this is measured in an uncontested/empty system - these are minimal prices... average prices are measured in billions for a single blueprint). It looks and feels like Incarna has been zombified.

Another thing worth mentioning is a perfect combo of significant research time increase (for capitals it's measured in months) and significant copy time decrease, which tremendously helps players (or entities) with collections of already researched blueprints over players who are starting to venture into industry. It would be interesting to see some statistics of which entities hold the most of researched (especially capital) BPOs, because I smell favoritism.

Basically, with this expansion you have revived three of the biggest mistakes you made in the past:

1. Prices utterly disconnected with reality
2. T2 BPO fiasco... What? Are you going to pull the old "Buy it from the market" mumbo-jumbo for researched BPOs now? Aren't players supposed to discover what game has to offer in a natural way - by buying the BPOs from NPCs like we did for the last decade and actually researching them without being heavily penalized and investing months more in research than the current BPO holders? And all that happens while the current researched BPO holders can print copies faster than ever.
3. Potential player favoritism, but that one should hang in the air without being confirmed until you publish the actual statistics. It sure looks like favoritism.

I'm not saying that the new system is inherently bad, I'm saying that you failed miserably in the balancing department.

Yes, they do. We had a straight-up trade-off: we could make the blueprint economy more stable in the long run, and nerf everyone's blueprints in the process to varying degrees, or we could accept we're giving a lot of people a leg up but ensure that people are generally getting a good deal in the short term. Our general tendency is towards the longer-term play, but in this instance we were already making seismic changes to industry gameplay, and we were concerned that a straight-up blueprint stats nerf would cause enough additional negative sentiment to discourage large numbers of industrialists and prevent the feature as a whole gaining momentum out of the gate, which could have significant negative consequences for anyone who likes to buy things. We don't like doing short-term-oriented changes but in this case the risk of "damn the torpedoes" was that they might actually sink us.

Did you at least SAVE the pre conversion BPO information somewhere, so that you can at some point when you feel more commfortable with that come back and convert those BPOs to something they SHOULD be?

And what “should” they be?

Oh, and how has this change “poisoned the BPO market for YEARS”?

So not the actual BPO market, but a rather minute subset, and by “for YEARS” he means “for a couple of months” (which isn't that much different from before).

As for the competition (and I'll grant you that the the market hasn't adjusted its prices fully yet so the numbers may change over time) the industry interface currently estimates a build cost of, say, an unresearched Archon without any kind of facility bonuses to ~1.2bn… which is obviously a lot more than the lowest sell price on EVE Central of 1.4bnohwait.

Yes, they do. We had a straight-up trade-off: we could make the blueprint economy more stable in the long run, and nerf everyone's blueprints in the process to varying degrees, or we could accept we're giving a lot of people a leg up but ensure that people are generally getting a good deal in the short term. Our general tendency is towards the longer-term play, but in this instance we were already making seismic changes to industry gameplay, and we were concerned that a straight-up blueprint stats nerf would cause enough additional negative sentiment to discourage large numbers of industrialists and prevent the feature as a whole gaining momentum out of the gate, which could have significant negative consequences for anyone who likes to buy things. We don't like doing short-term-oriented changes but in this case the risk of "damn the torpedoes" was that they might actually sink us.



Yes, and this was another big tension throughout development. We have been trying to make industry more fulfilling by increasing the number of decisions that are made, but we're still waiting to see how many people want their industry to be fulfilling vs just want to make low-mental-effort money for various reasons. The hope is that, as the system starts to really pick up and run, people figure out where the optimizations are and we fine-tune a few things, a strong core of industrially-minded players find the new status quo keeps them strongly engaged and creates an interesting landscape for everyone else to play in, industrialist or otherwise. If it doesn't work out, we'll need to reassess.

There is also, though, a degree to which this is representative of one of the fundamental driving forces of EVE: we know that players know that the optimal setup requires perfect stability, and we try really hard to ensure that stability can never quite be achieved, because at that point you've won and the game is essentially over. I'd also like to protest that the rules of the system are entirely static: what's changing is the landscape, which is entirely driven by the action of other players, and to us that's the absolute heart of "the sandbox" in a multiplayer context. It's not interesting because you're allowed to go off and play in your own corner without regard for anyone else, it's interesting because the actions of other players keep throwing up interesting new challenges, be that through direct PvP combat or extremely indirect market dynamics. A static game gets soved and a solved game has no longevity.

Have you checked to see if you really need that large a POS?

Same here. Have you checked to see what benefits you gain from pushing the really high levels?

It's not really a guess. It's how long it takes to fully research one of those BPOs (and then we really need to discuss whether that last single percent is worth it… especially on these low-n component blueprints).

Same here: it's not really anecdotal. It's what the in-game mechanisms and the market export data reports. As for making bank, the point is that if these are the margin you see with an unresearched BPO and no bonuses, it won't take long to earn back the research cost, which really casts some doubt on the claim that it wouldn't be worth it.

But sure, a carrier might not be the best example — they have far too many component requirements that are so low that research hardly makes any difference to begin with.