Player Features and Ideas Discussion

You're assuming that CCP would want to step in and manipulate the material requirements to keep per-unit costs the same. Honestly, I can't imagine a valid reason why they would want to do that.

Thx for the math.

My rebuttle to the 'entry level skill bar too high for people' would be first: it's about perception, not about introduction and effectiveness and a strawman argument in itself.

As an example, if you make L2 sec missions impossible to run with frigs and destroyers and need L4 skilled and Meta 4 fit cruisers to run them, then you set the entry bar higher. Adding skills for cruiser size weapons etc. to be able to run them faster and gain more from running them faster doesen't mean that it's now more difficult to start running L2s in general.

Of course the overall payout will be better for advanced players, but it does not mean lower skilled players will run them slower or not at all. It just means that in comparison they are not as effective anymore, which still doesn't block anything, just disappoints maybe some expectations. But that can already be achived by watching bombastic titan fights on youtube, downloading the game and undocking for the first time in your rookie ship

Secondly, and which would be a point I wanted to make anyway, maybe some of those skill requirements could be lowered to L4 to unlock, which means some lower skill chars could access some of the (lesser important ones to block support for multiple alts) skills for some early support (maybe not yield) benefits.

But again, 'me no PI yet', so treat with greatness of mind

There is a lot that needs to be done to PI long before more skills are added. That being said, more skills would be nice.

More planets, yep I can see this as a thing, and would certainly help, however in doing this, your also going to decrease the price of PI products pretty heavily, if everyone who does PI was able to do another 5 planets, then this could be an issue. Again with better fitting, the more you can do on the planet, then easier it is to make products, thus devaluing things overall. Basically you would train a lot of skills, and do a lot more work, to get the same net result.

So, if your looking at PI skills to add, we really want something that makes management a lot more simple, a lot more easy, but without majorly boosting the quantity of end product.

Remote POCO management for example, would be amazing, having it so you can empty a planet to the POCO remotely, each skill level boosting the range until you get to region wide. This is something that would be amazingly helpful, and potentially a huge improvement to PI. Especially if this skill allowed you to do POCO related stuff via station.

A feature/skill that allows you to see how heavily an area of a planet is being harvested, this could be skill related, or something they could add to PI as a whole, allowing you to pick better places on the planet to mine.

Other things that would help so damn much, would simply be a better PI interface, rather than having to zoom into planets to see what is going on, maybe even allowing us to restart ECUs. Speaking of ECUs, can we please get them to vary in colour. Having more than 1 on a planet and you cannot tell which pins are which!

There has to be a little less clicking involved also. I would suggest two changes.

1) reset all extractors. 2 clicks, all are reset on all planets. Usually we are not moving heads back and forth every day, but once a week or so. So a mass reset all extraction for all planets should be an option. Rightclick planet in PI window , click (reset all extractors on all planets), click yes

2) we should no longer need to be in system to launch materials to a poco. Just click on launch pad, launch to poco. Doesn't matter where we are

I think 6 planets per character is pretty fair (and honestly the most I can keep up with) so I wouldn't hold my breath for that one.

However it'd be nice to see some skills like the ones you mentioned which give you a bit of an edge on powergrid. I always thought a skill which could offload some PG usage to your CPU would be handy, since I practically never see the CPU get close to full.

And then, anything to make links less of a PITA would be much appreciated. A skill to increase extractor radius wouldn't go amiss either.

This would be great, tho I think technically limited, this would be due to every planet being a different size, sometimes you can get the pins super close, other times not so much.

It's passive until you try to move it...and you need to be in losec at least for decent profitability. Risk and reward works fine with pi right now for me.

PI Is really only semi passive. Unlike truly passive sources, like Research Agents, you can't accumulate PI forever intil you decide to spend it. Eventually the storage fills up or the raw materials run out, so it does require periodic minding, and as my math illustrates, the profit margins don't scale through the roof just because you add more planets.