Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Let's examine effort vs rewards for a moment here.
Adding more salvage increases the supply and reduces the price it demands which makes salvaging less worth the time. Also there are some suggestions for adding the ability to salvage stuff that can be turned into minerals. Not only would value be limited by the existing mineral market, but adding another source of minerals would harm the mining industry as well, and it doesn't need any more competition. Beyond that, though is the concept of resource sinks. Since minerals are constantly being generated out of nowhere and added to EvE, the supply increases, if those minerals aren't removed somehow the increase continues indefinitely which devalues minerals making mining less viable. Currently, ship destruction acts as a resource sink since the materials used to create this ships, and any of the modules that were destroyed rather than looted, is gone from the game so the growth of the mineral pool is reduced limiting inflation. Letting those minerals be recovered from destroyed ships reduces the sink and increases the growth of the amount of available minerals which would devalue minerals and harm mining as well as reduce the benefit the change would have had to salvaging in the first place.

The second issue is ease and depth. Right not salvaging has no depth. There are only two skills that directly cover salvaging (salvaging and salvage drones) and a couple of other useful skills (ORE industrial, for the noctis and science for tractor beams, both useful but not that required) and access to wrecks is straightforward and turning salvage into a finished product doesn't involve many steps. Beyond that, yield is fixed, and skills only reduce time spent. Contrast that with mining where there is a succession of skills that let you use better ships and equipment that raises your yield, and the fact you have to refine ore to turn into materials before you can manufacture. Similarly, while hacking is similarly low depth on its own, to gain access to those sites you need to train scanning skills to find hacking sites while salvaging happens anywhere ships are blown up; not only don't you have to look for wrecks, you really can't.


First of all, I would love to be able to probe out of wrecks. If enough wrecks are around, a wreck field signature should be created to be probed out (to prevent this from letting you easily find and gank missioners, deadspace should prevent site formation), and maybe randomly spawned sites would be nice as well; that way you can actually roam around and find stuff to salvage. I should note that would increase the amount of salvage available which could be detrimental to the market somewhat, but hopefully it could be balanced by the fact that it takes more effort, so dedicated salvagers can still get more income than those who just salvage as they go. More importantly, though, it makes it more meaningful to add variations.

Regarding the variations, we could possibly use some more skills to allow us to actually alter the yield of salvaging, so a skilled salvager can make more ISK than somone with just a few SP invested. Also, I wouldn't be completely adverse to skills that let you get compounds (refinable to minerals), and/or recover modules that weren't initially lootable, but the impact would need to be monitored extremely closely to avoid reducing the mineral sink too much, and it should be a higher level skill for professional salvagers. I think though, it would be much better to add more, new products. First of all, it might not be a bad idea to be able to turn salvage into components and use those to manufacture rigs, then, similar to mining, you can either sell the raw materials for a little bit of money, or invest in a bit more skillpoints and time to turn them into usable materialsto sell or manufacture with for a bit more profit. Second, though I think being able to do more with the materials would be great. My thought is that we should be able to manufacture meta modules rather than just plain T1, but to do so would require salvaged materials. It would have several benefits; first it would add value to salvage as meta modules are in high demand, second if T1 modules are also a required ingredient it would increase a demand for those as well, and both things would help the viability of manufacturing modules. Granted it would harm the viability of income from drops. Beyond that they could even add meta T2 modules which we don't have now, again adding some value, but it would also help T2 in general if there's a few variants, as it adds fitting options.

Recovering materials for the ew stuff would also add a spot for new subskills which also helps increase depth and breadth of salvaging.

The current state of salvaging, only produces rigs, you can reprocess looted mods for minerals but scrap metal is as good as valueless.
If you could reprocess destroyed ships for minerals then it would effect the mining industry because it would provide an alternate source. It might spark an outcry but what do they think you would be doing if you were not salvaging, you could be out mining which would provide competition to their industry so I don't think it is such a major shake up. From the looks of things the ground work for having extra salvaging activity has already been put in place, scrap metal processing skill, metal scraps, junk sites ect..