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Sounds like you should make friends with some Russians to strike at them while you sleep :)

I don't think there are Russians at the entrance to his wormhole - which sums up the division in these posts. CCP thining Alliances and a large portion of the player base thinking small corp & individual.

This update along with other this year are great for big entities but crap on solo and small corp play.

Your own mental hurdle seems to be that for some people, owning a fancy space factory is the entire point. As a player, I would like to own a small factory of my own. CCP however made this obnoxiously hard, since I'd need more friends who play EVE first and soon my entire free time would be eaten up by organizing an entire industrial corporation when all I wanted was a fancy space factory.

Now you could argue I could still own one, just not a productive one, but producing with a huge loss isn't fun either. Besides, using other peoples ECs runs into the problem of finding the right one for what you want to do. Industrial players can be flexible, but no-one is probably keen on becoming a nomad to always be where the EC for your next project is located.

If you can even find the right one in the first place.

Edit:

On the break-even point for fuel costs, you are exactly right! It's just until now, the ceiling for fuel costs was a moderate 10 blocks per hour for a small POS-tower. With the same functionality, it's now 45 per hour! Quite the difference. Together with higher base costs to get at least a medium EC and modules and rigs in the first place, a lot of players are now basically priced out of their playstyle.

My point was, forcing players to stop playing is a bad thing for a MMO. So having those higher costs for starting up is a bad thing. Sure, you can stay in stations or use other people's ECs, but for many, that's not the same thing as having your own center of operations.

These are the same folks who go to the hardware store and buy power tools that collect dust in their garage because, even though they haven't actually used a tool since high school shop class, they just really want a table saw, right?



Actually, you could still quite easily own a productive one - you'll just have to make some concessions. Do you need both labs and a factory in a single structure? Sure, you can have it right now and it all costs the same, but do you really NEED one? Could you not outsource any of those activities at all?

There's no doubt that it's a departure from the status quo, but pretending like it's some insurmountable hurdle is utterly insipid.

There are some people who want to buy a table saw and put it in the garden shed.

This is not being able to buy the table saw unless you also have a workshop, warehouse and administration building even tho the one in the garden shed still works

Something to consider. It's really only 15. You don't *need* to do invention and research at your manufacturing EC. In fact, you could argue it is wildly cost-prohibitive to think you need to pay 15 block/mo to invent when you can do it far far cheaper at an NPC station with total safety. Same for research. Yes, you lose a significant time bonus but it would seem that in your example of the small/solo producer, that can mostly be absorbed/managed in exchange for far less cost to run the EC making it very comparable to a small POS.

OK, let's go outside of HighSec for a moment, where there aren't tons of NPC-stations and public ECs available at every corner. Let's say you want to build T3-ships even. No go read what Iowa Banshee said

No, the table saw needs 15. The table saw, MIG welder, drill press, router, power washer, sand blaster, and bandsaw, in aggregate, cost 45, and the guy in question could actually get by with a hand saw and a tape measure...

...but he WANTS the toys.

I've calculated this through with only 15 blocks per hour, by the way. As long as you can't amortize the fuel costs, you're still building everything with a huge loss. Except for T3-production! T3-production doesn't have to compete with NPC-stations, therefore there is no way to just go to a station and save money.

For every small-scale industrialist with a working calculator, going into T3-production will make sense, since the fuel cost is unavoidable anyway.

My main problem is with T1- and T2-production. So to advance your analogy, you notice how the table saw can saw one type of table very, very well but is absolute utter dreck at every other kind of table. So you resign yourself to use your table saw with that one type of table forever...

Also I want to point out how messed up it is to complain about people wanting shiny toys in a video game. A game's purpose is to have fun and to have shiny toys to have fun with. "You don't need it!" is only technically right: We don't need shiny toys. We don't need games. We don't need EVE.

I suggest to CCP to avoid a marketing strategy in this vein, though.

"Eve might not be your game either"

I always admire this line of thought.

"You may be veterans, and you might be experienced, and you might be any number of other things, but because you don't like this idea, Eve is not your game."

Personally, I think that if you've been playing Eve for longer than few months, Eve probably is your game, and that perhaps it's not unreasonable to speak up in your area.

(Or perhaps I'm not stupid enough to not play the trend through to its conclusions: the more people you expel as "not fit for Eve", the less people you get to play with. In the end, you end up with one guy in his own little world, celebrating a game that's perfect for him, but no-one else).