Science & Industry

Currently, radar sites are among the least profitable out there.

One of the big contributors to this is the fact that Data Interfaces do not go away once they are built short of getting them
blown up, and once most industrialists have their interface tucked nicely away in a station, it then sits there... forever.

This has caused a huge price drop over time for those very same interfaces, making low and null sec Radar sites not much better than the HiSec ones.

What if the devs made these interfaces slowly decay, say somewhere in the neighborhood of 100-500 invent attempts before they would need to be replaced? This would generate a steady demand for replacement interfaces, increasing the value of the interface blueprints that seem to be in just about every 0.0 Radar site in New Eden, but rarely, if ever found in HiSec.

Just a thought!

Make them like R.A.M. stuff but a few hundred uses till they break, and cut there material need down to 20% of what it is now. I would like to some day use the 150 B.P.C. of them I have lying around. They drop so much in low I can't see the prices going up on T2 that much once people remember to pick the stuff up and not just leave it in the site.


Or just make it Easer to sell the B.P.C.'s on the market.



Or just up the T2 rig B.P.C. drops.


Or the up the salvage a lot.

I'd love them to remove RAM as well, it seems pointless, you already have a decent enough system in place with Decryptors and Datacores

I'm not sure i like the idea of items that degrade with use / get damage outside of combat anyway.

edit - if you must, create new T2 decryptors that have a limited number of uses/runs, that should start to use the stockpile of t1 decryptors more effectively

You seem to be missing the point: Data Interfaces rarely leave the game once built. Ships get blown up, decryptors and Datacores get used up, even RAMs slowly decay. Ice gets turned into fuel, and is then consumed. PI built items turn into objects that can and are destroyed or consumed.

How many things in this game have the true longevity of a Data Interface? And this is the problem. The excessively low consumption rate of Data Interfaces (occassionally one get destroyed while the owner is moving to a new base of operations), combined with a steady inflow of blueprints and materials to make them pretty much guarantees a steady decline in value.

Without consumption, there is no reason to build new. Adding a new, near permanent item to the game will cause the same issue all over again. It will be great for about the first 4-6 months, then it will become ok for the next 6 months, then it will become a take-it-or-leave-it item for the next 6-12 months, and after that it will be near worthless. I would rather have something that is already in the game fixed for balance than add a new item. As for the folks worried about how much making Data interfaces decay will affect prices of T2 items: assuming an average price of 50mil for the Interface, a 1% decay of the Interface per invent task, and an average 50% success rate for invention, each blueprint will cost about an extra million to make. For a 10run module bpc, it will increase the cost of your average T2 module about 100k isk or so. That extra cost, provided you are savvy, will be passed on to your customers.

When I saw "Even RAMs slowly decay" I could tell you have never been involved in T2 manufacturing. I go through hundreds of the stupid things every week. When one of my RAM stacks gets below 200, have Alt #3 build me another thousand. It is just one of the hassles of T2 production that doesn't add to the gameplay experience.

Highlight your last line. Yes, any additional costs I incurr would be passed on to my customers. Therefore, your proposal would add work for me, and additional complexity to an already convoluted T2 manufacturing process. This, for a net 0 profit for myself. Actually, I would expect my profits to go down. If there was 100k added to the cost of every T2 item, that makes meta 3 and meta 4 items more cost-competitive. More people choosing meta items means less demand for T2 items means lower profits. So you see why inventors knee-jerk reaction is "NO!"

Also, I don't think you have a grasp on the scale of your "tweak." I am a very small time inventor. I have a medium POS and four alts who invent and build things for me. They aren't even fully utilized because I don't have enough time to maximize their efficiency. Rather, I just log on for half an hour twice a day to get them to do something to pay my bills. At a 1% decay rate, I would be going through 3 or 4 data interfaces every week. That is just me.

With your numbers above: 1% decay rate, 50% success rate for a 10 run BPC, then one data interface would be required for every 500 T2 modules manufactured. I would like to see some numbers on how many T2 modules are manufactured from invented BPCs every week. Radar sites would need to provide approximately that many data interfaces every week, or the prices of these things will skyrocket. If there is a game-wide shortage of data interfaces, invention would completely stop. We would be back to the days of 20M isk Cap Recharger IIs and 500M isk Hulks.

So why take the chance of that happening? I understand having non-consumable items drop is a bad thing. Why not take the data interfaces out of invention completely? Stop them from dropping at all. Replace them in all the loot tables with something that is consumable and worth more. The ones that exist in game now become collector items like the limited edition giveaway shuttles. They gather dust in hangars and nobody thinks about them.

Wouldn't that make RADAR sites more profitable without the chance of breaking invention completely?