Monthly Archives: November 2013

Retooling Industry in EVE. Blue Sky

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Industry in EVE needs work. It’s not been touched, save for the addition of new things to make, in quite a while. When people talk about it, they tend to talk about things like changes to the UI, to make it simpler to put in jobs in batches, or adding a queue. What I’m going to suggest here is more involved than that. It’s not a ‘This should happen’ piece, but more a discussion point, to see if it sparks any ideas with people.

Industry in EVE, except for big multistage projects like capitals, can be very reactive to market shifts. It’d be interesting to introduce something which interferes with this. Which promotes longer term planning. The easiest, and simplest, way to do this is to introduce a retooling delay. So to install a job, you’re going to have to wait a little time for the facility to get ready to produce your things.

You could probably get away with having the ability to ‘prototype’ a thing, reducing the retooling delay, for an increased cost and time per unit. So if you just want one thing, you can get it made custom, for double the cost of mass production, but quicker.

It would be wise have a cost involved with the retooling as well. Materials, rather than ISK. Another use for R.A.M. and some PI things perhaps.

This would favour long runs, over short ones.

It would probably be worthwhile to change the process to get away from the ‘Put a job in to cook, come back a week later and hit deliver’, and move to the ‘set up the production line, make sure it’s kept fed, and you can retrieve the product when you want’ that you have with PI. You can always leave it for a long time, but you don’t need to. beneficial from a cash-flow perspective, as you don’t need to tie up your isk for a very long run.

This would impact of the use of low run BPCs. So you’d use those as a material in the production line. As long as you can keep it fed with new BPCs, you can keep it running. Run out, and the line comes to a halt, waiting for you to reload it.

We’d have to move to personal production facilities, as station lines would become clogged. With the code in place for personal structures, I don’t think that’s a major issue. Though you’d want to be able to chain facilities together. Say, a central storage facility, that nearby manufacturing facilities can pull from, at a corp level (Ideally something with a decent permissions model)

The PI model really would work quite well, as long as you could reduce everything to a drag and drop. Having to set up routes for 15 odd materials would be a pain. Being able to drag and drop multiple at a time from a storage facility would be easier.

Multipart ships could become a more complex thing, instead of the ‘make all the parts, then make the ship’ you could do ‘make the parts, and have them feed into the ship building as they’re made, requiring X of each part to get past each milestone. With each milestone taking a minimum length of time.

So, for milestone 1, you’d need X capital construction parts, and takes a minimum of 4 days.
Milestone 2 would up the requirements to an additional X capital construction parts, Y cargo bays and Z engines, and take a minimum of 5 days.
Milestone 3 would take the rest of the parts, and another 5 days.

You could just build all the parts at once, then build the ship, but then you’d be looking at the time to make the parts + 15 days. Or you could set up the lines to feed the ship build. If you’re making multiple ships at once, then you can change it to flow differently. So you have lots of lines doing capital construction parts, and not many on engines and armour.

T2 already does this in places, with the requirement of the T1 module/ship. Some T1 things could have their complexity increased.

It would be important to have ‘running a production line’ and ‘owning a production line’ being different things. Players who don’t use their own/corporate facilities have to pay the retooling cost, or a fee to keep a line inactive. Personal lines could be set up then mothballed (Materials fee after it’s been inactive for an extended period, to bring it back up to spec), or left running.

The entry fee would have to be fairly low, in terms of skill and material costs, so as not to disadvantage dedicated new players. Add a skill to cover how many lines you can manage inactive?

So, thoughts?

Navy Doctrine Fits

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There have been a few criticisms coming out of the recent live event, which saw a bunch of people leaving high sec to attack a target in NPC Nullsec. Most of them were people whining. Some were more valid, mostly focusing around in game organisation.

This post flows from one of the latter.

One of the biggest differences you’ll find between a Fleet from a large, well organised alliance, and a scratch fleet drawn together from randoms, is that the alliances fleet will contain ships which are far closer to each other in fit. You’ll have your DPS ships having similar ranges, everyone in the same kind of tank and so on.

That’s difficult to manage with a scratch fleet, as there’s no central source saying ‘Fit your ships this way.’

A side issue is: Newbies and noobs have this tendency to fit their ships badly. Newbies can break themselves from this, generally with the help of their corporations, and sometimes sites such as Battleclinic, or Eve Uni’s fittings.

However, it’s a bit difficult to send players off to look at third party sites, from the tutorials.

What would be good, in my very humble opinion, is if the Navies of New Eden (read CCP) were to publish some Doctrine fits. Tying it into ISIS would be great, though possibly a trifle excessive.

Then, when there’s a live event being run by one of the Empires, there can be a link to the doctrine fits, which may help shape the randoms into something a little more cohesive.

The moment that CCP release the SSO, I’m planning on sticking together a Doctrine storage system, for those groups without dedicated IT resources, which could be used. But something basic from CCP would be good. We don’t need a fit for every ship, but it would be nice to have the basics covered, both the T1 version, and the Navy version. Possibly some core T2 ships too.

Then you can add doctrine fits for some other things. Such as exploration fits from SOE, or fits from ORE, which fit a decent tank on the miners.

Teaching players to fit ships isn’t a simple thing. Examples go a long way.

CSM ‘Manifesto’

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The use of the word Manifesto is perhaps a trifle misleading, from how many people think of the word. There will be no promises of action, no ‘If you vote for me, you’ll get this’ statements.

The use is, however, correct. The CSM exists as a lobbying body, and as a feedback loop for CCP. As such, it’s important to understand the views of the people you’re electing to it; to make sure that their views, and your desires align along basic lines. So, here’s a post which I’ll see about updating every so often. in addition, I’d suggest having a read through my CSM posts which can go into more detail.

If you have anything you’d like to get more detail on, tweet me, or comment here and I’ll see about updating the page with an answer, or just answer in the comments if it’s really specific.

There’s no particular order to the following thoughts.

  • Carriers, Supercarriers and Titans should be able to take sub capital ships along with them when they jump, with a tonnage+ numerical limitation depending on what they are. Titan bridging should be removed. Changes the meta when it comes to power projection.
  • High sec industry slots should be replaced with a rental system for player owned slots. Ideally anonymous slots.
  • A read only CREST endpoint with caching for market data should be released
  • Local shouldn’t be an intelligence source. Should cost to maintain something in Sov null. NPC null should be standings based access to the NPC owners source.
  • Small gang warfare should have its place in Sov Nullsec warfare.
  • There should be a bigger downside to NPC corps, though with a difference between the ‘training’ npc corps, and the ones for older characters. With people being pushed from the schools after a while. Corp level negative standings, for example.
  • Corp Roles need serious work. Ideally so you can get really granular on them, but also allowing for grouping. so groups of structures having privileges granted to groups of characters. CREST would be handy for setup here.
  • There are potential ‘rewards‘ which can be given to people for out of game actions. These shouldn’t be in game objects which can be traded. And should be cosmetic. the linked post has some options. I’m leaning to the no benefit ones.
  • It should not be required to use 3rd party software to compete. So any releases with CREST will have to take that into account. Opening the industry interface or market interface completely with CREST would have you pretty much requiring it. Limits would have to be put in place which make it a little less efficient than using the client. Lower update rates. Maximum numbers of updates. That kind of thing.