Renting slots from players is something that came up in a forum thread I was keeping an eye on. And it’s an interesting one. The CSM has heard about it, but I thought I’d bring it to a wider audience, as it was a trifle off topic for the thread it was in. The person who brought it up has since posted a blog post on it. Go have a read. I’m not stealing the idea, just posting my own views on it. 🙂

Right now, a lot of industry, in Highsec, happens in NPC owned stations, in NPC owned slots. Some of us do production in POS, but that’s generally because we need slots which are not easily available. such as copy slots, and ME research slots. Anything other than those tend to be just because we’ve got space in the POS to stick things.

NPC services are, while a minor isk sink, not something I’m a major fan of. What is being suggested is:

The Pitch

Players/Corporations can make slots at their POS available for Public use, accessed through the normal station services. Materials will be moved back and forth by Magical Fairies. Well, by NPCs who you don’t see.

Prices will be set by the owners of the POS, with a little fee on top for NPC services to get the things back and forth.

Things to consider

There are a few things which need thought about. I’ll cover each in turn below.

• What happens when a POS array with jobs is taken down/offlined/blown up.
• Will people put up enough slots.
• Griefing Potential
• What speed do the slots run at

The slot goes away, while in use:

Blown up, taken down, offlined for more than X hours: The job is cancelled, and the materials are lost.  I’ll cover something else to happen in the Griefing section.

Offlined for less than X hours (over the entire course of the job): The job is delayed for that long.

Numbers of slots:

I don’t know about you, but I certainly would rent out slots, if I had spares; and the price should level out to something barely profitable, due to the invisible hand. I wouldn’t get rid of /all/ npc slots, initially. But I’d probably increase the price for them, so PC slots are better to use. There are 60,000 odd manufacturing slots in Highsec. That’s not such a good thing.

Griefing potential:

There is certainly potential. But there are ways to mitigate it, without entirely eliminating it. The main ones are:

1. Add an uptime counter and a jobs run counter for the slot, reset on offlining. So someone can tell if it’s being bounced up and down.
2. Add an escrow fees. You get paid when the job completes.
3. Add a penalty escrow, based on the number of slots. So if jobs are cancelled by your actions, the people who installed them gets /something/ back. Have the escrow level displayed as well.

At that point, people have a way to determine if a slot is ‘trustworthy’ and they may pay more for that. Or cheap out, and risk having it lost.

Speed

I figure slots should run at the reduced speed. Possibly with a small bump on it for the delivery of materials to and from the stations. 30 minutes or so.

Conclusion

And of course, all of this should also work with Outposts. putting things into player hands is a good thing, as far as I’m concerned. I’d prefer for it to be possible to break POS away from moons by the time this happens. Allows things to scale better. Deep space manufacturing ftw 🙂

Looks like we’re getting new and changed decryptors in Odyssey, along with a rationalized naming scheme. The first is going to be interesting for how they shake out price wise, and what they do to the marketplace. The second only makes sense. Having to look up ‘which one does what’ is a pain in the ass. Memorizing that kind of thing doesn’t make you better. Just better at memorizing.

The rationalization

All the decryptors now share a naming scheme. it’s [‘optimized’] + ‘racial name’ + ‘decryptor type’. The racial type matches that of the interfaces. So Occult for Amarr, Esoteric for Caldari, Incognito for Gallente and Cryptic for Minmatar. The decryptor are shared across all of them. And 2 have an optimized version which has slightly different stats.

The Decryptors

• Accelerant: 120%, +1 run, +2 ME, +5 PE
• Attainment: 180%, +4 runs, -1 ME +2 PE
• Optimized Attainment. 190%, +2 runs, +1 ME, -1 PE
• Augmentation: 60%, +9 runs, -2 ME, +1 PE
• Optimized Augmentation: 90%, +7 runs, +2 ME
• Parity: 150%, +3 runs, +1 ME (I think. no + against it) -1 PE
• Process: 110%, +3 ME, +3 PE (updated)
• Symmetry: 100%, +2 runs, +1 ME, +4 PE

The parity one I’ll want to double check, as it’s showing ‘1’ for the ME modifier. All the others are showing + or – before the number.

Also, right now, invention appears to be bugged, with the interface being consumed. I’ve submitted a bug for it. Sorted

The optimized versions are marked as ‘rare and valuable’ in the description, so I suspect the drop rate will be a lot lower. Probably decent true sec null only. They are significantly better, after all.

Process will be interesting to see as well. Hitting ME 0 is damn good for some runs. Right now, this decryptor puts you at -1 -1, rather than the 0 -1 it will in Odyssey.  Process is back the way it was.

First off, I’ll reference this post which removes a lot of the concerns which this raised. If you’re fully up on what’s going on, skip ahead to the suggestions I have made below. This means you, CCP <insert name here>.

The short version is: If you’re not doing anything else that’s banned, cache scraping will not have any action taken against it. This does a lot to relieve my concerns, but doesn’t entirely remove them.

For a little background information (skip ahead if you know what cache scraping is and what does it): Cache scraping is what software does, to get data from the eve client’s local cache, to do something with. It doesn’t alter any of the Eve files, but it does read them. This is commonly used to extract market data, which is then often uploaded to sites like Eve-Central, and the EMDR service. The cache scraper that’s probably the most used, is Evemon. It has a market cache uploader built into it, and has done for a fair time. This feeds to EMDR, eve central, and a couple of other end points, giving those sites a holistic view of Eve’s market, albeit one which can have a fair time lag on items which are less commonly traded. It’s commonly accepted as a valuable thing, powering such things as Eve-Kill’s ISK values for kills, my own blueprint calculator’s pricing, Eveopoly’s trade finder and so on.

The rules now state, explicitly, that this is a breach of the EULA. It’s been clarified that it’s one they won’t take action on, but still, there are at least some similarities between this and the cops not prosecuting people who go a few miles over the speed limit. Both are against the rules, and in an idea world, wouldn’t happen.

So what can be done about it. I have a few suggestions, ranging from the short-term fix, to a long-term solution.

Suggestions for CCP:

Short Term Fixes:

Take a market uploader that’s been open sourced, such as EMDU, Have a developer look over it for time bombs, and release it, without warranty, as an approved uploader. While this would cut down the volume of market data, due to a smaller number of people being willing to download/run it (Evemon users, in general, don’t know/care) it would allow for market data to flow.

Have a number of clients running at CCP, feeding EMDR with data via an uploader. Manually intensive, due to the need to restart them all each day. What gets uploaded can be controlled by the eve central request page. Then just request everyone stops.

Add an option to automatically export the market data to a directory when you look at it. At that point, the community can put together a new uploader to read that. Much like what happened before the cache reading, without all the RSI induced clicking on the export button.

Long term fixes

Introduce your own Market API. Possibly using Crest.

Feed EMDR with data yourselves, without running it through a client.

If CCP can do this, then we can do away with market uploaders, no longer skating in the grey area of cache scraping. While it’s said it won’t be enforced, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth to do so when it’s explicitly against the rules.

The /main/ thing that CCP should take away from this is: be careful how you tell us things. Because the way it was initially written was:

Cache scraping is now a bannable offence. But we might not ban you for it.

That’s a hideous mixed message to give your customers. Especially as many of the ones it affects the most are your community of third party developers. We love this game. We put time in to make it better for everyone. Please don’t tell us that what we’re doing is wrong.

Well, I’ve done it. Thrown my hat in, for the elections for CSM 8

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=215204

And the lie?

It’s not a particularly nice hat. It’s one of those caps known as a train drivers cap. Not a big floofy one, just one which looks a bit like a baseball cap, but not so hemispherical. Similar to

Please don’t trample it anyway? It keeps the top of my head from getting sunburnt, here in sunny Scotland.

Yes, it’s a bad parody =D And there are chunks I couldn’t think how to redo.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the class of ‘115.
Upgrade your clone.
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, good clones would be it.
The long-term benefits of clone upgrades have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience…
I will dispense this advice now.

Enjoy the speed and agility of your frigates; oh never mind; you will not understand the speed and agility of your frigates until you get pointed.
But trust me, in 2 years you’ll look back at your kill reports and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fun they really could be…

You’re not as bad as you imagine.

Don’t worry about your skill plan; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to jump a carrier through a gate.
The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind.
The kind that a dev implements in a dev blog you didn’t read.

Do one thing everyday that scares you.

Fight.

Don’t be reckless with other people’s ships, don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours.

Gank.

Don’t waste your time on revenge;
Sometimes you’re ahead,
Sometimes You’re behind.
The race is long, and in the end, it’s only with yourself.

Remember the compliments you receive, forget the insults;
If you fail in this, put a bounty on them.

Keep your old kill mails, throw away your old loss mails.

Duel.

Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your Life.
The most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives, some of the most interesting 40 year olds I know still don’t.

Get plenty of ammo.

Be kind to your structure, you’ll miss it when it’s gone.

Maybe you’ll mine, maybe you won’t, maybe you’ll station trade, maybe you won’t, maybe you’ll fly a titan, maybe you’ll hit jump instead of bridge.
Whatever you do, don’t Congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either.
Your choices are half chance, so are everybody else’s.

Enjoy your ship, Use it every way you can… Don’t be afraid of it, or what other people Think of it,
It’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own…

Dance… even if you only dance in triangles.

Do the tutorials, even if you don’t remember them.

Do NOT read battle clinic, it will only make you get podded.

Get to know your CEO, you never know when they’ll be gone for good.

Be nice to your corp mates;
They are the best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.

Understand that friends come and go, but for the precious few you should hold on.
Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle because the older you get, the more you need the people you knew when you were a newb.

Live in Null Sec once, but leave before it makes you hard;
Live in high Sec once, but leave before it makes you soft.

Travel.

Accept certain inalienable truths, prices will rise, theCSM will lie, you too will get bitter, and when you do you’ll fantasize that when you were young prices were reasonable, the CSM did what they were told and newbs respected their elders.

Respect your elders.

Don’t expect anyone else to trust you.
Maybe you have a tech moon, Maybe you have a some plex; but you never know when either one might run out.

Don’t mess too much with your clone, or when you post on the forums, you’ll look dumb.

Be careful whose advice you buy, but, be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.

But trust me on the clone thing…

The first thing I want to say is:
Ugg. It’d be nice if CCP actually put all the information for reactions into the SDE.

Anyway, what with the NOTEC thing, and Mynna suggesting that people might want to do some alchemy, I thought I’d look into the numbers myself. And hence, I give you: http://www.fuzzwork.co.uk/reactions/

It’s a fairly simplistic tool, and it doesn’t do any kind of sorting. But it will give you some quick figures on ‘this might be worth running;. Bear in mind, the simple reactions need 3 silos and a simple reactor. The complex ones need 3 silos and a complex reactor. You’re going to want at least a medium POS. So that’s around 200 million per month, just to break even. http://eve.1019.net/pos/ can give you an idea of what you need. One simple reactor and 3 silos will take up a chunk of that medium POS.

I was interested to see that, if you are to believe the market could absorb it, you could make more isk just selling the platinum and technetium directly, rather than reacting it into platinum technite.