Hello everyone. We have a series of changes planned for our December release to discuss today. These changes follow up on the reductions in isotope volume and moon material volume released in Lifeblood last month.
Combined these changes work towards the following goals:
Increase the economic friction associated with capital ship deployments and jump freighter hauling
Stimulate the ice product markets which would otherwise suffer from lower starbase usage
Improve the balance of ice product consumption (increased isotope and liquid ozone consumption relative to heavy water consumption)
Easier trade of high value reacted intermediate materials for T2 production (with the goal of nullsec regions being largely self-sufficient by volume but encouraging trade of lower-volume goods)
Somewhat reducing the pain that can be caused by heavy jump drive usage and high stacked jump fatigue values
To organize the feedback I’ll split the changes into three related forum threads:
This will serve as the discussion thread for the planned changes to fuel block manufacturing requirements
The changes to fuel blocks we have planned for December are:
Doubling the amount of liquid ozone required to build all four block types (from 167 to 350 per batch)
Small tweaks to the heavy water and isotope consumption as well primarily to round off the numbers and make math easier for people (167 -> 170 water and 444 -> 450 isotopes)
The end result of this change will be liquid ozone consumption that better matches the universe-wide ozone production, and less significant bottlenecks in ice product consumption.
These changes are now on Sisi for you to try out, so I encourage everyone to take a look and let us know what you think.
Thanks.
Is the rounding really going to make things any easier? The actual consumption is going to be using ME10 BPOs in a structure that has between 1 and 6% extra ME bonus. None of this results in round numbers on the topes or HW.
If it’s not an economic reason then I’d say leave it alone.
Edit:
The LO change is pretty good IF fuel block consumption is actually down. Looking at Jita the tope prices haven’t been dropping which suggests fuel block consumption isn’t that different from where it was before. Which is odd, I’d have expected it to be down.
I’m glad to see some increased use for Liquid Ozone. It’s long been a waste product of ice mining, and increasing usage should help to buoy the rest of ice as well.
Increase the economic friction associated with capital ship deployments and jump freighter hauling
Sounds like you just want everyone to form null-sec blobs like Goons. I take that back, honestly I agree with your grandeur idea of local production, lots small economies, etc. The problem is your game is a sandbox, much like the United States capitalist “free market” and the reality is that it doesn’t work. Only the large entities prosper. If you make these changes you will effectively be doing the opposite of what your vision entails.
To be fair, increasing JF fuel provides more incentive to keep things local. Don’t forget – to export something from a “null-sec blob,” you have to pay for freight, either by topes and effort or by paying someone else.
Yes but the the cost is much more apparent to a smaller entity. Goons don’t need to import and/or export as much because things are bought locally. The small guys will most likely need to both import and export.
And what happens when you scale those numbers per capita? Also, a good amount of those imports come from a select few individuals who are doing things far beyond the scale of normal players. Should we cater the game to them? Hopefully the subs of a few can keep the company running when the rest get disenfranchised.
First-hand empirical evidence, which is fine if it is not convincing to you. I am still allowed to present my opinion that these changes will only further the blob. Time will tell.
Do you understand what empirical evidence is? Observations. I have observed this happening first hand. My observations are my evidence. Did I write it down and catalog it somewhere for others to read? No, I did not.
We are conjecturing about the future, despite my evidence or your statement to its lack thereof, there is nothing else that can said to come to any conclusion until enough time has passed where the actual effects can be observed.
Its probably just easier for CCP in the future if they consider tweaking it. I’m sure there’s people that wish all the BPO base inputs started at multiples of 10
