First of all: as at least 2 members of the CSM pointed out yesterday on The Meta Show, with changes to capital mining coming in soon, this isn’t at all guaranteed to slow down capital production.
Second: the gain in question is to the industrialist, the person CCP is asking to jump through more hoops and yet keep paying them every month. More work and more complexity for gameplay that’s no more engaging or interesting, provides no more of a dopamine release.
That’s bad game design. It disincentivizes playing EVE as an industrialist. There’s a reason one of the most common descriptions of this update is “The path for aspiring builders in New Eden will be clearer than ever – DON’T!”
I suppose they think by making industry harder in the short term, supply will drop and prices will rise making industry more viable in the future. Which I’m sure it will for the big alliances at least.
I’m not just sitting in station. I log in, add skills to the Skill Queue and log back off.
Mining, P.I, industry, ratting, hauling… none of that interest me. It’s just a waste of time.
I only want to do PvP and fly in null but I don’t need to waste my time flying ships that put me at a disadvantage against ships that are 100x better than mine against pilots that have 50mil more SP than I have. This lightweight is still in training, not ready to do anything in game, basically worthless for another year or so.
So ships are going to cost more, eh? Well, that means that when I do get to undock and fight it’s going to take twice as long to replace my ship. Good, I have better things to do than play EVE non-stop anyways.
Hah. As if industry wasn’t viable before? We don’t just conjure ships out of nothing, after all. Yes, some of the margins are thin, but that’s because players set the prices, and they’re willing to accept thin margins in order to make money.
They’ll still accept thin margins on the open market, in order to beat the competition. That’s not going to change. The only way industry profit margins increase is through cartels. What drives profit margins down is competition. What raises profit margins is when producers agree not to compete.
And yes, Ken, Innominate, and Dunk all agreed yesterday that this will create another layer of ‘haves v have-nots’. If you’re already in the industry game and you’ve got the money to just immediately purchase the injectors and the new blueprints, you’ll be making even more money than before. If you don’t? Well, the barriers to entry just got higher, and the road to try to catch up with the established producers just got longer. You will never catch up, you will never really pull even with them.
If you’re not already an established, profitable industrialist, this change is… ‘just don’t bother’.
So I just joined my friend’s corp, right? And now I’m a recruiter, and I really want to see the corp grow. At the same time, I want to help newbros. I know! We can recruit newbros and give them free fully fit T1 ships to play with. But we live in Solitude and building things sucks.
After the changes were announced I rushed to Jita to buy a small library of BPOs. I’ve never been much of a builder, and now I have 3 characters researching BPOs in anticipation of how awesome this change will be.
I wouldn’t think they are bad devs per se (awful launch day bugs aside) however their practices are quite substandard for the size of their projects.
Watching from afar for about 4 years now I am fairly convinced that they have serious issues in their production pipeline, else there wouldn’t be that much trouble with giving promises that will never be held or continually relesasing (very meh) skins for ships which takes the guys over at reddit less than 15 minutes to create with a twist that they look quite more professional.
Which leads me to my suspicion that ultimately, they are having severe issues with management, not development since it can’t possibly take you 10 years to fix a game. Let’s also not forget that they sold out to a Korean studio that pursues business practices that closely resemble all deals, bundles (damn you SP bundle) and log-in incentives that you can now see in-game. I wouldn’t expect this to stop in the near future either - it will rather get worse.
Alphas have been able to build battleships. Now they won’t be.
Which does not, in any way, address the point of ‘more complexity without any gain to the industrialist’. The fact that you’re willing to get into the game—ahead of the changes, mind you—means nothing, except maybe that you’re exactly the kind of masochist CCP is counting on all industrialists being.
CCP were doing that long before PA were. The original form of PLEX was one of the pioneering MMO microtransactions. Before CCP, the idea of ‘buy a thing with $$ that you can sell in-game!’ didn’t exist. People keep thinking PA is behind all this crap. It’s like thinking Pele was inspired by David Beckham.
Yes… it takes money to make money, the haves and have nots, the rich and the poor, the big player and the little guys. Welcome to 10,000 years of human history. Mark 14:7 - “For the poor will always be among you.” We haven’t figured out a socioeconomic structure that solves that problem. Asking CCP to do so is a pretty tall order, and not particularly fair.
I do question this obsession with “catching up” with the richest people in the game. Why do you think you’re entitled to that?
Also, where you see barriers I just see opportunities. PI is going to increase in value. So will fuel blocks and by extension, PI and ice products. Exploration and gas harvesting will increase in value. Where you see barriers I see points of entry. Strange.
So?
But it does, right? Because the production of frigates to battlecruisers just got a hell of a lot simpler. They all have the same required inputs and those inputs were streamlined and simplified. I can build all the Punishers I want from HiSec and LowSec ores.
See, I’m saying one thing to you, that disconfirms what you’re saying, and you’re just not even noticing and continuing on your rant. At this point I’m doubtful we can have a meaningful discussion.
CCP were doing that long before PA were. The original form of PLEX was one of the pioneering MMO microtransactions.
Well this is all standard today, just as you described. But to be more specific: PLEX is a concept I don’t disagree with but I completely forgot to expand on this by referring to the facilitation of ISK (PLEX) gambling which they think they can exploit as some kind of a legal grey area that I forgot to add which is my original point I guess.
Lol. I’m not asking them to do that. I’m asking them not to make it worse. Just because there will always be have-nots, that doesn’t mean creating an all-new underclass is a good move, either in terms of game design or player retention.
Hi, I’m a director in Goonswarm. I don’t need to catch up. This isn’t about me at all. This is about the knock-on effects in terms of player retention, gameplay experience, and the overall health of the game. CCP’s intent—to make the progression in industry more streamlined and to try to make all aspects of industry as valid a way to make money in terms of ISK based on effort over time are good, but the execution is not.
Just like the execution on dozens of other well-intentioned changes over the last decade. Which we told them about ahead of time. And they ignored. Just like they’ll ignore the problems with this one. And then, just like the blackout, trollceptors, Rorquals, and Fozziesov, they’ll claim ‘nobody could have predicted these problems’.
PI is going to increase in value, yes. In terms of absolute #s, it certainly will. In terms of ‘what can that ISK buy you?’ No, it won’t. Because as prices on one set of components, and thus, final products, rise, prices on the things you get with that final product rise as well. It’s like saying ‘oh, but the price of oil will go up, that’s good because I’m invested in BP!’ without stopping to consider what the increase in transportation costs does to food prices, etc etc, and how the net effect is really just to make the money have less value.
Two things: First, CCP has long sworn by the philosophy of ‘if you could do it before the changes, you will still be able to do it after’. For example: ‘Battlecruisers’ was originally a single skill. It was not a prerequisite for flying Battleships. When CCP split ‘Battlecruisers’ into the four ‘[Racial] Battlecruiser’ skills, they changed the requirements on '[Racial] Battleships so that the skills would require the new battlecruiser skills. However, if you already had the battleship skill trained, you didn’t suddenly lose the ability to use it until you trained up the battlecruiser skill, because CCP held to that philosophy.
This change violates that principle. I don’t think it’s wrong to call CCP out on it when they decide to violate a principle that CCP has many times sworn they’d never violate.
Secondly, if the intention is to provide a clear progression path and streamline production training for new players, then suddenly locking them off from something they were previously able to do… doesn’t do that. It becomes a bait-and-switch, and it’s not hard to see how that can drive them out of the game. Driving new players out of the game is bad, because you know, we need new players. Every game does, and EVE—according to CCP—has relatively terrible retention numbers already.
No, it doesn’t. You need to invest more skill training now, and the required inputs weren’t ‘simplified’, only standardized. And if you’re banking on ‘I can build all the Punishers I want’… well, good luck getting an actual return on your investment any time this decade. Profit margins are already thin because of competition, and that’s not going to change. Increased raw profit numbers isn’t actually beneficial when it comes with currency devaluation.
Except you’re not. You’re saying something that completely sidesteps what I’m saying: that additional complexity of gameplay needs to provide additional engagement, or it’s just introducing repetitive tedium and work, not play, which makes people want to engage in the activity less.
You’re talking about the in-game effects, I’m talking about the in-player effects. You are not in any was ‘disconfirming’ my point. You’re not even addressing it.
If you’re talking about the Hypernet… don’t even bother. Is it a legal grey area? Absolutely. Is it bad? Even more absolutely. Did PA have anything to do with it? Not in the least.
Hilmar went out there in… I want to say Amsterdam, but it might have been Berlin or Toronto… and talked up how CCP Games was going to shake up the industry because they had ‘invented a new trading paradigm that can be used in the real world as well as in EVE Online’. Those are, if not his exact words, damned close to them. And then that ‘trading paradigm’ turned out to be the Hypernet.
Hilmar literally claimed CCP invented the raffle.
That, really, tells you all you need to know about just exactly who is looking to squeeze every drop from every stone.
But it’s not making it worse. It’s simplifying large sectors of industry and creating more points of entry for people, right? A great diversity of inputs (aka, raw materials, PI, etc) will have value now. You keep glossing over this. This is like 80% of the changes… The 20% of the changes that make things more complex only affect large ships. This follows CCPs design philosophy in recent years where they want complexity to increase dramatically as you approach ‘high end’ game play.
Also, decoupling the value of ships is an immensely beneficial change that allows CCP to tweak the prices of different hulls without affecting other hulls. They can increase the price of Titans by increasing the gas and reactions needed and those won’t have much impacts on the price of frigates. This reduces development debt and that funny problem EVE has where every little thing you change affects 10,000 other things in unpredictable ways.
If it’s easier for new players to build things - in particularly the things they can fly - how does it hurt NPR? I mean a newbie with a Venture and testes larger than acorns can jump into LowSec, mine some Jaspet, jump back to HiSec, mine some basic ores, and build all the Rifters he wants. How is that driving newbies away from the game?
It hasn’t been executed yet, so how can you say that?
This isn’t what I’m talking about though. I’m talking about diversification and increasing points of entry. More things will have value on the market. This means more opportunities, especially for newbies (PI doesn’t particularly have a high point of entry).
Well no, not really. There’s lots of things players used to be able to do, but can’t do anymore because of some changes. I think that design philosophy applied to the ability to fly hulls. I think I remember it being “if you could fly it before, you can still fly it now” or something.
I really doubt we’re going to lose many new players because they can’t build battleships. C’mon now. This probably mostly affects established players who use free accounts to buttress their production.
But it does. Ignoring what I said and repeating yourself isn’t a very effective discussion style. I’m sure as a director in an alliance you’re used to being able to talk over people, but we’re not in your alliance right now, we’re on the forums. Removing Zydrine and Megacyte from frigates does make them simpler to build. Standardizing material inputs simplifies things as well. It’s less sourcing of raw material. It’s less spreadsheets. You can actually build those ships locally now. This is a huge boon for small groups.
Well if our new recruits are having fun and stick around, I get more than a “return oninvestment”. ISK isn’t the only thing that has value.
Tu quoque.
People who enjoy industry will enjoy having more industry to do.
I don’t find your point particularly salient. You’re tunnel-visioning myopically on the changes to battleships and capitals and completely glossing over the massive changes to sub-BS production. I’ve tried to talk you down and bring you closer to a more “big picture” view but you don’t seem particularly interested at the moment. Maybe when you’ve calmed down.
Incorrect…sub BS T1 production…and not including faction ships. IOW, a very small percentage of the ships actually flown in game. But nice try at seeing the three drops in the bottom of the glass as half full.
Not exactly. PLEX was an outgrowth of GTCs, which every MMO was selling—usually on cards in computer stores and such. CCP added the ‘you can sell it in-game’ as a way to keep players in the game (since, before the f2p change, there was no option to play without either subscribing or using a GTC. PLEX just let players transfer the GTCs). There was an element of ‘combatting RMT’ in it, but from what people who were with the company at the time have said since leaving… it wasn’t ‘let’s get our cut’ so much as ‘Prohibition doesn’t work, let’s try to make it so there’s no RL money to be made in it’.
No. It’s not creating more points of entry. The people who will want to get into industry would already have wanted to get into industry. Now, in order to be competitive, they’ll need to have more alts running more PI farms in order to get the mats they need for basically anything with a halfway decent profit margin.
Right. But that won’t increase the number of people producing them. Nobody is saying ‘Damn, Planetary Interaction is widely known as the most click-bait, do-lots-of-work-just-to-get-started-then-hurry-up-and-wait part of the game. It’s so bad, the CEO had to personally step in to reduce the number of clicks to set up one planet from 300 down to about 180. But I’d totally be all over that if only I could make money at it!’
Because people already can make money at PI. This will just increase the number of varieties of PI that make money. But it doesn’t make it any less cancerous or more fun to get involved in those varieties of PI. So the people who were willing to make money doing PI? They were already making money doing PI. They’re making fuel blocks—which do make money. They’re making the components for structures. They’re making the things needed for reactions.
They’re already doing it. The point of entry was already there, and it’s already profitable. So that doesn’t actually get you any new buy-in, because it doesn’t give you new options, it just says ‘oh, hey, look! Now you can get the exact same models of cars in NEW COLORS!’
People who weren’t driving cars at all because have no desire to drive a car? They’re still not driving cars with a new color offering.
People who weren’t going to get into PI when there were only 201 or so profitable PI chains? They’re not going to get into PI because now there’s 60 profitable PI chains.
Except it doesn’t decouple, because the input cost isn’t the bottleneck. It’s the time, and the fact that you have to own sov. Frigate mineral needs weren’t impacted at all by supercapital production. Nobody found themselves suddenly unable to build frigates because titan production spiked.
What’s more, it’s re-introducing a control mechanism CCP should intimately know does not work. Trying to control supercapital proliferation through the expense of construction was the original means they attempted. Titans were supposed to be so expensive to build, they couldn’t imagine more than 3-4 of them ever existing at a time.
It doesn’t matter what kind of expense they try to build in, the people who want to build titans will find a way to do it with minimal expense and effort. ‘Minimal’ may mean—as we expect—that a hull that would have cost 30-40b to build in Delve 18 months ago will cost 300b immediately after these changes go in… but again, they’re planning ‘capital mining changes’, so I expect once those changes get announced, that 300b price point will start plummeting.
First, that assumes the newbies are looking to build what they fly. Which even your own example then throws onto the trash heap, with the newbie flying a venture to build rifters. Second, because it builds in a visible ‘your skills end HERE’ limit on progression. The newbie basically has a ‘you can do this until you hit X and then your progression stops’—and the point at which it stops, let’s remember, is before the point where they can’t fly things.
Alphas can fly battleships. They won’t be able to build them. That progression wall, where ‘I want to do industry’ is visibly hindered before ‘I want to run missions’ or ‘I want to do PvP’, etc, disincentivizes people who want to do industry.
The same way we said it on all of the other examples I listed: by seeing what CCP’s saying they’re doing, and understanding how that plays out in actual gameplay experience, because we’ve been doing this, playing the game, getting into the details on every aspect of it we can, for a long, long time.
But again, it won’t. See above.
Those are things where the activity itself was hindered or removed from the game, not ‘you can still do it, but now you have to buy another 75 skill injectors to do it! Give us $$ for those 75 extractors, lol’.
I doubt it. Most of the people running multibox industry setups do it on omega accounts because those accounts are also SP-training.
Standardization is not simplification, no. Standardization can bring simplification, but the two are not synonymous, and in this case, what you’re actually looking for is homogenization—and it’s homogenization that requires more skills.
If you were the guy who wanted to mine his own ore and build ships of X race before, you needed to be able to mine and refine a subset of the ores you currently need. If you didn’t want to do the mining, you still knew which compressed ores you needed to get the specific minerals you need, and not the ones you don’t. Each of those ores has its own refining skill to maximize yield.
Now, you no longer only need some of those refining skills. You need them all. That’s standardization, but not simplification.
Anyone in corporate or alliance leadership who does that should be shoved out an airlock. 90% of the job is listening, and understanding the members’ concerns. The authoritarian ‘we don’t care what you think raaaar!’ just gets people voting with their feet, and then you don’t have an alliance anymore.
That said, that doesn’t mean listening precludes being able to say ‘no, you’re wrong’.
This would be true if there was more engaging gameplay coming from this. Having more options to achieve the same goal would be good. Having more screws to turn exactly the same way is not. Which seems to be the point you’re missing: all this does is give people more screws they have to turn in exactly the same way, not more options they can choose—or not choose—to take advantage of.
I’m really not. I’m looking at the patterns being established, and the additional requirements being placed on characters and players. I’d say you’re the one being especially myopic, as you’re looking at ‘immediate, short-term, first 3 steps of the progression’ issues, and not looking at ‘what do actual industrialists, not just dabblers who got involved as a recruiting tool, look down the road to be able to do?’
That’s the same mistake CCP loves to make: they don’t seem to understand that EVE players want to be able to make long-term plans for how they intend to do things. EVE attracts people—especially in industry—who like to be able to establish a framework of activity that they can then rely on for more than a few months. So if you’re looking at how this impacts industrialists, you need to be looking at ‘what will those players be looking to spend their time on a year after they get into industry? Two years? Are you putting visible measures in place that—no matter how well you think those measures are minor speedbumps, or how right you might even be about that—look like absolute roadblocks to the guy who’s trying to lay out an extensive roadmap for where he wants to get to?’
And that’s what this does.
1. Numbers pulled out of thin air for example purposes only. It doesn’t matter what the actual number is, only that there is a number that currently exists, and it’s not 0.
If Slow Mode is there ‘to encourage thorough, thoughtful discussion’, then it’s not an issue of what I think, it’s an issue of what CCP thinks while they limit me to 1 post every 15 minutes and the inability to edit posts. I can’t help it if they won’t allow separate points to be broken out into separate posts that can be individually addressed and assessed without making even a simple direct discussion require 4 hours for a single exchange.
I mean, hell, posting the initial 6 questions in the other thread took 2 hours, because they want people to vote on the questions. And we all know that if CCP sees upvoted question posts they don’t like, they’ll hook onto any kind of ‘we didn’t know which question was being upvoted’ they can to ignore them.
Btw, @Xuixien, I realize that my fingers overran my brain at one bit, and re: ‘decoupling’, I wound up leaving off the fact that the mineral impacts were never part of ‘that funny problem EVE has’, because the mineral impacts were 100% predicrable, and predicted, even if somehow, CCP didn’t see it coming.
The bottleneck, again, isn’t the minerals—if it were, there wouldn’t have been massive stockpiles of minerals built up that CCP needed over a year of scarcity to begin to draw down. The bottleneck is man-hours. It’s simply ‘how much time is Player A willing to do X?’. If doing X becomes more onerous without commensurate increase in dopamine release, that number goes down.
Not… really? This change is specific to T1 production. Unless I missed something (possible), the context of this discussion has been T1 production.
We can talk about those if you’d like.
I’d like to see the stats on that.
But it is, right? Because there’s more stuff needed for production. Production requirements have diversified which creates more niches for players to occupy. There’s a wider array of profitable ventures for players.
Yes, and many people have wanted to, but haven’t actually done it, because of barriers of entry. Which are now lower. You’ll probably say something about “profit margins” now, but that’s not particularly relevant: profit margins are not a barrier to industry. Industry is building. Profit is selling. People don’t always build for profit and no one is entitled to profit.
So, planets I mine myself are free?
Exactly. Which means it increases the varieties of planets that make money. Which means more systems are viable. Instead of “does the system have XYZ planet” it’ll be more “the system has planets, we’re good to go.”
Hm, well this boils down to play preference really. I love setting PI up.
This actually isn’t a cogent people. You’re basically spinning in circles here: “There were already people doing things! The people already doing things are already doing them!” Bro, what?
Saying “there were already points of entry” also isn’t a logical refutation to the proposition that now there will be more points of entry.
Except it does, right? Before, a Rifter and an Avatar required all the same inputs: asteroid minerals. You could measure the cost of an Avatar in Rifters. Now you can’t, because the Avatar requires other things that the Rifter doesn’t need, right? So they’re decoupled.
This is hairsplitting over a rather minor point. You don’t need SOV to build battleships, dreadnaughts, or carriers.
Perhaps, but I’m also not talking about that at all.
No, it actually doesn’t.
???
Feels like a shifting goalpost TBH. Not all newbies are alphas and not all alphas are newbies. They’re decoupled, right? What you’re doing here is called “conflation”.
I did. You haven’t actually refuted any of my points, right?
I’m glad you were finally able to concede a point. I’m proud of you.
Perhaps.
And this is one of those cases, right? Because instead of having to keep track of the 10 specific material profiles for 10 different frigates, you only need to keep track of 1 material profile. That’s… simpler.
What additional skills are being introduced for the production of T1 sub-BS ships?
Which you can’t do when you gloss over 80% of what someone has said to you. Jussayin’.
This is opinion again. I find all of this very engaging.
The point you’re missing is that this only applies to battleships and above. This is what I’ve been trying to explain to you, right? For sub-BS things just got a lot simpler and more streamlined. For battleships and above, yes it’s more complicated for the final point of production - ie, getting the dude sitting at his computer who right clicks and selects “use blueprint” on the hull to the point of being able to do that - but as I explained already, it diversifies the activity of building big ships. This (may) break some monopolies - unless those players want to increase their overhead and add more accounts/more PI empires/more gas harvesting alts, whatever. And they’re free to do so. Or not do so, and just buy from players who are going out and doing those things.
But you are, right? For example, you’re making very broad, blanket statements. I’m explaining things in nuance - for X, things got more complicated. For Y, things got simpler. And you’re sitting there ranting “THINGS ARE HARDER NOW.” But they’re not. For X they’re harder. For Y they’re simpler. You can’t just say “THINGS ARE HARDER”, because that’s an inaccurate statement. The reality is more nuanced and complicated than that.
Oh. Well that’s not EVE anymore. We’re in the shakeup phase. What did they call it? ChAoS era? Or is that over now? I stopped keeping tracking TBH.
These changes only marginally reduced the complexity for those, to the cost of completely overturning a large swathe of the economy by changing ratios. And by “marginally”, I mean, it barely registers. The only people who benefit from this change are people who never want to go on a market ever and mine only in high sec, and only if they build frigates and destroyers, since cruisers and battlecruisers also require ores from outside highsec. Or people who can’t spend the literal 10min needed to make a spreadsheet to get a shopping list from your current pool of materials and the bill of materials for your next build.
tldr : “simpler” is marginal, introduces host of bad and uncertainty. Added complexity to everything else. Justifications go to garbage can.
I know! We can recruit newbros and give them free fully fit T1 ships to play with. But we live in Solitude and building things sucks. 
I don’t find your point particularly salient. You’re tunnel-visioning myopically on the changes to battleships and capitals and completely glossing over the massive changes to sub-BS production. I’ve tried to talk you down and bring you closer to a more “big picture” view but you don’t seem particularly interested at the moment. Maybe when you’ve calmed down.