I’ve had several cap and super BPOs half researched for several (I believe it was 2018 that I stopped) years now, due to me just not being able to bring myself to push the button and pay the insane fees. The worst of them is the Hel print which I just looked at to see what it costs; to push the ME from 7 to 8 is 2.5 bil with 1.8 of that being the SCC fee. To get from 0/0 to 10/10 it costs 50 bil.
A dev did briefly talk about this on one of their recent videos, some time in the past year, and said they were looking at this. What’s the deal?
Maybe the idea is that highly-researched blueprints are meant to be an investment only to be paid back after many industry runs, not a default choice.
While for lower tier blueprints it’s often a no-brainer to max out the blueprints, the blueprints you mention are for the biggest most expensive ships in the game.
What is 2.5 billion ISK if the ships they’re meant for are an order of magnitude or two more expensive?
You’ll never make the researched BPO cost back with industry (industrialists don’t calculate the cost of the BPO into their industry job expenses anyway) or with selling BPCs. You only make it back when you sell the original.
I am not complaining. Just explaining how it is. Not gonna give away my personal know-how, but just gonna say that buying and researching BPOs is an investment – first and foremost – and you need a lot of ISK to be doing that stuff. It’s going to tie up your funds for years. At least for anything serious, I’m not talking about T1 cruiser BPOs.
I have a 100b BPO library, which is still small-scale, and it amounts to 150b with research costs. So, roughly 50% on top of the costs of originals on average.
I think it makes sense that research should be expensive. Where I find a bit of issue is with copying. To copy some BPCs is needlessly expensive. Some people do this stuff for passive income, and it inflates the cost of the end product for no good reason. For some BPCs the end price you ask on contracts is 90% copy fees. I think that’s disproportionate. Should be 50% max, and even that is out of proportion.
You’re free to pick any price you wish to ask and course you could ask a price of which 50% is the copy fees.
However other people will undercut you and ask a lower price. 90% copy fees apparently is the point at which people still think making and selling copies is worth their time if they’re sold at that price point, which is 44% cheaper than your price.
Yeah, that’s not what my point was. I’m not the one who thinks BPCs should be expensive on the market. On the contrary, I am of the mindset that BPC cost should be minimal.
Example: Let’s say making a 10-run BPC for item x costs 2m. And you can sell it for 2.3m on contracts. If the copy fees were say 500k per 10-run BPC, then you could sell it for 1.5m. Making it cheaper for people to buy.
It’s not the case with all the BPCs. For many the margin is much higher than that. But some BPCs are being charged obscene amounts of ISK too. This summer I was the only person in the game bringing down Siege Module I BPC costs on public contracts. They were being charged 29m per 3-run copy! 3 runs is the max you can have on a Siege Module I BPC. And it costs ca 400-700k to make it! 1 copy. And guys were charging 30m per copy or even more! Several different people were doing that on contracts. I thought that was unfair pricing. And I brought them down to 10-13m bracket. For no external pressure. I was literally pricing my copies at 10-13m when the lowest price on contracts was 29m. I’m pretty sure I pissed off some guys there when I did that, but I don’t think a BPC that costs 400k to generate in the game, should be sold for 30m. That’s one place where CCP could actually do with increasing copy fees.
(^Now I’m giving away a trade secret with this particular example. But I really don’t care. If more people start making BPC copies, it will bring down the prices, which is how it should be. The BPC market should be low-cost. That is my point).
Considering the prices of Supers at the moment, it seems perfectly in line.
End game content isn’t supposed to be cheap and easy.. but I do agree in general that capital production needs to be shortened time wise, both research and manufacturing, and materials need to be reduced. Probably by about 20-30% across the board.
There’s attainable for players and then there’s ridiculously out of reach for players.