Concord Project Discovery Blueprints

EVE Technology and Research Center Forum Feedback & Requests
1

So, I decided to do this as I thought it might be worth it to invest the time to get these blueprints. Turns out it says Blueprint Original on the Information link in Project Discovery, but when you get the blueprint, it is a single run copy.

I was not expecting that. I actually turned out to be pretty good at this, and have a 98% accuracy ranking, but it still takes a long time. I just burned over 30 hours, (about), for a single run, 150 million ISK BPC, and maybe 60 million in payouts, plus some relatively worthless skins, (some of which look really good on the ships they go on, but still not worth much in general), a Hat and a T-Shirt.

Lets be real, I could have more productively invested that time doing something else, (and I will in the future), rather than staring at spectroscopy data and finding irregularities that indicate the presence of planets, stars, maybe black holes, and other things, (like an asteroid passing in front of the receiver).

So yeah, I’m not mad-angry, but I am disappointed and completely disincentivized. I could have got all that for about $4. Let’s just be real, that’s the equivalent of $0.13 an hour.

On the plus side, I have been asking myself periodically if I really thought it was worth it, and pushing on because that Marshal Blueprint would have been worthwhile to work towards if you could run copies of it, and now I have that question answered. It’s not.

Thanks!

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I don’t do anything for nothing. Searching for exoplanets is a cool feature, not an incentive to work for free. Do you think if they hired someone to do that, or someone pulled a grant for it, it would be any less than 50K a year?

The answer is no; of course not. Scientists get grants to do things, when they don’t get paid to do them. If they need income, they find something to do, (like search for exoplanets), and then they apply for a grant to cover the expenses involved and pay their wages.

That’s just reality.

It’s not a T2 BPO either, and if you want a T2 BPC it’s completely passively acquired. You just plug in skills, get a T1 BPO, then pop it in a Research facility, maybe add some cheap +% stuff, and roll the dice. Check in on it a little later and see if you got lucky. Rinse and repeat.

And the ships aren’t that special. They’re just faction ships. They look cool, and they have some nice bonuses, but they give away ships that are about the equivalent for free, such as those coming in a week.

As for other faction ships, you have two options: You can buy one without much trouble, or you can play the game and get one as a bonus for doing so, (if you want), along with a fairly significant amount of ISK, (enough that you can just buy them), and a bunch of other perks that make a lot of things easier.

This is just work with no reward. If I’d know that going in, I would have stopped at the hat. Just enough to feel like I did my part and got the swag, and learned about something mildly interesting.

If I want a Marshal Battleship I’ll just buy one, rather than spending another 400+ hours on this.

For that matter, I picked up 3 Monitor BPCs, which are much more potent ships, with Cloaking and near invulnerability, for 75 million ISK on Contract from people who picked them up in the Concord LP store while making a crap ton of ISK running Incursions. Cost me about 5 minutes for a ship that sells for about 300 million more than it’s little brother, the Enforcer.

5

I think if you grind Project Discovery / anything too much you make it a miserable experience.

I did it whenever I was warping on long journeys, whenever mining, whenever I had some spare minutes waiting for something else. It never really felt like work or a grind or a pain. I don’t think I ever did it for more than an hour or 2 at a time.

May have taken around 6 months because of that, but I now have all the ship BPCs including the Marshal, all the clothes and hundreds of ship SKINs, plus heaven knows how much ISK.

No complaints here.

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Quick calculation suggests about 500 million ISK from payouts to Level 500, and maybe if you get lucky 50 million from the Skins. Top is 11 Billion from selling the Marshal BPC, if anyone will pay it. It doesn’t look like they’re moving tbh, and why would they. It costs about 1.5 billion ISK to build, and it’s more or less just a Faction Battleship that is Black Ops focused, and no one is likely to use it as a Black Ops ship at that cost. Even just the build cost would make that unlikely. Killboard waiting to happen.

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The Marshal is overpriced because it is so time consuming to acquire, and it doesn’t involve playing a game. It’s 250 levels of grind past the last outfit. Nobody puts that much time into something and lets it go for nothing. Chances are, it’s only 11 billion ISK for the BPC because that’s as high as one ever sold for.

5: Man kind knowing about a maybe rock in space 500 light years away is relevant to about 1 in 50 million people. And only because they’re dreamers. It won’t mean anything to anyone in the next century or two. Probably longer. By then we’ll be able to do more than just guess.

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I should note, it’s also fairly obvious that people are botting this thing, which really comes as no surprise. Every sample shows the trends of EVE Pilots and a lot of them are matching each other within a decimal of precision, so you end up with spikes of common markers.

Now, you might say, “well they obviously all saw the same thing”, and that might be true, if all those people made the same mistakes, because they all also trend on marking pulsating star frequencies, which are not planets, and they trend on the most faint of impressions in a signal which is a complete mess.

And when I say trend, I mean the exact same mistake and pattern repeated by something like 98% of the ‘people’ who have done project discovery, with only a faint few other results in most cases. So what is that, 1000s to 10s of 1000s of people repeating the exact same matching patterns on almost every sample?

Likely just interference from an asteroid field or the Oort cloud because there are so many impressions and no real discernible pattern to 90% of them.

Also, the AI and the program, and apparently all but a very few of the people doing the project don’t seem to recognize planets with atmosphere, of which there are more than just a few.

It doesn’t train you to look for them, and itself doesn’t recognize them; or the test samples don’t have them marked because they’re fake, and someone just introduced a pattern which tends to be fairly obvious, and it fails you if you catch anything else, including other planets which it trains you to recognize, because it only accepts one sample result.

There’s more than a few issues with it to be honest, but I’m relatively certain that botting is common, and it’s mostly the same bot. Maybe someone just trained it to repeat a series of patterns and clicks; not exactly hard to do. Or maybe someone has there own AI running on it to mass produce BPCs. Wouldn’t be a shock these days either.

The downside to that, is it creates a lot of consistent results that are more often than not wrong, so it kind of messes up the whole program, and it creates the impression that it is easy, when in fact it’s not.

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It’s called feedback. You can argue with it if you want, but whether or not you agree is completely irrelevant to me. CIG implemented something new with Project Discovery, (It’s not that old, and changed it last July to what it is now.

I’ve taken the time to push through to the first real “reward” and I’m providing feedback on it. It’s not worth that kind of effort in my opinion. There’s a lot of things you can do in EVE that involve playing the game, and tend to be “fun” that provide reasonably balanced rewards for the effort you put in.

My opinion of what would be worth the effort, and reasonable if they make an effort to prevent people botting it for the rewards, or just clicking through, is that it should provide the Blueprints at the levels they are presented at, as it implies in the program.

It literally tells you the reward is a BPO. Each reward Tier has a direct link to the information on the reward in the Project Discovery interface, and those links state that the reward is an unresearched, infinite run Blueprint Original. That’s what you should get.

I have played EVE before, and prior to making this character in 2010, if I recall, I originally started in 2007. I am quite aware that Tech II BPOs are not a thing, and I’m aware that your typical faction ship BPOs are not available either. But that and this is not the same.

They have a means of acquiring BPCs for those in game with little or no direct effort.

The primary difference being “As Advertised” and this is not available in game through the primary means of acquisition. Neither are they Tech II, and they don’t fall under the standard Faction Classification; and there is no reason they shouldn’t be available to those who put in the effort as BPOs, (provided they’re not cheating).

That would actually bring down the market value to something more reasonable, while limiting the number of BPOs in existence.

And I am considering other things in EVE over the years. Alliances playing War Games and getting extremely limited ships that are actually crazy powerful fit right. The original accessibility of Tech II BPOs, which some people still have. The ability to make insane amounts of ISK with little or no effort. The disposal of the old rules on passive income with Skill Extractors, (I pulled over 11 billion in Skills and reinjected them last week to move things around, and could conceivably just pull the same again and sell it). Etc…

Things change; feedback is good.

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tl;dr

If I spend 400-500 hours on something like this I expect to be rewarded with something that makes the effort worth it. BPOs that I can research ME and TE on, and run copies of, (and maybe later research Tech II on if they decide to make that available), to sell or build would in my opinion make that effort worthwhile.

Apparently this is now a Tech II BPC. Will wonders never cease. Honestly, I couldn’t have missed that could I? lol. Log in today and move the BPC from the research station and I see Tech II flagging on it.

Doesn’t matter. Should be a Tech I BPO. Tech II is irrelevant imo. Pretty much meaningless today. Might as well flag the Gnosis Tech II as well. Would mean as much. Honestly though, the Pacifier comes closer to Tech II than the Enforcer or Marshal; as they scale up, the Traits bonuses appear to scale down, or other sacrifices are made, and while they have long lists, like the SOE ships, they’re tied to specific loadouts, so it provides versatility, but not greater potential.

I like them, but the Pacifier is probably the best of them. It’s not entirely cost prohibitive for what it is, and it has role functionality well suited to it. The Marshal is not practical for its perceived value at all, and I didn’t find it that tempting outside of the Hull appearance.

The problem with the larger two being CovOps in their perceived price point, value, is that price point on the Enforcer makes it most practical as a mission runner, and it just doesn’t suit it; while the Marshals price pushes it well above any reasonable use, and makes it merely a collectible for most people. Even at 2 billion ISK, it would be a risky mission ship if it wasn’t BlackOps; but as a BlackOps, it’s not purposed for that either.

As I said, I like them, but the delivery and resulting perception of value makes them completely impractical with the exception of the Pacifier. The only reason the Pacifier is really an exception is because a good pilot can avoid losing it, and it’s price doesn’t really make it that much more interesting a target than a regular CovOps.

14

Attempting to read your post just gave me cancer…

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16

I don’t agree with your opinion any more than you do mine, but you still made it. Wasn’t any need to delete it.

17

Tell you what. You add another tier in their with Tech I, non-Cov Ops BPOs for those ships that are more oriented around mission running, slightly less expensive to build, and more viable, I’ll be happy.

Just drop everyones level by 50, minimum 0 of course, and swap the tiers for the BPCs with the Tech I BPOs + Skin, while moving everything else down the list so you still cap at 500. That way someone who has already capped can push 50 levels back up and pick up the BPO, while retroactively receiving the other 2 BPOs and the skins.

Or add them between 250 and 500, and push the Cap to 650, with the Marshal Tech I Variant BPO + skin granted at 650…or something.

I just want to make Concord ships.

And leave in the ability to research Tech II BPCs off the BPOs; that will maintain rarity, and lower the perceived value enough to make them more viable and reasonably priced. - my thoughts.

18

Feeling pretty mislead by Project Discovery. The reward links to a BPO but it gives you a BPC with one lousy run on it. Should at least be honest about the reward.

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Duno for you ppl… but i doin rly good. I get around 35M ISK/h, do not counting reward crate. I complete all to the lvl 500 in 50h no more, with 90% - 99% eff. I sell every single blueprint and crate. For me perosonaly, can be a main job… the best option is mining + exoplanet… 100% productive time.

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