Maybe he is baiting you to give him an insight on what the smartest investment will be. I have done mine and will keep my mouth shut about it 
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Im not space rich.
I dont have a horse in this race, and am not “investing” in anything.
T2. Yes, we know.
As is all of Player NS.
I think you make very compelling arguments.
I’ll admit when I first saw mention of this feature on CCP’s Twitter, I thought it was a joke. When I saw more details and posts about it, I was worried. And when I saw people post details on the forums about what was possible, I was very alarmed. But you put forth very reasoned points as to why this most likely won’t be the balance nightmare some feared it might become.
But that argument cuts both ways. I’m going to oversimplify this a tad and I apologize but I’m just trying to keep the response short. Essentially, you’re arguing that this new feature won’t do anything. And looking over your arguments, I somewhat agree at this point. This new feature won’t do anything. So now the question becomes, why implement it?
This feature requires untold amount of dev hours to program all the aspects of it, balance it, bug test it, etc. And that’s before touching upon the other knock-on effects like the sudden need to overhaul contracts to accommodate a feature that doesn’t do anything.
Like, if a player had put forth this idea, even in a slightly more sane and less dev-time-intensive manner, he’d have been laughed off the forums. Everything about this upcoming feature is bad, and it can only be an intense time and money sink on CCP’s side, all to accomplish -nothing-.
Nothing will change due to numerous RNG rolls on multiple stats. Doctrines can’t change. Common ship fits can’t change. These things won’t be common. They’re being carefully balanced and tweaked so they won’t exceed or obsolete current balance endeavors.
The most it can do, is that someone, every once in a while, might roll something decent on a module he was probably already going to fit, and it’s unlikely he’ll field that module in PvP in anything less than an assured victory situation because it’d be too valuable to risk casually.
So what, exactly, is the point now? There’s already been an intense expenditure of development hours to put something in where the apparent long-term goal is to do [essentially] nothing.
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That will depend entirely on the cost/availability of these mutalids. There are several different types (each rarer and harder to acuire than the other).
If you farm the basic mutalids for yourself then you will have to weigh the cost of applying the specifc mutalid to a cheap T2 module or selling it for ISK.
It’s also not going to be easy selling these because buyers will have to sift through hundreds of contracts for the exact same mutated module - all with different stats and prices.
Really good RNG results are going to be so rare that you’ll never aee them hit the market (be it a T2, Storyline, Faction or Deadspace input). The vast majority of what I expect to see on contract is T1/T2 crap that’s been bricked.
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Fair enough.
If they are cheap/available, what will they most be used on?
If they are expensive/rare, what will they most be used on?
It’s hard to speculate since CCP hasn’t added Triglavian ships to the Abyssal pockets, finalized the RNG variations or given any indication of what the drop rates will be.
If I had to take a WAG I think the mutalid cost is going to be in the millions to tens of millions.
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Trig ships arent affected.
RNG variations will define whether they are cheap or not.
Drop rates also as above.
My questions hinge on what people will use them on if cheap/available or expensive/rare.
The addition of more NPC enemies to Abyssal pockets has the potential to increase the risk and associated reward, and could thus vastly influence the price and availability of mutalids.
There’s a big difference between what I plan to do, players plan to do and CCP plans to do - all of which can and will change from testing to release to followup.
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In which case they will still be either cheap/available, or expensive/rare (or somewhere inbetween.)
In my question, you dont need to worry about that, only what modules they will be applied to should those cost/rarity conditions become true.
Which module tiers will mutaplasmids most be applied to should they be expensive/rare, and which should they be cheap/common?
If CCP makes the Abyssal pockets too easy and the rewards too plentiful, then these mutalids could end of being cheap. The reverse is also true. And so is the very real possibility of CCP continually adjusting and tweaking these for the next year based on player feedback and their own metrics.
The best answer I can give you is that I know what I plan to do and that this will no doubt evolve between now, when Into The Abyss is released, what changes CCP makes and how players end up influencing everything.
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I think we were looking at it from the wrong angle all the time. Between fear-mongering and power creep there is the chance that people simply use them to find out what is possible with their fits if they accept certain stats to be better in exchange for others to get worse.
My prediction is, that this will still lead to a demand for them. I know for myself, that I’ll be trying out, what I can do with it. Can I - for instance - accept the negative side effects I might get on a 10MN Afterburner in exchange for lower PG fitting costs? I could maybe fit it to Destroyers that didn’t provide the overprop-option just yet. But, it might come at a cost in CPU or I might need to find a way to deal with higher cap consumption. It will open new opportunities while at the same time provide new challenges.
That’s the problem everyone with a vision faces. People laugh about them. In the case of a game where we can only plead for the Devs to do something, even more so. Unless you own shares of the company or are a very influential player, the chances that your visions become reality in this game are low.
Overprop might become more common. Subcap neut warfare might change its ways and so on. As a general statement I’d say that we’ll see a lot of people trying what is possible when you exchange fitting space(PG/CPU) for “module strength” or the other way around. Because these are the kind of rolls that will be common enough to be useable and cheap enough to fit them, if they provide something useful - if only in very specific tactical ways.
Another example.
Let’s say I fly something and my tank consists of LSE + XLASB. The LSE is for keeping me from getting Alpha’d and the XLASB is my actual tank against incoming DPS. Now, I take a LSE and roll it, find one with lowered PG, but also lowered HP. You might say, it’s a bad roll, but it could be useful for me. Maybe I don’t care about the loss in HP if in exchange I can free up PG to fit something else, like a Medium Neut.
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Yes, one player’s junk is another player’s treasure.
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Because it is an “industry trend” and some exec came across it and ordered the devs to shoe horn it into the game, despite it making no sense in multiple ways.
Thats what annoys me about these items. They all randomly generate inside some boundaries, but the market cant handle them and the contracts dont have propper search filters. Developing this took some time and i expected them to have something in place to makre buying/selling them possible.
CCP will seriously need to get some work done on this.
The most straight-forward way I can see at this point would be to include hooks for the changeable stats on each class of modules that is allowed to be mutated. In the contract window right now you can filter for Item Category and as their subclass Item Group.
For instance Blueprint Original / Carrier Blueprint.
Mutaplasmided Items / Mutaplasmided Afterburners (or so)
Then we’d need a slider or something for each hook of that subclass to allow us determine wether we want to filter in/out by setting a min or max on any of the hooks.
Visually I’d think there will need to be an overhaul, because the sidebar might get to polluted by information this way. Maybe sliders for “item Group” hooks on the top or bottom of the Contract window.
Some way of sorting these would be nice as well. The finer granularity the better. I might find 1000 Mutaplasmid 10MN Afterburners at first and by setting the max PG to value X I might decrease that number to 50. Still, in order to not look through each single Contract, it would be nice to have the option to either display the changeable stats in the list of Contracts or sort by stat. Or both.
If they included proper ESI integration for all of that, I’m sure someone will come up with a tool that allows for even finer granularity.
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Dont worry.
CCP will make you the contract UI you need to sell mutated T2 modules with greater ease, soon enough, once its already crippled DED/LP market.
Someone give the man a tissue.
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So pretty soon we’ll be buying DED/Officer modules for just a few ISK?
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I really don’t understand many of your comments in this thread. I get the sense that you’re not a fan of “Into The Abyss” (or maybe you are).
One thing is for certain: With less than a month to go CCP is going ahead with this. I think we’ll see an overhaul of the contracts system - but not in time for this release.
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After sleeping on this and giving it some careful consideration, I had a few additional thoughts.
• If CCP was smart they would limit mutaplasmids to Storyline, Faction, Deadspace and Officer. Including T1 or T2 is going to turn the contracts market into an absolute gong show in short order. Any overhaul to the contracts system post-release is going to arrive far too late.
• No one knows the drop rate, availability or cost of the mutaplasmids. Even SiSi is speculative and subject to change, so anything beyond that is just a WAG.
• In terms of risk vs. reward, T2 modules will probably be the bare minimum in terms of potential return on investment. Faction modules will have a relatively fixed cost and will be next in the popularity tier. C-Type Deadspace modules will be next because A and X-Type already demand a premium and are near-perfect for many of the stats. Only the affluent will be able to play around with A and X-Type and only the 0.1% will be rolling the dice on Officer modules.