"Dude, Where's My Free Astrahus?": When High ME + Low Run Counts + Few Input Materials Yield No Freebies or Discounts Worth Mentioning

[Haulie_Berry]

@Archer_en_Tilavine

Question is: how much of the general EVE population knows about this? And even if most of them knew about this, I doubt many of thing would check in advance to see what the gains are on ME10.I think most would blindly assume it’s worth it in general. It’s certainly worth it for the vast majority of BPs, so why wouldn’t it be worth it everything else like the problem cases I pointed out?

I can’t speak for others, but I’ve always done a lot of production, and I feel like doing cost/benefit analysis is kind of a central part of industrial gameplay. I would definitely not assume ME 10 is worthwhile, at least on any blueprint with a large research multiplier. Subcap modules and the like, sure, I plug those in for 10/20 just because they’re there and I have slots free.

However, I’ve been doing industry since back when there was no hard ceiling on ME/TE (PE, then) at all - you could research them to arbitrary levels, but there were diminishing returns. Under that model, you sort of had to figure out where you were going to stop because, “ooooo, if I go from ME 60-65, I can save 3 more tritanium on my capital armor plates!” So, that may influence my habits somewhat.

I’ve also built my own production calculators and spreadsheets over the years (which I don’t think is uncommon behavior among “scale” industrial players) which kind of forces some awareness of how the math actually works (such as the single quantity minimum).

[Archer_en_Tilavine]

Good points. Here’s one way to look at it that I didn’t explicitly delineate: the savings on the vast majority of BPs is linear to ME (since most require large quantities of input materials AND there is no cap on discounts), this is where players might be misled on the rest. They might feel the time/expense of researching is worthwhile relative to linear discounts - but when that doesn’t happen (or isn’t even close)…