I thought there was skill to improve reaction efficiency
My mistake, this is why you don’t copy paste kids 
So now that the values have been finalized and everything has been seeded, I’ve been playing with refineries in high-sec. I currently run an ore refining/reprocessing service on my citadel as my primary economic activity, so the changes to refining are going to have a pretty big impact on my business.
The following is admittedly a bit of a self-interested post, but I have a couple of questions and thoughts on refining as a service.
Question: With the changes to refining rigs, has it been decided how those are going to be converted?
In my experience most high-sec refinery operators are currently using Astrahuses and have both the HS and LNS M-set ore rigs installed. Since ore has been merged under one M-set rig, one of these has become redundant. Will both get converted to an ore rig? Or is something else planned?
Depending on how this is handled, there may suddenly be a huge number of excess ore processing rigs suddenly available. The rigs themselves are very valuable due to the materials - especially the T2 rigs - however because of the intentionally poor reprocessing rate for modules, they can’t be viably broken down back into salvage. Which is to say that if CCP is going to convert all rigs to ore rigs, then it’s going to tank the price of the rigs and the value of the investment. Which is why I’m curious what the specific plan is here.
Thoughts on refining as a service after Lifeblood
Meanwhile, after playing around with the new refineries on Sisi, I’m somewhat concerned about what this means for offering a public refining service as a for-profit venture. It can still be done, but I feel like it just got a lot harder, and I’m not sure it’s a good thing or a necessary thing.
Refining is a purely margin-driven activity. The name of the game is maximizing your effective margin by finding the station with the highest base refining rate coupled with the lowest tax rate. And since it’s an instant activity with no such thing as a system cost index, one refinery is almost as good as the next. Plus, relative to manufacturing there’s little room for specialization in terms of rigs. The net result is that the station with the best refining rate wins.
My concern, in a nutshell, is that refining as a service is being forced into this odd gap where the benefits are out of whack with both the costs of providing the service and the risks involved.
1) High equipment costs.
This is happening to all structure rigs, but mining rigs are a bit unique due to the lack of options and the margin-driven nature. A T2 rig is essentially a requirement to be competitive in any moderately trafficked system. Which even with the generalization of rigs makes even a basic (1 service) refinery very expensive. There’s no real place here for “cheap” refineries in high-sec, especially since there’s no reacting or moon mining in high-sec. You’re looking at 5B+ for a basic refinery, possibly more depending on where rig costs go.
2) Using a refinery structure is not only necessary, but the large (Tatara) is inherently better
As part of the rebalance, the bonus to rigs has been reduced slightly. A T2 rig now has a 53% base bonus instead of 54%, so you need to use a refinery structure to get back to where we are today with refineries on citadels.
The kicker is that the large refinery has a better refining bonus than the medium refinery, essentially amounting to a 55% base refining rate in high-sec with T2 rigs versus 54% for a medium refinery. Going back to what was said earlier about how the highest reprocessing rate wins, it means that having a top-tier refining service isn’t just expensive, but ludicrously expensive. Now you’re on the hook for a several billion ISK structure, and then a rig that’s probably 30B ISK, if not more.
Going all the way back to the first citadels, large structures have always been better than mediums, but not in this fashion. Their strength has been in their generalization (and defenses) rather than overall performance. Because the large structure has a better refining bonus, it’s a better refinery period. There’s no room when it comes to reprocessing for a specialized medium refinery to do one specific part of the job just as well.
3) Refineries are extremely vulnerable given their costs
The third point then is that given the high costs of operating refinery service, the structures are distressingly vulnerable. They have the EHP and defenses of a medium manufacturing structure (Raitaru), which makes sense. But they also have a massive 20 hour vulnerability window, which is over 2x that of the equivalent manufacturing structure, and 7x that of the citadels where refining currently takes place.
And I realize the large window is because refineries are also moon mining structures, so they need to be soft so that they can be attacked and displaced. But as a public service structure, a 20 hour high-sec window is quite large. In this case it feels like needing to balance refineries as moon miners has to take precedence over balancing them as service structures.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that these things are going to be extremely risky to operate. After throwing down a massive amount of ISK to assemble a viably competitive refinery, the damn thing can’t really defend itself and is vulnerable for many hours every week, a combination not found like this with any other kind of public citadel service. Consequently I expect refineries to be attacked more frequently than ECs or citadels today. It puts operators in a very tough spot.
Conclusion: Reevaluating Refinery Bonuses
Ultimately I think there’s a case for rebalancing refining, to bring risks and costs inline with the benefits, and overall to make it a more viable station service. The obvious and simple route would be to give both sizes of refineries the same refining bonus, so that a medium refinery is a viable refinery. A large refinery is still better for refining (1 rig for all refining operations versus a rig each for ore, ice, and moon goo) and defense. But at least a medium refinery could do one thing well.
However I’m also of the thought that, despite the name, maybe refining shouldn’t be shoehorned into what’s primarily a moon mining and reaction structure? The rig changes and refining bonus on refineries means that it just does’t make sense to offer refining on citadels or engineering complexes, and perhaps that should change. Status quo (no structure bonus) seems to work just fine for refining as a service in terms of balancing costs and risks. And even if changes are necessary, pushing refining towards engineering complexes might make more sense. That way it can be bundled with local manufacturing services, which can be offered in high-sec. Whereas a refinery structure in high-sec isn’t good for much else besides refining, despite the high costs and risks.
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Hello, have you decided what will happen to faction POS blueprint copies and faction POS modules blueprint copies?
I have a bit of them from my exploration endeavors and I asked about that few months ago during a CCP twitch stream.
I was told those faction BPCs will be transformed into faction BPC related to refineries. However CCP employee wasn’t sure yet what they will be turned into exactly.
Have you guys decided something on that?
Will we ever see small citadels/refineries, for the cash-stricken corps of EVE that are too small or too poor to afford a big one?
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according to the latest dev blog the medium refinery should be costing 1.1 billion isk barring market manipulation
What’s the point of those? If you can’t afford ~2B as a corp you are doing something wrong.
it can only be done if you are in an area full of idiots. anyone with a brain compresses at an open citadel then moves the compressed ore to one of the free refineries near jita.
if refining citadels are ever going to be truly viable compression needs to be taxable or lockable
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what corp can’t afford 650m for a M indi complex?
small structures are like MTUs and mobile depots
So, base reprocessing in hisec is 50%. Base in an Athanor is 51%. In a T2 rigged Athanor in hisec you get 55%. T1 rigged Tatara is the same. T2 is 57%. But requires that huge initial investment. No one in their right mind will use a hisec NPC refining service if the refinery is run by someone with even basic math skills. The margins look fine.
Do we know the size of the moon chunk in ore m3 for a 6 days extraction and for a 56 days. Will the increase be proportional to time.
This information would help to size the mining fleet.
I believe that during Eve Vegas it was mentioned that the full 56 days would produce a belt containing 1.5x the m3 of a Colossal anomaly. It was also said that it would scale linearly with time.
If so, then…
37.33 days = 1 Colossal
6 days = 0.16 Colossal
What is going to happen to POCOs already around moons? Will they disappear during DT on Tuesday?
And if they still remain, will this prevent refineries being stationed around the moon?
POCOs are around planets, not moons…
Refineries, as far as moon mining is concerned, have one new spot designated for moon mining, which is not the same as the normal “warp to 0” of a moon, so there should not be much interferences in you decided to deploy structures at a moon for some reason.
Perhaps I meant Control Towers around moons, but guess the reply is still the same from what you say here.
Has CCP decided where to seed all the new BPO’s for this new patch? As a returning player I would like more clarification on where these BPO’s will be seeded so I, and others like me, can start down this new journey.
You can check sisi right now. The ui tells you the exact m3 of each ore before you start a cycle
Your math is a bit off. The medium refinery (Athanor) is 52% with T1 rigs, 54% with T2 rigs. The large refinery (Tatara) is 53% is T1 rigs, 55% with T2 rigs.
The bonus on the two refineries is 2% and 4% respectively. This is multiplicative, not additive. So you’re getting 0.53x1.02 and 0.53x1.04 refining yields respectively with T2 rigs.
Is it true that Caldari Outposts provide a 50% bonus on the reaction cost system index? And what bonus do other outposts provide?
This is a bug, we’re fixing this today, thanks for reporting!