Project Discovery Restrictions/Thoughts

Industry Gameplay Center Science & Industry
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I have been doing “Project Discovery: Flow Cytometry” and discovered that there are more restrictions than the 100 samples/day/character for alpha and 200 samples/day/character for omega and the 25 levels per 1 million SPs limits

I have attached a picture of the restriction

Eve Online - Project Discovery
Eve Online - Project Discovery1920×1357 113 KB

The checkmarks are the ones that I can do each day. For the ones that I can’t do, I have gone into files and found which ones end at the same time (I know that the timer isn’t the actual countdown to when I can do them again which is always reset at downtime)

As you can see there are 4 days where the same timer is linked to 3 characters, which is very annoying.

Also, it seems to be that I can only do player 6 or player 7, not both, on the same day, after a while I just didn’t bother to check

I did this in July 2023 and had 7 times where 2 characters had the same timer

I get it that there needs to be a limit on how many characters a physical player can do a day, but at least randomize it and not the same character every day or 3 characters link to the same timer (I am doing them in a different order)

I have contacted support multiple times and always had the same kind of response similar to “Please note that there are internal mechanics for this feature in-game and sadly we are unable to disclose how this works.”

it suggested posting my thoughts on the forums, so here it is

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My thoughts about PD restrictions is that the upper boundaries make sense. The activity would be too easily botted otherwise.

There is one thing about the PD restrictions that frustrates me heavily, which is the rate limit of samples per minute.

If you get some experience in this activity and get good at solving samples fast (which tends to happen when you turn in thousands of samples), it’s easy to get into a flow and accurately solve more than 5 samples a minute. Yet when you try to do that you get kicked out!

If there is one thing CCP should fix about PD, it’s to increase that rate limit

up to what an experienced human player can comfortably do. Because doing PD for more than a minute currently is not enjoyable if you get kicked out of your sample-solving flow every damn minute.

That said, some feedback about your schema:

At 200 samples a day, 5 samples a minute you’re looking at 40 minutes to reach your daily PD limit for omega. At 10 accounts you’re looking at 6.6 hours of daily project discovery clicking at the maximum rate or 46 hours a week.

Why would you even want to take a full time job of clicking project discovery?

It looks like you’re running into some strange limits that lock out other accounts, but honestly, at 46 hours of PD a week I don’t see why the limits should be any clearer or more relaxed.

I reached over level 500 with two characters (which kind of burned me out on EVE for quite a while) and have indeed noticed the same behaviour you see, which is that on some days the timers can be shared and lock out yoru other character from PD that day. Luckily if you keep the number of characters low you won’t notice this limit.

I suspect this limit exists to stop people from botting PD on many accounts.

And frankly, 10 accounts is many.

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Hi Gerard Amatin

I was doing them with 10 alpha characters and was averaging 22-30 minutes/character (which took me about 4 to 5 hrs each day to do all 10 if all of them were doable)

As I mentioned in my post

If your 2 characters were to have shared the same timer every day, like player 6 and 7 from my example, that would be annoying, all I am saying is that it shouldn’t be the same character every day

As I also mentioned in my post

EVE Online PD - Project Discovery
EVE Online PD - Project Discovery1920×1357 93.4 KB

Something like this would be more tolerable for me

All these 19 alpha characters are at level 50 now and don’t have enough SPs to continue. I am not planning to continue them as the next valuable reward is at level 150 and would need 4 million more SPs

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I agree it’s annoying that two characters always block the other.

But it doesn’t seem to be a common occurrence, as this is only happening to just 2 of your 10 characters.

I don’t think it’s a problem that things become annoying when doing PI on 10 characters, you’re likely pushing past the limits of what CCP intended for PI.

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I’m not entirely sure that CCP intended PD to be run full time.

I’d like to think the thoughts behind it were more along the lines of doing it in a bit of downtime, or spare time in game whereas you’ve made it a full on job as seen in this quote.

Plus the more characters you have running it the more full on it will be.

Is that why you want the restriction lifted, just to do them faster?

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It fills the time nicely while orbiting an asteroid or camping a system while cloaked.

Turn on some music, get a nice pace of accurately solving a couple hundred samples for an hour and you may eventually reach level 500 months later.

If CCP had not intended for people to solve hundreds of samples a day in order to reach level 500 after months, they should not have required tens of thousands of samples for level 500.

Yes, I want one restriction loosened (not lifted!), so that people who can solve samples at a reasonable but high pace can stay in a flow and not be blocked by an error message every minute.

For me personally 7 or 8 samples a minute would be a comfortable rate, but 5 was the limit.

I’m still in favour of restrictions that make it hard to bot this activity, I just want it to be more user-friendly than it currently is.

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It’s not something that bothers me now. When we first started and it was something new years ago I took part but casually.

But if it’s what keeps you interested then good luck.

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@Mike_Azariah

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AH HA! A self admitted cloaked camper. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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