Quality of Life concept options for PI

Industry Gameplay Center Science & Industry
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As a Devotee of Planetary Industry, there’s a lot of little or big movements that could impact quality of life and the user experience. I have been doing weekly market reviews of PI, in it’s various forms, for awhile now. Cheerleading for greater engagement in the wonderment that is PI. What i’m providing is a simple list. I could go into detail on each one of these and expand on them if desired.

The world of Planetary Industry is overflowing with an abundance of opportunities to smooth out gameplay. As well, doing so would provide sizable wins for player enjoyment, engagement, and boost activity. And I’m not even talking about reducing the need of PI in industry. No industrial mechanical changes.

I’m speaking to the engagement portion to draw people into actually farming the PI. Planetary Industry is one of those areas where multi-boxing isn’t really a factor. It’s something where very small detail/QoL changes can have huge gains in viability.

Any one of the below changes would be a huge win for CCP & the players combined. Doing multiples would change the shape of the world of PI as we know it and the players would rejoice.

  • The Epithal, a t1 hauler & premier PI ship, was the second most popular ship undocked in 2022 according to CCP.
  • Between Mission running, Ratting, Mining, Exploration & PI, Planetary Industry is the only PVE activity that requires an account be Omega to engage in.
  • Unlike other PVE activities in this sandbox game, It’s also a solo activity not lending itself well to real-time multiplayer interactions.

CCP concept ideas
(The below list was garnered using submissions from a wide array of players through feedback forms & discussions along with reviewing already existing suggestions & ideas)

  1. Find ways to reduce the number of clicks required for PI setup - This was single handedly the largest complaint I saw. It’s seen as the primary reason people do not engage more with Planetary Industry

  2. Enable renaming of Launchpads

  3. Sharable templates per planet type & usage. Much akin to ship fits.

  4. Single-Button Resets for extractors

  5. Auto-pull from Launchpad to Poco storage

  6. Increase Launchpad & Poco storage

  7. ACL Access to poco’s / Enable corporate controlled PI (Possible New Corporate level skills under planet management enabling additional “corporate” PI planets?)

  8. Epithals need a T2 variant/bigger ship - (The premier ship for a pillar of industry is a T1 hauler)

  9. Remove PI raw material depletion on planet from over-harvesting or Increase regeneration of raw resources on planet. Auto-roaming harvester heads could also maybe be a solution? the further it roams, the longer the return time. so you get a guaranteed final output yield but a variable time to delivery

  10. Reduce/Remove the shifting around that PI raw materials do on planet (Mobile hotspots)

  11. Increase extractor head circle of effect

  12. Remove the expedited transfer timer

  13. Input routing should auto-select sources

  14. Hex grid planets with a snap-to position to help with alignment

  15. Whole setup needs simplification (could be done via mirroring the moon frack setup. Using skills to impact quantity, quality, and efficiency. Set collection times, and the trigger button (like moon fracking) could be to launch your output from planet to poco for pickup.)

  16. The ability to multi-select factories when swapping schematics and mass-changing (i.e. switching from rocket fuel to superconductors)

  17. Remove different buildings and collapse into one with upgrades. Bundle buildings into single entity - allow upgrades to that entity such as adding multiple factories or storage areas - this would remove the billions of clicks. For resource extraction allow for extractor heads based on number of extractor upgrades.

  18. Impact POCO empires & huge blocs, developing a need to network or share the workload for “controlling” so many POCO’s and receiving the rewards. This could be done by; Add a small fuel requirement for the owner/operator. Allow for an “upgraded” poco that maybe has some sort of benefit (T2 variant). Perhaps an addition of showing planetary stats showing how many active/inactive extractors & factories there are on a planet. Right now, there’s really no purpose to destroying POCO’s. There is no loss.

I do love talking about PI and it’s assorted potential. I build PI maps for players in my local area in game. I review the markets to assist others in knowing where things stand pricing/availability wise. So if CCP, or really anyone, would like to talk more about the world of PI, feel free to reach out to me.

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My biggest pain is to prepare my Epithal like this 12 times each couple of days:
image
18 * 12 times shift click, drag, ctrl+v, enter = 1080 keystrokes

Please CCP Dev team, add this QoL improvement: Selecting all together, shift drag, enter quantity: Have little stacks of all selected items.
Would be awesome.

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Some great suggestions here. I would also like to see some additional ‘play’ added to PI (similar to SIMS or city builder play) to make it a bit more engaging. Although it’s not the main focus of the game so I understand why CCP haven’t invested in it.

One point which everyone brings up though (your first point above) is regarding the clicks (effort) for PI. The problem here is that if there was minimal effort for PI, then everyone would do it which in turn would reduce the value of the products, requiring a change to the requirements or leaving the products devalued requiring higher volumes and thereby more effort for the players. It’s how all of EVE works - risk (or work) vs reward. If something is too easy, more people will do it which in turn will devalue it. Somehow the ‘work’ aspect of PI needs to remain in order for it to have any value. There might be a better way to achieve the ‘work’ aspect (rather than applying RSI) but there still has to be ‘something’ to ensure it retains value.

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All factions need an industrial with a planetary goods cargo hold.

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Single button planetwide harvesters reset would be HUGE

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As someone who has been doing PI for years on two accounts, I had thought of an extensive PI expansion/overhaul with a bunch of QoL changes earlier this year. I never got around to posting it and may never do, but let me give my feedback on your list:

Yes please!

PI setup takes a huge amount of (unnecessary) clicks and could be simplified a lot.

However, one of my main concerns against making PI easier is that it would make scaling of PI easier. And with scaling of PI I mean that people spin up dozens of accounts with 18 planets each, which creates such an oversupply that the ‘normal guy’ is better off not doing PI at all, just like a single-account player these days is better off not mining at all.

That is not a good game design, in my opinion, and would like to avoid that for PI. In other words:

Do make PI easier, but not more scalable.

What do I mean with that? An example of a good way to make PI easier:

  • Allow players to copy one planet infrastructure setup and paste it at another planet
    (Please give us this CCP!)

An example of a bad way to make PI easier:

  • Allow players to import a planet infrastructure setup and place it on a planet
    (Please do not give us this, CCP!)

What’s the difference? Well, in the first case the player saves a whole lot of clicks making their second, third etc. planets and saves a lot of clicks when moving their planets to a new region. That’s good!

Scalability: linear. The effort of running two characters is twice the effort of one character.

In the second case the player only has to import a setup once and then apply it to all his accounts, which means he saves a lot of clicks (good) but also manages to scale up to dozens of accounts without extra effort. This, in my opinion, is bad.

Scalability: non-linear,

same effort as 1, only limited by how many accounts you’re willing to spin up

I don’t know if others agree with me, but I think that it’s fine if people run 10 characters for PI, as long as it also takes 10 times the effort and time to do so. People shouldn’t be able to set up PI for 10 characters with the same effort as doing only 1, that would limit profitable PI to only be for people with multiple characters and multiple accounts, like myself.

A hard no from me.

Reason: see above. It makes scaling PI too easy, which makes PI a worthwile activity for many-account players only.

Yes please!

A button per planet ‘reset all extractors on this planet’ would be essentially the same as the current situation, except it would save us so much clicking. Especially when clicking on low graphic settings I need to triple click every extractor before it connects, it’s a pain.

I have my doubts. I don’t like adding more automation and do think people should be encouraged to be more in space doing PI, not less.

Again, this will make people doing PI go less into space, instead of more. Fewer ships in space is bad. I disagree.

Yes please!

A slightly bigger and faster T2 ship would make PI runs more comfortable. And on the other side of the coin, a much more expensive T2 ship makes for much better targets to catch at a POCO than those worthless Epithals.

No thanks.

Planet material depletion is one of the basics of PI. It gives players the choice to chase hotspots for more yield for extra effort, versus just letting their extractors where they’ve been the last few months for much less effort but also less yield. That’s a good balance.

Material depletion is what makes people spread out to other systems than their alliance’s main system, which puts more ships in space, which is good.

Material depletion is what gives value to those PI skills that make you see location of materials. Without depletion, just one account needs to have the right PI skills, the rest of your characters with 0 material sensing skills just put their extractors at exactly the same spot and pull up the same hotspot yield, forever.

That’s not an improvement, and would break down one of the basics of PI.

No. See my previous comment.

Maybe I don’t understand, but why would you want that?

Bigger extractor heads, as I see it, are a downside. You get bigger heads as downside of shorter pulls, which makes it harder to make use of your current materials as you overlap sooner.

If it’s ‘more yield’ you’re asking for, then no thanks. More yield just means more supply, and as a result lower payout for my materials, so it wouldn’t get me further. Except now I need to empty my launchpads more often.

I don’t know, but I guess this timer was created to encourage people to rely on automated routes instead of micromanaging their planets. I don’t really see a reason for the timer to exist, other than to give value to ‘upgrading a link’, which I also think isn’t a good mechanic.

Sure, get rid of them!

Do you mean routing an input source to a factory should automatically select the right schema based on that input source?

I really don’t understand why factories don’t already understand they’re supposed to work with input X if I’m routing material X to their factory. This is really straightforward and would save players a lot of unnecessary clicks.

Yes please!

I think this is an alternative solution to your previous point, point 16.

I prefer your previous point myself.

Multiselecting factories does the same thing as combining multiple factories in one, with respect to the amount of clicks it saves, except that when you multiselect factories you still have entire planet bases with many factories, extractors, launchpads and links, while in the second case you end up with a sad minimal planetary setup of one extractor, one lauchpad and one factory on an entire planet. A big factory, sure, but still just one.

I’m not sure if this is necessary.

Destroying POCO’s really annoys the players who are trying to do PI on those planets. Using the tiny launchpad of the command center is an option for export, but is an expensive and time-costly alternative.

Like you, I thought that destroying POCOs meant little, but more recently I had the pleasure of seeing my own corporation’s POCOs be destroyed and replaced by enemy POCOs, which is more annoying than I would have initially thought.

I guess you’re just lucky to be doing PI in a currently stable part of space.

My main PI wishlist - click reduction:

  1. Allow us to copy a planet infrastructure and paste it on another planet. Please no templates (for reasoning see earlier in this post), just a simple way to save an infrastructure and apply it on another planet of the same character.

  2. Routing a material to a factory should make the factory realise what schema it should use, or give us a list of possible schemas to pick from.

  3. Ability to multi-select factories, extractors or storage and do the same routing, schema selection or action for all of them at the same time.

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I would love to be able to group factories for both schematic assignment and resource routing purposes. I dread changing the factories to different outputs, especially when you have a schematic with 3 material inputs. My wrist throbs at the thought of PI day,

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How “easy” something is or isn’t should be dictated by player skill, or knowledge, not pure, mind numbing, tedium(and speedrunning carpal tunnel)

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Dear god this

Please let me able to shift drag a stack of pi and do multiple stacks

Or include the pi mats in the fitting so I can refit the ship and auto fill the xargo

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The only thing I can agree with is that POCOs should need a tiny amount of fuel, so they need to be refueled by the owner once in a while. Would even make sense, since they are a reinforcable corp-structure in space. Can be pretty cheap, its not about the costs, its about the effort that manually must be done to maintain them, so its really only convenient if you do it locally. A simple T1 hauler should be enough to refuel 10 POCOs, but someone has to do it. By hand. From a ship in space.

There is basically no other way to break the POCO cartels any more. They might be able to wreck anyone trying to challenge them, but they surely won’t be able to refill a thousand POCOs or more with their altchar-holdingcorp.

About all the other things, I would be very careful of adding more automation, larger maintainance intervals or larger storage bays, simpler interfaces or easier clicking. PI can be extremly lucrative if done in short cycles and if CCP reduces the complexity to the level of mining, a simple bot can be written to reset all the extractors multiple times a day, clear the bays, launch the pads. Especially if setups can be cloned to the pixel. Currently many people make longer cycles of days, some even a week because of the click-marathon. Imagine a bot doing all that multiple times a day because the interface is easily readable and reliable in position to auto-click. Same with hotkeying. Be careful! People WILL abuse it, large scale!

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I am like a super small fish compared to others in PI but I literally have 55 toons capable of PI and I am willing to plex their accounts instantly if like 15 out of these 18 things get implemented even in some form of them in the game. Just sayin… Simplicity is not a bad thing sometimes to even complex games CCP.

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If PI is made easier ==> more folks will do it ==> prices will go down ==> your ISK/effort will stay the same.

So, save the Dev time and leave it alone.

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first 8 suggestions are very good and dont affect existing balance.

i would love to see them considered by CCP

what would t2 epithal be like?
more agile? cloaky? have bigger PI bay?

PS: i do PI for 10 years now, only P0 to P2 on 36 planets in same planets in same system in null in same setup. I tried to do P2 to P4 with 6 planets, but i tired to prepare little piles with Shift+click every 3 days after 2 months of doing it.

and bazillion clicks while install planet colony is the reason why i didnt try to move into another place, like WH, or pochven. Cause labor cost of change is too high

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It would have to be an improvement for PI hauling, but shouldn’t get in the way of the existing haulers too much, or be completely uncatchable (which is usually what people suggest when they suggest better haulers). My suggestion would be:

T2 PI hauler

(based on Epithal hull stats):

  • Twice the PI bay
  • Improved warp speed (think BR)
  • +2 warp core stability (think DST)
  • Sameish agility
  • About twice the EHP

PI bay: self-explanatory QoL improvement for PI haulers. Nice risk-reward play as this also means you can have more value in cargo to lose when you do get caught.

Warp speed: It would save a PI hauler like myself a lot of time if I could warp around faster! Warp speed is also a nice defence mechanism as hostiles will have less time to react once they see you warp to a certain planet.

Warp core stability: a nice defence mechanism from DSTs. Epithals are notoriously predictable (they warp from planet to planet, landing on customs offices) and are therefore easy to catch, the only reason more people don’t do it is because an Epithal isn’t worth anything. A T2 version could really use this little extra to make sure that not every single unprepared tackle frigate can hold it down.

Agility: The Epithal is agile enough for the MWD+ cloak trick, and is agile enough to land, align, pick up goods and warp off to the next planet without delay, so I would say the current agility is fine.

EHP: to be expected from a T2 ship.

The ship wouldn’t have the massive defences of a deep space transport, nor would it be as uncatchable as a blockade runner, but it would (except in price) be an improvement over the Epithal in several useful ways.

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Just my thoughts:

How about +70%

okay.

No. Such ship usually does not travel trough hostile space, in most cases only between POCOs and a Citadel. You can always fit a warp core stabilizer for additional safety.

okay.

No. If you want more cargo and more EHP, the ship must be less agile and slower. Balance.

Overall, the goal of this ship is to reduce the amount of trips needed by increasing the transport capacity → more QoL for hauling your PI stuff. Fine, but then it must be easier to catch and more costly to lose, to keep the balance, else it would simply lead to less player interaction in space.

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What about a T2 PI hauler in combination with a T2 launchpad:
The hauler has a bigger PI bay and needs to activate a module like the industrial core in the Orca. Then it automatically transferes and routes all materials from and to the planet but will stay in space for a minute or so.
This could save those thousands of stack splitting clicks while beeing docked in your station, just add enough materials to the PI bay. (Bonus: Ships would fly in space with much more cargo/value.)
Additional it would save the clicks moving stuff from the cargo to the POCO and then to the planet, with that super annoying transfer timer. You just activate the module and wait there for a minute, fly to the next planet and click again.
Pilots would spend less time in station, more time in space, with more value and the thread of beeing a sitting duck while the transfer module is running. Maybe you would bring your friends to guard you: Even more ships in space.

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Sure.

Even if it’s just +40% I’d see it as a nice improvement. 2x was an example.

Did you read my reasoning for the warp core stability though? You didn’t address the point that it’s incredibly easy to catch an Epithal if you wanted, as they’re much more predictable than any other ship in space.

POCOs are in no way safe, if anything, they’re big ‘please camp me’ signs to catch juicy T2 hauler kills for covops hunters or cloaky dictors.

Yes, this is only an issue in ‘hostile space’, but have you considered that people also do PI outside high sec in parts of space that often have a permanent presence of hostile players in system?

Fair enough.

My point was mostly to address the earlier suggestion ‘more agile’, as I think it shouldn’t be more agile as the Epithal already is agile enough. Less agile is fine for me, as counterbalance for being harder to catch (+2 wcs).

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yeah I did read it, I just don’t agree. Since the PI-bay is not affected by Cargo Expanders, you have all the Lowslots to fill it with a Warp Core Stab and Agility Mods without any real downside. Giving you +2 Warp Core Strength and a perfect ability to do Cloak/MWD. Thats absolutely enough. Allowing the ship to have +4 Warp Core Strength with the bonus AND a stab is too much imho, because it would force any solo player to get 5 points of tackle to even have a chance to hold it. Thats too much imho. And against a cloaky Dictor it won’t help anyway.

Also one shouldn’t try to do a PI-run in a system with unknown contacts in local. Or if its just one, ask some corpmates for support, they can simply escort you for these 5 minutes. If they won’t do it, its a crappy corp. If none are online, do the run later.

Last but not least, in WH space whithout local its pure concidence if someone catches your epithal, no one is “camping” POCOs there, because you could sit for days on one and nobody comes along. It’s a pure waste of time and only works on very special occasions of you know the owner very well or have spotted him mid-run and then hoping you chose a POCO to camp he hasn’t already emptied. Clever haulers won’t start with Planet I and go up ony by another, they start their trip at a random POCO and zig-zag their run, so their next one is not easily predictable. In any case, too much a speciality to justify so much tackle defense imho. I have lived for years in a WH and usually you clear your POCOs when your corpmates report a calm chain or you have hole control or rolled all exits. Chances to be caught are close to zero.

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Most recent patch notes: “Improved the PI interface so that when you have multiple extractors, with multiple pins each, it’s more clear which pins belong to the extractor you are currently editing.”

Some might say it’s a small change. But I see it as evidence of forward momentum, and I thank you for it CCP!

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Simple fix is using a deep space transport, it has the 50k fleet hangar. Sure, it’s a few trips to refill but those trips mean money for those who have the patience to make it

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