My request is a simple quality of life upgrade to the user interface for industry. This upgrade would address the submission of industry jobs that are copies of each other and would reduce the repetitive nature of submitting jobs. In practice, the user would select multiple jobs (of the same type of item), scale the number of items produced and mass submit them to the queue. A check would be made for ensuring that all required materials are available, and the jobs would be placed in the hopper.
The reason why repetitive jobs are used is to lower the timeframe in order to reach a finished product. There is also a limit per player of what they can build.
What you are asking sounds more like a CEO requesting each player dedicate a slot to doing a job. I can understand this being an option for people with industry alts but it promotes non-play. Even with that I am for the idea of a CEO being given in game options to issue orders for a single slot use to characters with skills necessary to preform an action as this would allow Industrialists to “hire out” their slots and possibly get paid directly for them.
Would that fit your idea? Chief Production Officer requests the following workloads be completed by the character base and has offered the following payments to assigned jobs.
Edit 1:
This would mean the product is already assigned to the hangar dedicated for production and inputs are checked and reserved prior to assignment and reserved with dedicated input and output assignments. So Corp Hangar 2 (an example, people would choose their own) has the BPO lockdown set in it while 3 would have the inputs and 4 would have the output. 5 would be an open hangar for people to draw their ammo from which some productions are queued up for when the ammo runs low. 6 has the spare frigates and fittings which has some productions queued up as well. This would leave 1 as a dump hangar for miners and 7 as an empty freight container slot opened specifically to my mining crews with 7 being take and 1 being view. So many trust points to open.
Unfortunately this opens the world to industrial sabotage for players who choose to infiltrate and start/cancel all jobs so only assigned players would be allowed to begin production. You would need option for Public and Private production contracts. Players would need skills enough to activate a job at the location in question from where they are docked giving that skill which determines how far away you can start jobs at another use allowing them to work from the invention station gathering datacores while still producing for their corps as long as they are within range.
That’s both spectacular and evil incarnate depending on what people do.
First the main goal of the post was to suggest a reduction in the repetitive nature of submitting jobs (given an example of filling an individual build queue N times). Given that there are other similar QOL features (such as the “deliver all” GUI feature), I felt that it would be reasonable to explore other similar approaches throughout other parts of industry. From my perspective, the creation of a “build lots” button (which would utilize up to the maximum available industry slots in a given instance) would be reasonable. The justification is that the majority of industry time (from my experience) is spent researching product strategies and the execution is typically pretty shallow anyways (apart from hauling) and somewhat click-heavy (especially considering bulk builds).
On the second point, I’ve definitely kicked around that thought myself. That is, the ability to pre-allocate build slots to the corporation. This would improve QOL from the perspective of not having to log on to many different alts in order to execute simple build orders. I think the QOL for such an idea would be quite beneficial whilst the impact on the economy wouldn’t be dramatic (given that the items will get built regardless). I think from a game development standpoint, reducing mindless clicking and building deeper interactions in the process should hopefully be there vision for the future.
Also, I’m not advocating queuing up massive amounts of builds (in order to get around short build times for t2 bpc’s as an example). That, I would imagine, might cause some difference in the supply of certain short time frame build bpc’s (such as t2 light drones).
TBH, a better QOL would be the industry window defaulting to max runs on blueprints. I really hate it when you’re going down a line of blueprints for cap parts, and in the middle of it you have 2 single unit runs because EVE decided to say “LOL ■■■■ YOU”.
I think the idea of being able to ‘donate’ indy slots to someone else has some merit but needs to be thought through. Instead of having a ‘Chief Production Officer’ corp role, why not be able to choose per slot who to donate that slot to and be able to withdraw the donation pretty much at will (needs to be thought out)?
Say I want to donate two indy build slots each to Larry, Moe and Curly while keeping the other four myself. At the same time I might want to donate three lab slots to Dr Diabolik and two reaction slots each to Influenza and Hangover for their varied endeavors.
Use for donated slots would be as with their own slots and subject to the same access etc. rules.