Please remove the depletion mechanic from planets . Its highly frustrating in several ways . Firstly balancing your inputs to factories is a task to begin with after all that effort you don’t want it ruined within a week . Secondly fiddling with extractor heads every few days or relocating your setup periodically to counter that effect is a PITA and seems against the ‘fire and forget’ concept of PI . Finally I believe , and this is only speculation , its effect is a big reason a lot of people are totally put off doing PI at all which in the long run is terrible for the game in general . Even if it means stripping a percentage from the total PI on planet so we don’t overproduce getting rid of this annoying and frankly unnecessary mechanic would greatly improve PI and player uptake into it IMO
Base the tax rates of estimated product value not a base figure by PI level . ATM I am paying relatively more tax for my cheaper products than I am for my pricier ones, which is blatantly counterintuitive.
Scrap links and link costs and just allow people to route product from building to building . Its unfair for bigger planets and just frankly a unnecessarily fiddly part of setting things up . Just have the system take care of it in the background for no PG and CPU cost making planets so much easier to set up as you only need to route the products , which is a fiddly enough process anyway .
I think these things would make PI generally a lot better QOL wise and encourage more players to try and enjoy setting up and extracting from planets . The system we use hasn’t been looked at or touched development wise since its inception as far as I know and now with PI becoming a more important part of industry it deserves some much needed attention .
No, the depletion mechanism is fine. If you want to to optimise your PI gains you can chase hotspots around the planet. If you want to optimise PI output per effort you can fire and forget. Yes, you will gain less PI than someone who chases hotspots, but why should a low effort playstyle be rewarded the same as a high effort playstyle?
Tax rates are set by players outside high sec. You also get more valuable planets outside high sec. Go outside high sec. While you can do PI in high sec you face several limits, one of which is the extra tax you pay for doing PI in high sec. Luckily you can reduce that tax with a skill. Works fine.
Why should you be allowed to route wherever for free? You’re supposed to plan when setting up the planet. If there was no cost to links, one could chase hotspots across the planet by only moving the extractor heads, which is just silly. Yes, the current system means it’s better for your planet setup to build on a smaller planet and yes, that means usually barren planets are good factory planets. Luckily you can easily tell which planets are small, so if you see 3 giant gas planets and you need one of them, you could consider picking the smallest one if the difference in resources doesn’t matter to you.
This also works fine as it is.
If I wanted cheaper PI I wouldn’t be encouraging CCP to make these QOL changes so as it’s more accessible to more people or reduce the overall percentage on planet to compensate for the removal of the planetary depletion mechanic .
What I would like to see is changes that make it easier and more user , especially new bro friendly .
To clarify I mean the overall planetary depletion not the penalty for longer extraction times , so the benefit of a more active playstyle still exists but the depletion doesn’t constantly ruin your setup . If it should exist then maybe it should be reduced by a factor of 10 say so as to have some effect bit not so quickly and dramatically .
2 . Disparate tax relatively effects you wherever you do PI not sure why you think where you do it is relevant
3 . Well yes I do want to see it easier to produce P2 say on large planets , I think this is a large bottleneck in why more higher tier P ranks aren’t produced . The sheer logistics involved in handling the much more popular P1 , popular as P2 can be difficult to produce because of the cost of links especially on some planet types . It doesn’t seem unreasonable to imagine a army of drone cargo ships flying your product to anywhere round the planet for little or no cost given what we can do in space . It is also a slight easing of the setup routine , especially for factory planets , which would I think be useful .
Thanks for the feedback though as I say would just like to see more PI ‘out there’ and it be easier and more enjoyable to access
If you make PI easier, the value of the product will lessen. Therefore, all the gains you thought you made were fake. The ISK/Effort will remain the same.
Lets mine planets like we do moons, then use the indy tab to build.
I haven’t a problem with the isk/effort ratio . My problems are that for a supposed passive income it requires an awful lot of time to maintain properly . It is difficult to ‘ascend’ the pyramid of products unless you own the pocos and can import/export taxlessly and are willing to invest a fair amount of time to logistics .
For these reasons I’m not , though I would like to be , an advocate for PI within my Corp. I wouldn’t recommend it to new bros because of its problems with depletion making it a maintenance nightmare and because it’ll go nowhere for most people because of the amount of logistics required to ‘factory’ the product .
Perhaps there are better solutions I haven’t considered but I believe it would be a good thing for newer players if it weren’t for these idiosyncrasies , a good way for new bros to earn a little isk they can happily burn buying a couple of cheap ships and going roaming with little concern for there loss as the income was passive anyway . I believe this was one of the reasons the system was introduced the way it was in the first place , I don’t believe it really lives up to it though .
The difference between P2 on large versus P2 on small planets as result of the higher cost for links is often 1 in 12 extractor heads less for the large planet. In other words, a very minimal difference.
If the cost for links would be removed, there suddenly is no more incentive for smart placement of your buildings. And there is nothing that stops a player from following hotspots around the planet when it no longer requires another command center, 5M ISK and a lot of clicking to set a completely new setup next to the new hotspot, as players can place their extractors anywhere on the planet freely if links have no costs.
In other words, removing the cost of links isn’t really needed yet it trivialises PI building placement. No support.
Yes, I was talking about the overall depletion as well.
If you do not want your setup to be ruined, pick a planet that is further from other players who also do PI. It’s about the only part of PI that interacts with other players and you want it removed because you want full benefits ofa hotspot without the effort to chase it.
Personally I rarely bother to chase the hotspots across the planet. I’ve tried chasing nearby hotspots by relocating my extractors, tried chasing hotspots across the planet by relocating the entire command center and other buildings, but while chasimg hotspots that way would pay a bit more, but I find that adjusting just the location of the heads of the extractor often is enough to keep my storages filled with the right cycle time in null sec.
But while I don’t move my setup that often, I do think this should be an option for players who want to put in more time in PI for a greater reward.
Saying “hotspots shouldn’t move, because I don’t want to move my setup” is similar to a miner saying “this belt shouldn’t empty, because I don’t want to move my ship”.
Not sure about your first point you know you don’t have to link to your command center don’t you ? So there is minimal cost to following hotshots already it’s just a time and effort , you don’t have to pay the said 5m for the new command center just move your extractor factories and spaceport
/edit Regarding your point that we all share the same depletion , why do hotshots not look like they have been ‘eaten’ into when you scan , is that a fault of the scanning mechanism as it has always made me assume we all have separate depletion.
Also I would agree with your 1 head per link assessment for doing P1 but to create P2 you need 2 close hotshots and they are not always that close so you need to run longer lines
You’re right that you can leave the upgraded command center, but the a whole lot of clicking to set up the new base cost is the bigger factor in my opinion.
Scans aren’t perfect. At higher PI skills (I forgot the name of the skills) you get more accurate scans, but even those are an approximation.
And yes, I’ve seen resources from whuch nice circular dpots had been eaten by other players before. For some planets and some resources this will be more apparent than others. Especially the few resouces that appear in certain belts on gas planets show this behaviour.
If you set up your production line in a literal line, this can bridge part of the distance between two hotspots on a P2 planet without wasting resources on links. I can provide a picture when I get home if you want.
Sorry despite what you say I still believe links need to be cheaper (if not free) to allow more creativity with setups and depletion is far too exaggerated and exasperating an effect especially in high and low perhaps not so much in WH and null , never operated there so couldn’t speak on it .
I speak as one who has all the PI skills maxed, and has done PI for years.
PI has got to be one of the least newbro friendly activities in all of EVE. You need serious skills to do anything worthwhile.
I oppose all the suggestions of the OP. If you make it easier, everyone and their idiot cousin will be doing it. Then prices will drop like a rock, and the whole thing will be worthless.
One MTC covers decent (level 3-4) PI skills for the two alts on your account. Add two weeks of training on your main and you’ve got a good PI setup with 15 planets.
Free links would add as much creativity to planetary setups as free fitting space would allow more creativity with ship fits; suddenly you can do everything and the lack of restrictions means you do not require creativity at all to make use of the resources you have.
It’s bad gameplay.
If you want to get creative, try optimising the distance you can get between two extractors with the least amount of resources:
Or you can choose to give up an extractor head or two, a factory or storage to get just that extra bit of distance to reach the other hotspot.
If links were free you wouldn’t need to ‘optimise’ your setup; instead you could just place all your buildings randomly spread across the entire planet as if location doesn’t matter. In fact, location would not matter.
Links have a cost, and should have a cost. If links did not have a cost, people could get ‘creative’ and build monstrosities like this:
By creative I was meaning more expansive so as to possibly allow better balancing P2 planets and maybe alleviate the dreaded depletion somewhat rather than drawing pretty pictures but each to there own I suppose .
Also I think your right perhaps free links are just a little too easy
@Gerard_Amatin Just out of interest what sort of percentage loss to depletion do you suffer in null sec as I’m starting to wonder whether this is a problem with high sec PI where abundance is lower as you don’t seem to feel like there is any sort of problem with depletion . Is it my perspective as a high seccer that makes me feel things should be considerably more flexible as losing 30 to 50 percent of extraction strength seems excessive to me , perhaps though its because of the way the maths works ingame
Never done PI in high sec, but I guess the percentage loss is similar.
The resources in null are higher though, so even if you’re not directly near a hotspot you gain a decent amount of resources to keep the factories running.
I rarely chase hotspots except during initial setup, but in rare cases the depletion is bad enough that I relocate.
