What can we do to Improve industry for new players (answer to question from CCP Rattati)

This is an answer to a question that was posed by @CCP_Rattati in his recent interview with Oz

It took me about a year to build up my little industrial empire where I can make just as much as high-level abyssal gameplay, nullsec ratting, incursions, or any other high-level ISK-making activity in the game. However, to get to where I am required a lot of patience because of the current system, patience that I don’t think many players have.

The biggest problem that I can see with the industry at its current state isn’t that there aren’t enough opportunities out there for new players in terms of things they can profitably build. There are many profitable items that you can find blueprint copies for on the market and start making millions on, even with a low-skilled character. You really don’t need blueprint originals to begin with.

The biggest problem is that it’s extremely hard to find these opportunities in-game without using any third-party tools. It’s sometimes even hard with third-party tools. Another huge problem is that minerals are extremely hard to move which is counterintuitive to where we are moving with the dynamic changes to the ore distribution. Different kinds of ores have been spread out around New Eden which should incentivize players to move around more to get a hand of different ores, meanwhile, Tritanium is almost impossible to move at its current state. Yes, you can always buy Compressed Veldspar but for a new player with really bad reprocessing skills, that’s simply not an option since he will lose 40% on reprocessing.

So what needs to change?

  • A blueprint simulator where you can rank all original blueprints and blueprint copies in the entire game by profitability and factor in the cost of the blueprint/blueprint copy. You should be able to simulate all blueprints that you don’t own and also check how profitable it would be to produce and sell to different trade hubs. You should also be able to simulate blueprints to all existing structures as well as making your own simulated structure set up to simulate a blueprint to a structure you and your corp haven’t built yet. This simulated structure setup should also be possible to simulate in different regions like HS/LS/NS and WH-space. Preferrably this should also be able to be saved so people have something to look forward to.
    For new players, it’s also especially important that they can simulate the blueprint copy price from contracts and for example rank blueprint copies by ISK/per copy and add that into the overall simulation. Right now, it’s extremely hard to find all of this information without singlehandedly searching each and every blueprint one after another. The 3rd party tool ISKperH does a decent job at ranking blueprints by profitability but it doesn’t factor in the cost of blueprints which is a big problem. Preferably, all of this should be integrated into the same tool.

  • Make minerals like Tritanium/pyerite/isogen easier to move by decreasing their m3 size. For a new player, you should be able to fill a Kryos transport with all minerals that you need to build something worth the trip and the effort. That should be a goal to aim for when you’re changing the m3 size.

  • Consider adding a kryos,miasmos,epithal type ships to all the other races since most players only find out that Gallente is the only race that has them after they’ve chosen to train into a particular race. I’ve heard so many disappointing players that have trained Caldari/Minmatar/Amarr transport ships only to find out that Gallenete is the only viable one to train if you want to do industry.

  • Reprocessing simulator where you can simulate how much you will get back when buying (for example) veldspar off the market and reprocess it with your current skills. It should also be possible to simulate how much you will get by adding on skills/implants that you don’t have and simulate that. This simulation tool will give new players something to strive for since they can then look ahead and see when it will be profitable to reprocess themselves and when it’s best to buy minerals off the market. This tool should just like the blueprint simulator make it possible to simulate reprocessing at different structures that either are in the region or structures that you haven’t built yet in different environments like Hisec/LowSec/NullSec and WH-space.

  • Make all different mineral reprocessing skills equally as easy to train into. The current training structure of skills follows the old way of how minerals were structured by value. Because of that, all of the former null-sec minerals are extremely hard to train into since you need to train Reprocessing Efficiency to lvl 5, Science to lvl 4, and Metallurgy to lvl 4 to even be able to reprocess minerals like arknor, bistot or crokite.
    Rather, make all different mineral reprocessing skills equally as easy to train to lvl 5 just like veldspar is. Reprocessing and reprocessing efficiency should still be a ladder to climb up to perfect skills and they should be hard/take a long time but they shouldn’t be a prerequisite to reprocess any ore type, they should just be the endgame of reprocessing.

  • Make easier guides of how to do industry in game. There should be an ingame Wikipedia not just for industry but for every activity in this game. This Wikipedia could be totally run by players if players that write good posts are rewarded with more access and players that spam or are new have very little access and have to build that access up to overtime by showing they write good posts.

Lastly, I want to say that I agree with Oz on the point that making diminishing returns for bigger producers is the wrong path to go down since that will make it so that industry players won’t have an end-game. Just like any activity in this game, you start small, and if you’re good at what you do you grow your income over time to get to a more profitable end-game.

I would also like to mention a youtube channel that has done a brilliant job of showing new players how to build up an industrial empire from scratch (even in the current climate). I think you can learn a lot about how the industry works for a new player by watching his videos because this guy (just like me) started doing industry about a year ago and now has his industrial empire. Gaming since the '70s - YouTube

It is interesting that this is not possible yet, especially considering that 3rdparty reprocessing tools on the web are outdated, difficult to use or arcane. You can already simulate production, reaction, research and invention in the industry window after all. Setting up a similar window where you put in your ores and select a reprocessing facility from available options should not be too hard.

That means a newbie guy managed to understand industry, get into the intricacies of industry and makes a big living from it now. Just one year into EVE. Obsoletes the point that industry is all that hard, doesn’t it? The video also means that the info is already available, even in easily digestible video formats and people just need to search for the info and watch the videos while they fly somewhere or wait for skills to train. Good, that removes 2 painpoints that people frequently bring up: lack of information and lack of access to information, and nothing to do while waiting for skills.

Everything described here will help increase supply and will mean any profits involved in building anything are soon identified and arbitraged (if that term is appropriate for industry).

If you want low level industry to be profitable you will have an easier time and more lasting effect by looking at the demand side of things.

Upping the rate of consumption/destruction is an obvious idea, but so is making low level stuff more useful and competitive.

Tech 1 ships get looked over too much. I get the impression tech 1 frigs are completely pointless because faction are so cheap for pvp and Destroyers are available to noobs for pve pretty much immediately.

But is noob industry that bad anyways? Ammo sells quite well.

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  1. Yeah, you can simulate blueprints that you own a bit but the current simulator is very limited and as soon as you try to simulate blueprints you don’t own you run into a whole range of problems and limitations that I frankly have no idea why they are there. The problem with this is that simulating blueprints that you don’t own is how new players start so to have that be heavily limited is a big problem.

  2. Not really, because it requires an insane amount of “boring” effort to get to where me and the youtube guy is because the current system is so clunky. Don’t get me wrong, players love to be challenged but the challenge shouldn’t be: Do you have the patience to sit and check the price of 300 + items one by one to find anything that’s profitable. The challenge of industry in my mind should more be at the logistical side of things. How do I get a hold of what I need? What can I produce myself? what’s more profitable to buy off market? What trade routes should I set up to get a constant supply of X mineral at the best price and safely? What system should i produce in? and all of the countless small technical questions that I think are fun to explore and “simulate” for new players.

Yes, you make a good point here. Although, I think that a constant increase in demand will not be the solution because the margins that will produce will soon get eaten up by big industry players. What you really need is a dynamic demand that changes fast for small ships and modules.

Big industry players often have very long production cycles and long plans so they might not be able to adapt as fast to fast price changes in for example T1 ships/modules. or they are more likely not to jump on a short opportunity like that because it isn’t worth their effort to change their long-term plan to make a smaller profit.

I don’t know how you could make demand for small T1 ships and Items swing much more but I think that would be really good for small industry players. Maybe changing faction warfare so that you have a random week by week bonus to certain kinds of ships and modules, making their demand spike up and down.

You do? If you put a random BPC/O into the industry window, you can just select a facility of your choice for an activity in the Facilities tab and you can now even adjust the ME/TE manually to see differences in input material consumption. That’s something CCP introduced not so long ago because the simulation of BPC/O not in your possession really was a pain in the past when they first introduced the new Indu window.

Ammo and modules already build at higher margins than big items. But the isk/hour is simply beneath big industry players notice. This would more than likely remain to be true.

As for increasing demand for T1 frigs, they should be made more competitive rather than objectively worse in every way to faction frigs. And/or disallowing faction frigs from novice sites in FW would create steady demand for T1 frigs.

The problem with this is that it isn’t very obvious how to do this, it took me ages to work this out and I’m obviously not the only one! ie. It is a ui problem.

Yeah, maybe it was just me running into this problem in the beginning because I started in WH space. But if you don’t have any manufacturing structures in the WH you can’t simulate anything or test things out. I think when starting out it’s important that you can simulate anything from anywhere. Even in structures that you dream about building one day.
Another problem with the current simulation is trying to find a structure with a rig bonus for (example) small T1 ships from the long list of structures.
Or getting a good grasp over the different bonuses that you enjoy in different systems or in different security systems like hs/low or null.

A better simulator for industry would be really super nice. One particular thing that I would really like to know easy (without getting out the calculator) is when I am about to buy a BPO, what is the profit margin going to be AFTER I have it fully researched.

The current nightmare of trying to work out what is my profit per T2 ship (when I buy the moon minerals direct and do the reactions and build the components) is something I gave up even making a spread sheet for.

Why open a separate thread about this , when there’s already an existing one created before yours ?!

You can do this at the moment.

Show info on the blueprint you want to buy. View in industry.

You can manually change the ME/TE by typing it in the respective boxes.

OP means well, but I disagree with making industry easier.

Making things easier does not improve them. It just makes them easier.
Next to other things does this line of thought ignore all of those who do not need things easier.
Those who enjoy complexity. Those who don’t mistake complexity with tediousness,
or things “being too hard”.

When a majority of a population requires things to be easier …
… then things should be harder, so they learn to improve.

Otherwise it is an eternal downward spiral towards the bottom.

Idiocracy.

People always ignore the fact that literally hundreds of thousands before them had no problem learning things. Many people wrongly believe that things need to be easy enough for all of those who are having a hard time, ignoring that it’s a downward spiral due to there always being people who will be having a hard time, forcing things to get easier and easier until only idiots are left.

These idiots will not stop complaining, but instead demand things to be even easier.

It’s like “One more nerf and then it’s fine.”

OP means well, but “easier” should never be a reason for anything. We need to have faith in the fact that there are intelligent people out there and we need to attract those and not the lowest common denominator.

Things will never be easy enough, simply because there’s always someone dumber than the next guy.

“What can we do to Improve industry for new players (answer to question from CCP Rattati)”

Industry WAS pretty good for new players, there was lots of variety and the risk versus rewards was balanced.

Now it is watered down and random NPCs way outside a new players skill attack them.

Revert the code to Sept 2018, this is probably one of the areas they screwed up the most, this or ECM or WarDec, not sure which.

Industry is hard to get the newbro into. Here’s why: you can’t make money doing it as a newbro. Let me explain.

Indy is like Roth IRAs, property investment, or venture capitalism in a sense that you make a percentage off your wealth over a period of time. If you made 10% on a million isk… That’s nothing. If you made 10% on 10b isk, now that’s something!! New players don’t do indy because they don’t have the wealth to invest.

So basically you have to find a way to make money off indy that doesn’t scale well and is instantly accessable to newbros. An idea would maybe be newbros can make one assembled ship per day (lore says it’s easier to make assembled ships and takes a lot less resources). Ships definitely have a draw for new players and are often paired with nice visuals. There is a sense of pride in building your own ship.

Now, maybe a player just makes assembled ships every now and then for 5 years, learning the mechanics but never really getting into it because they haven’t bothered to accrue the wealth. That’s ok. That player could still be a great industrilist on their 6th year or sooner.

This describes ammo.

It has a high margin, much higher than ships, but the isk/h is too low for a veteran industrialist to bother.

Yes, I think the contract market should be integrated more into the game so that you could easily check prices like that. Checking the prices of one, two or three blueprints, when they are fully researched in contracts, is fine. But what’s difficult is to get an overview of a large number of blueprints.

There is a third-party tool that can calculate the raw mineral /moon or input price of a blueprint for you but I’ve made this argument many times before on this forum which is. 3rd party tools are not easily accessible for new players, many of them go down after a few years and they make players leave the eve client to use which is not good as there are thousands of other things players then can be distracted by which makes them leave the game.
https://lazy-blacksmith.space/blueprint/

There are so many fantastic tools out there that should just be copied into the game, and that would make the game so so much better for new players because usually, the in-game client is all they know.

Didn’t know that

It’s not about making things easier per se. It’s more about eliminating really clunky gameplay mechanics that just make players annoyed or forces players to sit and click and search hundreds of items at a time because there is no other way around it.

So, the grades of difficulty shouldn’t in my mind be based on “do you have the patience to sit there and click for 5 hours or not?” The grades of difficulty should be much more sophisticated than that. Like spending time securing logistics for your industry (which would lead into risk which is good) or sourcing materials from around the galaxy, making contacts with new miners/other industrialists to work together towards a common goal.

Could you be more specific as to what was better before? I’ve only been in this game 2 years so I don’t know the entire history.

Random NPC’s attacking way outside their skills? You must mean triglavians? As far as I’ve heard from CCP, the random triglavians that can attack miners brought down botting a good amount and If you are a new player, you’ll clearly see if the system is invaded my triglavians and you’ll get warning before you jump the gate. So if you miss that, that’s on you. Just like it’s on you as a new player if you go into low sec /Null sec and ignore the warning pop-up.