CCP Greyscale Comments on Tech 2 BPOs

We got hit with two industry Devblogs today as it looks like CCP is going to try to publish all six industry related blogs before Fanfest. On page 9 for the comments for the Researching, the Future post, CCP Greyscale made a comment on how much Tech 2 BPOs dominate the market.

Right, Mastadon, Claymore, Claw etc are BPO-dominated, so in practice all this means is more throughput and (presumably) cheaper prices.

Huginn and Muninn are in the area of concern, where we might end up warping the market a little.

Broadsword’s not a concern because it was released in Trinity (winter 2007) and to the best of my knowledge we stopped putting new ship BPOs into the lottery in Revelations 1 (winter 2006). If that market’s uncompetitive, it’s because of your fellow inventors, not BPO owners 🙂

CCP Greyscale source

This adds a little more information from what we got out of CCP Diagoras before he left CCP that I covered in my Percentage of Items from Invention vs Tech 2 BPOs post.


Burn Jita 3: Day 1

Burn Jita got off to a great start with freighter kills coming in one after another. I was able to watch a few hours of NickFuzzeh’s stream yesterday and was able to get some nice screencaputres before it went offline; image credits go to him.

If you are looking to keep up to date on the kills, head on over to use isjitaburning.com.

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Industry Devblogs Leaked

Overview

After a lot of long nights and mountains of data parsing involving a 26GB dataset, I have information about the upcoming Industry related Devblogs to share before the official announcements out of CCP’s headquarters. The Heartbleed security exploit allowed me to gather information about the topics from the CSM-CCP private forum and here’s what I found.
IMG_20140423_103906-1

Data Mining

Piecing together forum content 64K at a time was no easy task; there is a lot of change in the memory while people are using the forums. Now that I am living in GMT-8, I did a lot of the data collection over my evening to early morning hours. I knew that this was the best time to try to gather chunks of memory with the least amount of change due to the majority of the users being asleep.

I ran my exploit code at random intervals during the night from various VPN endpoints to try to keep the attack sources unidentifiable and obfuscated. Each time I was successful at getting a chunk of the server’s memory, I saved the output to a database.

Using some data mining techniques, I was able to make some of the 64K memory blocks overlap and build larger sections. Eventually I was able to get some partial HTML pages that were human readable, filled with the details of the upcoming devblogs.

Industryblog3

So far CCP has released two out of the six total blogs and here is the detail on the upcoming content:

#3 Industry UI

John Lander, also known as CCP Unifex, gave an announcement during Fanfest 2013 that his team was going to deliver a mobile portal into the Eve universe to allow some game functionality on tablets and phones devices. He recently announced that he was leaving CCP and I found that there was a lot of questions about what to do with the code that has been created by his team.

Code equals development time, which equals money. As far as the investors are concerned, the code that was written is still valuable and since it is a line item on the balance sheets, it should be used in some fashion. The board of directors did not want to write off the value because the mobile development group was being shutdown.

CCP Punkturis‎, a respected User Interface Programmer, just returned from maternity leave and had a empty task list; she was put in charge of salvaging the mobile framework into something usable. What is being delivered is a Industry UI that is built entirely around a grid structure. Each of the block represents an input. The goal of the design is that you have to feed in items to equal 2048 in order to start the industry job. If you don’t reach a multiple of 2048, the job doesn’t start.

“This fits perfectly into the risk vs reward idea,” wrote Ripard Teg, Vice Chair of CSM8.

2014.04.23.20.36.59

#4 Research

The intense hatred and heated ramblings that we see on the public forums regarding the Invention system and existence of Tech2 BPOs is also mirrored on the CSM-CCP private forums. The community backlash and scars from the t20 incident in 2007 are still not healed. The Summer theme of reworking industry was seen as a great time to change the design to ease the suffering and apologize for the hurt feelings.

CCP plans to add an additional component to Tech 2 BPOs in order to complicate their production and create a bottleneck that can be controlled. All existing Tech 2 BPOs in the game are going to require various amounts of Fedo as inputs. This additional input allows CCP to control the spawn rates of Fedo asteroids that can only be mined by Modulated Deep Core Miner II’s.

2014-04-24_fedo_tech2_bpo

Fedo asteroids can only be sourced from Palpis system in the Devoid region so this system is going to become as valuable as X-7OMU in Pure Blind, the primary source for Sisters of Eve LP mission runners.

#5 Job Cost Scaling

The idea on the table is to make industry more collaborative and nerf the profitability for solo-manufactures; CCP is forcing us to play with other people. Their idea is that the more people the better so job costs will sale with the size of your corporation with alliances receiving an extra bonus on top of that.

Initial proposed scaling numbers result in a 838.6% profit benefit to being in a 11,120 member alliance like Goonswarm Federation.

2014-04-24_vagabond_profits

#6 Teams

A major complaint of people is that if you want to partner up with a person from another corporation or alliance, you lack the ability to share resources in a secure fashion. A ‘team’ is a new tab in the corporation window where you can link external entities and give them access to your resources such as corporation hangars, and manufacturing slots, and POSes. A new, more tab-intense, nested window structure within the Corporation tab is being delivered to us.

Trebor Daehdoow, the CSM8 Chairman, was found stating that “this tabular, nested design is really the height of user experience. I can’t think of a better way to sort and filter for things.”

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Note: I hope you enjoyed this troll post. None of the actions outlined actually occurred and everything reported is made-up.


Historical Profits by Solar System

Overview

CCP has released two out of the six Devblog posts aimed at industrialists detailing changes for the upcoming Summer expansion. We’re seeing sweeping changes to the way logistics are done for capital ships, station research, POS anchoring limitations, BPO security concerns, and how inventors are going to be given a boost with BPC copy rates. Lockefox has a great summary of the concerns in his Everything Is Changing post.

Given the ideology coming out of the Dev Blogs to empower Nullsec industrialists while kicking Lowsec in the knees, I wanted to see how much of my industrial gameplay occurs in Lowsec — Is CCP killing my game?

Data Data

Summary of profit grouped by solar system with profit numbers obfuscated.

— Get Profit per Station By Solar System including Region
SELECT SUM(profit), mapDenormalize.itemName, mapSolarSystems.solarSystemName, mapRegions.regionName, AVG(mapDenormalize.security)
FROM wallet
JOIN mapDenormalize
ON (wallet.stationID = mapDenormalize.itemID)
JOIN mapRegions
ON (mapDenormalize.regionID = mapRegions.regionID)
JOIN mapSolarSystems
ON (mapDenormalize.solarSystemID = mapSolarSystems.solarSystemID)
GROUP BY wallet.stationID
ORDER BY sum(profit) DESC

2014-04-18_profits_by_solar_system

It turns out that Lowsec only accounts for 7% of our profits to date so I can’t complain about the nerf that is going to hit Lowsec capital builders given the upcoming compression changes.

2014-04-18_profits_by_solar_security

Conclusion

The changes to compression are a welcomed change, even if it means retiring or heavily modifying the logistical chain for Lowsec capital production. I have a feeling that there are going to be more major changes in the next four upcoming Devblog posts. Stay tuned.


425mm Railgun I BPO Firesale

With the upcoming compression changes outlined in the Building Better Worlds devblog, our stock of 425mm Railgun I BPOs became instantly useless for compressing minerals. They were researched to ME250/PE50, but I priced them at their NPC value of 15M as a firesale in order to get them to move. I was able to sell our stock within a week.

So long Railgun BPOs, you will be missed.

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