Devils Advocate Time

I had a very interesting conversation with an alliance pilot last night. He is under the suspicion that the reprocessing of towers is not a bug, but was intentional on the part of CCP. Dr. E and CCP Chronotis were probably worried about the spool-up time of the manufactured side of PI (the so called P1 thru P4 part). He posits that it was always intended that the player re-cycle existing modules in order to make sure there were enough P4 materials on the market so that once the towers and what not are pulled, people are able build towers until the more natural P1 thru P4 planetary manufacturing picks up the slack.

This may also avoid the usual effect of having the first units to hit the market to be so overpriced that they simply kill any tower re-supply until prices come down which would have some very bad effects on 0.0 space. i.e. due to the flood of cheap P4 available initially we may not get the massive price spike at the beginning of things. It may hurt extraction adoption initially since people will look at the prices and go - "return is not worth the isk invested and my time". Remember that with PI you need to calculate ROI since any isk you spend on the control tower and any of the pins/routes is gone. You only recoup this isk when you sell product.

The evidence he has for this being intentional: When you reprocess the existing tower you don't get any capital construction parts like you would if you reprocessed an orca (apparently he's done it twice - with the orca). This means that reprocessing (once the NPC goods aren't on the market any more with their fixed prices) won't be a very good idea since the way it works now any minerals you pump into a tower go bye bye even if you recover all the P4 materials.

Also CCP is on record as delaying the release of the Planetary Control Centers "because of issues of scale". Which does not tell us exactly what they were worried about although I suspect it was the hang time between removing the NPC goods and the industrialists spooling up manufacturing.

His personal suspicions is that this is what the indy guys at CCP intended, but he also thinks that their original schedule and estimates for this got thrown out of whack by the changes in dates.

My position is that ok, this is not totally outside the realm of possibility but that we'd know for sure if CCP reacted before the weekend. If they react today it'll mean it was an oversight and they fucked up, if we don't see some action it'll mean it's intentional and they were simply being quiet like they did with the shuttle removal. Evil bastards.

Well it's a position anyways. And as the pilot stated (I'm quoting him here - verbatim) it's only his opinion and:

"If you don't like it you can step outside and go play a game of hide and go fuck yourself"

Methinks he has run into one too many asshats on forums somewhere.