With the aid of one of my alliance pilots we did a little tour of the blueprints on Sisi last night. I take back everything I ever thought about this expansion being a placeholder expansion. This is going to be one of THE major industrial expansions for EVE. The mechanics of PI itself are rather lackluster. What's going to kick things in the pants is what you can do with the new end products of PI.
Control towers, POS modules, Sov structures, Station Materials...
There are blueprints for all of these on the market in Sisi. Pardon me but OMG is this big. Oh and BTW, just about all of them use Capital Construction Parts... The implication for the cost of a tower BPO is staggering. I fully now expect all these BPOs to cost between the price of cruiser BPO (probably for things like small POS gun batteries) all the way up to capital ship BPOs (for things like large control tower BPOs and Sov structures).
People have been concentrating on the extraction methods without considering the implications of switching ALL of these things over to player manufactured. You know all those "cheap" Capital Construction Part bpc's on the market? wave bye bye to the "cheap" part. They just got popular. Getting into PI? - not so hard, getting into tower and module manufacture? I hope you got your capital construction skill to at least 1.
This is a heads up people. PI itself is only the tip of the iceberg. Think about it you want to put a research tower up in high sec? PI material demand. You want to claim sov in 0.0? PI material demand. You want to replace that moon mining tower that got killed? PI material demand. You want guns on your POS, Ship maintenance array, etc... PI material demand... Eventually.
The adoption problem
Here is my worry. CCP is going to phase out NPC goods over the next few weeks. They say they are going to monitor the adoption of PI. I don't have a problem with controlling the phasing out of the NPC goods. BUT! I have a problem with the "monitoring" part of that process. Here is my reasoning: Until the NPC goods are gone there is no way to judge the true "demand" side of the equation. And on top of that, none of these things exist in isolation. Each category of NPC goods (including towers and the rest that can now be made) that you remove from the market changes the demand side of the equation in an uneven fashion. In other words you won't be able to judge the true adoption rate and true production capacity UNTIL ALL the goods are removed.
If my suspicions are true about the costs of the BPOs, well that's a barrier to entry to the most profitable segment of PI. The money won't be in the materials for the most part. It'll be in the end products. If the BPOs can't get into the hands of the manufacturers fast enough, then the demand won't be there. Which will reduce demand of PI products and affect adoption (under the impression that it won't be profitable at the start, which will lead to supply shortage compared to production capacity eventually. Basically until the end product is removed from the market, there is no reason to get into manufacturing it. If there's no reason to get into manufacturing something, there is vastly reduced demand for the items that go into making it. This could seriously screw with adoption numbers during the switch over.
It's a chicken and egg problem.
Conclusion
I've always wanted that the player manufacture the towers and what not. Not sure whether I've mentioned it in a blog post or and EVE forum post. I have been on record as saying "until they let us manufacture towers and what not they won't have a serious industrial system". Well... I may need to eat my words on that one. Control tower manufacture here we come.
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8 comments:
Well @#$%!
I, for one, hadn't even KINDA considered new BPOs and what skills it's gonna take to invent/manufacture.
Capital Construction?? DAMMIT - and here I bought into the illusion of getting into an industry from the ground up. Suddenly seems like this may very well be a situation for the rich & established to get more so, and newbies to get jack.
For the most part, anyway. And after the masses look into this and realize it (if the final version is like what is currently on Sisi) won't work out without major time invested noone will bother. Only current Carebears will take anything to that next level.
Not that everything is all Doom and Gloom (tm). Just that things may be a good deal more tedious than I originally thought. Especially when thinking of building something from PI from scratch and trying to consider the WHOLE picture.
Do you believe that this implies that construction of these structures will not be possible in w-space ?
DAMN! Now I have to reactivate Dar.
I was expecting something like this to eventually become the case although not so soon.
Planets must be important before DUST514 is released otherwise the premise of contracting console wielding mercenaries is moot.
Does it apply to all space modules including SBUs and warp disruptor bubbles? The bubbles in particular were deployed and died in massive numbers during the recent defence of H-W as both sides used them to control space.
@okami, well you need it for the capital construction parts. Don't think you need it for the towers themselves - so you could source those elsewhere.
@knug, probably the PI part for sure, we'll find out about the tower part soon enough - I have an alliance member investigating...
@David, sorry dude (o.O?)
@stabs, Warp disruptor bubbles already use NPC goods so you don't need a full blown tower setup to get into them. (Electronic Parts to be precise)... Wait a sec... Need to dig into this I haven't seen them on the spreadsheets yet. I'm hoping this is simply something that people missed as it's not some thing that feeds into the final 8 products. We'll see.
Ahem, this is what I was thinking of when I said that I was worried about whether I would have the cash to get into the high-end of this business.
@OkamiKurai Yeah, I know what you mean. I'm 7 months old and 9.5 million SP's wiser, but I still feel like a raw noob, who will have little impact. You read about people dropping 10's of billions of ISK on stuff and wonder ...
Of course, you could always buy ISK, I mean sell Plexes. I'm not going to, but then, I'm crazy.
The upside is that it gives me an interesting problem to solve: which skills to learn and in which order and to what level. Which BPOs can I afford and make a profit on, there will be some, I'm sure. Should I research some first? All fun problems.
Letrange Indy posts = best Indy posts. Great stuff m8.
So if I was CCP, I would just start raising the prices on all of my NPC sell orders. 10% or more per week. This allows player supply to under-cut NPC supply, without shocking the market completely by removing all supply at once. Once my NPC sell order price gets high enough AND player supply has taken over, my NPC sell orders will no longer be getting any volume, and I can remove them completely. Just a thought.
Bad news for ya: (or good news for good code)
http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=762
Dev blog from Torfifrans delaying Tyrannis until May 26
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