Do you want some cheese with that whine?

The whine

First some background, from the patch notes to Incursion 1.4:

The type of anomalies spawned by sovereignty upgrades now will be affected by the security status of the system. See CCP Greyscale's blog (http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=883) for more information. Please note that these changes will take effect within the first week after deployment and will not all be updated immediately after the patch is deployed.

For those of you who have had your head in the sand, this is CCP's answer to the isk fire hydrant that they let loose with Dominion.  The only surprise is the rapidity and steadfastness that CCP is approaching this change.  I approve.  I know this will be an unpopular position with the rest of my 0.0 confederates but unlike them, I have been expecting this for quite some time now.  Basically since the Dominion patch came out.  There was talk on CCPs part about increasing the sinks but obviously that fell thru.

 Possible Cheese

The problem CCP's game designers have is that they consistently design low npc cost mechanics.  Making more and more of the economy "player driven" does not necessarily imply you need to make it isolated from the NPCs.  One of the things CCP (grayscale, chronotis and other indy related devs) should look at when designing new systems or re-designing old ones is to look at where the npc interaction happens in their designs and make sure that there are appropriate sinks along the way.

For example, there are two ways to make a module:  You can make it in an NPC station (Installation costs and production time charged by the NPCs), or you can make it at an equipment manufacturing array.  Here the isk sink is represented by the PI component of the fuel used to keep the tower online.  The actual sink is the import/export taxes and the prorated planetary installation costs necessary to extract and process the materials resulting in the PI fuels.  Most of the costs in manufacturing a module at a POS are neither a sink nor a faucet.  Just a lateral transfer of isk from one player to another.  We can marry this with the fact that the PE development of a blueprint has very little impact on the total cost of a manufactured product.  So although there are sinks there they are rather small compared to the total amount of isk coming into the game through bounties.

I would seriously like to redesign the manufacturing mechanisms to be a little less abstract.  Setting up a production line should cost 5-10 times as much as a single example of the final product.  I'd change the way that manufacturing slots are setup and handled.  I would give a "size" to manufacturing lines (probalby in m3 heck why not use the m3 of the final product) and the running costs should be proportional to the length of time of the run times the "size" of the production line.  This would provide for a much more substantial "isk sink" that the current production.  Also the pvpers wouldn't bitch about it since they don't see a reduction in their "income" and manufacturers would simply adjust our spreadsheets and pass the cost on to the clients.

Doing changes along these lines would also allow us to consolidate various POS maufacturing modules to fewer modules but that the total amout of m3 of "manufacturing space" be the limit and not the number of slots.  Also reducing/elminating the setup costs if an previous "shop floor" for the same object was available and un-used.

Other thoughts

Another change I would like to see is the removal of "compression items" by changing the mineral mix of those items so that they can't be used for compression.  But I still see the need for "compression shippable items" for efficient shipping.  What I'd like to do here is have an intermediary step for hull manufacture.  I.e. instead of the current: mineral->ship hull, what I'd like to see is mineral->t1 component->ship hull where the t1 component is "compressed" compared to the mineral content.  I'd also like to re-ballance the current capital components and t2 components for this paradigm as well.  so you'd get materials->component->hull where the components are compressed vs the minerals.  This would mean it would be advantageous to ship components around vs the minerals or the final hulls.  This would spur a solid and viable market for components since they would be the "compression" item for long distance shipping.

Call me crazy but putting in some sinks instead of turning off the faucets would have probably gone over better.