Monthly Archives: November 2012

Industry Iteration

tl;dr: In this post, I talk about how I’d change industry, to shake things up a bit, while not crippling anyone. Change highsec slots and costs to make station based industry less attractive.

A lot of the following depends on significant updates to POS, and corp role management. Specifically the ability to launch POSes for personal use, or at least a lot more strictly tied down on usage rights. The ability to say “Person A can use this POS, but person B can’t. Person B can use this other POS which person A can’t (Person C can use both though)” is very important. Without it you have to depend on trust, which just really doesn’t work. Access groups on POS are thus important. And the ability to use BPO/BPCs from personal hangers.

It’s said that null-sec industry is stillborn, due to the ease of manufacturing in High-Sec, with its myriad stations with many many slots.

Some people would recommend just removing the slots, but this has some issues when it comes to newbies. I have an alternate set of suggestions:

  1. Have the price for slot use rise, when the number of empty slots falls below a threshold. This is in a similar fashion to how the price of Offices rises, when there are none free in a station. I’d base the rise on a percentage free, however. so when you drop below 50% free at downtime, it rises a little. When you drop to 10% free it rises even faster. Exactly how much is a more complex matter, but increasing above 33k per hour isn’t insane.
  2. Specialize the slots. If you’re manufacturing in a POS, you have to decide which arrays to launch, to get slots able to manufacture certain things. Specialize the available slots, perhaps by Corporation, so you can’t just set up shop in a station and manufacture /everything/ there. Imperial Armaments for Ammo and modules. But not ships or drones, for example. Make Ammo slots more common that others, to give newbies a break (as most people start on ammo)
  3. Increase the fuel cost for charters for POS, depending on the number of free moons in a system/Number of POS in the system. Possibly looking at surrounding systems too, but that’s a little more up in the air. This will: A: spread manufacturing across highsec more cleanly. B: make null-sec more viable as they don’t have that cost.

Manufacturing near Jita should cost you more than doing it 20 jumps away, purely due to competition for space and slots.

I’d also like to see the ability to stick in a bunch of identical jobs at the same time. Even if it’s restricted to ‘identical jobs, in the same facility’. That’d help.