HAHAHAHAHAHA! 1/10 Because your argument has been beaten to death, repeatedly, but bonus points cause you got me to laugh, final score 3/10.

HAHAHAHAHAHA! 1/10 Because your argument has been beaten to death, repeatedly, but bonus points cause you got me to laugh, final score 3/10.

[I give you a 9/10 for keeping me active in this thread. Usually, I bow out after a single neglected post. :)

Even though his posts are often of a troll-ish nature that doesn't make him wrong. As a matter of fact he is just right about this one. If you have only 10 people in a game, everyone owns 1000 isk they can mine all they want, nobody will ever have more than 10000 ISK. EVER! Actually less over time if transactions cost a tax... This basic principle doesn't change just because it's billions of trillions of ISK that exist in the game of thousands of players. The only faucets are anything that make the game have more ISK (bounties, npc buy-orders, ...), and the only sinks are mechanics that remove ISK from the game (npc sell-orders, taxes, ...).

But this all is beside the point, I'm sure CCP knows better when and to what extent this has to be considered, it's their game after all and in their best interest to keep it healthy! Also they are the only ones who have access to the kind of information you need to make informed decisions about this.

Can we please get back to the original question, how to create volume in the T2 rigs market? We got somewhat sidetracked to something that's barely an issue here as it doesn't really apply to the situation

...but what DOES remain is there exploration sites are relatively scarce. The most common by far are wormholes/unknowns followed by grav sites. At the other end of the spectrum are Mag and Radar sites, I'd guess with an about equal amount of each of them. This would HAVE to change for the most commonly proposed solution - increasing drops in mag sites - to have a large enough impact on T2 salvage parts supply and the following drop in T2 rig prices.
Also the BPC runs have to be increased (I personally think 5 runs would be fine, but 10 are also not overreaching) in any case so the new volume can be handled.

Thought about this quite a bit last night. And I don't think there is any sort of silver bullet that will fix all of the issues.

The biggest problem I'm seeing are the imbalance of the rigs and the randomness of the drops, leading to stockpiles of crap and shortage of the good stuff.

What is brilliant about mining is that you know exactly what you are getting. If prices of trit goes up, everyone goes mining veldspar, as it's a steady source of Trit and easy to get. This leads to reduced price and less people mine veldspar.

The key there, is that it is perfectly balanced by the demand of the market. If there is a demand for Trit, you go and get it. There is no bottleneck other than how much you can get in a day, so the bottleneck is just people doing mining.

On the salvaging side, the building blocks are too racially themed. The circuits are probably what is closest to Trit, but after that it becomes highly "this component is only in these few things" rather than a portion of all salvage is in all rigs (which would lead to much healthier market).

So I think that all rigs/salvage needs to be broken into smaller blocks, which then are directly used in rig production, or in a secondary tier, basicaly manufacture salvage.

Ok just looking through the forum here and I just had to comment on how wrong your thinking is.

I'm a miner. I mine ore, refine it and sell minerals. Everyone has the ability to mine in this game and make their own ships and modules. To a manufacturer I sell a commodity and convenience, just like RL miners do. If you think that mining just magics up ISK, why don't you do like this bloke and make yourself a toaster. Let's see how you get along with having to mine everything and build everything, ships, modules, ammo, from scratch. You can do it, everyone in EVE can mine and produce anything they need themselves. You don't need to pay a producer any ISK for that module, A producer can mine the minerals himself, he doesn't need to buy the minerals from a miner.

Suggestion of using PI for cross-conversion of T1 (and T2?) salvage materials.
[...]
With this idea you don`t need to change the salvage mechanic itself or the drop rates.

Howdy!

Im currently looking into the whole issue of the rigs. Going through the various loot tables and such I've already spotted quite a few problems, errors and so forth which I would like to fix, but I'm stepping lightly as I don't want to just go with guns blazing on this.

But I am interested in any sort of general feedback on what the situation is with T2 rigs from all angles. The salvage (difficulty, is it worth doing, is it too much of a nice?), to Mag. sites (are they worth doing?) , production and invention.

From our standpoint, we would like this to be a bit more commonplace, a bit more profitable for more people and less expensive.

We are also looking at a very short time-frame, so major changes might not happen. But I really like the idea of melting together T1 components into T2, so i'm gonna write it on a post-it and hang it on my monitor. It might be relatively easy to do, but the ratio might be a bit tricky to get right.

Any thoughts, ideas or suggestions are welcome!

As a matter of fact, yes. :)

I know what you've probably read in other forums/blogs, that ISK faucets are only those things that magically generate ISK into your wallet - like NPC bounties and ship insurance - and that all other activities - mining, for example - are just moving ISK around (I mine the ore, you buy it). In RL economics, this is true, and the equivalent of an ISK faucet would be a government which is printing more money - ie. creating more currency from nothing.

But, in RL, the physical assets/resources are finite and limited. In a game, we can create new assets/resources from nothing.

Thus, a more correct definition of an ISK faucet would be *any* game mechanic which magically spawns ISK - either directly (such as NPC bounties) or indirectly through the endless creation of new assets/resources (such as regenerating minable asteroids) which can be converted to ISK.

First of all I like that idea very much! But not changing mag sites would be a huge mistake. They are so completely useless that nobody does them, if people were doing them the shortage of T2 salvage mats would be lessened, especially with a (big) bump in drop chance (that being so low at the moment is the reason nobody does them). It's the perfect chance to make another unused feature usable.

First of all I like that idea very much! But not changing mag sites would be a huge mistake. They are so completely useless that nobody does them, if people were doing them the shortage of T2 salvage mats would be lessened, especially with a (big) bump in drop chance (that being so low at the moment is the reason nobody does them). It's the perfect chance to make another unused feature usable.
It also would lead to the bad situation that most T2 salvage effectively comes from L4 missions, which most people agree (I think) would be a really bad thing.

I think producing any specific T1 salvage should require at leat 2 or 3 others, in various but not huge amounts (single to low double digit values). Also the generica (ending in "circuit") should probably not be required to alchemize anything other than other generica. Should T2 salvage also be created with this, it should be from the corresponding broken-T1-variants as everything else would just be confusing :)
In any case any reaction like that should require some PI-product as a catalyst, to tie it into PI and make it a reason it's done on a planet, but also to give some more uses to the underused PI materials.

Thought about this quite a bit last night. And I don't think there is any sort of silver bullet that will fix all of the issues.

The biggest problem I'm seeing are the imbalance of the rigs and the randomness of the drops, leading to stockpiles of crap and shortage of the good stuff.

What is brilliant about mining is that you know exactly what you are getting. If prices of trit goes up, everyone goes mining veldspar, as it's a steady source of Trit and easy to get. This leads to reduced price and less people mine veldspar.

The key there, is that it is perfectly balanced by the demand of the market. If there is a demand for Trit, you go and get it. There is no bottleneck other than how much you can get in a day, so the bottleneck is just people doing mining.

On the salvaging side, the building blocks are too racially themed. The circuits are probably what is closest to Trit, but after that it becomes highly "this component is only in these few things" rather than a portion of all salvage is in all rigs (which would lead to much healthier market).

So I think that all rigs/salvage needs to be broken into smaller blocks, which then are directly used in rig production, or in a secondary tier, basicaly manufacture salvage.

So yeah, In order to do this properly, I believe that the following has to happen;

• Re-design of the mechanics of Salvaging, make it less random, more player controlled (more sand-boxy)
• Re-balance the rigs (could be done seperatly)
• Possibly re-do the whole salvage components in general (in conjunction with mechanic changes)

This list is probably much bigger though, but I think those are the key points.

That is probably not going to fit within the Winter expansion, so something smaller has to happen in Winter, and I think just a simple boost in the components might do the trick for now.

Off the top of my head I really can't think of any useful solutions to this, as the first idea that comes to mind is to treat it in a similar fashion as ore. (T2 salvage refines to good stuff, T1 salvage refines to bad stuff) This doesn't solve the problem though, except in the fact that it would balance individual prices in the T1 and T2 groups along set ratios, as bad T2 can make good T2, and bad T1 can make good T1. The prices in both groups would crash though.

The solution of "make the ratios huge then when the stockpiles go away change them to something more reasonable" doesn't work either. If that's the case, people will just hold onto their huge stockpiles because if they wait a year it'll be worth 50x as much.

Make it more like mining. So that you aren't getting random loot here, but that you are in control (based on market needs) that you go and get Salvage X, which you know comes from Wreck Y.

I think that is more Sand-boxy than how it is currently.

That is assuming ratters make about the same amount a salvager makes, which is simply not the case. Time spent ratting makes the most of any profession in the game. I suspect that the profession of salvaging is way down on that list, near the bottom with mining.

:shrug: I may be wrong on this. But you can not just blindly assume ratters care what is in the wrecks. They are only after ISK and salvaging does not give that.

I have a bit of mixed feelings about scripts (and then mining crystals as well)

I have a bit of mixed feelings about scripts (and then mining crystals as well)

What I do like, is that it gives you good control (and bonuses) to what you want. So you specialize in something and you are good at it. I like that.

What I don't like, is that I have to carry so much stuff with me. And then I always forget to get that other script/crystal. It is also just a bit convoluted.

So I'm torn.

What I do like (and in more general terms now), is a system that I can specialize in (many skills I need to train), that involves me strategically deciding on what I want to get (such as Mining), and that I have options in the field (such as crystals and scripts).

So yeah.. lot's of things to think about. And I appreciate all your ideas here

Keep 'em coming!

Would It not be a simple solution to just drastically increase the amount of T2 salvage in mag sites, with perhaps an increase in the frequency of the higher value drops. If you could average 50 units of T2 salvage from each mag site you run in null,(I'm thinking 3-4 drops of stacks of 10-20 units)

This would increase the supply of T2 salvage for T2 rig production, and make the mag sites worth running again. sure the high value stuff could still be rare, but if you are getting 10-20 of them per drop then everyone will run the sites hoping to hit a drop of 10-20 units of the high value stuff.

This increase in supply would only be available from running the buffed mag sites. Solve two problems with one fix.

Would It not be a simple solution to just drastically increase the amount of T2 salvage in mag sites, with perhaps an increase in the frequency of the higher value drops. If you could average 50 units of T2 salvage from each mag site you run in null,(I'm thinking 3-4 drops of stacks of 10-20 units)

Our PvP fleets generally stop and salvage all T2 wrecks because the possible ISK to be made there is nice. I'm not sure what proportion of T2 rigs comes from player wrecks, but if the prices drop by much, we'd likely stop bothering (we do not salvage T1 wrecks in general, say).

In exploration, mag sites are probably the most profitable mini-profession ones. Doesn't make them very profitable, though. I have so far never done them for the money, always because I was bored and didn't have anything else to do.

There's an interesting problem there: T2 rig demand is so low that the invention chance really hurts possible profits and the rig prices, so we generally shy away from it. High capital invention, high risk, low profit is just not a good combination. Should T2 rigs become more commonplace, this would change already, so even a small change might have a larger-than-expected effect.

Some thoughs.

As with T1 salvage, the differences in prices for the different salvage materials is extreme. Intact armor plates are traded at over 30m ISK each, while Lorentz Fluid struggles to hit 4k ISK. Excessive rig prices are based on a few extremely rare T2 salvage goods. If you want to reduce T2 rig prices, making those more common might already be the key (though see above for the averse effect when salvaging in PvP).

But more importantly, some of this is heavily based on basic rig balance. Some rigs are absolutely useless, making the salvage for them useless. A major factor here that drives prices up for some specific salvage materials is that there are only a handful of rigs that really are worthwhile to use. And some of that imbalance is even T2 rig specific - for example, the probing rigs for a covops frigate are worse in T2 than in T1 because you can't fit two of them, and one T2 rig is worse than two T1. Looking at some of the calibration costs might be a worthwhile "small change" rebalancing effort.

Be careful with the price rebalances now, though, as a general rig rebalance is on "the list" somewhere, and that will drastically affect rig prices again.

Number of wrecks able to be salvaged is not the problem; most people do not waste their time salvaging since the inflated NPC bounty prize amounts make salvaging comparatively almost worthless. The only solution I can think of is reduce bounty prize amounts and loot drops from npc rats to give ratters a reason to salvage.

Almost every time I hear of someone ratting in nul, the next thing I hear is "Does anyone want to salvage the sanctum I just finished?" Very few actually take the time to salvage. Part of the problem is while salvaging, your ship (usually a noctis) becomes vulnerable to attack. If you are busy with a "sea of wrecks" and not paying attention, you can easily be caught and killed.

Nul pilots would rather focus on getting ISK from bounties than trying to loot and salvage, and then go through the hassle of trying to sell it it all. Part of that stems from most ratting pilots can not reprocess scrap (loot) or build rigs, since most of them have nothing to do with industry and manufacturing.