Nigha
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Posted - 2006.01.20 13:40:00 -
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Here are my ideas:
Branding
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1. Leave the BPO system like it is
You can buy them on the market and do research and manufacture items. I say that because of the problem of backward compatibility. Imagine what happen with all the already bought and researched BPO's in you hangar if you change this system. javascript:insertsmilie(' ','WebPost','text');)
2. How to brand then?
Every item has some special attributes like "Optimal Range", "Demage Modifier", "Med Slots", "Turrets", etc. Give each of them modification points (the cost of decrease or increase a special attribute). Every BPO type has a predefined amount of available modification points that can be used to modify attributes of a BPO's item. Everytime you want to change one of the attributes in a positive way (e.g. optimal range +1km) the points will be subtracted from the BPO's mod points and vice versa. If the BPO has no mod points left you either have to decrease some other attributes or you're done.
If the research is done on a corps BPO it will brand that BPO (and all items produced with it) with the corps name. If you do it for your own BPOs the char name will be the brand name.
This should be possible for T1 and T2 BPO's.
A branding research on BPC's must be impossible.
If you copy a branded BPO all items produced with have the brand of the original BPO. javascript:insertsmilie('','WebPost','text');
Make the research time dependend from the amount of mod points changed per job.
Intrudice a new lab task called "brand" or "mod" or however...
Modify the all the attributes you like following the rules above and submit the job. Thats it.
An example of all that:
Let's take a ship like a covetor.
Let's assume the mod points costs to change a slot are 50 and the BPO has 20 mod points. You can remove a med or low slot (+50 mod points for the BPO) and add an additional high slot (-50 mod points for the BPO).
The BPO still has 20 mod points left for increase power grid or whatever.
Of course you can research items that will be useless (e.g. removing all low slots and make them high slots, or set optimal range to 0km), but hey, the market will decide it. And those who research such a **** will loose the investment.
3. How does that fit to the market?
You can restrict buy and sell orders in a way that multiple items to sell/buy must have the same or no branding. Would be good if you can see the mods in the market overview very fast and easy - without right clicking around.
That implies that you can't stack items with different branding in a hangar or container.
Another way is to introduce a bill-bord where corp's or char's can make the their offers with a contract point. Thats a good idea in general since it could be used to sell/buy bpc and t2 items too, beyond region borders...
4. What skills are required?
If I could wish, I'd say no one. javascript:insertsmilie(' ','WebPost','text'); I hate skills because there are just to much of them in the game. But if there is no way around lets say a new industry skill "Branding Rank 4" where each level increases the amount of parallel branding jobs possible, starting with 1 at lvl 1.
That allows smaller and younger corps to brand their stuff too. (Its difficult enough to make isk in this case). And its still balanced since such corp's don't have the isk to buy or even brand expensive BPO's.
5. Manufacturing implications?
Yes of course. It should be more expensive to manufacture branded items dependend of the mods done - more minerals and longer time is a good starting point.
Reverse Engineering
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Sorry. But i can not see any balanced way to introduce such a feature in the game.
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