Yeah, that 5 second anchor time is going to turn it into a real grind.

The only inconvenience this is going to cause is the transition period.

Not to point out the obvious, but why not make 8 blocks per production run (same materials)?

Small tower: 2 blocks / hour
Small pirate tower: 2 blocks / hour, +25% fuel 1 capacity
Small commander tower: 1 block / hour, +50% fuel 1 capacity

Medium tower: 4 blocks / hour
Medium pirate tower: 3 blocks / hour, +25% fuel 1 capacity
Medium commander tower: 2 blocks / hour, +50% fuel 1 capacity

Large tower: 8 blocks / hour
Large pirate tower: 7 blocks / hour, +25% fuel 1 capacity
Large commander tower: 6 blocks / hour, +50% fuel 1 capacity

Sovereignty reduces fuel consumption by 1 block per hour down to a minimum of 1 block per hour (so no free small commander towers in sov systems).

It will take 10 minutes to produce 4 Ice Block, so it will take 5 days to produce a month worth of fuel for a large tower

Protip: equipment arrays can't hold a full amount of minerals for 6 cycles of large guns. You'll have to learn to drag and deal with it.

fueling a tower is shift-dragging your fuel stack onto the tower instead of laborously computing the precise number of eight different fuel types to get a tower max-fueled then moving those fuel types one at a time

if you have ever fueled a tower anywhere but in w-space this is a stupendous improvement

sov system and faction towers are an easily solved problem that I have faith has been explained well enough in this thread to allow greyscale to make the needed tweak (400 blocks per run, large tower uses 400, faction and sov can be done with proper granularity here)

there is less work involved because you can pay some worthless empire peon pennies to make the blocks and get them in jita

Not to point out the obvious, but why not make 8 blocks per production run (same materials)?

Small tower: 2 blocks / hour
Small pirate tower: 2 blocks / hour, +25% fuel 1 capacity
Small commander tower: 1 block / hour, +50% fuel 1 capacity

Medium tower: 4 blocks / hour
Medium pirate tower: 3 blocks / hour, +25% fuel 1 capacity
Medium commander tower: 2 blocks / hour, +50% fuel 1 capacity

Large tower: 8 blocks / hour
Large pirate tower: 7 blocks / hour, +25% fuel 1 capacity
Large commander tower: 6 blocks / hour, +50% fuel 1 capacity

Sovereignty reduces fuel consumption by 1 block per hour down to a minimum of 1 block per hour (so no free small commander towers in sov systems).

Remove faction POS from the game completely.

No, I am aware of that but I'm not sure why he thinks that is somehow a reason to 'remove sov'. I don't think there's really any good reason why sov should grant fuel reductions in the first place.

How is it even remotely superior? You're whining about losing sov and faction tower bonuses when the reality is those things do not matter.

This reduces logistical workload (important if you have a lot of pos) and adds a new product that people can manufacture for profit or if you are someone who likes to run things end to end, you can turn your PI products into blocks for more profit (not a bad thing).

And if you extend this out several years, the people that have faction POS will be a much smaller percentage of the tower operating population. If they maintain their fuel advantage, the margins they can afford for things like reaction chains will be untenable for the majority of the EVE playerbase.

This would be a bad design decision.

I'm going to buy my blocks off the market like any other sane person will, and I have faction towers so the sov changes won't effect me personally (love the extra large fuel bay idea). My prices might go up slightly if fuel blocks are significantly more expensive, but I doubt they will be.

With Industry 5 and the 25% reduction in build time from an Ammunition Assembly Array, single run of pellets would take 6 minutes. With 5 assembly slots per array, that one POS module is capable of providing 200 pellets per hour.

This would power 50 control towers by itself, without the benefit of reduced cost due to Sov.

Hi again,

Update on the above post: we've looked at the concerns brought up here, and done another evaluation pass as mentioned above. The outcome of this is that, while we understand and appreciate that these changes will negatively impact residents in some areas of space in the short term, we feel that on balance they are still likely to result in a noticeably positive overall outcome in the long run. This decision is mainly predicated on the fact that we still have a sufficient degree of confidence in our models of nullsec causality.

We understand that many players have alternate models that predict negative outcomes; we will of course be monitoring developments post-deployment to confirm whether or not things are developing in the way we are predicting, with an eye to modifying the proposed system if we see unexpected negative outcomes occurring, but we don't believe that the arguments raised by players in this thread weaken our model sufficiently to justify changing our plans at this stage.

We appreciate that this decision is not going to be regarded as a positive one by most participants of this thread, and we of course respect your right to continue to express your previously-noted disapproval here in a civil manner.

That's all for today,
-Greyscale

Even for WH people, the changes should bring some advantages despite the extra step. Just import the ice as always, dump it with your PI output in an ammo array, and do as many runs as you can without the need for more math.

Ammo arrays are easy enough to fit, much easier than a CHA. But it would be nice of CCP to increase their cargo to match component arrays, or allow blocks to be built in component arrays too.

For everyone else, I don't see how this is less convenient. If you were buying fuel from market, this simplifies your life enormously. If you were doing PI to feed your tower, you were already doing a lot more work than assembling the blocks will be. But if the extra step bothers you, just sell your PI products and buy the assembled blocks.

No one is going to quit just because their corp has to adjust their fuelling processes you giant sperging ******.

No, I was pointing out that the very thin connection you were attempting to draw was full of ****. And I did that pretty well since your immediate response was 'oh no I didn't mean that at all'.

Very smooth.

so ccp greyscale, is this going get the same reply from you to customer feedback as the anom nerf?

or are you actually gonna act on this feedback before rolling out changes that effect everyone?

I think what he meant is that it's all about CCP's attitude of not taking into account some valid points brought up by some fellow forumers and giving no reason why. They should, at least, explain the reasons and objectives they want to achieve not taking into account player feedback. It has already been stated that they want to bring ease, but there must be more, like a hidden agenda, when they want to drop the bonuses of faction towers and sov, for example, and do listen to our whines to increase fuel granularity. It is not like they missed this point, it is wholly intentional. An explanation on this from CCP would be welcomed.

Somewhere at Page 10 was:



So give them the time they need to think about that....

At least they are listening. (or they were till page 10 or so...)

Hi again.

Changes:

• We're going to kick the build time down to 5 minutes and see where that gets us to.
• We're going to allow component assembly arrays to build fuel blocks too because why not.
• We're going to kick the granularity up by a factor of ten and re-implement ~15%/~25% fuel use bonuses for faction towers (and remove the faction-tower-specific bay size increases at the same time).
• CORRECTION: offline timers are not changed, that's still instantaneous; sorry for any confusion, I'm going to get the blog updated in a bit.

WRT the faction tower fuel use, we were hoping that what we were being told by various large-scale fuel operators that maintaining the high refuel interval was the main benefit for most people, as all other things being equal a 1/2/4 scheme is easier to work with than a 10/20/40 one. Obviously we didn't talk to enough small-scale users for whom the use bonus is a bigger deal; this feedback thread has established that this is still a big deal, so we're dropping to our first fallback position and doing 10/20/40 instead.

Things we're not considering:

• Upping cycle times. It breaks reactors etc, and it makes the system harder for players to wrangle. We'd like to move away from designs that require you to memorize data tables to use them properly.
• Making the handover (or anything else to do with this change) more complex/more automated. If for example we determined that we couldn't do this without some form of upgrade script, we'd have cut the feature, because it increases the workload and the risk of this change by a factor of two or three, and at that level we can't justify committing to it. This goes for putting fuel into towers, it goes for running two fuel types at once (which would require major code changes) and so on.

Other things:

• You'll be able to reprocess fuel blocks in the normal way, getting back all the materials etc.
• Currently they're configured to be researchable, with fairly short durations. I'm seeing some questions about this here - is there a strong reason why these need to be unresearchable? I don't have an industry designer on hand right now or I'd ask them :)
• We'll keep an eye on the ice use situation and make further changes there if needed
• WRT the changes to robotics use, assuming large towers are the primary use case then going the other way would kick global consumption up by a factor of 3-4, which would make them a gigantic production bottleneck. Reducing the demand on small/medium towers a little is believed to be a better option than significantly driving up the running costs of all non-small towers everywhere.
• The handover isn't doing anything magic - it'll use old fuel before the switchover and new fuel afterwards. We're saying "half-and-half" because we're recommending you all put a mix of old and new fuel in your towers while the switch is happening, so it has old fuel available before the switch downtime and new fuel available after the downtime.
• WRT talking to players earlier, we have to strike a very careful balance between getting feedback early and not getting people's hopes up. Ideally we'd get input from everyone as soon as we start design work, but our experience has been that bringing very vague designs to the community, and/or pitching designs that subsequently get cut due to being infeasible, creates more disruption than holding back until we're sure something is actually going to work. We do of course talk to subject-matter specialists (ie, people who play that area of the game regularly) within CCP, and the CSM, in the early stages of the design.

Awesome news, thank you very much for listening. The faction bonuses might be a bit much, right now the tier 2 towers are about a 15% reduction in cost, you might want to move to 20%/10%.

The problem with making the BPs have waste (not researchable, everything is researchable, the question is, is there waste?) would be that people might not have time to research them before the change goes live. Making them no-waste BPs, like the other POS BPOs would solve this issue.

20%/10% works for me, and makes much nicer numbers to boot. Any objections? :P

WRT the blueprints, they're set up to do something like 3 hours/level for ME, I think (12000 seconds) with no skills, with a 5% base waste factor (it's kicking the isotopes up to 420).

Changes that I've just checked in for testing:

• Build time now 5 minutes
• Can build blocks in component assembly arrays
• Removed capacity bonus from faction towers
• Upped batch size to 40 and dropped volume to 5m3
• Increased fuel use in normal towers to 40/20/10
• Increased fuel use in tier 1 towers to 36/18/9 and tier 2 towers to 32/16/8
• Sov bonus should kick in for all towers, it will be rounding up though so keep that in mind with your calcs

Man, it's like you think we enjoy fuelling. Gotta say I'm a bit disappointed.