Matthew
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Posted - 2006.05.25 11:56:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: Atma Darkwolf
Just got into the whole R&D thing so am quite new to this section of the game, but feels sort of strange that the most important thing u can reserch on a BPO is so hard to attain.
Well, if it's the most important thing to research, it stands to reason that more people would want to that than anything else, hence it is going to be a more crowded segment in terms of facilities. It's also the most important because it gives you the most benefit, so as with other areas of the game, it makes sense that the thing that gives the most benefit has more difficulties to overcome than the other areas.
Originally by: Atma Darkwolf
Was this a mistake on the dev's part?
I'm not sure it's intended to be quite as bad as it is, but NPC-provided facilities are not intended to provide for all the demand anyone could ever want, especially now that player-owned facilities are available. Competition for facilities is an intended part of the system. That's the problem with just increasing the number of slots. Adding more slots would reduce the queues, which would cause more people to decide it's worth researching, pushing the queues back up. To really improve the situation, you'd have to increase them to the point where they couldn't possibly all be used. At which point the whole facilities system becomes a non-issue, and the POS-based facilities get relegated to a very niche role.
Originally by: Freada
Material efficiency is what people do the most of. When they made the lab changes in the RMR patch they reduced the number of lab slots that could do ME to a fraction of what they were before.
However the previous quantity of lab slots also had to compete with people doing PE and copying, so it's not as clear-cut a reduction as you make out. Of course, only the Devs know what proportions of activities the pre-RMR labs were being used for, but they would have checked that before deciding on the split applied.
There's also the fact that the RMR system allows much more efficient use of the slots available. By removing the old renting system, every slot is now guaranteed to be occupied 24/7, and not to be occupied by the old ME10000000 slot-sitting jobs. So the 20 slots per station we have now will be getting through a lot more real work than the old slots were.
The only bit of the RMR system I'm not so keen on is how the rents on the slots have stopped changing to reflect demand. A cheap slot with a long queue generates more pent-up demand than an expensive slot. It encourages research that shouldn't really be economically viable, as queue length as a demand control is a test of patience, not one of economics. If they re-introduced price movements to heavily-demanded slots (maybe count "crowded" as every slot having a queue length over X days), then the excess demand would be culled through economic measures, rather than through impatience. It would also help close the gap in the slot market between the cost of an NPC facility, and a POS array.
One thing that should help the situation, and move the facilities market far more into the player-controlled domain, is the introduction of the Contracts system in Kali. Right now there isn't really a way to reliably create a public-access POS-based lab. With the contracts system, it will be a lot easier for BP owners to contract with POS owners to get their BP's researched.
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