Hi everyone,

Here are some bullet points:
- Sorry for the delay in keeping up with this, we've been busy :/
- We're aware of the unhappiness being expressed here
- We don't want to have skills that are as in-practice mandatory as the old Material Efficiency skill in the Industry skillset - skills are supposed to be about specialization, not about jumping through hoops
- We are very keen to avoid doing refunds *wherever* possible, hence the desire to repurpose this skill rather than delete it (reasons: we dislike skillpoint reassignment as the act of reassignment incrementally devalues the perceived value of skillpoints accumulated over time; and deleting and refunding requires a fairly substantial investment to write the necessary DB scripts, run upgrade tests and correct any errors, and time we can reduce for work on things we don't want to do allows us to spend more time on work on things we do want to do; this is an imperfect statement of our position as I'm writing it on the fly to give you an approximate idea of *why* we don't want to do a refund here, but the statement that we don't want to do a refund *is* essentially perfect and out of scope for discussion in this thread, much as you may unfortunately disagree with it.)
- We are in any case too close to the release to implement a refund at this time, and that is a non-disputable statement of fact precluding us from doing so even if we wanted to (which we don't)
- We are aware that you're are unhappy with how far the new skill is moving from its original value proposition, and we'll have another look at it this week. *If* we decide to make changes, they may not be viable for the initial Crius release, but would be unlikely to trail by more than a week or two
- We're not delaying the release for this issue; I assume everyone understands that but it's always better to be explicit :)

Open to suggestions :)

10%/level job cost reduction.

People who max it can more easily produce in busy systems. People who want to do industry more casually can do it someplace less busy and can easily end up with less overhead than the guy in the busy system, even if the casual guy has 0 in the skill and the "professional" has 5.

It's not required for industry and it's still a fairly hefty "nerf" to how powerful the skill is (from 25% reduction as current with ME down to at most 5-7% reduction in the busiest systems).

"Reduce install cost by 50%" at level 5 sounds like a lot, but it really isn't, since it's at most 50% of 14% or whatever in busy systems, down to 50% of .5% or whatever in slow systems.

If we had to choose one solution, which are people favoring more - 3-5% all jobs time reduction, or additional skills with this skill at 5 as a prereq?

*stuff*

He's just throwing his toys out the pram because he couldn't get a SP refund.

We're *all* hoping that this new release schedule helps us break lots of old unwanted cycles, don't worry :)

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What we are currently leaning towards is:
- Adjusting the Advanced Industry skill to be a ~3-5%/level reduction to the time of all industry jobs, targeting (but *not promising*, to be clear) a July 29th update.
- Adding some additional industry-specialization skills requiring this skill at 5 once the release has settled out and there's some consensus on what would be valuable bonuses.

This is not final and we're soliciting further discussion still :)

I still think it's a mistake to force the TE choice into this skill. Even moreso when it's going to be for non-mfg purposes which gets really muddy (all my bp research/copy alts certainly aren't happy about having to cross train this).

I still prefer my idea from a page or two back; have this skill amplify the bonuses received from teams (10% per level). That's the best generalized-specialized outcome you could ask for. A general skill we all have to V that amplifies the specialized choices we each make via teams is far more appealing to me than a forced TE bonus I still don't want :) Yet at the same time it doesn't need to be at level 5 for a new indy type to compete with careful team/system selection.

Also, anything that goes wrong with it you can blame on teams rather than the changed skill and, as teams are new and shiny, you'll have a lot of lattitude to tweak those values later without outrage.

How about give bonus to team?

Change name to Team Efficiency skill,

give bonus 10% / level to all team in system when character set job, example.

As others here have explained (even to me :), everything to date suggests the intention is for teams to be widely available and accessible to many. Sure you might not get the best or most perfect team to your system, but very few people should be locked out of teams completely except by choice.

This thread has gotten rather out-of-hand. The shorter "science" time is good for the very reason that it would affect everything, which does indeed relate to a reduced cost (it's a fairly small reduced cost, but it still reduces installation fees). When it affected only production time, the savings would have been significantly lower. With it affecting everything, though, well, the savings are much better as you're getting a universal savings.

Saving 5% on a pack of chips at the store is pretty meaningless, especially if you only get said pack of chips once in a great while. But if you got to save 5% of all of your groceries, the savings are significantly higher more worth it.

My vote is absolutely for changing it to affect all science- and industry-related jobs.



Comparing the old ME to the +% damage skills isn't exactly a fair comparison, as you can still be effective without any of the extra Gunnery skills trained. With the old ME, if you didn't have it to V, you wouldn't be able to compete at all on the markets, and would be losing ISK on everything you sold. You would be better-off simply selling the minerals.

OK, new skill is set up internally, hoping to ship it next week. And yes, it'll only apply to new jobs. New thread incoming in F&I, will link in a sec.

[edit] https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=4834965#post4834965