So a few general topics people are hitting on here:

Just do X or add Y to make them better

As mentioned in the original post to do Teams properly would require a not insignificant amount of work and the Development team wants to do this properly. At the moment however taking on such a project does not align with some of the priorities we are discussing for the next few releases. Unfortunately we are always choosing from a series of things to do next and we sometimes have to push things back.

Also as this thread expands a number of people are already raising numerous issues that we are aware of need tackling to really make Teams as good as they need to be, but this also highlights the scope of the project, as mentioned is not small.

Why not leave them in?

This is a complex question to answer and one we have been debating for a long time internally. The honest answer is that everything we add to the game is one more thing to support and maintain. Trimming is good for the health of the game both for it's players and the developers, we would not pursue this course of action if we did not believe it was the most valuable thing for the game in the long term and we'd rather not let the feature languish as this makes it increasingly harder to revisit in the future.

As a result the removal should impact a minimal number of players, and allow us to focus our efforts where it counts. To be clear, we are not never going to follow up on the feature, but this course of action will make it easier for us to do when we can. We want to be more flexible in how we react to features that are not meeting player or developer expectations and that should hopefully include sometimes removing a feature until such a time as it can be revisited.

TL;DR

In summary we can only realistically look at two options here:

• Leave them as is (yes it would be cool to do X or Y, but realistically we cannot)
• Remove them

When you added the build teams at the same time you increased the material requirements on capitals and supercapitals which is all well and good but since you're removing teams again now does it mean you'll revisit build requirements because thats a huge hit..

It seems to me like convoluted system that'll do very little in the end.

Could you, please, somehow remove the scanning mini-game too? I bet almost nobody would play it if it was optional.

Slight mistake here. When CCP added build teams, at the same time they increased the amount of minerals you can get from a unit of ore. The increase in capital mineral usage I believe was to help offset this increased mineral supply, not the addition of teams.

In summary we can only realistically look at two options here:

• Leave them as is (yes it would be cool to do X or Y, but realistically we cannot)
• Remove them

Removal insinuates that it will never be revisited, let's not beat around the bush there. There aren't many (if any) features that actually make it back into the game after they've been removed. If anything, it'd actually become more difficult if not just as difficult to re-implement it later on as the game evolves. The only difference is with it's removal there's now a lack of motivation to bring it back at all and what few people did use it get penalized unnecessarily.

It's a shame that the feature is being removed, but with the low usage, and the problems with it, it's better to remove it until a team has the time to work on it properly, rather than leaving it in a half working state.

It's a shame that the feature is being removed, but with the low usage, and the problems with it, it's better to remove it until a team has the time to work on it properly, rather than leaving it in a half working state.

You only get more now if you got a Tier2 or Tier3 Minmatar outpost so thats a really wired justification. Highec refine you actually get LESS now.. Lowsec POS you get the same you used too....

Problems I see with them;

* Large number of utterly worthless teams (1% off building probes. CCP plz), so if your metric is related to how many of the teams are a month make me piles of ISK)

* You generally overestimate how useful a time bonus is. I don't care if the job takes 2d 15 hours or 2d 13 hours really... Now if the job takes 1d 15h instead of 2d 15h, I'm interested...

* Large percentage of available teams having very small bonus (0.5% bonus... not quite worth the :effort:) and very hard to grab the valuable teams (2%, 3% etc) without alarmclocking for auction end times.

* Terrible auction system. No sniping rules whatsoever. Look at online auction sites and learn something before implementing.