El Yatta
Caldari
Mercenary Forces
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Posted - 2006.11.01 22:42:00 -
[1]
Edited by: El Yatta on 01/11/2006 22:45:49
I think when pricing the datacores in RP, CCP need to consider their eventual market, ISK price. It is not feasible to expect to supply cores inhouse, because most normal people will have a few researcher's in corp, but not the huge farm of 30-50 alts that you'd need to supply a reasonable amount of inventing. I dont think having even more reams of alts that sit there gathering RP and not playing is a mechanic intended by CCP.
After the initial rush as people with large stocks of RP cash theirs in, it would be nice if the amount per core is reasonable so that they sell ok on the market.
I personally feel that, maybe 1m per starship engineering core, is pretty reasonable. At 30 cores per go for inventing a HAC, that is 30m, plus a t1 cruiser (5m) and the build cost (35-40m, mostly morphite, components and another t1 cruiser), ignoring any investment in skills and data interfaces and additional costs for decryptors. With this you'd be able to produce HACs at 75m if you invent successfuly. Of course if your failure rate is 50% then it will cost 110m, and if its 66% failure then 155m, and so on).
So, 1m per starship core... how much do people value their RP at? If 1 core was 1000 RP then you are looking at 1000 ISK per RP, so most people sitting on a stash of say 300k RP are sitting on 300m - a reasonable sum, but not necessarily worth the 18-24 months of time needed to acquire the RP.
Further more, at 1000 RP per core, once the initial bulk RP of the past is gone, then those who wish to use their RP to sell cores will not be able to keep up with demand, taking over a week to produce one core, or 7-8 months for one HAC's worth (assuming it succeeds of course, if you fail to invent half the time then, as before, you can double that figure!).
Are there enough RP gathering chars to keep up with demand? Of course not, so in our hypothetical situation, demand for cores will exceeed supply, market price will go up, far FAR beyond that 1m per core I suggested. Now, say they only rose as far as 5m per starship core, which means Johhny Science who has been sitting on 300k RPs can cash those in for 1.5bn ISK, which is still not much money for two years. Now it will cost 150m for the cores for a HAC, plus decryptors, t1 item and build cost, so 200m. Thats at 100% inventing chance - go down to 50% and its 340m. Without adding profit (as I'm only talking about trying to produce internally, god forbid people try to sell invented produced T2 on the market as well) its already impossible in this situation to make a HAC that is cheaper than the market.
Now, some of you will have spotted my little logical flaw - this assumes a 1-run HAC BPC at the end! Of course it will be possible to get multi-run BPCs out, we hope, but so far all we know that affects it is a) the decryptors used, b) the original runs on the BPC. Its also hinted in the original invention material that the t1 BPC loses both runs and a LARGE amount of ME/PE (even to going negative).
This leaves us in a bit of a dilemna. I know that there should be player skill involved - e.g. striking a balance between ME/PE on your t1 BPO making BPCs, how many runs on the BPC to churn out, whether to choose a chance-of-success or number-of-runs decryptor (either one should reduce your item cost at the end, but either way if it works out that you can get out a 3 run BPC, 33% of the time, it still doesnt make things any better than if its 1-1, as above, and then we easily run into problems if the rate of RPs being converted to cores is less than the demand for cores that week). But, CCP will need to tweak it as well, as no amount of careful choices will make it worthwhile.
SO: Step 1) Make it more like 100 RP per core.
Step 2) Make it fluctuate between 20 RP and 500 RP,in order that you, CCP, can control the rate of invention more directly.
Step 3) Think long and hard on the final values for % modifiers on invention, invention skill, decryptors, as well as final no. of Runs out.
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