Cade Windstalker wrote:Lemme see if I can explain why this isn't just arbitrary complexity.
First off, this is something that's been talked about among players and CCP for years now, ever since they removed most of the Meta 0 loot from the NPC drop tables to remove "gun mining" as a significant source of minerals.
That's the first thing, a lot of these Meta items aren't actually used much, they just get reprocessed into minerals. This hurts miners and industrialists by, very slightly, increasing the supply of minerals and pushing down their price.
So, what does changing these drops into components get us?
Right now, we have several hundred different Meta modules that are dropped by rats. What this could be replaced by is a smaller set of components similar to what we have with Rigs and Salvage currently. I would imagine some components only get dropped by some rats under this model and others get dropped by most or all rat types.
So someone ratting or doing missions gets these component drops, sells them on the market, and then these components get turned into meta modules by industrialists. This helps both parties. The industrialists get something new to make and sell, and as a result the mission runners get more stable loot drops. Since this smaller set of modules get used to make everything almost everything dropped should get used and turned into valuable modules instead of having a small set of valuable drops and everything else being more or less worthless.
Some components will probably still be more valuable than others, but if it's balanced right so that everything has at least one useful module that it goes into both parties should benefit.
I don't think anyone's talking about this affecting Officer/Deadspace/Faction loot but it easily could, just instead of dropping a module it drops one or two components that get fed into making one of these modules, which could help normalize the value of some of these modules, raising the value of lower demand ones and dropping the price for the more in-demand items.
From a lore perspective this just gets explained as the differences between pirate/NPC and capsuleer ships. Capsuleer ships are more durable and perform better so their systems survive intact better, as opposed to pirate vessels whose guns and other systems are more tightly integrated and less well isolated from a catastrophic disassembly incident.
To build on Cade's post....
Right now ratters are supplying a fairly fixed amount of meta modules to "the market". The justification for this statement is the law of large numbers. When there are N thousands of rats being killed that can drop X meta module with probability P, the number of meta modules X being dropped will be N*P. Thus the supply is rather inelastic--i.e. fairly fixed. This means that the price is largely determined by demand. Thus, if there is a sudden change in demand the only way for the market to resolve this change is through a price change...usually large price changes.
If there are common components across meta modules then this kind of situation can be ameliorated in that the demand will become more elastic--i.e. the familiar upward sloping supply curve. That is components will move between meta module markets as preferences shift and change for whatever reason. Thus a particular doctrine will not be limited by the limits of the market.
Think of it this way, suppose all modules of meta level K share the same components. And suppose the Amarr modules become more in demand, the market can adjust more easily/readily under the proposed change than under the current regime. Not only that, but for people who rat, their markets also become more...."smooth". They don't have to worry what the flavor of the month is.
Seriously...trust "the market" it is surprisingly good at getting people what they need and want. It isn't perfect, but there aren't may such systems that are better really.