Vultan
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Posted - 2003.06.13 21:53:00 -
[1]
The real problem with the factory slot issue, and to some extent the lab issue, is that the existence of factories is not based on a free market economy. With every factory being rented that should encourage the development of additional factories. Assuming limited space on a station then the existing factory owners would try to parcel out there factories in subdivisions. (e.g. If a customer wantÆs to make bullets then he gets the 1/100th of the factory space needed to make those bullets. The rest of the factory is parceled out the same way.) As this evolves the factory owner will realize that the more of the work, and thus capacity, the factory can do the more factory he can sell. That would encourage micrification of the factoryÆs working parts in order to allow for more factory work to be done and thus for a factory owner to have more customers.
With competition for factory space so high a smart factory owner would change the method of rental from a pure time based to a combination of queue, percent of factory needed, and time based method. A factory owner would base prices on how much of the factory is needed and for how long. They would then take an order and complete the order on their schedule, not ours (note IÆm simplifying for game purposes). Now since the designers did not include a method for percent of factory needed to build something we have an issue. This can be resolved by using the volume of the final product. They then set each factory maximum capacity to the largest ship currently available (note: as newer and lager ships are introduce this should increase, in addition they could make each factoryÆs maximum output different and thus make us hunt for one big enough to build those Titian sized ships).
Queues can be added by changing the existing slots list to the queue list. For the moment there probably wouldnÆt be enough queues slots per station, but it would be a start. (Remember they have to worry about cpu and disk space issues.) Each player would be allowed to have as many queues going in place of slots per the skill Mass Production. Yes this will nerf the skill Mass Production quite a bit. Unfortunately I donÆt have the stats to know by how much and in which way. With so many people wanting factory space it may not be a Huge nerf, but it most likely would be. A fix for this is to add/change the skill to allow it to control the maximum volume of the final product (You want to build that titan, better have level 5 in Mass Production).
Time, I would suggest that we pay a flat fee for time based on location. Not sure what the price point break would be as I have done no analysis on it, but say remote areas might be 1isk per sec and high traffic areas 20isk per sec of total time to complete the queue. Then its volume * time for price.
Well there are a lot of permutations to what IÆm suggesting here. But I hope people can see the issue better from my observations. To those who may have suggested these ideas or something similar, my apologies. IÆm too busy to read every post or even 1/1000th of them on these and other boards.
The issue for me is to get thing running better faster. I would never expect all this, or even something close to it, from ccp in a week. So for those people out there that want fixes now please remember that programming takes time. Expect changes in stages and donÆt expect each change to work correctly out of the gate. Each should build on the other and may need the next change for us to really understand where Eve is going. |