Isobel Mitar
Gradient
Electus Matari
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Posted - 2008.07.10 18:18:00 -
[1]
Some comments to the ideas by CCP Chronotis earlier. In general, nice stuff. Great that you're thinking about this side of the game. 
Meta manufacturing:
Being able to construct named variants with additional materials and skills sounds like a nice addition to the T1 production tree; I like this idea.
If this gets implemented, it is likely to increase the availability and lower the price of certain high-demand named items, particularly ones that are better than T2 variants (such as 1600mm RT plates or Hypnos multispectral ECM), require long long training times to use T2 (such as Arbalest cruise launchers) or with critical fitting requirement differences.
It would also affect the people currently making their isk from trading named items.
Changing loot drops:
This would certainly affect the demand for T1 items, but also the available mineral supply to build them. I believe for most players older than first few months majority of the loot (except for choice items) currently gets recycled either by themselves or by the loot buyer - if the mission runner even bothers to gather the loot in the first place.
Introducing barriers of entry:
Reducing build times by additional skills will affect most the market of products where factory time is the profit bottleneck - where traded volumes are largest and build times longest (and incidentally, also needed capital smallest, making it most likely entry point for new producers): Namely, ammo. Is this intentional?
Bit beside the subject, but: I personally do not advocate hard barriers of entry to a field. I believe one of the strengths of Eve as a game is that a new player with low-SP character can often with short training time start to add real value when working together with higher-SP characters in many different fields. (tackling in pvp, looting and salvaging in pve, hauling, market orders in trade and so on)
Shopfronts:
How would this be implemented? Alternate system to market and contracts? Modification of contracts system? Additional filters to already-existing market UI?
"The go to guys for all your product needs" is already happening in Eve to some extent with IG/OOG applications and tools; I know of several ordering systems in addition to the one my corporation runs.
As a side note: I do not believe shopfronts will affect the trade hub situation. Difficulty of logistics is what makes customers (and producers) go to market hubs - who wants to fly around gathering their purchases bit by bit? Tweaking the UI goods are sold with won't make moving goods any less a bottleneck and timesink.
Some ideas:
Being able to fiter market by option "within x jumps from a certain place" (not necessarily the place you currently are in) would be nice when trying to buy a set of items.
Eve could use more tools to help players (producers and customers) to build delivery services for goods, and making shipping a more competitive way of earning your isk. The current mechanism (hauling contracts) isn't working very well, partly because of UI issues.
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