Julia Venatrix
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Posted - 2008.11.04 15:10:00 -
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Note Greyscale's addendum in the comments thread.
 Originally by: CCP Greyscale
On reflection this probably wasn't made sufficiently clear in the blog: this is step one. The goal for this initial release of the Alchemy concept was to make the minimal necessary change to relieve some of the pressure from the system. We'll be watching how things pan out and seeing where the system reaches equilibrium, and then deciding if there should be a second step and, if so, what it should be. The scope is, therefore, intentionally limited. For the same reason, we deliberately avoided changing or supplementing existing dependencies between intermediate and advanced materials, or switching up which high-end raw materials are used in which intermediates. Changing these dependencies would have an extremely large impact on existing producers in terms of logistics and so on.
Some other things:
- Note that in terms of fiction, as it was brought up briefly from a couple of different angles, despite the name this is not transmutation. Instead it's simply utilizing different raw materials for the same product. There's a reasonable parallel here with biofuel, I think, although more in terms of running diesels on pure chip fat rather than the 5% ethanol fuel or whatever.
- The use of the word "refine" in the blog is, as pointed out by some other players in this thread, used because that's exactly what it means. Unrefined materials need to be refined, in a refinery. Currently this will only work in station refineries; if there's a need to extend this to starbase refineries we can add that in future but the inefficiencies would seem to make it something of a lost cause.
- The 20:1 figure is roughly approximate, with the emphasis on roughly
These "step one" alchemy changes aren't meant to fix the dyspro bottleneck/cartel/whatever - if for no other reason than quite a few players have put quite a lot of time into creating that bottleneck and would like some isk for their effort thank you very much. The changes are more of an upper cap on how profitable cornering the dyspro market can be - and it's still quite a generous cap. As things stand, a 20x material requirement and a 10x time-to-produce (with concomitant overhead costs) mean that alchemy is not commercially competitive with dyspro mining. But it does offer a financially-inefficient method for achieving independence from the vagaries of dyspro supply for alliances who do not control adequate sources of that strategic resource.
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