Building Better Worlds

CCP have released a devblog on the changes to industry that will be in the summer expansion. If you have an interest or do any industry with EVE Online and haven't already read this please go read it.

The Changes

In short the changes breakdown as follows:

• Damage Per Job is going away for R.A.M. and R.Db items
• Extra Materials are being removed
• All materials will be affected by reprocessing/production efficiency
• Market groups are being reorganized, again, to make a little more sense
• Industry slots are being removed, replaced with a variable charge based on demand/usage
• POS standings, in high sec, requirements are being removed
• Remote BP access will not be shared between POS and NPC station.
• Copy speed is being reduced to make it easier to distribute copies.
• New User Interface was shown that will reduce the click-fest we all have come to hate

Reaction

There has been much discussion about these changes and some of the best has come from Lockfox and The Nosy Gamer doing a casual look at the changes from their perspective. Lorna finally weighed in a long post that covered it from her perspective very nicely.

Overall it seems to be positive, even people I've spoken to in the channels I'm in are in favour of the changes that have been listed.

My Reaction

The devblog came as a surprise to me, I really didn't think Industry would be the summer expansion focus and I'm very happy with the changes that have been announced but I can't help but feel that the focus of the changes is for the solo industrialist and not the co-operative or group industrialists. I can understand the need for some of the changes, it removes maintenance and overhead for features that were good 10 years ago but no longer have a place. 

BPO Risk

One of the corporations I'm in has a research POS, it sits there churning out copies of the BP's we have, adding PE/ME to those BP's and it just works. The BP's are safe in a station in the system and the lock down functionality is used to secure BP's from opportunistic theft. Not that this is likely, we're a group that are friends and share this resource.

Making it so the BP's now cannot be remotely researched from the safety of a station is going to increase risk not just from external war dec's but also internally from (in larger corporations) as in order to move from copying to inventions or adding ME/PE additional roles will be needed. The likelihood that these roles may be wrongly or mistakenly applied increase, sure corporations will have proper auditing in place and will spot these things but the current Role Management UI/feature isn't exactly flexible and easy to use.

POS Standings

We recently put a new POS up in a 0.5 system, nothing special it was a staging POS in a well known system for use and friends to use in times of war and/or during operations. Our corporation is small and has no more than a dozen members at any one time but the slog to get standings was painful and slow, something never to happen again thankfully.

This is probably the most interesting change, will we no longer see offline towers cluttering systems holding precious moon locations or will we, hopefully, see more war dec's looking for enemy towers with the aim of killing them and, if a research POS, extracting the BP's held within?

The removal of the standings for a POS will, I think, result in a lot of new towers going up but towers aren't simply a "drop and forget" thing, you've got to fuel them and protect them should a bigger entity come along and want that location.

Industry Slots

Lorna will be (at least initially) ecstatic, they were complaining about the slots needed for industry in null sec and then this comes along and banishes slots forever! Of course you can't have the pleasure without pain and those doing anything that previously used a slot will have to figure in increased costs depending on how busy a stations industry is.

Hopefully no longer will people need to look at erecting a POS for manufacturing should their station be permanently suffer from "slot full" syndrome, they just have to pay a little more to use the station they want.

New UI

A new UI for industry was teased at the end of the devblog and it certainly looks good but that's all so far.:

So pretty but where are the buttons, the text telling us what's happening?

My initial impressions are it looks cluttered and not at all intuitive but then again it's just a picture and I cannot yet play with it to see how it functions. Hopefully we'll get a lot more information on this in the near future, a video of use would go a long way to helping understand this.

And lets hope "batch installation" has finally been implemented.