*Bing* - Proposed Invention and Reverse Engineering changes

Another week, another devblog to review. This time details on changes to Invention and Reverse Engineering that did not make it into Crius.

Summary

First the really bad news, this will not be released in Oceanus or any time soon. These changes are being worked on now and have no release date.

Proposed changes are good, simplification of Invention and Reverse Engineering process and skills required mean it will be easier to get into and, I hate to use this analogy but it fits, level the playing field for all players new or veteran.

A change to the base success change also could, long term, see more T2 ships being available on the market or as blueprint copies. But the best change of all is that inventing will be changed so that only a single run is needed of a blueprint, meaning maximum run copies will yield multiple copies instead of one.

Skill Changes

Skill/item requirements for Invention will be changing. In their investigation CCP found that Electronic Engineering and Mechanical Engineering skills and data cores were being overused whilst some Racial Encryption Skills were not as intuitively used as they could. 

As a result a number of ships, modules and ammunitions are having their required skills and/or racial skills changed:

Changes to skills for invention

Skills required for Tech 2 manufacturing are also receiving a major change with the "construction" skills needed being changed to 1 instead of 4 or 5 they are now and as compensation for those who have trained this each extra level will yield a construction Time Efficiency reduction.

Invention and Reverse Engineering Merge

Comparing the two is confusing but they have almost the exact same look and feel. CCP decided that based on feedback and usage these two separate entities should be merged and just called Invention. In short Invention will be the future activity to describe the industrial activity that will yield advanced blueprints regardless of Tech level.

Using a Tech I blueprint will result in a Tech II blueprint copy or using an Ancient Relic will result in a Tech III blueprint copy.

Data cores and Decrypters will still play a part in the process, with Decrypters being expanded to affect Tech III blueprints, but Data Interfaces are going to be removed the game (yes!) and Meta items will no longer influence the quality of a blueprint.

Teams, much like in manufacturing, are being expanded to include invention and will function much the same but their bonuses will apply only to Invention.

Invention Outcomes

By far the most interesting changes (to me) is the introduction of the outcome gradient for Invention and the tweaking to the base success chance for all blueprints.

Rather than the binary style Success/Failure only indicator these changes will now see each Invention job have one of eight possible outcomes (four each of Success/Failure). Each has a benefit either in the end result:

• Success has a change of improving the base ME/TE) 
• Failure has a chance of a % of the data cores used being being returned

The new outcomes are as follows:

• Success (exceptional): yields a ME 2 and TE 3 bonus to the outcome
• Success (great): yields a ME 1 and TE 2 bonus to the outcome
• Success (good): yields a TE 1 bonus to the outcome
• Success (standard): basic unmodified outcome
• Failure (standard): 50% of datacores returned
• Failure (poor): 25% of datacores returned
• Failure (terrible): 10% of datacores returned
• Failure (critical): no datacores returned

The probability that one of the new Success/Failures occurs is as follows:

The new outcome gradient of eight is an excellent change, no more do we have "success or failure" only but now we see a tangible benefit to success (increased ME/TE) but also a form of compensation in data cores being returned if we fail.

Base Success Chance

CCP are changing the base success chance for item types, not so much to compensate or restrict what is available but it should see a base chance increase of 5% for all invention.

The change also, finally, formally documents what chance when inventing rigs, capital ships (for the future perhaps) and sets all Mining Barges in the same chance tier:

Old Base Chance

40% - Modules and Ammo

30% - Frigates, destroyers, Freighters and Skiff

25% - Cruisers, Industrials and Mackinaw

20% - Battlecruisers, Battleships and Hulk

New Base Chance

40% - All modules, rigs and ammo

35% - Frigates and Destroyers

30% - Cruisers, battlecruisers, Mining Barges, Industrials and Ore Industrial

25% - All battleships, Industrial Command Ship

20% - Capital and Capital industrial ships

Roughly a 5% base chance increase for ships may not seem a lot but spread out over 200 attempts its a good increase of about 10 over the old base.

Multiple Invention Runs

Invention is seeing a major change in how blueprints are consumed with the process now using only a single run of a blueprint copy instead of the whole blueprint copy. This, wonderfully, opens up a future change to allow Invention to be semi-automated and no longer require manual input after each Invention attempt.

Imagine being able to kick off an invention run on a 100 run copy of a module and return a week or two later to see 40 Tech 2 variants and a heap of returned data cores from the run rather than having to check after each individual run.

This is a great change that should do a lot to make invention less cumbersome and more useful, all the changes since Crius to industry have been good in the UI/behaviour columns and its excellent to see this continuing.

In Summary

Read the devblog, it has lots more pictures and explains in more depth what the proposed changes are. The changes ARE going to be good, it may well see an influx of people who will now give invention a proper try instead of seeing the skill requirements as a barrier and not bothering.

Looking forward to seeing this evolve with user feedback and see how it changes but the announced content is enough to make me quite excited at Invention for the future.