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Thread Statistics | Show CCP posts - 31 post(s) |
Chris Winter
Zephyr Corp V.A.S.T.
466
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Posted - 2014.07.10 17:34:00 -
[1] - Quote
During the mass test today, I noticed that the "Material Efficiency" (-5% material requirements per level) has been changed to "Advanced Industry" (-1% time per level).
I'm sorry, but what? I wouldn't have bothered training this to 5 if it had been like this originally. You've taken a skill that was absolutely necessary for manufacturing and turned it into something that's not worth training.
This skill is going to be refunded, right? Because this isn't an example of "skill's usage changing slightly," this is an example of "skill being removed and a new one added in its place." |
Chris Winter
Zephyr Corp V.A.S.T.
466
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Posted - 2014.07.10 18:05:00 -
[2] - Quote
Owen Levanth wrote: Again someone who doesn't read dev blogs, or only skims them. ME has been changed because the entire underlying mess of waste has been changed. The ME-skill only affected the 10% extra waste and slowly reduced it to zero on level 5.
Now this extra waste doesn't exist anymore so reducing material requirements with a whopping 5% per level would be ridiculously strong.
I read the devblog.
Nowhere in the devblog did it say we were going to get a skill taken away without a refund. |
Chris Winter
Zephyr Corp V.A.S.T.
466
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Posted - 2014.07.10 18:13:00 -
[3] - Quote
The skill was so substantially changed that it's more like it was completely taken away and a new one was given in its place. The new skill is completely different than the old one, and significantly less powerful/useful.
The learning skills were removed and refunded because their mechanic was removed from the game. So now that this wastage mechanic is being removed, why isn't the skill related to it being removed from the game? |
Chris Winter
Zephyr Corp V.A.S.T.
467
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Posted - 2014.07.10 20:58:00 -
[4] - Quote
Except that I'm losing an advantage over players that decided not to train the skill. So, for example, if I have L5 in Widget Specialization, and CCP decides to rebalance Widgets so that everyone gets the benefit of Widget Specialization 5 without any training, and Widget Specialization 5 no longer affects Widgets at all.
It would be like if CCP decided to remove the mass penalty on armor plates from the game. Great, so now the skill "Armor Layering" is useless, so they remove it and refund it, right? Except, no, CCP decides to change the skill's name to "Shield Layering" and make it reduce the sig bloom penalty on shield extenders.
No refund because the skill didn't get removed, it got changed! Bull.
When a skill is changed so that it doesn't do anything that it did before and instead does something completely different, it's time to give an SP refund.
Adding a new skill for people to train isn't a big deal, they've done it multiple times in the last year. |
Chris Winter
Zephyr Corp V.A.S.T.
468
|
Posted - 2014.07.11 20:44:00 -
[5] - Quote
Khiluale Zotakibe wrote:On this note I would like to suggest the removal of weapon upgrades and advanced weapon upgrades as they are a major barrier to properly fitting a ship and all 1 week pilots should be able to fit optimal doctrine fits. That's an interesting point.
In Crius they're turning Refining into a profession that requires a significant amount of skill investment in order to be competitive. But, at the same time, they're changing Manufacturing into a profession that requires no skill investment to be competitive.
What? How does that make sense?
I would understand if they made a change similar to Drone Interfacing where they halved the benefit of the skill and rolled the rest of it into the base stats. That would be reasonable.
But the change they're making would be like taking Drone Interfacing and making it affect guns instead... |
Chris Winter
Winters Are Coming
470
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Posted - 2014.07.15 08:14:00 -
[6] - Quote
Mardris Fol wrote:Unfortunately there is far too much precedence for this sort of change.
Two cases:
Scanning skills - 50% of benefit moved from the advanced skill to the base skill. No change over all but I wouldn't have spent months getting the final level of those skills for half the benefit.
Drones - 50% of Interfacing bonus removed and built in to base stats. No change over all and I would still take that but the principle is that same. The benefit of the reduced skills over the baseline is much reduced.
In this case I took the skill because although it was expensive it was 'essential' and now those skill points are essentially wasted. There's no change over all but I don't do enough manufacturing to be affected about 1% or 2% faster production (for level 4/5) and those skill points are a complete waste for me now.
There are some business models where increased volume means increased profit but that's just the mass producers.
Your two examples are fundamentally different from this situation. In both of those cases, the skill was simply reduced in value by moving some of the benefit to either a lower rank skill or the basic stats. However, the skills still provided a benefit to the same stat.
In the Material Efficiency case, the skill is being completely changed into something entirely different that has nothing to do with the original skill outside of being in the same skill category.
I don't think there is any precedent for a skill being removed and another different skill added...and the SP from the first skill transferring to the second instead of being refunded. |
Chris Winter
Winters Are Coming
475
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Posted - 2014.07.16 07:20:00 -
[7] - Quote
mynnna wrote:5% faster building is 5% more isk per time, 5% faster that you can pivot and make something else based on changing market conditions. That assumes you can have your production lines running all the time, which isn't always practical or reasonable. Most people probably have their production lines set to end while they're asleep or while they're at work, and if they're building less than 20 things at a time (fairly common to have batches of less than 20 for things like ships, I suspect) they may not be able to take advantage of this skill at all.
Quote:This actually is the second iteration and I do hope and in fact will be encouraging CCP to revisit it because the original change was more interesting, but let's drop the hyperbole and not make out like it's a waste, shall we? Sometimes it's a waste, sometimes it isn't. If I (for example) primarily manufacture pirate faction ships from BPCs, 5% TE doesn't matter in the slightest.
The ME skill was useful to every manufacturer, no matter what you manufactured or how often you manufactured. This TE skill is, I suspect, only useful to a relatively small subset of very high throughput manufacturers. Really, that's my fundamental problem with this change.
Good to hear that this isn't the only option that's been considered, though. Hopefully this won't be the final iteration. |
Chris Winter
Winters Are Coming
497
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Posted - 2014.07.16 17:20:00 -
[8] - Quote
Was the manufacturing rebalance done by a completely different team than the refining/reprocessing rebalance?
For the manufacturing rebalance, it's all "it's too hard to be competitive and we're reducing the barrier for entry."
For the reprocessing rebalance, it's all "it's too easy to be competitive and we're INCREASING the barrier for entry."
I'm fairly certain that the train to get perfect refining in highsec was longer than the train to get no-waste manufacturing, but now manufacturing has a 0-day train to be competitive and refining has a 6-month train. How does this make sense?
EVE is hard and should stay that way. It's perfectly fine for there to be skills that are very beneficial, if not required, to have at 5 in order to compete, as CCP is proving with the reprocessing changes.
Honestly, just leave the ME skill as-is. I'm fine with that solution too. |
Chris Winter
Winters Are Coming
508
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Posted - 2014.07.17 20:10:00 -
[9] - Quote
10%/level job cost reduction.
People who max it can more easily produce in busy systems. People who want to do industry more casually can do it someplace less busy and can easily end up with less overhead than the guy in the busy system, even if the casual guy has 0 in the skill and the "professional" has 5.
It's not required for industry and it's still a fairly hefty "nerf" to how powerful the skill is (from 25% reduction as current with ME down to at most 5-7% reduction in the busiest systems).
"Reduce install cost by 50%" at level 5 sounds like a lot, but it really isn't, since it's at most 50% of 14% or whatever in busy systems, down to 50% of .5% or whatever in slow systems. |
Chris Winter
Winters Are Coming
517
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Posted - 2014.07.19 04:55:00 -
[10] - Quote
People who are saying that install cost is based on job run time...what? In Crius I thought job install cost was going to be based on the market value of the materials?
I said it before in the thread and it got ignored, I'll say it again.
The skill should reduce the job install cost by 25 or 50% total at level 5. This ends up being a less significant improvement than the ME skill (up to something like 7% in very busy systems) and it's not mandatory since people without the skill can save even more than that by moving to a different, less busy system.
It's a win-win. The skill continues to do kind of the same thing as no (reduce cost of manufacturing), is fairly powerful but nowhere near as powerful as the current iteration, and isn't mandatory. |
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Chris Winter
Winters Are Coming
519
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Posted - 2014.07.22 03:03:00 -
[11] - Quote
Even 5% time bonus to all industry activities isn't useful and isn't what I trained the skill to have. The majority of my production was done by buying pirate BPCs and manufacturing them. They're all 1-run BPCs, so I can't finish more in a given amount of time with a TE reduction.
This is a really poor replacement for the skill. If I was still paying for subscriptions I'd be cancelling them in light of this absurd treatment/disrespect of customers by CCP. I trained the skill to have a cost reduction. If the new skill isn't reducing costs then the old SP need to be refunded. I get that you don't like SP refunds on principle, but this is a rather more egregious example of a skill change (removal and new one added) than anything else recently. |
Chris Winter
Winters Are Coming
519
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Posted - 2014.07.22 15:27:00 -
[12] - Quote
Summer Isle wrote:Saving 5% on a pack of chips at the store is pretty meaningless, especially if you only get said pack of chips once in a great while. But if you got to save 5% of all of your groceries, the savings are significantly higher more worth it. Except that with Advanced Industry I'm not saving 5% on everything. I'm saving 5% on the time it takes to get through the checkstand at the store.
If I was actually saving 5%, I'd be totally okay with that. The skill used to save me 25% on everything, and now it saves me 0%, but CCP is sitting here telling us "oh yeah it's totally the same kind of skill even though it doesn't do remotely the same thing it used to, so there's no SP refund."
That's not what I paid for. I "pay" for skills in the amount of time it takes to train them, and I "paid" ~15 days to get this skill to 5 in order to save money (indirectly by reducing minerals) when I build things. In any other business, changing my product after I paid for it would be a "bait and switch" and would very possibly be illegal. Switching this skill to do anything other than save money is a bait and switch, and saving time isn't the same thing. It might be just as good (or even better) for some subset of manufacturers, but not for everyone.
Please, CCP. Your customers are smarter than that, and treating them like they aren't is just disrespectful. |
Chris Winter
Winters Are Coming
520
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Posted - 2014.07.22 15:56:00 -
[13] - Quote
Heck, I'd also be totally okay with getting SP partially refunded at a lower rate depending on training speed. Determine how long it would take to train the skill if I were fully mapped for it with +5 implants or whatever, and then give me that much time worth of SP in my current attribute map with my current implants. So if (for example) the "max" speed of training was 2600, and I'm currently completely off remap for this so a training speed of 1860 or whatever, I'd only receive 768000/2600 * 1860 = 550k SP or so. Drop Advanced Industry to a rank 2 (which it should be anyway with this bonus), and then everyone can fully train the new skill back to 5 if they want to, or go do something more useful if they prefer. |
Chris Winter
Winters Are Coming
521
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Posted - 2014.07.23 20:37:00 -
[14] - Quote
Thanks for the quick turnaround, but I'm still severely disappointed at how this all turned out. A 300% increase to a useless skill is still useless, and the only consolation we get is that we'll have the opportunity to dump EVEN MORE time into training skills that might maybe possibly (but probably not) help us at some undefined point in the future.
Just so CCP can go and change those skills to do something completely different anyway. |
Chris Winter
Winters Are Coming
547
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Posted - 2014.07.24 22:04:57 -
[15] - Quote
The whole "we avoid refunding SP whenever possible" seems a bit silly now that drone skills are getting refunded for even less of a change than this.
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Chris Winter
Winters Are Coming
547
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Posted - 2014.07.25 20:40:49 -
[16] - Quote
Bizzaro Stormy MurphDog wrote:Chris Winter wrote:The whole "we avoid refunding SP whenever possible" seems a bit silly now that drone skills are getting refunded for even less of a change than this.
Can you explain what you're talking about? Players who had Combat Drone Operation at 5 but Scout Drone Operation less than 5 prior to Kronos received Drone Avionics at less than 5 at Kronos.
Yesterday during downtime, CCP tried to bump their Drone Avionics to 5 and refund any 'extra' SP (that they had earned by training Drone Avionics in the meantime), but failed miserably and ended up reducing their Drone Avionics skill down to whatever it was a few months ago and not actually refunding any SP. |
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