Eve’s economic system is pretty awesome. By and large I have
nothing but praise for it. But as of late I've noticed a peculiarity of the Eve
market. If you look at two of the same product made by two different players,
you’ll notice there’s no difference between them. It doesn’t matter if one was
made by a 100 million SP player and the other by a player with less than a
million. From a game design standpoint, this makes perfect sense. You can’t
have players fiddling around with your finely tuned code, regardless of how
long they've been playing. However, from an economic perspective this lack of
different qualities can be quite restrictive.
The
problem arises when a pilot begins to approach the upper echelons of
manufacturing. I’m talking when you have Industry and Production Efficiency to
five and are working with 8 or more production slots. If you want to increase
profits at this point, there are really only two options. The first is to
decrease you costs, an example by buying cheaper materials and BPC’s or
investing in a BPO. The second would be abandoning the current product being
produced and searching for a more profitable one. I would like to propose a
possible third option, increasing the quality of the product. What I mean by
that is there should be some sort of system added to the game by which players
can produce superior versions of current ships, modules, rigs, etc.
I can
think of a few ways to set up a system for this concept. The first of which
would involve there being an item, let’s call it Chemical X, which would be
added in the manufacturing stage to increase the quality of the end product.
There could several different versions of Chemical X, each affecting the end
product in different ways. One could increase the produced ship’s agility, another
increasing the shields, and so forth. The next question to answer would be how
one acquires Chemical X. It could be some sort of random dropped item from
officer spawns and the like, but that just doesn't feel right for Eve. The
better option would be that it were produced in a reactor on a POS. The
materials required would be quite varied, ranging from high end minerals, PI
products, ice and gas cloud products, and moon goo. The essential point would
be that Chemical X would need to be created from a wide range of materials,
thus creating a logistical hurdle for production.
Another
possibility would be to have several different grades of materials one can
gather. As an example of this, let’s imagine you were producing high-end
Atrons. The firsts step in the process would be to gather mineral, as is
normal. The added step would be that you would combine these minerals into new
types of metals, somewhat like alloys (in the traditional sense, no relation to
the in game item). This process would require a new skill, something like
Molecular Recombination, in order to perform it. Molecular Recombination would
have to have a high multiplier, at least 15. Level 1 would allow you to produce
the recombinant materials for frigates, level 2 for cruisers, level 3 for
battlecruisers, and level 4 for battleships. Level 5 would unlock Advanced
Molecular Recombination, allowing for the production of upgraded capitals ship
materials. Once the materials were acquired, production of the upgraded Atron
would require the manufacturer to have an additional skill as well, Recombinant
Production. It would follow the same logic as Molecular Recombination (level 1
for frigates, 2 for cruisers and so forth). With the skill trained to the
proper level, manufacturing would continue as normal.
These
two systems are by no means perfect solutions. It’s difficult for an economic
layman such as me to predict the effect varying product quality would do to the
market. I personally think that the markets would be more interesting and dynamic
were there some variety between the same items. This may be a case of “don’t
fix it if it ain't broken” but why shouldn't we attempt to make a great system
better.
No comments:
Post a Comment