Industrial Improvement

Apologies for the lateness of this blog post, I meant to have it posted yesterday evening, however, various circumstances conspired that this was not so.

On to business. Let's start with ways to improve industry and trade.

First Point:
Currently, a large amount of tech one modules are fairly useless to produce, at least if you intend to sell them, because no one really buys them. There are various reasons for this, I believe, and it needs more investigation, but I suspect that module drops off of NPC ships are largely to blame. This can be seen in a number of cases where the sell prices on the market for modules available only as loot (meta level one and two items) is less than the sell prices for the same type of item that was manufactured (meta level zero varieties). The sell prices for any manufactured item are of course limited by the mineral cost to produce it, people selling looted items might not use this as a consideration. Thus, while buy orders for all meta level zero items exist, they are for prices below the mineral worth of items, and sell orders for many meta level zero items have very low rates of sale. One of the net effects of this is that manufacturing is somewhat more difficult to get into for a new player than combat or mining, as one needs some experience and knowledge of how to read Eve's market to figure out what modules will actually provide a profit when manufactured, and even then the competition for limited sales can be daunting for the budding industrialist.

There is, of course, no easy solution for this problem. Simply turning off all loot is not really an option here, it is a part of the game, and while there is room for adjustment, I do not believe such a big change should be made without very careful consideration of all the potential implications, and a plan to deal with them. However, there is room for change. As a possible – and I stress possible, it needs a good deal of thinking through – solution or partial solution, perhaps a reduction in the amount of meta level loot, coupled with the ability to produce meta level items. Details obviously need to be worked out – would these be produceable from BPOs buyable from NPCs, or would some form of invention be required? Special components, or just minerals? Would you need skills to make them or not? But that brings me to my next point:

Point Two:
We need more midlevel manufacturing opportunities – something between tech one and tech two manufacturing. To some extent, tech two component manufacturing helps, it's something you can do that requires more skills and resources than tech one manufacturing, but not as much as tech two research and production requires. Production of meta level items has the potential to fill this niche.

Point Three:
Speaking of niches, it would be nice to see a manufacturer be better able to build a brand identity. Now, there are two problems with doing this currently: one, your items are exactly the same as someone else's that produces the same type of module. You can't say “we make the most reliable ones” or “we make the most powerful ones.” I remain cautiously optimistic about tech three items in regards to this, but I'm not holding my breath. Second, the market doesn't allow for people to choose who to buy from based upon who's selling it. More on this farther down. So I'd like to see some way to establish a brand identity, and I'd like to see specialization rewarded. Perhaps more advanced industry skills that make it faster to build certain groups of modules, maybe tech three will allow other things. We'll see.

Point Four:
I'd like to explore the idea of having components for most all items, even tech one items. This could give newer manufacturers something to produce that would always be in demand, be another thing people could specialize in, and make manufacturing of tech one items slightly more interesting that just putting in minerals – you actually put in the parts to assemble the item, which makes a little more sense. But perhaps not – it's an idea to explore, not something that I'm completely sure of. And maybe tech three will give something like that, I'm waiting to see.

Point Five:
The market! I think we should take a look at potential changes to the market. The current market is fine for some things, but it has some noticeable failings – you can't pick and choose who to buy from, nor do you know who you're buying from, making it impossible to boycott a specific company, or be loyal to a specific brand name – in fact, it makes the building of a brand name rather hard, and makes advertising rather less important for many corporations (speaking of which – I'd love to be able to rent ad space on the CONCORD billboards). It also encourages undercutting by .01ISK, in fact, it makes anything else rather dumb in most cases (obviously not in all cases – but in most). Personally, I'd like for someone to buy my goods because my goods are the best, or because I have a good relationship with the customer, or something like that, rather than because I managed to lower my sale order or raise my by order by a tiny amount more recently that anyone else.

I think I'll end this here for now, I plan to have more in the next couple days. Be sure to tune into Eve Radio tomorrow, myself and other candidates will be speaking between 1800-2100.