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Dev Post: CCP Fozzie on Post Crius Industry Scaling.

July 26, 2014

There has been lots of discussions on the effect of the recently roll out Crius patch on the industry as general, today we got a reminder and further clarification of what CCP Games have as goals for the New Eden industry on a macro level. Read on.

Ok let’s sit down and have a chat about the design behind the industry cost scaling in Crius. Obviously there’s some confusion. For one thing, the primary goal behind the cost scaling has nothing to do with sinking ISK from the economy (ISK supply growth has remained well within a healthy range both before and after Crius).

First, I’m gonna link CCP Greyscale’s recent dev blog on the principles behind the industry changes, as it’s valuable reading.
Go ahead and take a quick look.

Back? Ok excellent.

So there are two major philosophical goals in EVE-Online game design that are important for understanding where the cost scaling came from:

– We want as many areas of the game as possible to contain interesting and meaningful choices, so that players know that their actions matter and that their mastery and clever decision making is rewarded.

– In general, soft barriers are better than hard barriers. This is why the office bidding system provides better gameplay than the old industry slot system, for instance.

With these goals in mind, we knew coming into the planning for our Industry revamp that removing the hard capped slot limits was going to be a very valuable change. Hard caps on slots scale poorly as the game population grows over time, rely on values dictated by us instead of reacting to player behavior organically, and create the frustrating situation where sometimes the game tells you that you simply can’t do the kind of industry you want right now. A soft cap would instead allow players to choose whatever cost level is acceptable to them, based on their other goals and motivations.

Hard caps break the first goal as well. When a player is choosing where to engage in an industrial activity, it’s a much more interesting choice to have multiple nuanced factors to consider (such as cost scaling and team availability) than to simply put their job into the nearest open slot.

If we had simply removed the slot limits with no other changes, the optimal gameplay choices would have almost always have been to engage all of EVE’s industry within one starbase in Jita. This would obviously have represented a reduction in the number of interesting choices available to industrial players.

The primary goal of the Crius cost scaling is to provide an incentive for players to spread out their industrial operations instead of building everything in one system. When combined with other factors that incentivise concentration (such as the sharing of teams and proximity to trade hubs) this gives players an interesting and evolving set of choices.

The upshot for Wormhole dwellers is that every installation in the game has at least some level of operating cost under the new system, and that the lower per-system population of Wormholes means that these costs will generally be much lower in Wormholes than in most other areas of space.

As most of you have probably realized, the cost scaling was implemented primarily for gameplay and balance reasons, not strictly for role-playing purposes.
Within the fictional universe of EVE Online, these isk charges represent the collective costs of maintaining and operating industrial facilities (including the costs of paying the staff of these facilities). They do not represent a government tax, so those of you who are opposed on principle to paying fictional taxes to fictional governments can rest easy.

It is true that the fact that some other areas of the game (such as starships) do not require upkeep costs and this represents an inconsistency, but adding upkeep costs to ships would not be a beneficial change to the gameplay of EVE at this time. As in any video game a certain level of suspension of disbelief is required to help smooth over these sorts of inconsistencies between the realism of the fictional universe and the requirements of a fun and interesting gameplay experience.

Hopefully this has been at least somewhat helpful in communicating what our goals were with the Crius cost scaling changes, and if you have any more questions feel free to ask.

– CCP Fozzie

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