Nerf by Kindness – Invention Changes

This piece is a follow up to the “Lighting the invention bulb” Dev Blog, which came out on September 11th. In case you missed it, you can read it here.

As shown, there are a series of changes coming (soonish) for invention, the changes include:

• A rebalance of datacore and science skills required for invention.
• Merging Invention and Reverse engineering
• Removal (and reimbursement) of data interfaces
• Teams replacing Meta items as modifiers
• Multiple success/failure outcomes ranging from improved ME/TE values to partial datacore refund.
• Base chance tweaks on ship invention (most easier, freighters harder)
• Tech III subsystem selection becomes selectable rather than chance based, but chance to succeed nerfed
• Multiple invention runs

With the exception of multiple invention runs, these are fairly straight forward. There will be some market adjustment as inventors get used to the new mechanics and adjust their skills and formula. There might be some short term datacore imbalances as pilots move to different invention skills and standings for different research agent.

Multiple invention runs will be a mixed blessing. For most ME or TE research or copy jobs, you set the job; go away for roughly a month, and come back to a completed job. For Invention of T2 ammunition and modules there is a real barrier of having to reset jobs every hour. This means at keyboard, logged in, and setting an alarm. Then of course no invention while asleep.

Until now, how well you do with invention is based on how well you resolve this pain.

Coming soon(*): The next logical course of action is to allow players to start invention with multiple runs (…) so they don’t have to launch them manually every hour, which is what we’re going to do with this set of changes.

This will make a huge impact on your ability to submit invention jobs. It will also make a huge impact on your competitors ability too.

When something is made easy, more pilots will start doing that activity. Total ISK earned across all of invention might go up, but ISK/invention pilot hour drops. It happened with exploration when the scanning changes dropped, and I am getting reports of a drop in manufacturer ISK/pilot hour from the recent manufacturing changes. I expect this to happen with the invention changes.

(*) Soon is not real Soon (Oceanus on 30 September) but more a pretend Soon™, at a later and currently unspecified date.

Finally, some sound advice from CCP : Please remember all of this is subject to change until deployed and that Market speculation is done at your own risk.