All posts by CCP SoniClover

EVE

Team Up: Industry Work Teams

April 30, 2014 CCP SoniClover

Hello capsuleers! This is CCP SoniClover of Team Super Friends, here to talk some more about Industry changes for the summer.

The Story So Far

Previous blogs in the industry series have shown you a whole host of changes we’re making to industry in EVE Online. To cover all the details we have six blogs lined up in relation to Industry:

? The first blog of this series tackled Reprocess all the things!, where we explained the overhaul to the reprocessing formula, skills, starbase reprocessing array and compression in general.
? Building better Worlds focused on manufacturing system changes, mainly damage per job, extra materials, slot removal and starbase improvements.
? Industry UI details the journey of discovery in figuring out the new Industry UI
? Researching the Future explained changes to blueprints, namely refactoring the research system to use more sane levels and changes to copy times.
? The price of change explained the cost scaling system, which is one half of the industrial landscape shaping.
♥ Team Up tells you about teams, the other half of the landscape shaping.

Landscape Detour

Before talking about teams, let’s get a bit better acquainted with what landscape means.

For Industry in EVE specifically, landscape means the interstellar topography of what is being built where. Out of over 6,700 non-wormhole systems, New Eden has several large solar system hubs, such as Itamo and Penirgman, several hundred systems seeing a decent amount of industrial activity and a whole lot of systems seeing little to none. Several things can contribute to a landscape forming, but as things stand, the two main ones are distance to market and security level. The slot barrier is also a limiting factor, though not so much for manufacturing. The current slot system is mainly a bottleneck for material research and copying.

The dramatic changes to the cost of industry jobs, as outlined by CCP Greyscale in his dev blog, adds another layer to the landscape, one that will rival the distance to market and security level in shaping the industrial landscape. In fact, if we do nothing but the cost scaling changes, we’re encouraging players to spread industry activity out as much as they can, which is not ideal. That is where the team system comes in.

The Elevator Pitch

Let’s start with a quick elevator pitch of what "teams" are. We’ll then dig into the details in later sections.

All jobs now require a workforce. All jobs automatically have regular workforce attached, so no special action will be required to start jobs We're not exactly sure how you capsuleers were able to build things without one before!

A "team" is an expert NPC labor force, that players can choose to hire instead of using the regular, provided workforce. A team consists of specialists that give bonuses to certain jobs.

These specialized teams are not available everywhere at any time. They are hired into a system through an auction. Once in a system, the team is available for anyone doing a job in that system for month, at which time the team retires and goes on a much needed space "vacation".

There is a vast variety of specialized teams. Each specialized team affects a particular job activity (like manufacturing or copying) and a limited sub-section of items. For example, a team could affect manufacturing of frigates, but have no effect on manufacturing of cruisers.

The Long-Winded Version

In the new system, all industry jobs require a NPC workforce (for the summer release, this might only apply for manufacturing, with the others being added later). By default, a regular workforce is hired and its salary included in the base cost. Players then have the option to hire (at an extra cost) a specialized team, consisting of team members with specialized knowledge and expertise. These teams can give a bonus to the job. The bonus might be reduction in materials needed and/or time to complete the job. This extra bonus comes in addition to the bonus you get from the facility you’re using or the research level of your blueprint.

The teams consist of people that have willingly used Inferno boosters to enhance their capabilities and creative juices. The cost of course is that after the frantic period of high activity, they break down and need extensive therapy to recover a semblance of a life. And yet thousands of people jump on this opportunity for the massive amount of money they can generate in the short time before inevitably burning out, meaning they and their families are set for life. You can read more about Inferno in this chronicle.

A specialized team resides in a solar system and can be used by anyone doing a job in that system, including in POSes. The teams thus act as a counter-balance to the cost scaling – the presence of a good team can offset the increased cost in operating in an active system.

In order for landscape shaping to be dynamic over time, what system a specialized team will operate in is determined by the players. Industrialists interested in getting teams to help them out need to periodically acquire new teams because of their limited "careerspan" thanks to Inferno.

Before describing the life cycle of a team, let’s get a bit more in depth on the teams themselves. Here is the low-down of the specialized teams in a digested form:

Each specialized team is linked to a specific activity (manufacturing, copying, material research, etc.).
Each specialized team has a type, indicating what kind of stuff it can affect. There are six types: structure, components, consumables, ship, mobile and equipment. For example, a team that could affect the manufacturing of Rifters, would have the “manufacture” activity and the “ship” type.
Each team has four members, and each member has a specialty. The specialty can be broad, but with less bonus (for example Ship – Small Class) or narrow and bigger bonus (like Ship – Frigate). Team members cannot have the same specialty.
Each team member affects either material efficiency (ME) or time efficiency (TE). Members of a team can affect either and don’t all have to affect the same.
Each team member also has an efficiency level, which dictates how big of a bonus he or she gives. There are five level of efficiency, with each level above 1 being a multiple of the level 1 bonus. The bonus given by level 1 is determined by whether the team member has a broad or narrow focus and whether it affects material efficiency or time efficiency. The stat bonuses as they stand now are:

	Material		Time
Level	Broad	Narrow	Broad	Narrow
1	-0.5%	-1%	-1%	-2%
2	-1%	-2%	-2%	-4%
3	-1.5%	-3%	-3%	-6%
4	-2%	-4%	-4%	-8%
5	-2.5%	-5%	-5%	-10%

Broad is for team members that have a broad specialty (like Ship – Small Class), narrow is for team members that have a narrow specialty (like Ship – Frigate).

How much extra cost a specialized team demands depends on the overall efficiency of the team. The extra salary is a percentage that comes on top of the normal salary cost. The percentage can range from +2% to +18%.
In addition to its stats, each team also has a unique name that gives an indication of what it can do and where it originated.

Teams can be viewed in a new tab in the Industry window, called (you guessed it) Teams. This lists all teams, but can be filtered in many ways to allow players to drill down to exactly what they’re looking for.

A team is either up for auction (where players vie for where the team will operate) or active in a solar system (the one that won the bid). So if you’re looking for a team with particular characteristics, you would start by looking at what teams are active in your vicinity and if there are no good candidates currently active, you can see if any decent team is available for auction.

When you’re setting up a job, a regular workforce is pre-selected to work on that job. The cost for using this workforce is baked into the normal job cost. You can use a team by selecting it in the team list tab. This will add the team to the job process and its stats and team cost are automatically applied so you can easily see the differences the team has on the job (less materials needed, faster production time). Selecting another team replaces the first team with the new one. You can de-select by clicking the selected team again to go back to the generic team. You can select teams that are not active in the system you’re setting the job up in, for comparison for instance, but you cannot of course start the job with a team not in the system selected.

Let’s look at the life cycle of a team now.

Teams are seeded into the game over time and become available for auction. The stats, name, home and activities are all randomized, meaning there is a wide variety between teams.

All auctions last seven days. Bids are placed on a team on behalf of a solar system. This means bids made by multiple players on the same system are pooled together.

When placing a bid, the default location is the same system you’re in, but you can edit this to bid on a system remotely. A bid can be entered for any system, including wormhole systems. Bidding on behalf of a system that is far away requires a minimum initial bid. Teams have a home location when they are created and the minimum is higher the further away the team’s home is. This represents a relocation cost and gives a small amount of geographical differentiation without it being too stifling.

Note that while a team is up for auction, it cannot be hired on any other jobs.

When the auction ends, the solar system with the highest pooled bid wins. The team becomes immediately available for hire in the winning system. The team will be active in the system for 28 days (four weeks), at which time it retires (or is institutionalized; Inferno does not treat its users well). Any jobs the team was hired for are completed normally even if the team retires while the job is still ongoing. If no bids were made on the team, the team retires immediately at the conclusion of the auction.

Reasons and Explanations

Before signing off, let’s look at a few of the reasons for this particular design.

The reason for teams being active for such a short period is to keep the system dynamic over time – we want the landscape shaping to be an ongoing process, not just something that gets settled in a few months time.
By not restricting the geographical locations of teams we emphasize the competitive element between industry hubs.
Randomizing the stats and activity of the teams creates much better granularity that both creates a more diverse landscape but also allows more players to get involved, as lower quality teams can still be of value to new industrialists even if the big dogs are claiming the best teams.
Having teams be tied to a system rather than to a specific facility and/or owner emphasizes the public aspect of building a hub a public system. A system with lots of good teams in hi sec can be used by anyone interested to operate there. The only way to monopolize a team is to get it to a system with no public stations (for instance where you have an Outpost).
There are no extra benefits given to those that spent money to attract a team to a system. This is on purpose to keep the system simpler. However, this does mean that players can freeload of the money and effort spent by somebody else in acquiring a team into a system. We’ll monitor the behavior of industrialists in the weeks following the release to determine if we need to take action to reward those people active in getting teams into systems.

Final Thoughts

Finally, we have a few designs and iterations to go for post-summer release. Here is a brief overview over some of them, though if and when anything in this list will be worked for is still not decided. The list does not include expanding teams to work for all industry activities, as it is a given that will be supported (though reverse engineering is not 100% certain).

Legacy – One of the things we’ll be monitoring in the new system is how the players will adapt to the landscape shaping. If we feel we need to strengthen hub-building activities further and give more extensive bonuses for them, we would implement a team legacy design, where the teams leave legacy behind when they retire, benefitting future industry activity in the field the team was in. This legacy would dissipate over time, so new teams still need to be hired for a system to maintain the legacy.
Team ownership – Teams are now generated and seeded by the system, but putting team creation and training in the hands of players would add a new profession to the game. Creating and developing teams would likely be something players could do on planets, as part of Planetary Interaction (PI). A team owner could then auction of his teams and get a cut of their extra salary cost.
Geographical differences in team specialties. Currently, the same rules are used to generate teams regardless of where they are located. This change would make it so that teams created in Amarr space would be more likely to have specialties for armor or lasers, for instance.

That’s it for teams for Team Super Friends. Please leave your feedback in the comments and we will try to answer all questions as best we can.

EVE

Team Up: Industry Work Teams

April 30, 2014 CCP SoniClover

Hello capsuleers! This is CCP SoniClover of Team Super Friends, here to talk some more about Industry changes for the summer.

The Story So Far

Previous blogs in the industry series have shown you a whole host of changes we’re making to industry in EVE Online. To cover all the details we have six blogs lined up in relation to Industry:

? The first blog of this series tackled Reprocess all the things!, where we explained the overhaul to the reprocessing formula, skills, starbase reprocessing array and compression in general.
? Building better Worlds focused on manufacturing system changes, mainly damage per job, extra materials, slot removal and starbase improvements.
? Industry UI details the journey of discovery in figuring out the new Industry UI
? Researching the Future explained changes to blueprints, namely refactoring the research system to use more sane levels and changes to copy times.
? The price of change explained the cost scaling system, which is one half of the industrial landscape shaping.
♥ Team Up tells you about teams, the other half of the landscape shaping.

Landscape Detour

Before talking about teams, let’s get a bit better acquainted with what landscape means.

The Elevator Pitch

Let’s start with a quick elevator pitch of what "teams" are. We’ll then dig into the details in later sections.

A "team" is an expert NPC labor force, that players can choose to hire instead of using the regular, provided workforce. A team consists of specialists that give bonuses to certain jobs.

The Long-Winded Version

Before describing the life cycle of a team, let’s get a bit more in depth on the teams themselves. Here is the low-down of the specialized teams in a digested form:

Each specialized team is linked to a specific activity (manufacturing, copying, material research, etc.).
Each specialized team has a type, indicating what kind of stuff it can affect. There are six types: structure, components, consumables, ship, mobile and equipment. For example, a team that could affect the manufacturing of Rifters, would have the “manufacture” activity and the “ship” type.
Each team has four members, and each member has a specialty. The specialty can be broad, but with less bonus (for example Ship – Small Class) or narrow and bigger bonus (like Ship – Frigate). Team members cannot have the same specialty.
Each team member affects either material efficiency (ME) or time efficiency (TE). Members of a team can affect either and don’t all have to affect the same.
Each team member also has an efficiency level, which dictates how big of a bonus he or she gives. There are five level of efficiency, with each level above 1 being a multiple of the level 1 bonus. The bonus given by level 1 is determined by whether the team member has a broad or narrow focus and whether it affects material efficiency or time efficiency. The stat bonuses as they stand now are:

	Material		Time
Level	Broad	Narrow	Broad	Narrow
1	-0.5%	-1%	-1%	-2%
2	-1%	-2%	-2%	-4%
3	-1.5%	-3%	-3%	-6%
4	-2%	-4%	-4%	-8%
5	-2.5%	-5%	-5%	-10%

Broad is for team members that have a broad specialty (like Ship – Small Class), narrow is for team members that have a narrow specialty (like Ship – Frigate).

How much extra cost a specialized team demands depends on the overall efficiency of the team. The extra salary is a percentage that comes on top of the normal salary cost. The percentage can range from +2% to +18%.
In addition to its stats, each team also has a unique name that gives an indication of what it can do and where it originated.

Let’s look at the life cycle of a team now.

Teams are seeded into the game over time and become available for auction. The stats, name, home and activities are all randomized, meaning there is a wide variety between teams.

All auctions last seven days. Bids are placed on a team on behalf of a solar system. This means bids made by multiple players on the same system are pooled together.

Note that while a team is up for auction, it cannot be hired on any other jobs.

Reasons and Explanations

Before signing off, let’s look at a few of the reasons for this particular design.

The reason for teams being active for such a short period is to keep the system dynamic over time – we want the landscape shaping to be an ongoing process, not just something that gets settled in a few months time.
By not restricting the geographical locations of teams we emphasize the competitive element between industry hubs.
Randomizing the stats and activity of the teams creates much better granularity that both creates a more diverse landscape but also allows more players to get involved, as lower quality teams can still be of value to new industrialists even if the big dogs are claiming the best teams.
Having teams be tied to a system rather than to a specific facility and/or owner emphasizes the public aspect of building a hub a public system. A system with lots of good teams in hi sec can be used by anyone interested to operate there. The only way to monopolize a team is to get it to a system with no public stations (for instance where you have an Outpost).
There are no extra benefits given to those that spent money to attract a team to a system. This is on purpose to keep the system simpler. However, this does mean that players can freeload of the money and effort spent by somebody else in acquiring a team into a system. We’ll monitor the behavior of industrialists in the weeks following the release to determine if we need to take action to reward those people active in getting teams into systems.

Final Thoughts

Legacy – One of the things we’ll be monitoring in the new system is how the players will adapt to the landscape shaping. If we feel we need to strengthen hub-building activities further and give more extensive bonuses for them, we would implement a team legacy design, where the teams leave legacy behind when they retire, benefitting future industry activity in the field the team was in. This legacy would dissipate over time, so new teams still need to be hired for a system to maintain the legacy.
Team ownership – Teams are now generated and seeded by the system, but putting team creation and training in the hands of players would add a new profession to the game. Creating and developing teams would likely be something players could do on planets, as part of Planetary Interaction (PI). A team owner could then auction of his teams and get a cut of their extra salary cost.
Geographical differences in team specialties. Currently, the same rules are used to generate teams regardless of where they are located. This change would make it so that teams created in Amarr space would be more likely to have specialties for armor or lasers, for instance.

That’s it for teams for Team Super Friends. Please leave your feedback in the comments and we will try to answer all questions as best we can.

EVE

More Deployables from Super Friends

January 14, 2014 CCP SoniClover

Hello Capsuleers! This is CCP SoniClover fresh from my holiday hibernation to tell you all about what shenanigans Team Super Friends is up to for the Rubicon point release due at the end of January.

What you will see from us in 1.1 can be neatly divided into two parts – couple of variations of siphon units on one hand and a new deployable called Encounter Surveillance System on the other.

Put the Siphon

Let’s start with the siphon variations. There are two of them, both also small like the one released in Rubicon.

The Small Mobile ‘Rote’ Siphon Unit steals the same type of material as the base version from Rubicon. But instead of favoring raw materials over processed materials, the Rote will favor processed materials. This means it steals more of processed materials and if it can steal either raw material or simple processed materials, it will choose to steal the processed materials. As for the base version, Alchemy output is not stolen. Here are the most pertinent stats:

Processed materials siphon amount: 110 units
Raw material siphon amount: 20 units
Waste factor: 10%
Capacity: 1000
The build cost of this unit is slightly higher than for the base version.

The Small Mobile ‘Hybrid’ Siphon Unit steals polymers (from Polymer Reactor Arrays). It does not steal Fullerenes directly. The batch sizes of the polymers vary a lot (currently ranging from 2 to 1000). This huge range makes it difficult to work with. As there is really no reason for this great of a range, as part of introducing the Hybrid Siphon Unit, we’re adjusting the batch sizes for polymers a bit. More on that below, lets first look at the most pertinent stats:

Polymer siphon amount: 50% of batch size (we’re using percentages here because of the size variation differences)
Waste factor: 10%
Capacity: 1200
The build cost is the same as the base version.

A bit more on the batch sizes. We’re increasing the batch size for the smallest ones, so they all have a batch size of at least 100. We’re adjusting volume and blueprint material requirements accordingly so that the end result remains the same (i.e. each batch takes the same size as before and building requirements require the same amount of polymers proportionally). Furthermore, we will run update scripts to update all current stockpiles of polymers when the changes go live. This includes all inventories, as well as buy and sell orders and contracts. This means that players will retain the correct ratio of polymers.

Money for Pirates, ISK for Free

Now for the new deployable. The collective term is Encounter Surveillance System, or ESS. Let's start with a quick tl;dr version, refer to the rest of the text for further details. After 1.1, players receive 95% of a bounty income in Null Sec. An active ESS in a system changes the direct payout value to 80%, but further 20% is stored in a system-wide pool that can be accessed through the ESS. This additional bounty payment can rise to 25% over time. So post-1.1, players have the choice to either skip using an ESS and get 95% bounty value, or use ESS and generate 100% up to 105% of bounty value, but have a portion of it be at risk.

Each race has their own ESS, so there are four in total, Amarr/Caldari/Gallente/Minmatar Encounter Surveillance System. An ESS allows an empire to monitor bounty-generating activities in the solar system it is deployed in. Why this is a thing is due to an on-going and ever-growing feud between the empires and Concord. Concord has decided that monitoring these bounty-generating activities (i.e. killing pirates) outside of their jurisdiction is becoming too expensive, especially with the lost income from high-sec Custom Offices. As a result, they will no longer pay the full bounty amount. There is no statistical difference between the racial variants

After Rubicon 1.1 the payout for killing pirates in Null Sec is 95% of the actual bounty. So a pirate with a bounty of 100.000 ISK will give whomever killed it 95.000 ISK after the point release.

Deploying an ESS in a system affects the payout. With an active ESS, the base payout (what you get directly into your wallet) is reduced further, down to 80% of actual bounty value. This is because Concord doesn’t like it when somebody starts interfering with their bounty activity monitoring.

But what happens also is that the ESS starts computing bounty payouts. This is set to 20% of the actual bounty value. This means that with an active ESS in a system, the total bounty payouts are 100%, or equal to the value players receive today. The main difference is that part of it is only accessible through the ESS and does not go directly to the player. The ESS represents empire monitoring efforts that allow them to compensate players to offset the reduced value that Concord is paying out.

The longer an ESS is active in a system, its payout value increases over time and can rise from 20% to 25%. This addition comes on top of the other payments, i.e. the base 80% payment remains the same. This means that with a fully increased ESS, the total payment is 105% of the actual bounty value. Note that this increase only applies to bounties generated after the increase has occured. Also, the increase in payout level is based on bounty-generating activity, so the payout level will not rise for an active ESS if there is no bounties being generated in the system.

The value the ESS tracks creates a system-wide pool. This is a common pool for all bounties generated in the system, there is not a separate pool for each player.

This pool can only be accessed through the ESS. Accessing the ESS is a timed action that takes 20 seconds to complete. Only one player can access the ESS at a time and the access range is 2500 meters. Once a player has accessed the ESS, a window opens up where the player has two choices, Share and Take all. Anyone can access the ESS. The ESS cannot be accessed while cloaked.

The Share option will share the contents of the pool amongst those that have contributed to the pool. Each player then gets his own contribution back. Choosing this option is effectively confirming the monitoring efforts of the ESS as correct, allowing the empires to transfer ISK directly to the contributing players. This ISK is transferred even if the contributing player has left the system or is offline.

The Take all option will give the total contents of the pool to the player accessing the ESS. Choosing this option is effectively telling the ESS its computations are incorrect and the player will take on the responsibility of dividing the ISK correctly. At least, that’s what the empires, in their infinite wisdom, are assuming that the law-abiding pilots of New Eden will do. The ESS hands out the value of the pool in the form of ISK tags. See more below in ISK tags. It takes time for the ESS to print the tags and hand them out, this time is 40 seconds.

Here is an early version of the window:

The choice thus for players is either to skip deploying an ESS, receiving 95% of the bounty value, but getting it all directly to wallet. Or they can deploy an ESS, generating at least full bounty value and even more over time, but with a portion of the bounty value being at risk of being stolen.

Facts and Figures

Let’s try to cover some of the further aspects of the ESS in a bullet-point list (plus some repeats):

Encounter Surveillance Systems are sold directly from the navies of the empires. For instance, the Gallente ESS is sold in Federation Navy stations. The retail price is around 30 million. Stat wise, all the ESS structures are identical. The only difference is what kind of ISK tags they drop (see more below on ISK tags).
Only one ESS can be active in a system at any given time.
An ESS cannot be deployed close to stations, stargates or starbases. The minimum range from these structures is several 100 kilometers.
An ESS can only be deployed in Null Sec.
It takes 60 seconds for a deployed ESS to become active. As with the other mobile structures, the anchoring and onlining is a single action.
The ESS has a global beacon, meaning it will be visible by all players, allowing them to warp directly to it. Note that the new scan-block deployable does not interfer with this.
The ESS has around 150.000 Hit Points (ca. 90000 structure, and 30000 each in armor and shield).
The ESS can be scooped up by the owner of the ESS (the player that deployed it).
Destroying or scooping the ESS will not affect the system-wide pool. That is only affected by successfully accessing the ESS and choosing to Share or Take all. The system wide-pool stays intact and becomes available again when another ESS is deployed.
The payout level of an ESS is reset if it is destroyed, scooped or when it is accessed and the system-wide pool is distributed.
The current payout level of the ESS is visible in the name of it, and can thus be seen anywhere in the system.
The ESS has a warp bubble with a radius of 15km. Warping to the ESS brings you to the edge of the bubble. This warp bubble has exactly the same functionality as a normal one.
Whenever a ship warps to the ESS, a broadcast is made in local informing everyone in the system that player X is in the vicinity of the ESS. This triggeres even if the approaching ship is cloaked.
Anyone can access an ESS, not just the owner.
When a player accessing an ESS has chosen whether to Share or Take all, everyone that contributed to the pool receive a notification of the choice made. This notification includes the name of the player that accessed it.

The Bounty Reimbursement Tags

When a player chooses the Take all option when accessing an ESS, that player receives the ISK in the pool in the form of tags. These tags are called Bounty Reimbursement Tags. Each empire have their own tags and the tags dropped depend on the ESS type (so the Amarr ESS will drop Amarr tags). The Bounty Reimbursement Tags have a volume of 0.01. The actual functionality is that the ESS stores blank tags and then prints tags and drops them when needed.

Apart from the empire distinction, tags also come in four value variations, 10.000, 100.000, 1 million and 10 million. So the tags for Amarr, for example, are named Amarr 10K Bounty Reimbursement Tag, Amarr 100K Bounty Reimbursement Tag, Amarr 1M Bounty Reimbursement Tag and Amarr 10M Bounty Reimbursement Tag.

When the Take all option is selected, the pool is divided into tags, using as few tags as possible. Remnants (i.e. whatever is left under 10K) are removed.

This is the End

You can test the new siphon units and the ESS feature on SISI right now, we’d love for as many as possible to try them out and give us feedback.

That’s it for Team Super Friends. Our main goal for Rubicon and its point release has been to introduce different ways for players to affect each other’s gameplay, introducing risk where there was none before, give players some interesting choices and general mayhem. We hope we’ve hit at least some of our goals, improving EVE in the process. Until next time.

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EVE

No Honor Among Thieves – Siphon Units in Rubicon

October 17, 2013 CCP SoniClover

Hello capsuleers! This is CCP SoniClover from Team Super Friends, here to tell you about Mobile Siphon Units. This is one of the four mobile structures coming out in Rubicon. The Mobile Siphon Unit is deployed close to Player Owned Structures (POS) and can steal resources from it. Before diving into some details, let’s start by looking at why this particular structure is being made.

We’ve been contemplating some sort of a moon raiding feature for awhile now. While the prices of high end moon mineral has fallen sharply after the rebalancing work in Odyssey, it is still something interesting and worthwhile. It also aligns itself well with our general intent to give players more ways to affect each other’s income than just through brute force. Finally, it allows us to strengthen asynchronous gameplay, where players can be interacting without having to necessarily be at the same place at the same time.

Now for some details. Note that all numbers and stats are subject to change.

Rubicon will have one Mobile Siphon Unit. This will be a small version (20 m³), so carrying one, or even several, is not much of a constraint for most ships.
The unit will have a BPO available in NPC stations. There is no tech II variant. Prices and material components are still being worked on, but should be in a ballpark of 10 million.
Siphon units are deployed the same as other personal deployables, where you just need to deploy, there is no anchoring or onlining. Once deployed, a siphon unit cannot be scooped up again. The name of the player that deployed the siphon unit is visible in Show Info.
Siphon units must be deployed close to a POS, outside of shields to a maximum distance of 50 kilometers from the control tower.
Siphon units can be attacked and accessed with impunity, there are no criminal or suspect flags involved.
Siphon units are not automatically attacked by POS guns. Players can take manual control of POS guns to shoot at a siphon unit.
Siphon units have an EHP around 50-100k (exact numbers to be decided).
The Small Mobile Siphon Unit in Rubicon can steal raw material (from Moon Harvester Arrays) and processed material (from Simple Reactor Arrays). It will prioritize raw material over processed material if both are available. It cannot steal alchemy output.
The stealing happens on the production cycles (once per hour). What is stolen comes from the production, thus items in storage are never stolen directly.
A siphon unit can only steal from the end of a chain. For example, if a POS has a two Moon Harvester Arrays that are both connected (through a Coupling Array/Silo) to an active Simple Reactor Array, then only the output from the Simple Reactor Array can be stolen. A siphon unit steals from a single chain each production cycle, so it cannot for instance steal both raw material and processed material at the same time.
The Small Mobile Siphon Unit can steal 60 units of raw material or 25 units of processed material.
It has a capacity of 1200 m³. If it is full, it stops stealing. Anybody can access the storage and take from it. It is not possible to put items into the storage. When you select a siphon unit, a bar shows you how full the unit is.
More than one siphon unit can be deployed around the same POS. They steal in the order they were deployed.
Siphon units also have a waste factor (assumed to be lost in transit). This wastes (destroys) a portion of what is stolen. The waste factor for the Small Mobile Siphon Unit is 20%.

This hopefully gives you a good overview of how siphon units will function. We’re looking into more versions of siphon units to add later (like in Rubicon 1.1). Larger variations would steal more, but take more room and potentially cost fuel to run. Other variations could steal additional types of materials, such as complex reactions or polymer reactions.

There’s more stuff to come from Team Super Friends, so keep your eyes open. Until then, let us know what you think in the feedback thread.

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EVE Rubicon: Player Owned Customs Offices in Hi-Sec

October 1, 2013 CCP SoniClover

Hello Capsuleers!

I am CCP SoniClover from Team Super Friends here to tell you about one of the things we’re adding this winter. It’s a little thing called Hi Sec Player Owned Customs Offices (POCOs). With the tl;dr version out of the way, lets dig into some details.

Lets start with a quick overview of Customs Offices for those unsure of what they are. Customs Offices are structures that orbit planets and allow players to import and export goods between the planet and space. There is one in orbit around each planet in the EVE universe. They are heavily linked to Planetary Interaction, and allow for a more secure, larger transfer than manually launching goods from the planet into space for pickup.

After EVE Online: Rubicon comes to EVE on November 19, all Customs Offices in empire space (0.5 security status and above) will become owned and operated by InterBus, an NPC corporation. Anyone can shoot at InterBus Customs Offices, if one is destroyed, players can put down a gantry and build their own Customs Office in its place. You can read about how to anchor a Customs Office here. Again, this will apply to all Customs Offices in high sec, in all systems and all security bands, but existing restrictions on Customs Offices will remain (like in the Jita solar system).

Once a POCO is in place, players can make a legal attack only if they’re at war with the owning corporation. Attacking without an active war on the owner will bring CONCORD intervention. Customs Offices will now have a value on Kill Reports, meaning for instance that if the owning corporation has a bounty, then destroying their Customs Office will pay out bounty.

Because of the importance of wars in taking down POCOs, we’re putting in a restriction on when ownership of a POCO can be transferred and to whom. A corporation that owns a Customs Office cannot transfer ownership if they are at war or have a war pending. This does not apply to transferring ownership to another corporation in the same Alliance as the owner (as the war will still cover those).

POCOs in hi sec will give the owner the exact same controls as POCOs in low sec – the owner can set the tax rate as he wants and can have different tax rates based on standings. This includes denying access. While this can be used to stifle imports to a planet, it can never stop you from exporting from the planet, as you can always launch directly into space. This, coupled with the fact that is doesn’t cost a great deal to set up on a planet, means that while high sec POCOs can disrupt your operation this change can never shut it down completely.

The NPC tax will continue for hi sec POCOs (as we want low sec POCOs to still be competitive). The tax rate stays the same, at 10% for export and 5% for import. This is then in addition to whatever tax the player owner sets.

New Skill: Customs Code Expertise

We are introducing a new trainable skill, Customs Code Expertise, which will reduce the NPC portion of the tax rate, but 10% per level (so at level 5 the NPC export tax rate will be 5% rather than 10%). Again, this skill only affects the NPC portion of the tax, not the player owner tax.

Tax Base Change

We’re also adjusting the tax base values for commodities. These have not been touched since they were adjusted based on market values in November 2011 and are a bit out of sync. We’re reducing the values for all types, as follows:

	Current	New	% change
Basic	500	400	20.00%
Refined	9,000	7,200	20.00%
Special	70,000	60,000	14.29%
Advanced	1,350,000	1,200,000	11.11%

These two changes (new skill and adjusted tax base values) mean that the NPC portion of the tax is going to be less than it is right now.

We have a few other things up our sleeve for Rubicon, so keep an eye out for more dev blogs from Team Super Friends in the near future discussing those. Until then, take care.

- CCP SoniClover

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Probe Scanning and other Goodies for Odyssey

May 28, 2013 CCP SoniClover

Hello capsuleers!

This is SoniClover from team Super Friends, telling you about some of the things the team has been working on for EVE Online: Odyssey's June 4th release.

The team took part in the theme-conception work overseen by CCP Seagull earlier in the year. From that work the exploration theme emerged as something we wanted to focus the expansion on. Super Friends part in this work was looking at the current probe scanning system to see what changes were needed to fit the overall vision.

What is this overall vision? The overall vision for exploration is to make it a more noticeable part of the game and lower the barrier of entry. Exploration is something that appeals to a lot of players, but because it is so obscure it was rarely something that newer players entered early. Instead, newer players tend to go for easily accessible systems like missioning or mining as their first careers. The goal was to try to make exploration as easily accessible in the early stages as those two, as exploration allows players to experience better the unique flair of EVE than mining or missioning does.

This is no easy task, as this has to be accomplished while at the same time retaining the functionality of the scan probing as a whole for other users of the system, such as veteran explorers, wormhole dwellers and scouts. While the focus this time around was on accessibility and basic mechanics, we feel this is only the tip of the iceberg and the changes we’re making now give us an opportunity to expand the exploration mechanic at the higher end, adding more depth of gameplay, in the future.

It’s full of probes!

With the vision discussion out of the way, let’s delve into the meat and bone of this dev blog – the changes coming in Odyssey.

So let’s start with the changes we’re doing for probe scanning:

You launch all probes in your launcher at once, regardless of how many you currently have loaded. You can have a maximum of 8 probes in space at the same time. All players can use 8 probes now by default as the Astrometrics skill no longer limits the number.
There are two pre-set formations coming in Odyssey for players to use – Spread (probes aligned to cover a large area) and Pinpoint (probes aligned to focus on one point). These are not intended to be the absolute best possible formations, but rather a solid starting point for budding explorers.
The probes launch into space next to your ship, but the formation view in the solar system map is centered around the sun and is not indicating the current position of the probes until you hit scan and they warp to the positions you've determined.
The default method for moving probes is a single handle for all probes you have out. Holding Shift will give you an individual handle for each probe, same as the current default. Holding Alt allows you to move your probes closer together.
Probes will also resize together by default, holding Shift allows for individual resizing. Note that this is the opposite of the previous system. Resizing probes keeps them centered. We’ve also made the celestial brackets be less in the way when moving/resizing probes.
The recall and expire options have been changed a bit – recall is now instantaneous and happens automatically on system jump or dock. Probes still have a timer, but instead of being lost when the timer is out, they automatically recall instead. The system remembers your last probe setup before they were automatically recalled so they can be quickly deployed again in the same pattern (by activating the launcher). No more forsaken probes in space!
On the visual side, the scanner window is changing a bit. Apart from some basic polish, we’ve added the buttons for setting formations. The formations only work if you have 8 probes total, they do not support fewer than that at the moment.
The scan result list is seeing the biggest amount of changes. The progress towards getting a warpable signature has been made much more visually clear, as well as indicating the difference between your current and last scan results. This allows players to get a better sense of how well they’re progressing towards the signature they’re focusing on.
As mentioned above, the Astrometrics skill no longer dictates the number of probes you can use. Instead, it now gives a bonus to all of the relevant areas of probe scanning (scan strength +5%, scan deviation -5% and scanning time -5% per level). The specialized skills (Astrometrics Rangefinding, Astrometrics Pinpointing and Astrometrics Acquisition) instead give lower boost per level (5% instead of 10%). Another change is that Astrometrics is now a starting skill for new players, same as Mining for instance. The skill was given out in the exploration career agent chain, but it is much more straightforward to have players start with it, plus it aligns better with the vision of making entry into exploration be on equal footing to mining.
We’re adding new modules that affect scan probing. These are three types of modules that affect the same things as the specialty skills (scan strength, scan deviation and scanning time). Each module type has a tech I and tech II versions, the tech I version has BPOs on market, the tech II versions can only be acquired through invention and they require a new ingredient only found in archaeology sites to build.
Deep Space Probes (DSP) are being removed. With the overall changes to scanning (not just probe scanning, but also the addition of the Sensor Overlay), players are getting a fairly good overview of non-ship objects in a system. Combat probes exist to track down ships and are intended to become the new main avenue of scanning down ships. The other changes and additions coming in Odyssey speed up scanning down ships and removing the DSP counters this a bit. This means that on the whole, scanning down ships is going to take approximately the same as before, but with greater variations depending on circumstances. Existing DSPs will be changed into their corresponding combat versions.
The career agent missions and tutorials have been updated with the changes coming in Odyssey.

The Name of the Game

We’re changing the terminology of a few things, plus adjusting distribution somewhat.

We changed the terminology of some of the exploration sites:
- Radar sites become Data sites
- Magnometric sites become Relic sites
- Gravimetric sites become Ore sites
- Ladar sites become Gas sites
- The Unknown type has also been split into Combat and Wormholes.
The main reason for this change is that the Radar/Ladar/etc. terminology is already in use elsewhere in the game and having the same term for two different things can only lead to confusion.
We’re also changing the name of the hacking and archaeology modules:
- Codebreaker becomes Data Analyzer
- Analyzer becomes Relic Analyzer
The main reason for this name change was to tie the two module types better together and reduce confusion, especially when it comes to the Analyzer name.
A final name change is for decryptors. The old decryptors had thematically strong, but very random names. The new naming scheme is easier to grok, while retaining a bit of the thematic appeal.
We’ve removed Salvaging as a thing of its own in exploration sites. No salvaging sites will be distributed post-Odyssey and there are no special salvaging containers.
As part of the work Team Five-0 is doing, Ore sites (aka Gravimetric sites) are being made Cosmic Anomalies instead of Cosmic Signatures, meaning you no longer need probes to find them.

Finders Keepers

We’ve made several important changes to loot drops in exploration sites:

To compensate for salvaging sites no longer appearing, archaeology sites drop more salvaging materials now than before (there was no special salvaging-only loot in salvage sites).
Because players are no longer guaranteed to receive all the loot when opening a profession container, loot drops have been increased to compensate. This is a combination of increased drop chance, increased quantity, higher number of runs, etc. On average, a solo player should receive loot of equal value post-Odyssey as he receives now.
We’ve added some new loot into the mix to make exploring a bit more interesting:
- Three new decryptors, one has similar drop rate as existing ones, two (with the prefix Optimized) have a lower drop rate.
- Capital rigs, tech I and tech II versions. Tech I is seeded on market, tech II BPCs you get from exploration sites or through invention.
- Faction POS structures, BPCs for both versions (i.e. Blood/Dark Blood) can now drop in exploration sites. These have a very, very low drop rate.

Market Mania

We’ve made a few changes to market groups, to make it easier to find some items:

Decryptors are now listed in a more rational way. Instead of being under faction groups in Prototypes and Datafiles under Research & Invention, it is now listed under the empires and the group name is Prototypes and Decryptors.
There are two new groups under Ship Equipment, named Scanning Equipment and Harvest Equipment:
- The scanning equipment group has the ship, cargo and survey scanners as well as the hacking (Data Analyzer) and archaeology (Relic Analyzer) modules. This group also has the probe launchers. The survey probe launchers now have their own sub-group.
- The harvest equipment group has all the different mining equipment (lasers, ice, gas, etc.), as well as salvagers and mining upgrades.

Some POS work

In addition to the exploration work described above, Super Friends also did a couple of POS stories:

We added Personal Hangar Array. This is similar to the Corporate Hangar Array, but, as the name implies, is for personal storage only. The PHA has a storage capacity of 50,000.
We adjusted the arrows and camera when positioning POS modules, to make it less of a hassle.

Future Maybes

There are a few things that we want to get in, but aren’t able to in Odyssey. We aim to get these things in for a point release, but can’t promise it. Here are the most pertinent ones:

Custom formations – Odyssey will only have a very basic formation setup. We want to expand this and allow players to save their own formations and support formations with variable number of probes in them.
Scan history – the colored bars in the scan result list give an indication of whether a specific result got better or worse from your last scan. We want to take this further and allow players to essentially ‘go back’ to a previous result.
Improved visual clues – we want to make it clearer in the scan result list what results are at maximum signal strength for the current scan range set.

That’s it for Team Super Friends, we hope you enjoy these changes and have a great summer!

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Bounties, Kill Rights, New Modules and War in Retribution

November 21, 2012 CCP SoniClover

Hello Capsuleers. I’m CCP SoniClover from Team Super Friends here to tell you some more about what the team’s been working on for Retribution. This blog is a follow up on the first one I did, which covered our work on a high level. I recommend you skim over that one if you haven’t already, as this blog assumes the reader has at least rudimentary knowledge of what’s going on. But I’ll quickly summarize what the team has been working on – we’ve been re-doing the broken bounty system so that now bounty is paid out proportionally based on the loss inflicted in a kill. We’ve refactored the kill right system so that players can now get others to help in exacting revenge on their former assailants. We’re also continuing to iterate on the war system and adding and adjusting a few modules.

The team has used the time since the last dev blog to implement, refine and polish the features, taking into account feedback from various sources – the CSM, the forums, test servers and so on. This feedback has resulted in us making some adjustments to our work and priorities and will be discussed in more details below.

On the whole, we’re on track to deliver what we set out to deliver. A few items have fallen of the to-do-list, but there are a few new ones on it instead. We aim to continue working on these features post-Retribution, so expect further iteration down the road. We’ll keep you posted on the details here as the time comes.

So without further ado, let’s look at some of the stuff we’ve been doing.

It’s Full of Bounties!

In addition to the Most Wanted List, we’ve added a Bounty Hunter List to the Bounty Office. This lists the characters with the highest total bounties claimed in ISK, as well as the number of kill reports they’ve been on where a bounty was claimed. There is separate list for corporations and alliances, though those do not list number of kills.

There is also a tab where you can track all bounties you’ve placed (My Bounties).

When you have a bounty placed on you, the notification you get sent now also includes the name of the character that placed the bounty on you.

We’ve reduced the minimum amounts for placing a bounty on corporations and alliances, from 50 million and 500 million to 20 million and 100 million respectively.

It will not be possible to place bounties on NPC characters (like agents) or corporations (but you can place a bounty on a player character in a NPC corporation), nor on CCP developers or ISD people.

A final note on bounties, there have been a few misconceptions floating around regarding them that we want to clear up/restate:

Having a bounty on you will never by itself make you a legal target anywhere.
The 20% payout is based on the loss value of the kill report, not on the bounty pool itself. Example: If you have a 150 million bounty on you and the loss value of the kill report is 100 million, then 20 million will be paid out, leaving your remaining bounty at 130 million. If the bounty pool had been 15 million instead, then the entire 15 million would have been paid out on the kill.
The total loss value includes both ship and lost modules.
If you’re fighting a character that has bounty on him and he self-destructs or is killed by CONCORD, you still get the bounty. The bounty then goes to the player with the highest damage contribution.

License to Kill

As before, the kill right section under your character sheet is the place to go to view your kill rights. But now this is also the place where you manage the kill rights you have.

In the kill rights view, you can now make your kill rights (the kill rights you have on other characters) available to others. You do this through the utility menu at the right of the kill right entry.

We’ve added an option for people to limit who the kill right is available to. Now when you make a kill right available, you can choose to restrict access the kill right to a specific corporation, alliance or even character. You can still make it open to anyone if you wish. When you make a kill right available, a notification is sent to the target of the kill right informing him that the kill right has been made available (and to whom if that is specified).

You can also revert your choices here and cancel the availability of your kill rights, using the same menu. Currently there are no restrictions on how fast or frequently you can cancel kill right availability or make them available again.

To be able to spot better those you have kill rights available on, we’ve added a new icon to the overview and the chat channel. You can set these to show those in your vicinity (overview) or system (local chat channel) that you can activate kill rights on. Note that there is also a bounty icon already in existence that is now more viable to show than before.

To use a kill right (your own or one that another player has made available to you), you select the target’s ship in space. In the select window you can activate the kill right (for kill rights available to you from other players this might cost you ISK to activate). This makes the target a suspect for 15 minutes. If you have more than one kill right available on the target (for instance if two characters have made it available to you), the one costing less is always chosen as default.

The Suspect flag means that anyone in the vicinity can now attack the flagged player. Running through the scenarios of what this entails make this less of an issue than at first glance.
* If the kill right is made available to everyone, but at a low price, the targeted player can simply use an alt or a friend to get rid of the kill right. This is then just an extra hoop to jump through for those players frequently causing others to get kill rights on them.
* If the kill right is made available to everyone, but at a high price, then there is much less of a chance of it being activated constantly and thus less of a hassle. This is especially true when considering that players will likely be wary of kill right scams and thus not keen on paying to activate a kill right with a considerable cost.
* If the kill right is made available to a specific entity, then this is little different than being at war – you just need to remember whom to look out for as it is not as clearly shown as for war.

If a kill report is generated where a kill right was removed (i.e. the kill was a consequence of a kill right being activated on the victim), then the kill report shows this by stating that the victim was killed on behalf of the owner of the kill right.

The Rules of War

We’ve done two iteration stories on the war system from the Inferno expansion. These are the stories we got to this time around, but there is more work to be done here.

The aggressor now has the option to retract a war that has been made mutual by the defender. This ends the war in 24 hours. The other option here was to give the aggressor a chance to accept or refuse making the war mutual, but we felt the retraction was a cleaner and simpler solution.

The other story is a bit of refactoring of the war declaration cost. We’ve removed the cost multiplier based on number of wars you’re in, as this was causing issues when wars are being copied around, plus it’s much more severe to be multiplying the base cost now compared to before (50 million and 2 million respectively).

Also, we’ve changed a little bit how the cost scales depending on number of characters in defender corp/alliance. The cost now starts ramping up faster than before and thus hits the ceiling of 500 million sooner. Before the cost started scaling up around the 128 character mark and hit the ceiling at ca. 7200. After the change, the cost starts ramping up with the 51^st character and hits the ceiling at the 2000 character mark.

Tools of the Trade

Here’s some more information on the two new modules we’re making for Retribution.

For the Micro Jump Drive, we will start by just doing a large version of this module (Large Micro Jump Drive), which only battleship size ships can fit (Battleships, Marauders and Black Ops). Here are a few pertinent points:

The spool up time is 12 seconds; this is reduced by 5% per level of the Micro Jump Drive Operation skill (which you need at level 1 to fit the module).
The Capacitor Need is 786 and the reactivation delay time is 180 seconds.
The jump distance is 100 kilometers, the ship will maintain direction and velocity.
The module is affected by warp scrambling effects, but not warp disruption effects (including bubbles and interdictor effects).
The fitting requirements are: Mid slot, 77 CPU, 1375 PG.
On activation, the ship’s sig radius is increased 150%.

For the salvage drone, we will start with only a tech I version.

Small, 5 drone bandwidth use.
Speed 900 m/s.
Base salvage chance is 3%. This is increase by 2% per level for the Salvage Drone Operation skill.
Cycle time is 10 seconds; same as for the salvaging modules.
When you deploy the drones, they go to idle mode, but you can activate them to start to automatically salvage wrecks. In this automated mode, they will only salvage your own and neutral wrecks, not wrecks belonging to other characters. You can manually order the drones to salvage wrecks belonging to other players, though.
Salvage drones never loot, they only salvage. Also, there is no difference in the quality of the loot received – salvage drones can salvage the same items as the salvage modules, the only difference being that because of lower chance they are much worse at salvaging difficult wrecks (and are incapable of salvaging the most difficult Sleeper wrecks).

One final note is that we’re also making a small adjustment to the Noctis. We’re giving it a drone bay of 25m³. Initially, this was limited to salvage drones only, but we decided to remove that restriction, so you can now put any drone type in there.

Finally, we’re also tweaking a few of the Inferno modules. Notably:

Ancillary Shield Boosters – we’re reducing the capacity by 30%, increasing the capacitor need by 40% and increased the duration of the X-Large ASB to 5 seconds from 4. We’ve tested several other changes, but feel this is enough at this stage. We want to be cautious in not nerfing them too much, but if further changes are needed we have another batch ready (this would make the ASBs use a small amount of cap even when fueled by a cap booster). But we don’t want to do that unless it is obviously needed.
Reactive Armor Hardener – this module is basically doing what it’s supposed to do, but we wanted to give it a bit more oomph, so we’ve increased how much the resistances shift every cycle. It is now 6% instead of 3%. Also, the skill Armor Resistance Phasing now also reduces capacitor need of using a RAH.
Target Spectrum Breaker – We’ve reduced the activation time to 8 seconds and reduced the scan resolution penalty to 25%.

Quick note, the drone damage amplifiers are also being adjusted (their damage bonus is increased), but this is the work of Team Game of Drones, so I’ll only mention it in passing here. Also, Team Five-0 is also adding meta-variations of the drone damage amplifiers (and other drone modules). Check out the Game of Drones dev blog here and here for more info.

That’s it for Team Super Friends. We hope you enjoy what is coming and have a happy Retribution.

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The Retribution of Team Super Friends

October 11, 2012 CCP SoniClover

Hello Capsuleers. By now you’ve probably heard that the name of the upcoming release this December is Retribution. Team Super Friends is happy to participate in this jolly endeavor of revenge, rage, repercussions and Christmas Carols. We’ve cooked up a set of features sure to spice up this dish of revenge (best served swiftly and sharply) and here to tell you all about them is I, CCP SoniClover.

Mutiny on the Bounty System

Here’s a little secret: the Bounty System is broken! Shocker, right? Well, that is all about to change. We’re going to muck out all the advertisers, poker stars and attention seekers currently clogging this busted system and add some grease and shoe-shine to allow real players to trample over each other in there as [insert deity of your choice] intended.

Below, I will go a bit into the nuts and bolts of the bounty refactoring, but first I want quickly cover what the goals are that we’re aiming to achieve.

The key one is to give people faith that money they put into the bounty system has a fair chance of actually leading to their target crying tears of fear and frustration.

We also want to support the overall theme of the expansion of strengthening the ties between actions and consequences, up to and including making it important who you associate with.

Finally, we want to support bounty hunting as a career choice, preferably in a way that makes it possible for newer players as well as older players to get involved.

The intention is to have the bulk of this work be ready in the Retribution expansion, but there are several items we then want to iterate on post-Retribution. I will mention a few of them later on.

Bounties 2.0 – now with less exploits!

The core of the new bounty system is to pay out only a portion of the bounty at a time, instead of paying the whole pool upon a kill. Here are the pertinent points (with the usual disclaimer that things are subject to change as we continue developing this):

The amount paid out from the bounty pool upon a kill is now based on the ISK loss inflicted on the target. This is similar to the system used in FW for calculating LP payout, i.e. finding a Total Loss value based on the value of items lost (plus some insurance calculation finagling). We’re making this system a bit more robust and harder to manipulate, but we’re not telling you how ;)
The bounty payout is based on a percentage of the Total Loss, so the bounty received will always be considerably less than the actual Total Loss value. The base number we’re going for right now is 20%. This means that if you blow something up worth 100 million, then 20 million is paid out in bounty (or whatever is left in the bounty pool if less than 20 million).
This also means that the bounty pool of a player will be paid out over time, so a player with a high bounty can be killed numerous times before the pool depletes.
Currently, bounties are only claimed on podding. We want to extend this to ship destruction as well. This means that if you destroy someone’s ship and then pod him, you get bounty twice (the podding bounty is then based on the value of any implants the target has).
Bounties are public, same as now. This means anyone can claim a bounty. Claiming a bounty is based on Final Blow. If you’re in a fleet and get bounty, the bounty is shared between the fleet members.
Bounties can now be placed from anywhere in the game, not just the Bounty Office in stations. Bounties on the same character go into a joint pool, same as now. The minimum ISK amount for placing a bounty is increased from 5k to 100k. Also, bounties can now be placed on anyone, we’re removing the -1 security standing requirement currently in the bounty system.
You can track bounties you’ve placed on other players, seeing how much has been paid out. You’re also notified if a player you’ve placed a bounty on is killed.
Bounty pools are eliminated and a portion returned to those that contributed to the pool if the target has been inactive (unsubscribed) for a long time.
We’ll redo the Most Wanted list to make it cooler and more useful. The characters with the top bounties on them will be ranked, with the rank giving a bonus to the payout percentage for killing them. This means high-rank characters are potentially juicier targets.
We will add a Bounty Hunter rank list as well. Characters gain rank points on this list for scoring big bounties and hitting characters high on the Most Wanted list. For the time being the Bounty Hunter rank list will be purely for epeen purposes.
We’re aiming to continue to use the Billboards and CQs to show Most Wanted status.
Bounties have no effect on who can be attacked legally where.
Important note: Existing bounties in the old (current) bounty system will be removed when the new system rolls out in December. This means that bounties that have not been claimed by that time will be gone for good.

Bad Company

Our main focus is on getting the individual bounty system to function, but we feel extending bounties to corporations and alliances would be an excellent and exciting addition. So, well, we’re doing that.

Placing the bounty will work pretty much the same as for individuals. Each corporation and alliance has its own bounty pool. Bounties are paid out from these pools whenever a character in this corporation/alliance is killed. This means that killing a character can pay out from three different pools. If this happens, the most specific pool is drained first (i.e. first the individual pool, then corporation pool, then alliance pool). Viewing a pilot in space will still only show a single bounty amount – the total of the three pools.

Note that bounties are paid out for anything that creates a kill report, so you’ll get bounty paid for destroying for instance a POS belonging to a corporation that has a bounty placed on it.

The minimum ISK amount to place a bounty on a corp is 50 million. The minimum for Alliances is 500 million.

The Most Wanted list will be divided into three different categories, so there is a Most Wanted Character, Most Wanted Corporation and Most Wanted Alliance list.

“Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. I have his Kill Right. Prepare to die.”

We want to broaden the scope of who can become involved in the bounty hunter system. While much of what we’re thinking must wait for later releases (see the Iterative Work section below for a glimpse), one thing we want to do is allowing people to use each other’s kill rights. While not directly connected to the bounty mechanic, these two things tie nicely together in giving this sense of actions-having-consequences-theme we want to foster. Furthermore, it makes it slightly more possible to pursue a bounty hunting profession in hi sec.

Kill rights are part of crimewatch, so we had to sync up with Team Five O on their work in refactoring that system. We’re tying into the crimewatch system in two ways:

Kill Rights will now be created at the same time a Criminal flag is put on a player, but only for attacking in hi sec or podding in low sec. RRing a Criminal will not create a kill right (but still puts a Criminal flag on the repper).

The second way is in how the kill right is used. This is changing from previous functionality. If you have a kill right against someone, you can activate that kill right to make your target a suspect (i.e. give him a Suspect Flag, as explained in the crimewatch blog). This allows anyone in the vicinity of the suspect to engage him legally.

An additional functionality is that you can allow other players to use your kill right. You can mark any of your kill rights as open and set a price on using it. This price can be any ISK value you want, including 0. There is a new bracket icon for open kill rights, so spotting players with an available kill right on them will be easy.

Kill rights are bought “on the spot” in space, i.e. if you select a player in space and that player has a kill right on him for sale, you can buy & activate (one action) it right then and there. This immediately puts a Suspect Flag on the target, thus allowing you and others in your vicinity to attack the target. If the target player is killed while under a Suspect flag, then the kill right is ‘spent’. If the target manages to escape and the Suspect flag timer (15 minutes) lapses, the kill right is still available to be purchased (activated) later on.

Kill rights will continue to have a lifespan of 30 days.

Iterative Work

There are a few additional things we’re looking into as a possible post-Retribution iteration work. Some of that stuff is too early to discuss right now, but here are a few tidbits of what could happen:

Structure bounties – this is the ability to put a bounty directly on a structure like POS or POCO. While this is indirectly achieved by the ability to place a bounty on the owning corporation, being able to place it on a structure instead allows for a more directed strategic incentive.
Private/public bounties – the ability to narrow the selection of who can claim your bounty. This would allow people to have more control over who can reap the benefits of the bounty and gives the receiver confidence that he will be rewarded for his efforts.
More selective kill right selling – this is similar to the one above, only for kill rights instead of bounties. This basically allows the owner of the kill right to select more carefully who can purchase the kill right.

Modular Work

New modules are much less of a focus this time around for team Super Friends, but there are a few things here we’re doing:

Adjust the ASB to be more reasonable. The ASB is a little on the strong side right now. We want to adjust that while maintaining the overall functionality of the module.
Micro Jump Drive. The classic ‘blink’ ability, allowing ships to maneuver around the battlefield in a new way (with some hefty limitations of course) . We’ll try to get this out on a test server as soon as we can. It’s still some weeks away, but stay tuned.
Salvage Drone. As the name implies, this is a drone. That salvages. Need I say more? Ok, a bit. This is a small drone. It’s a bit worse at salvaging than the modules, but has the advantage of course of having longer range while saving precious slot. Again, we’ll get this out on a test server as soon as it is ready.

EVE

Inferno 1.1 Changes To the War Dec System

June 13, 2012 CCP SoniClover

Hi there capsuleers. I’m SoniClover from Team Super Friends, here to bring you the highlights of what the team has been working on for Inferno 1.1. Without further ado, let’s hop to it:

The Bi-Weekly Attention Span

Ally contracts will now have a fixed length of two weeks. It is of course possible to ally again after the two weeks, but there is no recur automatically option in, so you will have to go through the motion of offering to ally every two weeks. Important note: When Inferno 1.1 goes live, all existing ally contracts will get a two week timer (i.e. they will end two weeks after Inferno 1.1 goes live).

Lets Step Outside and Settle This Like Men

Allies can now no longer be part of mutual wars – mutual wars are now strictly mano-a-mano. This means that when a war is set to mutual, all existing ally contracts are set to end (i.e. their two week timer is adjusted to end immediately), with the usual 24 hour grace period. Furthermore, no new ally contracts can be accepted.

Money For Nothing

There is a cost now associated with hiring lots of allies. You are still free to hire as many allies as you want, but there is an increasing cost in doing so. Refer to this:

Ally #1 – Free!
Ally #2 – 10 million
Ally #3 – 20 million
Ally #4 – 40 million
Ally #5 – 80 million
and so on…

Note that this fee is for hiring an ally for a two week period, as per the contract length change mentioned above.

You Can Bribe Me, But Not Too Much

There is now a cap on how much the number of members in the defender corp/alliance can affect the war declaration cost. The cap is 500 million. Note that this is not a cap on total cost of war – the multiplier for the number of wars you have declared still applies.

Push the Button

We prettified the UI a bit in the war list, making it easier to select what you want to do there. We use a brand-new utility menu and it looks like this (list populated based on your roles, of course):

And Now For Something Completely Different…

Lastly, there is a new skill out there, called Armor Resistance Phasing. It reduces the cycle time of Reactive Armor Hardeners (or, well, the one that currently exists) by 10% per level. This skill costs ca. 600k, has a skill rank of 5 and is sold wherever good skill books are sold (i.e. the usual places).

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EVE

With Friends Like These… – New Ally System

May 18, 2012 CCP SoniClover

In EVE Online, wars are fought for any reason the human mind can come up with and are a true melting pot of emergent game play. We've always left it to the players to define WHY they fight, but we've also always wanted to give you guys more tools to frame your war-mongering ambitions.

The new Ally System introduced in the upcoming Inferno expansion is an addendum to the war mechanics, one that allows players to more easily get aid when finding themselves dragged into an unfavorable war, through our mercenary marketplace. A corporation or alliance can join a defender in a war as an ally, fighting alongside the defending side. The war system will effectively regard the two one entity when it comes to tracking war progress.

A previous dev blog (found here) discussed the ally system a bit, but now we have more to show on the UI side and can discuss the nitty gritty in a bit more detail.

My Kingdom For An Ally

So, lets say you find yourself on the receiving end of war declaration and you want to swing the odds a bit more in your favor. You want to it to be known that you’re interested in getting help.

To do so, you go to your Corporation panel in the Neocom and select the Wars tab.

In the 'Our Wars' tab you’ll see the wars you’re engaged in. You can click the sword in a war in which you’re the defender and check the Open for Allies checkbox on the bottom of the popup window called Allies (which also lists all active allies you have, and existing ally offers). Note that only the CEO (or a Director) can make this change.

Click to enlarge

The 'Our Wars' tab also lists the ally status of your wars and shows the wars that you’re an ally in.

If you’re the CEO/Director, you see an exclamation mark (!) next to the sword, when you’ve received an offer from someone interested in becoming your ally. The offer includes a text field and an ISK amount. You can either accept or decline the offer. If you want to negotiate with the interested party, you can use the normal communication channels for that until an agreement is reached.

Can I Come In And Play?

On the other side of the coin, if you want to become an ally for some interested party willing to pay for your services, your first stop is the All Wars tab in the Corporation/Wars section. This is a list of wars to spectators, but a mercenary marketplace to potential sellers of muscle.

In the All Wars tab you will see a list of all active wars (it shows 50 most recent, you can also use the search function to find wars of a specific corporation/alliance). Wars where the defender is asking for an ally are shown with a plus sign on the sword. Wars where there is one or more allies is shown with an asterisk (*) next to the sword.

Click to enlarge

The best way to find prospective patrons is to filter by checking the ‘Assistance requests only’ checkbox. You can now see all wars where the defender is seeking allies.

Click on the sword icon on the right, this will bring up a box where you can enter message and suggested ISK cost and send it to the defending corp/alliance to initiate contact. When the defender accepts an ally offer, the ally becomes a formal part of the war and can start fighting 24 hours later.

Say Hello To My Little Friend the Rules Lawyer

Now it’s time to step back a little and look at some of the rules and regulations surrounding the ally system. Let’s do it in a nice, tight bullet point list:

There are no limits to how many allies you can have
There is no limit to how many wars you can be an ally in
You get an ally for a specific war, not all wars you’re in. You can ally with the same corp/alliance several times though
Only the defender can get allies
If a corporation that is an ally joins an alliance, then the ally status transfers to the alliance as a whole
A corporation/alliance cannot join as an ally against a corporation/alliance they are already at war with.
Similarly, if you’re already an ally against someone, you cannot declare a separate war against them or join as an ally against them again. Basically, ally status counts as being at war with the aggressor corp/alliance, so anything that would create a new war state between them cannot happen
The payment from the defender to the ally is a one-time payment, it does not recur every week
The ally cannot seperately negotiate peace with the aggressor – the war ends for him at the same time as the defender (either because the bill wasn’t paid or either side surrenders)
When you offer to ally someone, you must wait for them to respond, or 24 hours (which ever comes first) before making another formal offer.

Just Shut Up And Tell Me Why

So, now many long and fancy words have been spent to explain the what and how of the ally system. But the why is still left unanswered.

One of the main goals we had in reworking the war mechanics was introducing more options for the defender. The line we had to skirt here was maintaining the war system as primarily a tool mechanic (as opposed to feature mechanic), so whatever options we would introduce had to comply to that.

The ally system ended up being a good solution here, because not only does it provide a simple way for someone to get help, but it also introduced risk for the aggressor and an avenue, or career, for the many pilots interested in mercenary-like activity. And most importantly it emphasizes one of the key truths in EVE – that having friends is really important.

Future Is Not A Dirty Word

So what’s in store post-Inferno? While Team Super Friends is not going to do a whole-release worth of iteration on the ally system, there are a few things in the pipeline.

Setting a fixed contract length to ally contracts is one thing we want to do. While the current implementation is fine for the most part, there are a few edge cases where the eternal ally bond can become an issue. It should also make negotiations smoother, when the knowledge of the exact length of the contract is known beforehand.

Another thing we’re looking into is to exclude the ally system from mutual wars – if a war has been made mutual, then no allies can be involved and existing ally contracts are cancelled. This mitigates a little the fact that now when a war is made mutual the only way for it to end is by surrender. We’ll monitor the early experience with the system post-Inferno and make a decision whether this change is needed/wanted.

There are several improvements for the ally marketplace that we want to look into. Most notably, giving defenders the ability to enter more information when looking for allies, such as by allowing them to enter location, price range, etc. In a similar vein, allowing mercenaries to advertise their services is something we’re looking into, where they could filter by preferred area of operation, their strength, etc.

Another area we might iterate on a bit is the war report - we want to show more clearly the contribution of each ally in the war - how much loss they've inflicted and received as portion of the total. This is in addition to other additions we want to make to the war report that are not just ally related, such as introduce timelines and battle reports.

Finally, we want to expand a lot on the information spreading of wars and their state. We want to show information about active wars, their war reports and how wars concluded in EVE Gate. This can include several kinds of leaderboards, such as ranking war loss inflicted vs. war loss received, rank the effectiveness of allies (i.e. how much loss do they inflict of the total, etc.) and similar rank lists. One thing we want to be very careful about here is what data to count and what data is presented. For instance, wars against entities that actively fight back will count more for these rank lists, to encourage people to fight those willing to fight. Getting this information on EVE Gate would give players a better understanding of the military strength of corporations and alliances, with a special focus on mercenary corps. Naturally, it can also act as a nice status symbol for those interested in this kind of activity, with entities competing for the ‘Hall of Fame’.

On the whole, the ally system is an exciting addition to the war system, one that makes wars more of an uncertain business and an interesting avenue for mercenary pilots in New Eden.

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Steel Daggers

All posts by CCP SoniClover

Team Up: Industry Work Teams

Team Up: Industry Work Teams

More Deployables from Super Friends

Put the Siphon

Money for Pirates, ISK for Free

Facts and Figures

The Bounty Reimbursement Tags

This is the End

No Honor Among Thieves – Siphon Units in Rubicon

EVE Rubicon: Player Owned Customs Offices in Hi-Sec

New Skill: Customs Code Expertise

Tax Base Change

Probe Scanning and other Goodies for Odyssey

Bounties, Kill Rights, New Modules and War in Retribution

The Retribution of Team Super Friends

Inferno 1.1 Changes To the War Dec System

With Friends Like These… – New Ally System

My Kingdom For An Ally

Can I Come In And Play?

Say Hello To My Little Friend the Rules Lawyer

Just Shut Up And Tell Me Why

Future Is Not A Dirty Word

Steel Daggers