EVE Blogpack #30 – The Crucible of Market Dominance
Published November 15, 2011 | 
“With the Winter expansion possibly being named ‘Crucible’, it certainly is a melting pot of refinements and tweaks aimed at making the EVE experience smoother and more wholesome. If the developers suddenly found themselves some spare resources and approached you for an additional feature to include before release, what single concept would you pitch them and how would you implement it?
For bonus points, the one thing lacking from this “patchwork” of iterations is a cohesive storyline to package “The Crucible” together. How could this expansion be marketed to potential new customers?”
Implementing Market Dominance – The Product Heat Map
The market interface has remained virtually untouched (save filters) since Adhar first received his capsuleer’s license in YC108 (2006). The donchian channels are the same, the buy/sell windows are the same, and in order to see cross-regional prices, the enterprising capsuleer is forced to turn to the helpful services of firms such as EVE-Central.
One thing that all retailers need is a way to identify customer need and location, location, location. There’s a gaping void in functionality in the New Eden market tools, and the ability to identify buying patterns and possible locations for retail ‘outlets’. This void has been partially and inexpertly filled by the major trade hubs – pilots are forced to travel to these locations, because retailers aren’t able to accurately put product where it needs to be – closer to where pilots need it.
So here’s the feature I’d implement – a mechanism for visually tracking the sales of various items as a heat map. Much as the current star map allows traffic patterns (or ship kills, or…) to be mapped onto the universe, this interface would allow a product or category of products to be viewed in the same way. Ideally the heat map would be inter-regional, but if that’s too computationally challenging, even a region-by-region view would be beneficial to the capsuleer seeking to open new markets.
To make the best use of it, the pilots would ‘seed’ the market in various locations to see where products sell the quickest. Over time the heat map will adjust to reveal the optimal markets for the products being offered.
BENEFITS:
- This system would have the benefit of being beneficial to the pilots of New Eden (less time flying to get products),
- It would increase profit margins – pilots will pay a premium for convenience.
- It would disperse the hell that is Jita (somewhat).
- Based on dispersing trade, it would reduce suicide ganking by spreading traffic more evenly across New Eden.
- It would provide a whole new and complex way for the market and trade crowd to play.
- As pilot needs change (war, conquest, moving about), it would open opportunities for astute players.
- It would integrate the market dynamics more closely with the player-driven nature of EVE – traders can put their products where they’re needed.
- It would reduce the impact of market bots (yeah, yeah, we know they’re out there), since the trade locations would become more distributed.
Bonus Assignment – Organizing Theme for Crucible
Much of what we’re seeing in Crucible is consolidation and improvement in the capsuleer experience. Many features, such as nebulae and engine trails can be attributed to recent advances in camera drone technologies – a better view of the universe for the mind behind the ship. (Arydanika and Seismic Stan had the same idea on the most recent Voices from the Void podcast, but I’m sticking with it because I had the same thought before I listened to the episode. Great minds and all that!)
There is more going on, though. The empires are consolidating their hold, broadening the line of demarcation between protected and patrolled space and the lawless regions of capsuleer empires. CONCORD is selling planetary customs offices to Interbus on the outer regions, but will not be providing protection from them. We’re not quite sure what the Interbus board of directors is thinking, but shareholders are already in an uproar. Time to short this particular stock!
CONCORD is finally recognizing the high degree of criminal sophistication in high security terrorist attacks, and denying insurance claims to capsuleers involved is such incidents. Bravo CONCORD, welcome to the future!
Winter is coming, and New Eden is preparing for it. The question is, what will the future bring?
Review: Recent CCP Dev Blogs outlining what’s coming for Winter
- Oct. 18th – Player-Owned Customs Office – Allows (requires, really) corporations to erect customs offices around planets in Low- and Null-Sec. They’re destructible. The Empires will maintain the High-Sec customs offices as double the tax.
- Oct. 20th – Implants on Killmails – Implants on podded pilots will start appearing on kill mails.
- Oct. 21st – Ship-troduction: Minmatar Tornado – Announcing the first of the 4 Tier-3 battlecruisers, complete with a link to the Boomstick clip from Army of Darkness. Battleship-sized guns on cheap hulls. Glass cannon gankfest, anyone?
- Oct. 27th – Crashes – An Update – Announcing some changes to how the EVE client records and uploads crash events to the CCP servers. No direct in-game impact, but presumably the developers will have modestly better data to work from, which will improve their ability to make the client (and thus our time in New Eden) better.
- Oct. 27th – Ship-troduction: Gallente Talos – The next in the series of Tier-3 BCs. Also references upcoming Hybrid rebalancing (was there an earlier dev blog on that?)
- Oct. 31st – Hybrid Weapon and Tech II Ammo Rebalancing – Finally, a boost to Hybrid weapon systems. In addition, announcing some much-needed boosts to select other T2 ammo types.
- Nov. 1st – Beauty Hides in the Shadows – Upgrading how the client renders shadowing effects, yielding sharper shadows and a better look overall. Did our camera drones get an upgrade? Some Caldari Zeiss optics?
- Nov. 2nd – Ship-troduction: Amarr Oracle – The third arrival of the Tier-3 Battlecruisers, this time from the Amarr.
- Nov. 3rd – Introducing New Nebulae into EVE – Regionalizing and dramatically enhancing the backdrop of all New Eden’s action. Reaction in the Twitter- and Blogo-spheres has been very positive.
- Nov. 4th – Ship-troduction: Caldari Naga – The final introduction, this one for the “ice-cream sandwich” Caldari Tier-3 Battlecruiser. Hulking slab-sided beast designed for throwing lots of dps downrange.
- Nov. 7th – Starbase Happy Fun Time – A set of changes set to alter and make (somewhat) less onerous the task of managing POS. The most hotly-debated change relates to the shift in fuel consumption (See my note on Pos Pellets, and the Update with market shifts)
- Nov. 8th – Size Matters: Scaling the UI – Providing the eye-strained pod pilot with the ability to size the user interface (UI) to something approximating readable. And a new font!
- Nov. 9th – Introducing the EVE Launcher – EVE gets a full-on game launcher like other not-to-be-named MMOs. No in-game impact, but good for keeping the alert capsuleer updated on important developments.
- Nov. 10th – Improvements to the Fitting Window – Move over EFT (ok, not yet), the fitting window is getting a bit of love. Showing DPS calculations and some modification to make grid/cpu usage more apparent.
- Nov. 11th - Exploration & Complex Changes – “pinch yourself: more bosses, more modules, more loot, less lurking, less scraps, less pop-up bother”. Some rebalancing, some filling in the gaps in DED ‘plexes. Lighter scrap metal.
- Nov. 11th – Death to the Session Change Timer – Reducing session change from 30 seconds to 20 seconds, but you’re still indestructible for 30 seconds on undock, and invisible for 60 seconds after jump. The dock workers are stepping up their game and talking less smack.
- Nov. 14th – Dedicated Follower of Fashion – The ability to get a full-body look at your fellow capsuleers. Carbon technology improvement.
- Nov. 14th+ - Test Thread for Singularity – references to new features on the test server that haven’t found their way into Dev Blogs yet.
- Nov. 15th – Crucible Feature Page – The official feature page for the Winter Expansion, which more or less pulls all of the above together.
Plus a bunch of other features:
- New Warp Tunnel Effect (here’s a video of it on YouTube - also shows the engine trails)
- Engine Trails
- Event Agents (?)
- Items tell you how long you’ll have to train to use them
- New Captains Quarters (for the other 3 races) – this was referenced elsewhere, too.
- Assault Frigates get a 4th bonus (not on Singularity yet, but referenced)
- Stargates align to the system you’re headed to.
- New T2 Modules
- Loot All option on Wrecks
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What I’ve been trying to find out is whether fueling a POS is going to be cheaper or more expensive under the new fuel block system. Any thoughts? My corp have an anchored POS but we have not had it online for about a year now, but recently been thinking of it so we can do more industry stuff from the POS. Don’t want to go through all that set up hassle and investment if fuel costs are going to rise even more.
Overall the big change is that heavy water and liquid ozone are now fixed resources. That is, if you ran your tower lean on grid or CPU, the costs will rise somewhat since the new fuel blocks require the same amounts as a maxed-out tower. I’d run the profit calculations to make sure you’re still getting your isk with. Unless you’re running the POS for other purposes (defense, capship mfg., etc.)