Principles of Industry in EVE Online

[Forum Admin]

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This is not a feature blog, but rather a view of the bigger picture, of what we're up to and what you can expect out of it.

Coming into this industry work, we had two main goals. Firstly, industry should be easy to understand. Once you've decided what you want to do, it should be obvious how you do it. The UI should be easier for you to read and easier for you to use, and it should be simple for you to understand the consequences of your actions. If you want to do an invention job, for example, you select a blueprint, see what materials you need, what skills are affecting the outcomes, and what your chances of success are, and then just click the "OK, invent me this" button so you can get on with your next job. The math is simpler, the factors affecting each job are clear and consistently presented, and every click represents an actual decision to be made.

Secondly, industry should be interesting and skillful. You should feel that *you* are "good at industry", rather than just that your character is. You're good at industry because you make good decisions, you outsmart your competitors, you've invested in the right places and you're ahead of the market. You invest in the long term, and those investments pay off, and you stay involved because there's always something new to do, some new market to conquer, some new tricks to learn, some new process to master.

EVE industry generally treads a different path to comparable professions in other games. You're not crafting that one perfect weapon, trying to work out the perfect ratios of rare ingredients, because you're not a master craftsman, you're a master industrialist, and you work at /scale/. And in the new system, that's where your challenges will be: how to scale up, how to spread out, where to settle and when to move.

Your sums will drift over time, as the activities of other players around you affect your costs and your outputs, and you'll have to figure out who to team up with and who to compete against. Maybe you'll find a quiet backwater system and hire mercenaries to keep others out and your costs down. Maybe you'll cut a deal with some fledgling nullsec group, trading arms for facility access. Or maybe you'll pick a high-value system and form a local industrial cartel to control the system and outbid those heathens in Jita for the best manufacturing teams. And you'll always be asking "am I working in the right place?", but the answer will only rarely be "no, I should move" - because industry works on a slower cycle, and because in teams and player interactions you have the tools to change the answer if you don't like it.

This is the world we're trying to create, the industry that New Eden deserves: one where you're in charge, where you're facing a new challenge every day, and where you have all the freedom in the world to decide how to solve it.

Crius will be the first step in this process that you'll experience, laying the groundwork for future development. You'll see further improvements to invention and reverse engineering in follow-up releases, along with tweaks and enhancements to the Crius release, and possibly a few extra surprises - all aligned around giving you more control and more options, making the work easier and the decisions harder.

This blog is a bit of an experiment, to see if this kind of blog is a useful addition to our usual feature-heavy ones. If it goes down well, we’ll probably do more, and if you think there are ways we can do it better, please let us know in the comments and we’ll tune future iterations accordingly!

Build safe,

-Greyscale

 

 

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