Thursday, July 02, 2009

Get Riggy With It

So in a recent dev blog they talk about the summer mini-expansion and one of the features caught my eye:

Small, Medium and Large rigs

Ever wanted to build the ultimate speed kite frigate but couldn‘t afford the rigs? Tank your cruiser to the max? Mod your little hauler? Now you can!

We are adding small and medium sized rigs ( existing rigs will be considered large rigs ), which will be cheaper to buy and make. With this we are hoping that more people may get introduced to the joys of rigging and the sorrow of losing your specially fitted beautifully rigged ship. CCP Chronitis will explain further in an upcoming blog.
Rigs, ultimately, failed to reach the price point the developers expected methinks. Even the cheapest rigs are multiple millions and throwing them on a tech 1 frigate or destroyer (or cruiser!) seemed like a waste.

Why did they fail to come down in price? I suspect market forces. After all, the only inputs are the blueprints and salvage parts, the former being relatively inexpensive and the latter costing only time to salvage from NPC wrecks. With all the mission runners and ratters salvaging, the supply of parts should be enough to provide the market with a good number of rigs, but the demand for them to put on larger tech I ships and Tech II ships outstripped the supply by a decent margin.

There becomes two ways to drive the price down: change the supply equation by either decreasing amounts of parts used for each rig or increasing the supply of salvage parts. In a fashion, CCP has decided to decrease the parts used.

The questions are
- how are they going to limit ships to certain sizes of the rigs,
- will destroyers use small or medium rigs, and will battlecruisers use medium or large,
- will small and medium rigs use the same parts in the same ratio but smaller proportions?

Time (and the dev blog) will tell.

10 comments:

  1. I don't think they will limit ships to certain sizes of the rigs because I predict they just want more availability in rigs and to make them more affordable for noobs and small ship setups.

    The rigs will ultimately fit onto whatever, but their benefits will scale with their size.

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  2. Since rigs use percent increases they already scale with size. So if they scale the benefits with the rig size then small rigs would be practically worthless on small ships.

    No, I suspect some other mechanism.

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  3. The biggest problem with rig prices is that it takes MANY missions to get enough scraps to make one. And everyone is hoarding their scraps to get enough to make a rig.

    My biggest worry about this patch is: What happens to my cruiser fitted out with BS sized rigs. Or to my cov-ops with BS sized rigs....

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  4. Ah, very true point there.

    But the EVE stuff is very weird, such as the shield hardeners hardening percentages, where the higher it already is at, the benefit for an additional one used is actually less.

    But I still think your point of view will be true.

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  6. I like to think of this as Expert/Competent/Amateur rigging. Sort of the "quality" of a rig.

    At the end of a day, a rig would be like, a bunch of wires and a guy to tinker. The smaller the bunch of wires, the less materials would be used, less calibration/tinkering, less cost and less benefit.

    As in "I should have hired an expert to do that rigging job :P but it was way too expensive."

    Anyway, if it fits the calibration on a ship, I think it should be OK.

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  7. As it is with mods, Frigates/Destroyers should be Small, Cruiser/Battlecruiser Medium, and Battleship on up Large. But this gets me thinking, why not capital ships sized rigs?

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  8. im tinking that they will limit the rigs to the sizes listed above by cozmik. that way they could decrease the cost to fit the rig to a ship without decreaseing its effectiveness. and i guess that would sorta build into quintrala's well worded description as in smaller ships would need less wiring and parts to upgrade over bs which are MUCH MUCH larger.

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  9. oh and i also see some rigs possibly being cross platform like salvage rigs or such rigs only being available for one class of ships.

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  10. Anonymous2:31 pm

    I would think the Calibration mechanic would be the best way to limit whcih rigs a given ship might fit.

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