Team Un-Building

My reaction when the dev blog about industrial rentable teams in the Cruis industry revamp was released was tepid at best:

Overall, I'm disappointed. When I saw teams were coming into things from the second dev blog I had more of an image from World of Tanks where you get inexperienced tank teams and train them up over time to become proficient experts in various abilities. Instead we get temporary random components to fight over in auctions.
And again, I feel this feature will aid the large scale rich heavy industrialists over the small scale and casual industrialists. Those with the wherewithal to hire the best teams to their hubs can amortize the hiring cost over their jobs and produce more cheaply even in busier systems than those who work with generic default teams or the poorer quality teams. I'm also willing to bet that capital ship production teams will be in highest demand even if poor quality because the large capital jobs makes savings more significant.
On the other hand, the devil is in the details. What's the spread of randomization of the teams? How many teams will be created? Will null sec powerhouses achieve any benefit from outbidding everyone to bring teams to null sec? How much will freeloading affect benefits (which ties back to my question of whether or not teams are tied up in jobs once they are working)?
Together with all the other changes coming this summer means I don't even know how this is going to shake out. Time will tell.

Well, time has told and CCP decided to pull the plug as the feature was seeing very little use and low impact on the game:

While we definitely think that the core idea behind teams is a good one and brings value to the game and you, in its current state it is adding the wrong type of complexity and not impacting the universe in the way we hoped. We have done some initial investigation and it is clear that bringing it up to the quality standards you should expect of us is a large project. A project which at this time is not the highest priority for us against some of the other things we are looking at. Given this, we believe the right thing for EVE and its players is to methodically remove industry Teams from the game over the next few months until such a time as we can properly revisit it.
Our rollout plan is to disable the seeding of new teams by the end of 2014 and to disable the UI features in one of the first releases of 2015. While we would stop seeding new teams, any existing teams in use would continue to provide bonuses until they retire, including those being actively used in jobs. We will also be closely monitoring the impact this potentially has on the Industry landscape and react as appropriate if the change is not as expected.

To those wondering why CCP didn't just leave this little used feature in, having extra code to work around for future releases increases complexity and risk for little gain if the feature is mostly ignored. I applaud their willingness to address the issue by admitting its not working out and removing the feature instead of letting it fester.

I admit the impact the teams had was less than I anticipated, probably because the effort of getting a useful team for your operations was complicated due to horrible auction mechanics and poor interface design and usability.  Ultimately, though, I feel the major failure of teams was in trying to force players to work together to achieve a common goal without providing sufficient tooling to accomplish that. Creating a secondary inflexible market for teams that are randomly generated and of mixed use seems to run counter to the main economy that is flexible and supplied via player actions.

I think the next iteration of teams, if they are ever given a second chance should:
- make use of the main market
- be player "built" (i.e. designed and created)
- can still have a limited lifetime and can still be used by everyone in the system
- have fewer but more focused bonuses

However... I have my doubts they will be coming back, which is a shame because I thought it might lead to crews for ships.

Development 101

One of the most important things in any complex application is enabling the user to find things that are relevant and important to them. Its development 101.

I was playing with the industrial changes and explored the teams interface. I figured out the difference between teams already at work and teams up for auction, saw how to bid on them (not a fan that you *have* to hit enter after typing a solar system name, but not a big deal), and decided to throw a bid on a team as an experiment.

Note: not pleased the bid had to come out of my alt's personal wallet instead of a corporate wallet, but again not a big deal.

I log off and logged back on the next day and decided to check out that bid I made.

And I would if I can find it. 

I don't know if the auction finished and I was outbid or if its still running. I simply cannot find it as I did not explicitly write down the team name as I made the bid. That's crap, CCP, that is unacceptable. It should be simple as a check box to see the teams I've made a bid on, or at least that have a bid from my system / a specified system. This is a big deal.

Seriously, can you tell which one I've bid on?

The interface knows my bids because if I hover over the right one in the auction column it tells me my bid amount! It should be obvious at a glance which one it is, and ideally if my system I bid for is the current winning bid or not.

(And no, I do not think this is a good spot for the API and a third party developer to step in. This is a good spot for CCP to develop a new feature properly. Their QA department should have caught this.)

On a positive note, I'm pleased with how many active teams there are and how easy it is to browse for the ones that impact a certain blueprint. Still need time to tell how feasible it is to get a team I want though.

* * * * *

In other news, the first of two pre-Crius Archon builds comes out in two days, so after I get back from a long weekend family trip I'll evaluate what changes to my Archon build there will be. Look for that post Monday.

Team Building

The sixth and final Industry dev blog was released today at the start of Fanfest and covers a completely new feature of manufacturing and research: Teams.

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.

More details on what a team is:

- 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.

So with four activities (for instance) and six types there are 24 combinations of activity/type a team can be.

- 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.

I *think* this means that once the team activity/type is determined, each team member has a specialty within that category. So someone would only have a specialty of "Frigate" only in a team with a type of "Ship". Is there a list of all the specialties somewhere?

 - 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.

 And the exact bonuses in a readable chart:

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.

Did you follow all that? To reiterate, a team will be good for an activity like manufacturing, research, etc. They will only be good for one type like Ships or modules or structures, etc. Within that team of four members, each member affect either Material Efficiency (i.e. less materials) or Time Efficiency (i.e less time in factory) and will either have a broad specialty (for example, Ships - Small Class) with a smaller bonus to the efficiency or a narrow specialty (for example, Ships - Frigates) with the larger bonus to the efficiency (see chart). And each team member is different.

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.

 Teams are randomly created, auctioned for a week, and work in the winning system for four weeks. I can't tell if a team is available for all relevant jobs in the system for the four weeks, or if players need to book them and share them.

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.

Again, no word on how they are shared in the system. At this point, I'm assuming its available for all jobs or else it would put a damper on the cooperation aspect for bringing a team to a system during auction.

There's more in the dev blog so go give it a read.

Overall, I'm disappointed. When I saw teams were coming into things from the second dev blog I had more of an image from World of Tanks where you get inexperienced tank teams and train them up over time to become proficient experts in various abilities. Instead we get temporary random components to fight over in auctions.

And again, I feel this feature will aid the large scale rich heavy industrialists over the small scale and casual industrialists. Those with the wherewithal to hire the best teams to their hubs can amortize the hiring cost over their jobs and produce more cheaply even in busier systems than those who work with generic default teams or the poorer quality teams. I'm also willing to bet that capital ship production teams will be in highest demand even if poor quality because the large capital jobs makes savings more significant.

On the other hand, the devil is in the details. What's the spread of randomization of the teams? How many teams will be created? Will null sec powerhouses achieve any benefit from outbidding everyone to bring teams to null sec? How much will freeloading affect benefits (which ties back to my question of whether or not teams are tied up in jobs once they are working)?

Together with all the other changes coming this summer means I don't even know how this is going to shake out. Time will tell.