Invention: status and update (Revelations 1.3)

Invention was supposed to be the revolutionary feature of Revelations and should have changed the entire science and industry genre as we know it, with the potential side effect that could change the biggest part of the player economy; Tech 2.

However, the effect that invention was supposed to bring has not yet been seen. The problem lies in the amount of players that have been able to attain the required tools to utilize the new feature.

What tools are these?

They are called Interfaces and the requirement for starting any kind of invention job. These are different from existing tools because they aren't consumed, one can be used as many times as desired and for more than a single job at any given time.

This means that every player that focuses on science and industry only needs one for the rest of his career. This made early predictions of how many interfaces should get introduced into the game on a daily basis a bit harder.

On top of that we decided that there should be only one source pool for interfaces; inside exploration sites. The choice of source made it harder, almost impossible, for us to predict the results, but we still did it, knowing that we would could easily monitor and tweak anything related to exploration distributions without the need of porting big updates to the server.

How did it go?

The amount of interfaces that were seen in the first 2 weeks after Revelations release were disappointing. Then came the patch where the multifrequency scan probe got introduced for exploration to make it easier to see if and what kind of signatures are present in a solar system. This made the drop rate more reasonable, but still not enough.

At the end of the year there were around 200 more to be built, which is far from being enough.

That's not all...

We knew that interfaces weren't coming in as fast as we hoped after that patch, but what we didn't realize right away, was the lack of materials to build them. Only a couple players had managed to build an interface.

Yeah yeah CCP screwed up, when will we see this fixed!

We've resolved both the issues by bumping the drop rate of interface blueprints and the materials needed to build them. Now we're simply waiting on Revelations 1.3 getting out, which will be at the end of this month.

Anything more on invention?

We are also having another look at how data cores are coming into play, which are also found in exploration sites.

They can also be retrieved from research agents, who sell them for research points. We will look at anything from the buy limit per day, which was done so that we wouldn't see a flood in data cores in the first days of Revelations, to the research fields and which cores you can get and finally how many research point they cost.

Any comments on the data cores (specifically concerning agents) will be my privilege to read in the thread of comments, and I assure you that any further problems related to invention will from now on be a top priority of getting fixed.

Ave,
TomB