Teams and the Revamp of Industry in EVE Online

Hello Capsuleers!

This is CCP SoniClover from Team Super Friends, one of EVE’s dev groups working as part of the Industry revamp. The bulk of what we’ve been doing will be coming your way in Crius on July 22. The major portion of our labor has been the industry landscape, namely scaling of job costs based on activity and teams. Teams are specialized NPC workers that can modify your industry jobs. We’ve discussed the basics of these features in previous dev blogs, namely here for cost changes and here for teams.

This dev blog will go over some of polish and iterations we’ve done based on testing and feedback from the Council of Stellar Management and players like you. Also, at the end I will discuss the team specialties in a bit more detail than in the previous blog.

Extra Cheese

We added more types of teams in addition to manufacture teams, so in Crius there will be teams for time research, material research and copying. Invention teams are part of the invention changes coming later.

We added tooltips, notifications and wallet entries relating to the industry landscape (teams, costs, etc.), so players have a better understanding of what is going on and how to do things.

We added API support, giving third party tools the data required for active teams, teams in auction and so on.

We added filtering options in the starmap, allowing players to filter by industry activity and cost. This helps greatly in giving players an overview of what is happening where.

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We will be monitoring how people use the bidding system and listening to feedback to see if it will require us to do any further iterations on it.

Window Polish

We’ve polished the team view in the industry window quite a bit, based on testing and feedback. For example, here’s some that came from players trying things out on Singularity, our test server:

• When a blueprint is selected, the team list is automatically filtered based on the blueprint, showing the correct filtering settings.
• Once a blueprint has been selected, it is possible to filter teams based on job type on that blueprint, for example copying teams or manufacturing teams.
• Filtering team Specialties is now better, with better sorting and an improvement to comparing between teams.
• We added an option to limit the view to active teams in the system the selected blueprint is in, to support setting up jobs remotely better.

(click image for a larger version)

(click image for a larger version)

Support Team

We’ve continued to help out Game of Drones with their mammoth task of overhauling the whole industry process, to make sure we deliver a stellar industry feature.

We made a few small changes to starbases:

• We removed the standing restrictions for deploying starbases in hi-sec.
• We added a minimum corp age of 7 days for deploying starbases.

We continued to polish the reprocessing UI. We also adjusted the reprocessing stats of Outposts a bit. You can read more about reprocessing changes here.

We moved the Planetary Interaction (PI) window out of the old Science and Industries  window. It is now under the EVE menu in the Neocom, under Business.

Extra Special

Each team has four team members. Each team member has its own specialty. The specialty dictates what jobs it affects and to what extent. The effectiveness of teams and team members was explained in the first blog on teams, but here is a bit more information on the specialties themselves.

There are a total of 134 specialties. They are divided amongst 6 types: Structure, Components, Consumables, Ship, Mobile and Equipment. The types are not of equal size, the Consumables one has a total of 11 specialties for instance, while the Equipment one has 50.

Specialties are either broad or narrow. Broad specialties affect more items, but generally have less effect, while narrow affect fewer items, but can have a higher impact. For a team to have a team member with a narrow specialty, another team member must have the broad specialty related to it. For example, Ammo is a broad specialty, with Hybrid Ammo being a narrow specialty. A team can thus never have a team member with the Hybrid Ammo specialty, without having a member with the Ammo specialty.

There are 39 broad specialties. Of those, 23 have narrow specialties linked to them. Each of the 95 narrow specialties is linked to a single broad specialty. A broad specialty with a narrow specialty associated with it can have a single one or as many as 10 (there are 10 narrow specialties for the Medium Class broad specialty).

Each specialty is linked to one or more item groups. Some specialties only affect a handful of items, while others can affect dozens. On mouseover on the specialty on a team, a tooltip appears listing all item groups affected by the specialty.

While giving an exact mapping is outside of the scope of this dev blog, we can give a complete list of all the specialties. In most cases, figuring out what items the specialty affects is fairly self-explanatory.

Structure type:

Components type:

Consumables type:

Ship type:

Mobile type:

Equipment type:

It’s worth emphasizing that the intention was not to have all specialties (and thus all teams) be equally viable or valuable. We fully acknowledge that some specialties will be much more sought after than others.

That’s it for Team Super Friends. This might actually be the last dev blog from Super Friends, as the team will no longer exist with the same member composition as a result of some changes to better facilitate the new frequent release cadence. Some members have joined other teams and some have joined a new team. While Super Friends might be done, you can still expect to hear more from all of us in the future and we will be keeping a close eye on all things related to industry.

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