Let's start with the negative, just to get that out of the way: Scrapmetal Processing. That's a huge nerf, with the maximum yield for reprocessing loot going from 100% with everything trained perfectly, etc, down to, if I read the blog correctly, 55%. Wow. Suddenly all of that crappy loot is going to be worth about half of what it's currently worth. It's definitely time to clear out the hangars of anything remotely worth melting down. This affects salvagers immensely, and I imagine it'll affect ratters, too. I understand the logic behind such a huge kick in the teeth- CCP wants module compression to go. There is a lot of collateral damage to that decision, though. Folks who don't do, and oftentimes have no idea about, module compression are catching it in the shorts with no way out. I hope CCP revisits this in the future and lets these folks have some sort of option- perhaps the soon-to-be-pointless Rorqual could now reprocess all loot at high efficiency, and let it serve as something else besides a glorified booster and paltry jump freighter. Let it reprocess in siege mode, thereby keeping the fuel and time requirements. This won't impact the smaller salvagers much, but it'll keep the module compression folks bottlenecked.
So that's what i disliked. Everything else about the industry changes sounded good, though. I won't discuss them explicitly here, since that's being done elsewhere. Like I mentioned, the big question for me now is, what changes? Every character in Eve is unique, and the changes affect everyone a little differently. For Kym, doing the math leads to an interesting conclusion.
Kym's got decent refining skills. Everything that gets mined on a regular basis gets refined with zero waste at the Minmatar outpost that currently has its base yield at 40%. Her skills are at level IV for most ores that she mines, and a week of training could get the other ores there easily. She doesn't have every single last ore skill highly trained, though- there is ore that I hardly ever mine or place buy orders for, because there is something more useful or valuable instead. Also, Kym's not a miner- she's an industrialist, who's got mining and salvaging as a fallback career. So there was never a plan to maximize all of those skills to V. Anyways, Level IV, plus a 2% implant, gives a perfect yield of 97.5%, which is the highest possible yield (there's a 2.5% tax levied) at the outpost.
That all changes with the summer expansion. That Minmatar outpost is now going to (I believe) have a base refine yield of 57%, assuming it doesn't get one final upgrade to 60%. The "new 100%" is 86.8%- that's going to be the highest possible, with the upgraded outpost, level V skills, and a 4% implant. Kym doesn't have that right now, but I'm not going to focus too much on that in this post. Instead, I'm wondering if I should refine anything at all at the outpost, or whether I should just anchor an Intensive Reprocessing Array at a POS, and refine there. Here are the relevant numbers: The POS would refine at a base of 54%, and the array assumes Kym has perfect refine skills (scary POS code is the TL;DR on way that's the case). The outpost would refine at a base of 57%, and take into consideration Kym's skills, but also charge a 2.5% tax. In order for the outpost to be a better option, I'd need to train the relevant skills to V, which for the ores that I commonly mine means about a month of total training time, give or take. With that extra month of training, the outpost would give me an extra 0.5% yield, compared to the POS. If the summer expansion were released tomorrow, it would make more sense to refine at the POS.
Follow all that? Essentially, because of the 2.5% tax, the outpost as it exists right now is only going to ever be 0.5% better than the POS. Upgrade the implant, you say? It applies to both the POS and the outpost. Is it worth it to me to spend a month of training to get that extra 0.5%? Right now, that is doubtful. The whole risk/reward also needs to be considered here, too. Warping to a station in Provi is nearly always more dangerous than warping to a POS. Reds go there first, and generally stay away from a POS (fleets aside, but I'm talking about the everyday roaming solo and gang pilots). The minerals also need to end up in the POS eventually, anyways, in order to build stuff. Taking ore to the station and then hauling, again, up to the POS just doesn't seem worth it for that extra 0.5% and month of training time. I can think of a million things I'd rather be training for a month than refining skills to get a 0.5% boost.
Sounds like I've made up my mind, doesn't it? The outlier here is alliance command- if the outpost gets upgraded from 57% to 60%, then that's a difference of 3.5% compared to the POS- also known as seven times more than 0.5%. In that case, I think spending the month to train V's will be a better return on the time investment. I guess we'll see. For the time being, I think I'm going to hedge and buy that array. If others out there are doing the math, and are arriving at the same conclusion as me, maybe I should buy ten and wait for the price to increase as demand inevitably rises.
:-)
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