One of the major new introductions to the industry process into Eve with the Cruis update is the appearance of Teams into the game. Initially, upon hearing the word “team” mentioned, my corp mates and I thought that it could mean some way for multiple characters to work on a research or manufacturing project collaboratively. The reality was very different.
In Crius, CCP have added the notion of actual people having to be hired to operate research labs and manufacturing plants, whether this be at a POS in the hidden depths of a wormhole, or in a gleaming Amarrian Station a couple of jumps from the Amarr home world. To expand upon this further, CCP has also added the ability to bid for a specialised team to come and live in a particular station and offer their services. Of course, there is a cost for this too.
The bidding process is pretty simple. You go to the Industry window, choose the Teams tab and click on chartering to bring up the list of teams and various filters such as location (system / region etc.) and speciality. Teams consist of 4 members, each of which bring something different to the table. Once you’ve found a team you like where the auction is finishing sometime soon, you can bid on them. If you’re successful then you get a notification from Concord and the team magically arrives in your selected station.
One really important thing to note is that multiple people can contribute to a bid. When you bid, if your chosen system is the same as another person’s existing bid, your bid adds to the total for that system. Strangely, once the minimum bid has been met, other people can then bid low amounts. For example, I bid 500k on one character and 110k on another for one system, and then when I went to bid with a third character for a different system, it told me the minimum bid was 130k. I tried again with a fourth character bidding for yet another system (Rancer this time lol), the minimum bid was 150k.
Although it might sound like it’s broken, actually it allows for a group of players to agree to each bid and contribute to winning a team, although it seems that each bidder will be forced to bid at a higher level than the last, so if you each want to contribute 200k ISK, looks like you won’t be able to do so.
The overall beauty of this system is that you can bid from one place for a team to be located in another, so if you operate a regional (or universal) manufacturing empire, you don’t have to be in the target station to bid for the team to go there. Below you can see that I’ve successfully hired three different teams to come to my Outpost to help:
As you can see, all three teams are for manufacturing and so will not affect other activities such as researching material efficiency. Also, each team has four distinct effects that can be used for specific blueprint types, and also a salary commensurate with how big an effect they have.
So let’s see what they do. My first example is going to use the bottom team from Caldari Steel, and I’m going to make some Medium Nosferatu’s
So here we are with 100 runs up on the clock and no team selected. The first thing to notice is that it shows which members of the available teams could contributing on this job, and what their contribution, and salary, would be. Below you can see the difference when the team is added to the process:
The first thing to notice here is that both highlighted team members have had an impact. You can see that the estimated material price has dropped from 15.25 million ISK to 14.41 million ISK, a saving of 834,820.48 ISK. Not too shabby at all. The job cost has increased from 263,652 ISK to 284,744 ISK, i.e. only 21,092 ISK more, giving us a total saving of 813,728.48 ISK.
So a saving of over 800k ISK from only a single job? At this point it’s pretty obvious that the bidding for teams with popular characteristics will be pretty fierce, and will no doubt run into many millions of ISK. This, however, is a bit of a concern once again for me, as it will probably mean that the larger industrial groups will be able to spend big to get the best teams and spread their cost out over lots of jobs, again reducing their unit cost, whereas the smaller operator will not be able to compete on the bidding and will, as a result, have a overall higher unit cost and be less profitable.
Anyway, back to the team information. You can also hover over the “Job Duration” and “Total Job Cost” display to show a very useful breakdown. For these, I used the other teams with a couple of different blueprints. Firstly, to show the Job Duration information, I switched to making a Dragonfly:
It’s another Caldari Steel team, but this time I’m getting a 1% reduction in materials and a 6% reduction in time. You can see above without the team that I’m enjoying quite a good reduction in time taken already. Below, you can see the team adding their effect:
I’ve achieved a further 6% reduction, but in this case it’s only reduced it by 8.5 hours, which isn’t really anything to write home about (although in 8.5 hours you could write home several times I’d expect!). Also noticeable is the fact that it’s increased the job cost by 1.89 million ISK. However, I can happily confirm that the 1% reduction in materials in this particular example has reduced the estimated cost by 18.09 million ISK, giving a total cost saving of 16.19 million ISK allowing for the team’s salary payment.
Below you can see the cost information breakdown for the above job with no team:
The system cost index is worryingly red, but I’m guessing that’s because on Sisi, I’m probably accounting for a reasonable percentage of the universal industry activity as there’s probably not exactly thousands of us testing the interface out right now. I also decided that I wouldn’t tax myself. Below is the final screenshot, this time using a Survey Scanner blueprint and the final team:
With this you can see that the team’s 11% salary has been added to the total job cost. In this case the team only affects the duration of the production, and so this is probably not a particularly worthwhile addition to this particular job, although as you should be able to make out from the screenshot, the team affects the material cost of other things, and so would most likely have been bid upon for those attributes instead.
So… are teams worth their weight in Megacyte? The answer is that they probably will be, as long as you can get the right team for the right price and then make sure that you use them properly and regularly.
I have no illusions that bidding on some teams will be very competitive, and as with any auction it is something you should calculate the value first before you bid, to make sure you don’t spend too much. It will also mean that you will need to plan your activities more carefully if you are bidding, or adjust them accordingly if you’re sharing a team with somebody else who bid.
One thing is for sure with Crius, industry in Eve will not have a fixed cost any more, and if you’re serious about being as competitive as possible, you simply cannot ignore teams. I think that CCP has done a really good job with how teams will work, and their addition to New Eden is something that all industrialists in Eve should be looking forward to with fingers poised over the “bid” button at the 8 seconds left before auction ends mark, just like on eBay!
The real question here is whether Crest will allow for offline bidding, leading to the Eve edition of BidSniper?
Crius - Industry teams... worth their weight in Megacyte? (TLDR - yes!!!)
No comments:
Post a Comment