Crius - Reprocessing

Before Crius arrives on the 22nd, I decided to log on and conduct some tests at some Outposts.

If you haven’t looked through the patch notes in detail, I’d suggest you do so by clicking here, things are changing quite a bit to say the least.

Firstly, you should know that the new interface is gorgeous – it has nice animations when you click on things, although it can suffer a little bit from lag if you have lots of blueprints and locations to view. If you were here when the unified inventory was introduced, you can probably get the idea, although it’s nowhere near that bad and can only get better through CCP’s ongoing polishing.

Reprocessing:

Firstly, let’s look at what used to be called refining, and is has now been called reprocessing. Firstly, I’d like to hold my hands up here and say that I’m a little confused as to why it’s now called reprocessing rather than refining. The Oxford Dictionary description of reprocessing is “Process (something, especially spent nuclear fuel) again or differently, typically in order to reuse it” and for refining it is “Remove impurities or unwanted elements from (a substance), typically as part of an industrial process“.

Ok, so in Eve you actually use the same menu option to both refine, ore and ice for example, and reprocess, mission runners reprocessing modules looted from mission wrecks or the mineral compression favourite 425mm Railgun I. However with how yields are changing, the amount of modules and things other than ore and ice that will actually be reprocessed should drop sharply, as even with maximum skills you will get a very poor return of minerals from those invested in building the item. However, refining ore and ice will actually yield more minerals than previously in specific situations, such as using one of the reprocessing arrays at a POS or with an upgraded Minmatar Outpost.

I decided to use the most simple example in the form of Veldspar for my tests. I went out and mined 10,000 units of the stuff on Tranquillity, and purchased some at 100 ISK per unit from the seeded market on Singularity at an Amarr Factory Outpost in null sec space. For reference, my skills in reprocessing aren’t perfect… well actually for the current way of working they are perfect, as I have both Refining and Refinery Efficiency to 5, and all of the ore specific skills to 4. I also usually have a 4% implant in slot 8 that covers any gaps.

So, on Tranquillity I went to a Minmatar Outpost that has been upgraded to level 1 and refined my Veldspar. The result, rather unsurprisingly, was 30,000 units of Tritanium. Hooray, the system works. Next, I logged onto Singularity and acquired Veldspar, 2% and 4% reprocessing yield implants and got to work.

The image above shows the amount I got, with no reprocessing implant plugged in, at the Amarr Outpost. The image also shows the nice UI and demonstrates how you can have multiple things selected for reprocessing. This is, obviously, less than the amount you can get now – well actually it’s infinitely more, as an un-upgraded Amarr Outpost currently can’t refine anything.

I then plugged in a 2% implant and tried again, which yielded 28,916 units of Tritanium, and switching to a 4% implant gave me 29,483. Even with an implant I couldn’t get to the current “perfect” level, and if I were to train all of the ore specific skills from 4 to 5, I’d need to invest 178 days of training time to do so. If I did though, I’d achieve 30,029 Tritanium in an un-upgraded non-Minmatar Outpost. Not too shabby.

Next up is the Minmatar Outpost, which in this case has been upgraded 1 level for reprocessing.

The above result is without an implant, and already shows that we’re getting more than we previously could have. Adding a 2% implant takes us to 31,229 and the 4% yields 31,841 Tritanium. If my ore specific skills were at 5, that would give a maximum of 32,431, which is 8.1% more than we currently can get. In fact, if you had a fully upgraded Minmatar Outpost with maximum skills and the 4% implant, you’d be able to get 36,034 units of Tritanium, which is a massive 20.1% more than we currently get. Although the ISK investment is massive, if you do serious amounts of reprocessing then the payback won’t take too long at all.

This could be a serious driver for conflict in the future, and if you rent space then expect these Outposts to either have a high tax imposed on them; a high rental value; or both.

Now the bit I’m not a huge fan of – the reprocessing arrays that can be anchored at a POS. They come in two flavours: normal and intensive, with base reprocessing values of 52% and 54%. Immediately this seems rather unfair – you’ve spent billions of ISK buying and deploying a Minmatar Service Outpost in the nether regions of known space, and some upstart plants a small POS at a moon in hi-sec and gets the same refine rate than you do. You spend several billion ISK more only to find out that he’s swapped it to a different POS module that, once again, matches your massive space installation.

This to me, is simply wrong. I tested both arrays out, and the results, with my skills and testing the implants, demonstrated the point. Unless you plan to spend tens of billions of ISK deploying and upgrading a Minmatar Outpost to level 2 or higher, you might as well try and get into either a Caldari or Amarr Outpost instead and just use an Intensive Reprocessing Array at a POS. I personally think this is a shame, but CCP probably have good reasons, and those reasons are probably aimed purely at the hi-sec industry groups, however as somebody who’s spent lots of time in hi-sec (and pretty recently too), manufacturing in null sec is not without its own costs and, as CCP’s mantra goes, risk = ISK.

TLDR – lovely interface; upgrade those Minmatar Outposts now; reprocessing arrays are unbalanced

Crius - Reprocessing