OGRank - EVE Online: T2 lottery and invention

The T2 lottery is one of the most hated features in EVE and Oveur has already announced it will be changed. But how? And what will happen to the lottery when invention will become more important? TomB blog entry wants to clarify the idea CCP has about how Tech 2 manufactury should be giving more details.
Check it out!

My last blog was about invention, and so is this one. Hey...it looks like I don't have much to talk about. But this one is required.. it's a short follow up on the Lottery blog by Oveur.

Bla bla ... Invention was supposed to be the successor of the lottery system, giving the tools to the players. The problem was our fear for the new system and the possibility of crashing the T2 economy... we pre-nerfed it. Bla and bla...

I forgot, bla bla... but I have to say something... sure, let's say that we want invention to take over, then we have to say how we are going to do it.

In my last blog I mentioned that data core drop rate in exploration sites might get adjusted, and that the cost of buying 1 from research agents might become less than a lot. That's still on the menu, but with one more flavor added to it, and it ain't banana+strawberry, which makes the stuff taste like chewing gum.

These numbers below are currently being worked on for our next patch, which we call Revelations 1.4 and I call "cool", planned for a release date in a couple of weeks.

NUMBER 1 - Buyout Limit
Each agent has a limit per player on how many data cores you can buy from him per 24 hours. The idea was to not doing any weird things to the economy in the first days of Revelations, but has the side effect of being really annoying when you want to cash out from your agent and move on in life. Let's just remove it.

NUMBER 2 - Datacore Cost
Lower the cost of data cores when bought from Research Agents. Well...you are really supposed to get more from them.

NUMBER 3 - Datacore Drop Rate
Exploration sites in low security and 0.0 are currently not in balance with the ultra violent risk vs. reward formula that has made EVE as we know it. We are increasing the drop rate drastically.

NUMBER 4 - Skill Cost
The drop rate of the invention (encryption) skill book has been increased to be in line with the adjusted drop rate of the data interfaces.

And so it goes on...
DON'T TALK IN CAPS BECAUSE YOU ARE MAD AND DON'T START PANICING TODAY AS IF THIS WAS A MONTH AFTER THIS HAS BEEN RELEASED. No need to talk doom and gloom that this is going to wreck EVE, the T2 Market, your relationship or your life. ;)

The first thing I'm guessing I'll hear about are things like "THIS DATACORE IS TOO EXPENSIVE COMPARED TO THE OTHERS" (for example mechanical engineering datacores). That's because almost no one has been researching the field that should store the cores, the drop rate in exploration sites is, however, balanced to the need of invention, so the more used ones are more frequent.

We could balance the cost of buying them from research agents with the market prices, but it's a fact that more people will start researching fields that have datacores that will give more ISK. Eventually it will become balanced.

Once Rev 1.4 is out we will reevaluate the outcome and there is definitely more we will do.

We have already been planning on improving data core based exploration sites by adding Escalating Paths to them, and increasing max runs output on the Tech 2 copies (but randomizing the run outcome a bit) and ... and ... removing the lottery system?