Re: Incoming Patch speculations
I agree about the kernel drop rate.
I was in the process of researching, but I'm going to stop wasting my NIC. What this has done is make researching and prototyping something only large or wealthy corporations will be able to do. Incidentally, these are also the corporations that do not need to use the market to sell the goods the researching is going to allow them to create; but they will use the market to buy kernels.
In general however, I think we are going to see the rate of kernel sales go down, because like me most small or solo players are not going to be able to afford to do the research. Now, I know this sounds like a contradiction, because if the demand goes down then the price should also, but already in the market the demand for Kernels is low, but the price is still the same as when the demand was high. this is likely because there are players out there with enough NIC to control the realitively low volume of kernels.
Eventually, another level of reserch is going to be added, but even if the rate is such that it takes a corporation with T4 maxed out 3 months to get T5, the vaxt majority of corps will only just then be reaching T4 at the same time.
The value of the plasma being dropped is actually good, a 0 star was worth about 1500 NIC after tax, so there will be more NIC on the market, but it isn't industry NIC, its combat NIC. The difference being the characters that are doing the research are not getting the benefit of the new NIC source, only the dettrement of the higher kernel price.
Combat pilots with more NIC will likely PVP more and buy more items, true. This ties in with the repair extensions being removed, so it may be cheaper to buy new standard items then to repair (but not likely).
Combat pilots will be looking to buy more T2+ items with the new NIC.
But there won't be any on the market, because the corps that have the tech don't need the NIC... they really won't need it now that they can go out and gather millions of NIC on beta while kernel farming (extrapolating if 0 Star is 1500, then 4 star mech is going to be like 15-25K)... and very few independants can produce T3-4 (other than drone kernel level t4 items like guns).
TLDR - The research rate of most players just got reduced by at least 1/2 and depending on the inflation this causes, at much as a 3/4 reduction, while beta corps again get a boost because of higher bounties and direct access to higher level kernels.
A reason to move to the new beta Islands maybe? But screwing alpha players definetly.