AeonThePiglet wrote:@Arga: Fragment refining I'm not so sure is a good idea. Protos are already barely cost effective for a wide range of goods, so putting significant extra pressure on the pricetag of the components ain't exactly a good idea.
could be, i just threw the idea out without really looking at the various perspectives.
There are 3-types of fragments - Damged, functional, and perfect.
Fragments always drop from npc's, but the functional and perfect are rarer. Currently, most farmers just leave them or delete them because their value is low; they're not worth hauling.
In most cases, you'll get 1 or 2 modules from ewar with espitium as a component, and a little more rarely from an assault. But on average (per 100 bots) it's 2 or 3 espitium per npc after recycling even with HGR extension.
So, it would be something like
Damaged fragement - 0
Functional fragement -1
Perfect fragement - 2
Prototyping for starters is very expensive, but there are the same (3) extension for ME as for mass production. So it's much much less expensive to build P's as characters advance.
So, there would be a decision to make for both farmers and producers, to sell the Func/perf or recycle them.
It would certainly raise the price of these fragments, but that cost would be born by the small producers since large corps can just farm them.
But, there could be an issue here.
Small producers, not new - just solo or 2/3 players, now have a dilema. To produce T2 items that require espitium, they need both fragments for the PT as well as the espitium from them. They either have to recycle the fragments for espitium and buy the fragments, or buy epitron and make espitium and use the fragments.
This sounds like it moves the decision to the individual. 'I hate beta and refuse to buy epitron', then they can recycle and buy framgents - or farm them. Or they can choose to buy epitron and make espitium and use the fragments directly.
I'm not sure of the drop rate of fragments, maybe it makes sense to only have it on functional for (2) units and not on perfect at all.