Topic: Refining as a job

ATM refining is a necessary task to get commodities out of resources. Which is mandatory for production. But as refining needs no time if all resources are available in private storage it is often performed by the producer "just  in time".

Due to the fact that the difference between having that skill maxed and having the skill not at all is quite low (less than 2% on good facility, ~10% on alpha+ facility) a lot producer don't even care about maxing that skill as they feel they can afford the loss for "cheap" commodities or do better investing the EP elsewhere.

There would be a place for the job of a refiner, but this job is atm not possible due to the fact that together with the costs of buy/sell orders there is too less margin left for someone buying raw materials and selling commodities.

So in the end I see refining atm as a necessary but useless task between mining and production. I guess most producer will see it more as a burden than as a chance.

In long term I see two possibilities:
1. Remove comodities and the task refinig, let use raw mats instead
2. Think about how to make a job out of this burden, that is comparable to the job of prototyping or production so there might start a niche for someone doing this for other (at least if population grows).

As I stared long time ago my industrial career by doing the refinery task for my corp I would prefer second solution, to bring back some depth in production that was lost in the indu 2.0 patch for me. Therefore I would suggest to do some changes to refining:

- increase the influence of skill (maybe by advanced refinery) or reduce taxes in a way that it is more influence of individual player than of access to good facilities. No skill on best facility reduces the difference to max skill to below 2 %. Long time standing was a way to distiunguish between good and bad refiner, but with gamma this is no longer relevant, as on best facilities all have same standing and assignment grind has no meaning.

- change the refining task to something requiring time/slots/... to have a preproduction that can't be performed by one single refiner for whole alliance with only small effort as this would mean that new refiner still have no chance against vets.

Maybe this would help that pure producer buy no longer raw mats but commodities instead.
I know that this would be problematic if introduced today, but I think it should be introduced when population rises and should therefore discussed now to be able to be implemented till that day.

Re: Refining as a job

I would rather like to be able to recycle commodities back to it's raw materials.

2nd Top Killer 2012
02: 061 -- 353 -- 292 : Xadhoom


"Annihilator no fix for crashes when fighting burial/merkle/xadhoom ?"