My rifter is equipped with the following rigs…

This isn't a phrase many of you are accustomed to hearing right now in EVE and for good reason.  Rigs are relatively expensive and to rig or not to rig is one of the toughest questions we face when making our ship fitting decisions.  The right rig can make your ship awesome and in some cases radically alter the performance of your ship.  We want to enable you to have the option to fit your frigates or cruisers with more cost effective rigs, so without further ado, let's talk about multi-sized rigs.

Multi-Sized Rigs

Currently, you have a Trimark Armor Pump I which costs around 15 million ISK on the markets today and can be fitted to any ship with a rig slot and enough calibration points.  What we are doing is splitting this rig into three types; small, medium and large with the same effect but scaling material costs.  Small ships like frigates, destroyers and their Tech II variants such as Interceptors or Interdictors will be able to fit a small rig. Medium-sized rigs can only be fitted to medium-sized ship hulls such as cruisers, industrials and battlecruisers...you get the picture! 

What kind of cost scaling?

A medium rig using current salvage prices will vary between 600k - 5 million ISK, the small rig is around 100k - 1 million.  The factor is five so far, so a medium rig should be five times cheaper than a large rig and a small rig five times cheaper than a medium rig, although this could change (as usual) based on ongoing feedback and testing.

So the effect is the same?

Yes, the small, medium or large Trimark Armor Pump I rig will all provide 15% armor hitpoint bonus and have the same drawback to ship velocity and use the exact same skills as your current rigs.

What about new blueprints?

New blueprints for the small and medium Tech I rigs will be seeded and sold by the same NPC corporations which sell the large rig blueprints.  Each of the new rigs has a Tech II variant which can be invented using the typical scaling datacore costs between small, medium and large rig blueprints.

What happens to our current rigs?

The rigs you have now will become large rigs as will their associated blueprints become large rig blueprints. But do not worry if you have the rig already fitted to your ship. The rig size fitting restriction is only when you try to fit the rig to the ship. Since the effect is the same for each size rig, you will not lose anything from this transition besides having paid more in the past for a rig where a smaller size is subsequently available in the future.

But, but rigs need much more lovin'!

Yes they do, which is why it's time to tell you about the rest of the ongoing project for rigs revamping.  The whole project focusing on rigs stems through possible multiple future releases but the big picture is all important so going to give an overview here. 

1. Multi-Sized Rigs

The first part was creating multi-sized rigs; this is ready for public feedback and testing in the near future and addresses the primary goal of what we wanted to improve with rigs with the lack of cost effective rigs for the small and medium sized hulls.

2. Rig Balancing

The part many of you may be interested in and have opinions about will look at the overall balance of rigs.  There are many things that need attention in this area, from the drawbacks of each rig group (or lack thereof) to the bonuses being rather weak where a 10% bonus does not really scale well at all between each effect and the presence of a whole bunch of rather useless rigs to the introduction of new rigs like mining rigs.

We will be starting a thread in the Features and Ideas Discussion channel in the next few days to start gathering opinions on rig balance.

3. Salvage Conversion

Salvage conversion is something we have wanted to look at for a while.  This is the ability to effectively fix broken salvage so it can be used to manufacture Tech II rigs.   The most likely way this will be done is a through a reactor which will convert a quantity of broken salvage to fixed salvage in reactors which can be placed at high sec starbases.

4. Transport of Rigged Ships

This is something that can be a pain for many of you.  There are ways around it such as using courier missions if the ship is small enough with a freighter or an Orca's ship maintenance bay for smaller ships.  We will be looking into numerous ways to help alleviate the issue of transporting rigged ships.

5. Salvage Drop Rates

Some salvage drops far too frequently, some not enough for the quantity it is required in.  Some time will be spent looking at this to ensure drop rates are suitable for the future.

In closing

That is it for an introduction to the "Rigs 2.0" project and the first stage of that with the introduction of multi-sized rigs and a glimpse at what else is in store in the future for rigs.  As ever, your feedback is appreciated on the aspects of multi-sized rigs, the transition to these or the other future related projects with rigs.  Remember: things may change from the time of this blog to release and are not set in stone!

Ave - Chronotis