As we've heard, the blueprints used in Dust are adversely affecting the economy, and CCP has to do something about it.


IMO, the blueprint situation in Dust has striking parallels to the tech 2 blueprint crisis that happened in Eve, back in 2006 or whenever.

The situation was slightly different: in Eve, a few lucky people had blueprints and were the supply bottleneck and made lots of money from everyone else.

In Dust, people spent RL money and the blueprints are now crippling demand. Either way, it's not good for the economy.

The solution for Dust blueprints might be very similar to what happened in Eve.

The solution was to make blueprints unable to keep up with demand.

In Eve, the introduction of invention increased supply by a hundredfold, so what would take a T2 blueprint owner a month to produce, could be done in two days by a dedicated inventor. Sure, the inventor couldn't make those items as cheaply, but he could move a lot more items per month.

In Dust, this would be accomplished by taking blueprints out of the fitting screen, and into the realm of manufacturing the objects instead.

So, say you had an 'Exile' assault rifle blueprint.

Before the change, you put the blueprint in your light weapon slot and never have to worry about it again. Free assault rifles!

After the change, your blueprint spawns, say, 25 'Exile' Assault Rifles each downtime. In the fitting screen, you select the assault rifles themselves, instead of the blueprint, and when you run out, you'll have to switch to a different weapon.

So if you don't use a blueprint regularly, you'll stockpile them, 25 each day, and if you do use it regularly, after a while you'll find you'll need to re-engage with the Dust economy again. Also, because they're actual items instead of blueprints, those items will be available to be salvaged instead of just disappearing.

Personally, I peg each blueprint at 25/day for dropsuits, weapons, modules and equipment, and 3/day for vehicles and vehicle modules, but that's just a wild-ass guess.

If this change were implemented, I think those of us who have blueprints won't be completely outraged, and in fact might be happy that they're deriving value from blueprints they're not even using right now, since they'll continue to stockpile.