The majority of us have heard the slang term “EverCrack” at one time or another. The term refers to what many feel are the addictive qualities of EverQuest. Of course, the supposition that any MMORPG is addictive is a highly controversial subject among gamers. Many gamers will get defensive at even the slightest intimation that MMOs are addictive. To a degree this is perfectly understandable. The mainstream media has often emphasized the negative aspects of MMOs, including the idea that people can become addicted to them. Those of us who started out playing pen and paper games long ago can still remember the 80s, when the mainstream media demonized Dungeons & Dragons.

But are MMOs really addictive? Perhaps part of the reason that many gamers do not see them as such is the simple fact that they view addiction as a dependency upon a physical substance, such as alcohol or drugs. Here I should point out that they are confusing physical dependence (in which usage of a substance can result in withdrawal symptoms if one stops using the substance) with addiction (compulsive, uncontrolled behavior regardless of the consequences). Today the medical community recognizes a wide variety of addictions--from gambling to shopping to sex addiction--which have nothing to do with substance abuse. In fact, there are some who recognize cyber addiction as a disorder; cyber addiction being a broad term referring to things such as habitual use of the Internet to, well, playing games.

This is a helpful write-up by EVE Player Kjellerup:

When you produce stuff there is always some kind of waste involved. This waste can be decreased by two things:

1) Your Production Efficiency skill (Reduces incompetence waste). Called PE.
2) The Material Research Level of the BPO (Reduces design waste). Called ME.

Wasteage is always added to the base mineral amount of what you are producing, and no skill level or ME lvl can reduce mineral cost below the base amount. Base amount is best found by looking up the item in item database on the Eve website.

First let me point out that there's a little confusion as to incompetence waste. According to the skill Production Efficiency it reduces waste by 4% per skill level, but according to the formula in the Player Guide it reduces waste by 5% per skill level. In the following I will assume it's 25% minus 5% per skill level, but it doesn't really matter if it's so or 20% - 4% per skill level, as you definitely want this skill at lvl 5 when going into production.

On a note some people will probably come here saying it's 25% - 4% per lvl, meaning you will always have a 5% incompetence waste, even at PE lvl 5. This is not true, as it's been tested and the numbers ingame simply gives PE5 a 0% incompetence waste.

Your base incompetence waste is 25%. Therefore you can calculate a formula for incompentence waste as: 1.25 - 0.05 * PE lvl.

When you reach PE lvl 5 you are no longer incompetent at producing, so personally you have no waste. Unfortunately the BPO which you just bought have a few design flaws that gives it design waste. You can reduce this waste by researching the Material Level (ME) of the BPO. You can see the design waste on the BPO under Wasteage Factor. This is always 10% (0.1) except for some rare items that have a 5% (0.05) Wasteage Factor. Drones used to have a 5% wasteage factor, but apparently they don't anymore. By researching the BPO we can reduce the design waste using the following formula: 1 + Base Wasteage / (1 + ME lvl).

Let's do some numbers for ME then. Using the above formula on a BPO with 10% base wasteage, we can calculate our production waste (assuming PE 5) to be:

ME0 - 10%
ME1 - 5%
ME2 - 3.3%
ME3 - 2.5%
ME10 - 0.9%
ME50 - 0.2%

As you can see, ME lvl's from 1 - 10 takes wasteage from 10% to 1% whereas lvl's 11 - 50 only takes it from 1% to 0.2%. For some people this will mean that researching a BPO above ME10 is a waste of time as you're only removing the last 1% of waste on those levels. I will leave that decision up to you. Generally the bigger the item, the more it will gain from being researched above ME10 but then again bigger items have a tendency to take ages for just one ME lvl.

Let's take what we know now and see an example. I will use the Kestrel for this example. Looking at the Kestrel BPO we can see that it requires the following materials:

Tritanium - 14,852
Mexallon - 2579
Isogen - 861
Noxcium - 1
Zydrine - 1

Blizzard stated when the game was in beta stages that there would be no junk loot. Each drop would have a use. Many can be used for enchanting, alchemy, blacksmithing, engineering, cooking and so on. Armor and weapons of course drop as well. There are few junk drops that drop which you simply sell back to an NPC. Blizzard has come out with a color coding system. Grey and white for common, green for uncommon, blue for rare and purple for epic.

Well what happens when you get a blacksmithing drop and you're an engineer? Or you roll on a drop you can't use? You take it to the AH. What happens when you run across an NPC with nice set of numbered green shoulders you can't use? Buy them and take them to the AH and sell them for more than you bought them for.

Many games use a free for all loot system. Blizzard attempted to make a dummy proof lottoing system for groups and raids. You can adjust your drop settings in a group to what you'll roll for. People can select need or greed now, rather than just roll or pass. But people roll on what they don't need, sometimes for things such as disenchanting, twinking out alts or to sell on the AH. Items, such as the ones on NPCs are there to be available to people, yet their being sold on the AH.