No need for the tinfoil hat at all. Both parts of your post (hat on/hat off) are a perfectly cogent summary of the situation CCP has let fester for years. It’s why I keep pointing out in other threads that ‘the problem’ isn’t Alphas, or VNIs, or Gilas, or drones… it’s the fact that CCP has pretty much actively encouraged AFK/bot farming, mostly in Null, because it drives sub sales and because the by now huge section of the player base that makes use of this mechanic would riot if it was seriously crippled.
So they engage in public activities like “We took this away from Alpha bots” and “Look, we caught and banned 600 new botters!” to pretend they are doing something, so all the subbing players can nod and say “Yep, there’s CCP, going after the real botfarmers. Not me, with just my 4 subbed accounts all busily AFK farming, just to support my own personal needs of course… but the real botters. The ones breaking the game. Probably a filthy pack of Alphas.”
As a sub-based game with very little else in the way of steady income stream, and a declining player base, CCP simply can’t take the risk of messing with null farming and the potential consequence of cancelled subs.
You are correct but only in a limited fashion. Plex4Cash buyers want ISK. They want the most ISK they can get for their Plex. The more ISK they can get for their Plex, the more likely they are to do the math and say “Hmmm, I can grind out the 6 billion ISK I need for ship X, or I can drop $40 bucks on a Plex purchase and just buy it now”.
The Plex4ISK players do not directly pay CCP, but they do create the entire market into which Plex4Cash players dip every time they want a quick ISK fix. Without the Plex4ISK players there is no Plex4Cash market. So the mechanism by which players buy Plex from CCP to convert to ISK on the market is created by CCP, but entirely enabled by the Plex4ISK players.
Every cash game has two currencies, one obvious - the game currency for the cash shop - and the other less obvious: time. Players who spend real $$ in the cash shop are generally trading cash to save time. Players who exchange game items and in-game currency for cash currency are trading their time for cash. You can’t have one side of the market without the other to drive it. Both sides are providing something the other side considers valuable.
It actually doesn’t balance around the cost of subs, although that is a somewhat stabilizing factor. Some people who occasionally decide whether to sub or plex the next few months will make that decision based on relative value of sub vs. plex. However, the actual feedback mechanism is that of Plex4ISK buyers competing for the limited pool of available Plex on the market by outbidding each other. As each wants plex generally sooner rather than later, and as some of them get more efficient/amass more ISK, they drive a bidding process which pushes the ISK value of a Plex up.
Neither side of this market is infinite, there are only so many players/farmer and only so many hours a week in which to farm. When Plex supply increases (eg. the sales glut of 2017/2018) the ISK/Plex cost drops. When Plex supply decreases and ISK supply increases, and certain players remove a lot of Plex from the active market - the ISK/Plex cost climbs steadily.
Only CCP can tell you the actual data on how much the increased ISK value of a Plex drives actual cash Plex sales… but the current long hiatus on Plex sales is fairly revealing.
Anyways, sorry for the off-topicness… but I find many of the discussions on the ISK/Plex issue both interesting and … perplexing.
1/10, and the 1 is because you did look up wikipedia. I don’t think you read it though.
You described the decision process, which implies the existence of opportunity costs, but you neglected to say anything about the opportunity costs themselves…
This is objectively wrong. And if you do not understand why, you are lacking knowledge at a fundamental level and I will not bother addressing anything else you have to say. Please take the time to educate yourself on this.
These are posted to the forums and the official Dev blogs each month. Should be fairly easy to find.
This is also wrong and shows a lack of actual experience using a VNI to rat in anomalies. The Signature Radius nerf and Drone Speed bonuses removal are primarily PVP focused nerfs (not that I expect anyone here to really understand why). These nerfs do not affect the way the VNI rats in combat anomalies (+10m Sig doesn’t change that much when receiving damage from rats) and the drone speed bonus (while nice) does not contribute a significant factor to income (because your drones don’t actually move that much in combat anomalies).
Also, neither of these “makes them even harder to AFK” you can just as easily walk away from the keyboard with a VNI before and now after the change.
It didn’t get a nerf. If you believe that it is, you haven’t tried ratting for yourself with a VNI because you will notice that there has been no change. The same fits will still tank against the rat damage easily (even with +10m Signature radius) and the same fits will still deal damage against the rats easily (even with the removal of Drone speed bonuses).
As for the rest of the discussion, I would stop engaging with @Elena_Laskova. They are missing some information at a fundamental level and you will just be wandering in circles trying to explain basic concepts. It’d be nice if we could stay on topic and not get derailed just because one person doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
Well, i have seen an increased number of dead VNIs in NS anoms right after the change - some got their drones killed, some just died. Whether that was the change to VNI itself or something else in the client or anomalies is debatable.
Would you tell me which regions are you seeing these in? Because a blanket statement like “in NS anoms” doesn’t actually mean much.
Not in the way you’re thinking that it is “debateable.” The nerf did not change much in the way of the VNI’s survivability. +10m Signature Radius is not as big as you think it is. I’d reckon most people on this forum wouldn’t know what that actually means, as well.
You’re making this a bigger issue than it is. This hasn’t changed much in regards to VNI ratting. There’s a reason why it’s still one of the most common ratting ships in nullsec in the game.
Each time I see comments like this from people, it usually stems from armchair pyfa warriors who don’t actually rat in nullsec using a VNI themselves. Do you have experience with ratting in a VNI before and after this change? Because I know my alliance in nullsec is still using them without a problem.
Then the increase in VNI deaths that you’ve seen are more likely attributed to VNI bots that are being hunted. Over on Reddit - Dive into anything there’s a bit of a cultural wave of anger against Bots, and people have come up with a very easy way to catch repetitive VNIs with little to no effort.
For example, there two videos:
Gives you a pretty quick overview of how to catch ratting Dominixes and VNIs.
No, this is a lazy change and won’t fix the core issue of the easily bot-able nature of combat anomalies. I think CCP needs to address the underlying issue with EVE PvE in general and just adding a webbing rat is a bandaid fix on a bigger issue.
yes. One of my (alpha)characters flies VNI, but i dont afk so the change had little effect on me personally.
But that bandaid fix would have worked, imo.
As for underlying/core issue… CCP would have to disable/remove aggressive drone AI so that players will have to target and send drones against every target manually. On par with turret users.
You could AFK and you won’t notice the difference. I’m not even sure what you are doing while “actively” ratting that would be significantly different from being AFK. Your drones will still attack the targets one by one and your VNI will continue to spin in a big circle.
No, people will just change the VNI ratting fits to account for webs, or just increase the tank to survive more applied damage.
This is also a bad idea. Bots can be coded to spam the “Engage Target” command with drones (Default Hotkey: F) and with the “Auto Target Back” feature, this would mean zero change for Bots.
All this change will do is making is more frustrating for real players, because they need to spam the Engage Target hotkey, and if anything, would drive more people to Bot, because now they’re stuck on their keyboard hitting the F key for 20 minutes.
Are we talking about AFK game play or Bots? That change was aimed at AFK ratting players.
Why are you suddenly get so defensive? Would active play like any other weapon system become inconvenient for you for some reason? And if players resort to bots - they will just expose their accounts to the risk of getting banned.
It is amazing how some eve players fail to grasp this simple concept.