Demonstrating an understanding of this (from the opportunity cost wikipedia page) was one of the requirements for 10/10:
(Thus) opportunity cost requires sacrifices. If there is no sacrifice involved in a decision, there will be no opportunity cost.
Don’t give up. it’s a simple concept with a fairly small threshold to understanding. FWIW the wikipedia page could be better - you might need to look elsewhere.
A general comment to people who want PLEX4ISK sellers to be “paying customers”.
This isn’t a matter of opinion. “Paying Customer” is a reasonably well defined term.
It’s useful to consider the distinction between customer and consumer. Considering PLEX as a CCP product, PLEX4cash buyers are paying customers who buy PLEX, while PLEX-using freeloaders are consumers of that product.
In this case, PLEX4cash buyers operate as a “middleman”, moving PLEX from CCP to PLEX4ISK sellers, with everyone gaining something they want in exchange for something they value less along the way.
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Note that this doesn’t cover the sub-topic “Who drives the market for PLEX?”, which is more complicated, and for which there probably isn’t a “binary” answer. All we know for sure is that it isn’t CCP
This is wrong and further evidence that you are fundamentally lacking the key concept that PLEX does not exist in-game unless a player spends real life cash to purchase the item from CCP. Please stop while you have already discredited your own knowledge on the matter.
Null anomalies and VNI aren’t nerfed, because that is only one small slice of a broad-spectrum issue that extends across EVE. As some of the side-discussions have shown, the actual problem is:
“Why is EVE designed to be so easy to bot/AFK farm, and why is it far more productive to set up a bot/AFK farm process than to active play, and why has CCP made the region of space where the richest, most powerful alliances live, into by far the most productive region to bot/AFK farm?”
But Scoots already answered this: Because that panders to the largest blocks of steady sub income that CCP has, and keeps them subbing so they can keep farming, piling up literally stupendous amounts of assets so they can field the huge fleets that make the news a couple times a year so CCP can put out a “$600,000 battle in EVE!” news bite.
Nerf VNIs and they will switch, en masse, to the next most efficient hull. Nerf drones and they will adjust the bot programs to target with weapons and fit anti-ECM on their ships. Spread the anomalies out and they will simply park an alt in 3 different systems and rotate between them. Nerf Null and they will find a way to farm high sec.
Farming needs to be addressed, botting needs to be addressed, ridiculous out-of-control ISK faucets need to be addressed, and the near-untouchable power blocs of Null maybe need to be addressed, or at least shaken up a little.
But you address these issues at the source, by changing base game mechanics, to make botting/farming less profitable/manageable. You don’t play nerfbat whack-a-mole with every hull/mechanic combo they find to make mad ISK.
Assuming that every alt is an omega (because under normal conditions you cant launch several alphas), setting an alt in every system is an additional expense.
You’ve just derailed the focus from AFK to bots, just like Scoots did, but they are 2 different things. AFK is legal, bots are not. It is possible to fix AFK with a game mechanic change, but it is an endless struggle not in developers’ favor against bots.
VNI is good because it is cheap and allows for AFK farm via current drone mechanic. Remove core reason behind AFK in drone ships (aggressive drone AI) and problem of AFK VNIs and gilas will cease to exist simply because it would not be possible to AFK in them anymore.
You are mistaking the ‘method’ for the ‘behaviour’. First off, I have no problem removing Aggressive Drone AI myself… I only play actively, and I target my drones individually more than half the time already anyway. So no skin off my back.
You are also calling “addressing half the problem” (ie, botting) a ‘derail’. The behaviour is ‘ISK/loot farming while paying minimal attention to the game’. You are talking about making one single method of doing that (AFK/botting in a drone boat) slightly harder for actual, real people playing the game legally, and implementing a ‘solution’ that would actively encourage people engaging in a legal behaviour to shift to botting. Since a bot would have no problem targeting X, Y and Z and hitting ‘Attack target’.
People won’t change their behaviour because you make one single method slightly less convenient.
It’s fine to suggest a solution to an issue. It’s not fine to get so wedded to your solution that you lose sight of the actual problem.
Core game mechanics need to be shifted to be less bot/AFK friendly. As was pointed out in the very useful article Daichi linked. EVE could be made much more active-play oriented by design, not by nerfing every gameplay method that botters and AFK farmers develop to amass wealth while barely playing.
My suggetion of adding more/faster web and tackle rats in anomalies was snuffed as “bandaid fix”. While i agree it is not a complete solution, but it can be a part of a series of changes to address complex issue.
Other ideas that might be fun to explore:
make drones to lose connection to host ship if they get beyond drone control range
or make them drop the target and “return and orbit” to host ship in that case
or drones lose all pilot and ship related bonuses that apply to them should they fly outside of control range.
Maybe even add a script to damps or a new e-war module to affect drone control range.
Sure, those things are worth looking at. As is the article’s suggestions of having less bounty, more ‘drops’. As would having more randomized spawns in anomalies, rather than a fairly predictable sequence of X.Y,Z spawning in anomaly N.
More importantly, EVE has an issue where people need a certain amount of ISK/loot to achieve certain common goals, and CCP has designed the game where it takes hours of repetitive, fairly simple tasks to achieve those goals. That pretty much leads directly to people opting for AFK farming or botting.
They also have monetization issues, where they have a firm income stream from subs, and so they have designed their game in a way which encourages those players who are willing to pay for subs, to pay for multiple accounts subbed, because hey, if farming is profitable on one account, it’s twice as profitable on two!
Anyways, the potential re-design of EVE core mechanics and gameplay is another topic. Just pointing out that farming null for ISK, using whatever method, is a core game design issue. Not a ‘hull X with weapon Y’ issue. Because people can and will find another method, if that is what the game pushes them to do to achieve their goals.
It was interesting to read all (most) of your answers. And I agree with @Kezrai_Charzai.
It makes me a little bit sick to find a lot of people who become addicted to some AFK ratting. It’s basically earning ISK from time spent running a PC (same as a Bitcoin farmer would do), which isn’t, I guess, the original scope of CCP for this game. Yet it works.
I have myself other means of getting some good ISK. Just I think this is something keeping new players out. It is pretty scary to join an alliance and find out that to get easy money you have to create an alt or setup an AFK tool. Sounds quite a tradeoff for enjoyment.
Reducing number of anomalies per system would work, introducing some more consistent damage to drones would as well, … but I guess if CCP did not address these issues in these years, they won’t in future. Somehow helps them.
This is a terrible idea. If implemented it would mean that my afk cloaking alts would need to be found alternative employment that may, heaven forbid, involve ‘playing’.
