Could very well be the reason why. If the Abyss is truly instanced, that means there can be only one player at any given time in an Abyssal system/region. From looking at Zkill, there are only 200 instances. If there were more than 200 players trying to enter the Abyss at the same time, you’ll either get put in a queue, or you would see multiple players in some Abyssal instances. That’s the only two ways it can be.
On the test server, I entered several Abyssal instances where there was another player wreck already there…
That’s probably why they are giving everyone free filaments, because less than 2% of the playerbase are actually running Abyssal content. I’m sure CCP can see this on their end. Like I said in a couple other threads, the Abyss expansion will probably have a shorter lifespan than even Resource Wars did…
I mean, let’s be honest here. When every player sees that first off, the filaments were hard to come by right off the bat, then players are losing multi-billion ISK setups, the total lost to the Abyss is already in the trillions, plus there’s a good chance you get ganked anyway when exiting even if you survive the Abyss. Doesn’t exactly make players want to have anything to do with it, especially new players…
I ran Abyssal instances probably a hundred times or more on the test server, and now that it’s live, I haven’t felt compelled to run a single one…
Is this a hard limit? Why would CCP keep it at such a low number?
It seemed like several people I encountered online were very worried that Mutaplasmids would be too radical and potentially permanently wreck the meta, I guess they’re not as powerful as they were hyping them up to be if there’s really just no incentive to gamble on them.
Having a ridiculously high barrier for entry isn’t new to any aspect of EVE Online, but at this point I consider the Abyss to be veterans-only territory for how complicated and risky it is even to get inside, let alone take advantage of its potential rewards. I think maybe CCP was trying to make something radically different to give seasoned players something new to do, but since obviously the people who are hooked to EVE will spend an infinite amount of time and money on it, they maybe should have focused on making new content that gets new players hooked in the first place.
It would be easy to tell if that were the case. Simply use dscan or probes when in the Abyss and you could see other players in the same system as you.
Or better yet, just look at Zkill and find an instance where two players died at the same time in the same Abyssal system…
This is good for players that don’t run Data sites, (the source for filaments I’m guessing). I’ll save my filament until the smoke clears and give it a try.
When I tested it out on SiSi, there were several times I encountered player wrecks in the very first room of the Abyssal instance I was running. If it was procedurally generated and instanced just for me, that wreck would not have been there. There was also a player corpse. I collected the corpse and looted his Ishtar…
Also, when it was on the test server there were only 100 Abyssal instances, but there were like 500 players testing it out, which is probably why I would occasionally see other players in the same “instance” as me…
Like I said, I haven’t even bothered to run any Abyssal filaments since it went live. What has changed since it was on the test server? Can we still drop mobile depots and MTU’s while inside the Abyss? Can we pop a filament in the middle of the sun? Right on top of a citadel?
I haven’t tried any of those, but I believe deployables are stilled banned from inside filaments. I know some were exploiting downtime to create a 300 AU deep bookmark. There was also some discussion about burying the filaments inside of missions behind acceleration gates (Attack of the Drones would be a fun one).
