December 2017 Arms Race Release – General Feedback

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That’s two different pair of shoes though. One is the market speculators who should have seen the Update page and realize more boosters are coming, generally should know the risk and generally shouldn’t complain.

The other are folks who ran the Drone Sites during event and thought their early-adapting and risk-taking would pay off better than what they normally do. Mind you, we’re probably speaking about people in the lower bracket of income, who thought with some extra effort they might catch up a few meters to the ongoing everyday wealth-accumulation of the empires in Null and Wormholes. After the Event was over, the drop rate for Accelerators was buffed, meaning every adventurer who came to Lowsec during the Event, tried to step ahead by taking risk, was then told: you could have done the same with less risk and for higher rewards later. I’m not sure that is a good lesson to be learnt.

As we’ve understood, the way things went were intended all along and while misinterpretation met miscommunication, it’s nothing to be too concerned about, since this thread helped to shine light on all perspectives, which hopefully means all sides involved learned from each other.

That’s indeed a good lesson for everyone who tries.

:smiley: I was joking, but thanks for the clarification.

Sorry for being slow. I guess with both the Agency Event and Rogue Drones appearing at the same time and the Event having opportunity rewards (points) for completing the Drone Sites, it was too tempting to assume that one is happening within the framework of the other and not both of them being separate things. It could stem from past Events back when The Agency didn’t exist, as there were always sites appearing specifically for the duration of these.
Now, I think most people understood, that the past Agency Event was deeply connected to the December changes for Alpha Skills, providing Battleships, Skillbooks and such. What we still might need to really internalize, is, that The Agency is indeed a separate entity and while it can give rewards for finishing temporary Event sites or permanently spawning sites like these Mining Ops, The Agency itself is not a “container” for Events.

It could be a bad idea, but maybe this understanding could be reinforced by The Agency being a bit more present on its own, strengthening the profile of it being the meta-Agent of all things that happen between Players and the NPC world. For instance I could imagine total bounties/mission rewards/ore m3 of the past week being displayed in an Agency overview window or from time to time having news items appear there as well, that are not directly leading towards upcoming Events/Rewards. I really think the Agency is the much better approach, than just throwing in Events or Dailies, and I also understand that development time is precious. So, these are just some quick and too general ideas for maybe the future. Very curious to see the Agency being able to control content distribution.

P.s. If I said “the game is lying” (not sure I did) I hopefully put it into brackets, as I never assumed any intent behind the misunderstanding that arose.

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If we could create our own events, we would find ways to farm or possibly abuse that mechanic, unless some completely new form of how the entire NPC world works, would be implemented. Right now most NPCs, no matter their cool names and background story, do not behave at all. They are simply there to be farmed over and over again. If we don’t want Dailies or Events that are disconnected of the game, we’d need that to change. Let’s imagine for a moment an EVE in which NPC behave more like a player Alliance, when put under pressure: fighting back, using ressources to grow their power, reacting to constant harassment with either higher forces or leaving regions if only feeding to others. Using the standing system for more advanced diplomatic gameplay between players and NPCs and such.

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Well, sorry bro but the original text was “7 days of farming item with a rate of 2/ hours max” and since I couldn’t imagine 2 per hours meant 48 (since there’s no 2 in 48), I thought you were trying to type 24 and your fingers missed the 4.

There’s an amazing amount of people in say Amarr local during events talking about how you should buy their boosters that will last for 24 hours yadda yadda, and it seems like a lotta people don’t know about bio 5 and the 48 hour magic. Just wanted to make sure you knew. You’re already all over it, swell. :wink:

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s’okay, better late than never! Thanks.

And I didn’t report it because I didn’t think it was a bug. Lots of NPCs in this game occasionally drop loot and occasionally don’t. :wink:

That said, a lot of those rats have good bounties to at least give you something when the wreck is empty… in this case, the bounties are pretty minimal from the rogue drone event rats, so it’s good to have ze loot.

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2/hours relates to the drop rate.

I made around hundred sites and had a 5min/site, 2accelerators/hour(so per 12 sites) in HS on the first day. Sure you make more in null but HS is where people farm the most.

Lots of rats in the game actually almost never drop anything.
lots of sites are not worth anything. eg. escalations in HS, or drones ded in HS (rogue drone infested sprout, ateroid). Since this bug is present for over several years now and still not corrected, there is no point in raising a bug because a rogue drone site have crappy loot.

at this rate it becomes a feature, you know.

(sorry for the tone, it’s nothing personal, just a statement of how unsupported most features are - so why make efforts in raising a bug when our bug submissions have no follow-up ?)

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Ah, gotcha now. yeah.

Yep. And then you have your normal anom/mission drones now that don’t drop any loot unless they’re a sentient drone or a special drone in a mission (drone domis that drop Elite Drone AIs, thank you very much for those 8 billion ISKies a year ago, drone domis over the years)… and then you have your mission rats that ALWAYS drop loot (EoM from Gone Berserk, Mordus rats from Mordus Headhunters, any tag-dropping navy rat, etc.).

There’s one rat I wish would always drop loot: the Supervisors that can spawn in the 2nd rooms of Worlds Collides. They’re a rare enough spawn I wish they were a guaranteed loot drop when they do spawn. so many empty Supervisors. ;_;

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Wow. Here I thought CCP would be good again as they didn’t put the Glacial Drift skins in the NES for the Rogue Swarm event … but just as Christmas arrives, they start screwing people over again by putting Glacial Drift skins in the NES for the Yioul Event. Way to go CCP, way to go for Christmas. :+1:

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Someone did at some point, maybe it was me, but I just wanted to clarify that we don’t want the game to lie and so far, from my perspective, it has not yet. It was just a clarification that omitting information, as bad as we agree it was, is not the game lying to anyone.

Yes, exactly. The Agency Events so far have had a mix of sites added in, and normally we name the Event the same as the site to really drive the connection. However in this case it was a small detail that was missed and not communicated well, the Rogue Swarm sites are not named after the Arms Race Event or the other way around.

Correct. When the Agency Events were not accompanied by event sites, we pointed you towards existing content in the game. That’s all it really does, it is kind of meta-content that points towards content, but doesn’t really come with content itself. It just happens that when there were event sites, we usually focus on those alone. It’s just that it’s hard to point to some of the existing content by name because there is so much out there and the randomness of site distribution means it could be really hard to find a particular site if we don’t alter its distribution behavior.

So the idea here is that we would set up a system that allows corp members to set objectives, but they would have to provide the rewards. They would mostly be fairly generic challenges: kill X number of faction Y; complete X number of type Z sites; complete missions given by faction Y or Agent X.

These would be simplistic tools compared to what we use, mostly using drop down menus to select the Verb (kill/complete/etc) and Object (missions/sites/pirates/etc). They would have to be contextual and dynamic so you couldn’t select Kill Sites (duh) but still be quick and easy to use.

The idea is there. It’s a stretch goal that can only be accomplished after we get other stuff done, so we can’t focus on it yet.

Because the event NPCs are rare enough, and the bosses doubly so, they should have something. I say rare, in comparison to NPCs that are in the game all year round.

Many sites are designed that way since they are available all the time. However that does not excuse them for bad design. Much of the content needs to be revisited.

Getting the exact Glacial Drift SKIN that you want is really hard. If it rolls a SKIN on the loot table there are 294 possible hulls, each with an equal weighted chance. Now, we could try to weigh the chances of the SKIN drops so that certain ones are more likely to drop. Unfortunately, that would be favoring certain players or ships over others.

EDIT: Hi, mom!

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so it’s the same chance to get frigate SKIN as much as titan one?

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So? That’s what the market is for for these ingame even generated skins. Just because you cannot get a skin in the event sites does not mean this is an excuse for you to overcharge RL money for these skins. Thank you very much for this blunder. :slight_smile:

Besides, thank you very much for confirming that you and by extension CCP are in favour of pay to win. Just because something is “hard” does not mean you should make it easier by just throwing some RL cash towards it. This kind of reasoning is wicked and heinous. I have taken a screenshot of that message, so (this means GM, ISD and Devs) don’t even think about altering it.

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actually not.
Those rogue ded sites previously had drops. They were designed with drop.
Now CCP removed the drops from drones, meaning those drone ded sites have been removed their drops (the drops were basically providing ore).
My point here is that since some content is defect, we can’t know when new content is defect by design or by bug.

Even it is is a bug. CCP did not correct the existing sites for several years. Why would they correct it now ?

Finally, CCP has a habit of secret for internal algorithm. What seems broken may or may not be actually broken.

Against, nothing personal, I just give you my opinion on the topic on “why people don’t submit bugs for lower drop rate”

there are more figates than titans .
6 titans I guess, 4T1 frigates per empire.
However maybe there is as many frig skins as titan skins.

IIRC in previous events, T1 frigs had more chances to drop than T2 BS or faction titans.

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not my point. Titans are rare and SKINs would be great drop from event sites, if they are as common as frigate SKINs there are no real value in them.

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maybe not your point, but still your question.

There is NO real value in the items of Eve besides the one people give them. Some items are better than other and still cost less.

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There are no real value in EvE items at all, they just pixels, but some pixels worth more in-game if they come in less quantity (like SKINs).

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No it’s actually not, you just trade one on the market. Have a duplicate? Drop it on the market, and grab the one you need from somebody else there. This is how EvE’s player driven economy works. These are fundamental basics you need to understand, there is no reason to micromanage everything with out-of-game mechanics like in other MMOs without a real player economy.

Again this is fundamental, and things like un-tradeable items, personalized items, stuff that magically vanishes from your cargohold when leaving the “instance” … all introduced in the last couple of months and not seen in the years before simply are not EVE!

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Yeah, and that’s fine. The only reason I mentioned it was to point out that I didn’t get around to fixing it because it was not immediately evident and by the time we had a fix tested and ready, it was 1 week after the event started. A lame excuse for my inefficiency.

Yes, and I’m not a fan. Sure, we should probably favor Frigates over Titans, but what I was really hinting at was making it so Astero Glacial Drift SKINs drop more often than Kestrel Glacial Drift SKINs. Why would we do this? Because Astero are flown by more people and are more common than Kestrel. That’s what I think we should avoid.

Back to the question at hand: Should we favor Frigates over Cruisers over Battleships, etc? I toyed with this idea but the amount of time to spend on it was a few days that were best used elsewhere.

CCP as a whole and my opinions are not directly connected. There are many different opinions within this organization and they only have varying degrees of influence which changes over time.

I have read and understand your concern. I do not want CCP to go down the dark and evil road that is bad monetization. If @Rivr_Luzade would like to continue this discussion, please suggest some good monetization items for the NES. Do not suggest prices, you and I should leave that to the people with all the data.

Ah ha! By selling Glacial Drift on the NES, we have lowered the value of the drops. Understandable.

We’re always working about one event ahead and we have been working on this exact issue already. The Guardian’s Gala will see a shift: in-game SKINs versus NES-only SKINs. We want to see if that is more appealing.

Originally I wrote more to this comment and then cut it out because I thought it was unnecessary since we all (hopefully) understand that the market exists.

The point I was trying to make was, this was just another method of obtaining the SKINs.

When did we recently introduce items that magically vanish from your cargohold?

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kick modification for you then : weight(ship) = 1000B /max(adjustedprice(ship), averageprice(ship))
With adjusted price the price used for manufacturing, and averageprice the 1-y average trade value of the item.
The max is here to avoid market manipulation(if someone sells his alt a molok for one isk, this should not modify the price of molok too much).

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You are asking the wrong question. You don’t need a monetization model for the NES because EVE already has one: The Subscription has been paying the bills for CCP for over a decade and the macrotransactions were never necessary before, and EVE had more characters playing the game before macrotransactions got introduced. You already ask for subscription, that’s more than enough income.

The questions you should ask are how you can make people want to subscribe to the game. Come up with PVE content (or use the multitude of suggestions from the forums) to make people want to subscribe to the game instead of nurturing whales and farming those who still log in:

  • Give the natural phenomena or abandoned wrecks or landmarks roaming around agents giving you interesting actual exploration tasks (my suggestion);
  • make agents shuffle around space to enrich and revitalize space (my suggestion);
  • develop more group PVE in addition to the solo activities so that people can choose to make money in groups rather than alone if they want to (Amarisen Gream’s suggestion if I remember correctly;
  • stop postponing necessary rebalances, for instance, to the HAC/AF that have been unnecessarily outclassed by T3D/C for years.
  • Make SKINS obtainable by ingame activities. Drop rates and chances can be adjusted just like with faction and officer spawns so that people play the game to obtain them instead of waving their credit cards.
  • Resource Wars, FOBs, Shipyards are kind of a step in the right direction, but the RW have very poor incentives, the FOBs are easy to trick, Shipyards are being farmed by way fewer ships than it was originally envisioned.

Just a few suggestions to cater to PVE oriented crowds without at all harming the sandbox nature of EVE. They make people want to subscribe to the game because it feels awesome, it feels alive, it feels like you can do something whenever you log in and vary as you want. If you can make people want to log instead of thinking “I have to log in for this and that”, you earn money just like that.

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This sounds pretty amazing.

Are there any plans to allow PVP objectives being set as well? I guess it would be a bit more complicated than kill X number of ships, unless it could be: kill X number of ships from corp/alliance Y, the latter of which would be great for rewarding efforts in a specific conflict. Then again it could also be more about points, not killmarks, so people who fight in gangs collect rewards too. Now if there was some way to do the same for logi, say set for a specific timeframe during a fleet and the likes, that’d rock.

Also mining. There are already people using the corp mining ledger to reward best miners, an automatic system would have its appeal.

For both and maybe even Player vs. NPC content, it might be good to have the option to set specific goals, but also to have a competition for the best in a set timeframe.

Anyhow, I could see any version of that working pretty great, especially if The Agency was the broker for all of that.

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We have the ability to make that happen right now. However, we do not because of how it can be abused.

If we were to make a corp event system available, it would likely allow PVP objectives. I would like for it to have all the basics, so mining and production should be included as well. In that case, it’s up to the corp to think about how they want to incentivize activity within the corp. I tend to get into a lot of details about this, but it’s so far out we have no idea what it will actually be able to do.

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