I don’t know if this has been suggested before, but I thought I’d put my thoughts in to recommend a change to CCP that might benefit the community by creating end game content interest.
I’ve been playing eve for close to 15 years now, I’ve experienced much of the content eve has to offer. I’ve been going up against diamond rats to challenge myself in the PVE arena. I was glad to see that their difficulty was significantly higher than missions or combat sites. Their reaction is similar to that of pvp groups. They escalate, swarm and contain good fleet compositions support, tackle, etc.
My main concern is that the reward doesn’t match the challenge these groups pose. After finally finding success destroying these groups I’ve found they seldom drop worthwhile loot. Essentially, they’re not worth the challenge they present.
Has CCP discussed modifying the loot tables for these fleets to match their challenge and entice late game players to engage them? It seems like a waste to code this awesome content and not adequately reward the groups taking them on. I would think that a fleet like that would drop loot which matched their fittings instead of a set of empty wrecks and only metal scraps for salvage.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I for one would be excited to engage more with this content if the rewards matched the challenge presented. Please review the loot tables for diamond rats. Have them drop loot similar to that pvp fleets would drop, have their salvage provide t2 salvage. Right now they just seem like an incomplete part of the universe.
TLDR : Diamond rats don’t drop loot, update their loot & salvage tables please CCP.
They’re just neutral forces that float around space, protecting their miners. I don’t see anywhere CCP says that they’re supposed to have a “reward” for killing them. Besides, we don’t need an additional ISK faucet or asset source that can be farmed.
s are an aftereffect of a pirate F.O.B. being in a system, an annoyance force. You get rewards for killing a FOB instead of farming rats. I think its fair enough - you get paid for solving the problem instead of perpetually treating the symptoms.
I think the OP’s general idea is good, but I would go a step further and modify all the rat loot tables to match what they would be fit with based on their capabilities. This would mean that in order to find certain meta modules you would have to go hunting the rats that would be carrying them (or make them yourself, assuming CCP ever deigns to give us the blueprints for them).
You want a good meta neut/vamp? Go hunt Blood Raiders.
Looking for a certain kind of stasis web? Serpentis have those, go kill them for it. And if you’re looking for stasis grapplers then bring enough firepower to take down a battleship, because nothing smaller than that is going to be carrying one!
Warp disruption field generators? Ohhhhh boy. Only HACs fit those, and pirates aren’t going to spam those in low-level sites, so take some level 4-5 missions and hope that one of their room bosses is flying a HAC, because you’re sure as hell not pulling one off a standard cruiser!
Guristas rats will drop meta Missile Launchers, Angel rats will drop meta Projectile weapons, Sansha and Blood Raiders both drop meta Energy weapons.
You can already find WDFGs occassionally in Faction spawns.
You don’t get out much… do you? This is already part of the game with respect to primary weapon platforms. In addition, if you’re looking for Faction/DED specific modules, this is also already the case. You can only find Shadow Serpentis faction items in Serpentis space by killing Serpentis Faction spawns or running Serpentis DED sites. The same applies to all other rats.
Actually, I do. Most of my ratting has been against the Serpentis, but I’ve hit every pirate faction at some point and have noticed that while they typically drop what you’d expect from any given ship to be fitted with, they also drop things that just don’t make sense. I’ve gotten stasis grapplers off of battlecruisers, energy neutralizers off of Guristas frigates, and WDFGs off of ships that shouldn’t be carrying them at all, like regular cruisers and battlecruisers.
Those rats are actually easily farmable. That is, they can respawn infinitely. So giving them any value means you can create infinite value from one place. Unless that value is very low (ie you can only go to like 10M/h in HS), it’s a very bad idea to give it to the rats. The simplest way to avoid this, is to give them NO value at all.
I’m saying that I don’t think rats should carry neuts/vamps unless the ship they’re flying is bonused for them or they’re like diamond rats; special ships based off of player fits that appear in special circumstances. I also don’t see why a battlecruiser would carry a module worth >1mil ISK into combat in their cargo hold, or at least not as often as I find them (every 3-4 ships).
If there’s any ships that should be carrying stuff they can’t or shouldn’t have fitted, it would be haulers, and I would support adding NPC hauler traffic to systems for players to hunt in privateering/piracy missions.
Other than that, I believe that all rats should drop what their ship would be fit with, and that their ships be fitted according to their hull bonuses. An Imicus shouldn’t be hitting me with a targeting jammer and a Maulus shouldn’t be diving into brawling range with blasters.
Does that seem reasonable to you? Honest question.
It’s not ok. It would devaluate the LP store of the corporations that are competing against, or the activity that produces those items for eg the industry.
The same way FW devaluates the value of research agents.
The only way to make it out of abuse it to make it worth nothing. anyhow once people start abusing it, the value of the items it produces crash down - and in the end people complain that “CCP makes an activity that is not worth it” just because they don’t understand how it works.
Why this change?
I don’t see any reason, purpose, or benefit from this proposed change other than for the sake of validating your own idea.
Why?
Nevermind the fact that this is not how NPC rats work (for example, Sansha NPC Battleship rats fly Nightmare hulls but fire missiles), but why do you care so much about this?
No, it doesn’t, actually. I see no point in changing the way it currently works.
It’s part of a potential change to rats that I’ve been thinking up, though I never expect it to be implemented. The general idea was for rats to behave like a player would, taking advantage of the hull’s bonuses and acting in concert with one another; logistics frigates would remotely repair their allies in combat, EWAR frigates would jam you and keep at a distance, drone boats would deploy drones to fight you with, tacklers would point+web you, etc.
Their ships would have stats that match what their ship is fit with, and whatever they dropped would come from that same fit. I actually made a post on Reddit about it a couple weeks ago.
If I’m being unclear, please let me know.
Some of it comes from ships not being fit the way a player can fit them just bugging me, but mostly it’s because I think fighting rats should be intuitive. A player should be able to look at a rat and know what it’s probably going to do from the hull alone, and that the names of each particular rat should indicative of their purpose.
As far as Sansha rats go, they only have four sub-capital ship hulls to choose from which get used to fill in for actual destroyer, battlecruiser, and industrial hulls. I’ve seen Succubus hulls mounting missile turrets when the ones we use clearly can’t do that, and it irks me a little, but I chalk it up to them being hull variants players can’t use yet like most of the Angel ships.
Well then, I’m sorry to hear that. I suppose we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
This is your mistake. They can’t.
One very simple reason is, because the rats should then drop items from their fit, just like a player do - and that would generate items out of nothing, which is against the principle of eve where all materials are player-generated.
The only possibility is then that those bots also purchase their items from the market. Still this creates ISK out of nothing, and possibly an infinite amount - which is bad
Therefore making rats do drop as much as a real player is out of question.
Since a rat would thus have more difficulty but less reward than a player, this is problematic. Therefore the rats must either be not abusable or be less challenging than a real player.
The rats are not abusable when they take an arbitrary limited amount of time to regenerate.
eg rats in a anomaly take I think it’s ±10min to regenerate. So at most form one anom you can make 6*anom value per hour (eg 180M for a 25M value anom). you multiply this by the amount of anoms, and you add the travel time (warp time+align) to the regeneration time, and you have your maximum theoretical abuse value for the anom.
Of course in reality you also have to add the amount of time to complete the site, but in some cases it may be lower than the travel time (DD titan assuming you can chain the DD)
No way players-made rats would tank DDs that are made to kill them. so now if instead of 40 0.5M worth rats, each single frigate rat drops 1M worth of modules (plus the bounty), then the price of modules would be so low industrials and miner could stop the game. Why would one mine ore when you can gun-mine rats in anoms with a DD ?
s are an aftereffect of a pirate F.O.B. being in a system, an annoyance force. You get rewards for killing a FOB instead of farming rats. I think its fair enough - you get paid for solving the problem instead of perpetually treating the symptoms.
I suppose we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
No need to be rude about it, man.