So let me get this straight: you’re going to take a mechanic that utterly failed on the first implementation because everyone hated it, and since ESSes were so popular the first time around, now you’re going to force that mechanic down everyone’s throats, but with even more convoluted gimmickry attached? “But we need to to curb inflation,” you say? Have you even looked at your own MERs? Have you seen the bounty figures for the drone regions? Pro-tip, guys: it’s not Johnny Line Member ratting in his Myrmidon for 45 minutes between strat ops that’s creating an out-of-control ISK faucet. Nuking normal players ratting income isn’t going to do anything to curb inflation or restore the purchasing power of ISK-- all it’s going to do is cause botters to roll a few more botting accounts to make up for the shortfalls from the dynamic bounty system (which is going to maintain inflation while also driving PLEX prices higher-- good news for CCP but bad news for anyone who wants to PLEX their accounts instead of using realbux).
ESS change is going to impact botters less than everyone else because they’re the ones living a thousand jumps into dead-end regions, and they’re the ones who have nothing better to do than sit around all day in groups shepherding their botting supers-- it’s literally their job, after all. Who do you think is more likely to have issues defending their ESS for three hours: a bunch of Chinese dudes whose literal job it is to sit around and make sure nobody interrupts their ISK making? Or Johnny Line Member who only has an hour each day to rat because he has a real job during the day and his alliance wants him to join fleets all the time.
It seems to me that with these changes, bots will keep botting, inflation will stay high, but the combination of botters wanting to PLEX additional botting accounts (to compensate for the dynamic bounty system’s negative impact on ISK/hr in backwater regions) and regular people trying to cope with paying for their ships while the purchasing power of ISK remains in the toilet and there’s no way to earn relevant quantities of money anymore will drive the ISK value of PLEX up. Good for sanctioned and un-sanctioned RMT, I guess-- bad news for normal players who want to PLEX an account.
You know what I’d rather see than all this dynamic bounty and ESS garbage? Make supercapitals have a warp core strength of one, like most every other ship in the game. Watch the botting supers get deleted. No bots, no absurdist ISK-fountain. Problem solved.
Awesome change! Now I can make more money mining in HS than Null and can also make more money doing incursions in HS than ratting in a super in null! Thanks CCP. All the risk and no reward makes Null Sec Nick very happy!
Well, to be fair it is nullsec. It’s been pretty dumb that for over a decade, local chat has made it such a safe place to operate. ‘Cowards” probably should head back to highsec where they can farm in safety if they can’t accept the idea they have to fight sometimes.
Changing the system so that some of the ratting ISK being generated is at risk of being stolen by other players isn’t a bad idea. Of course some of these knobs might not be perfect and there still has to be something more to gain for putting yourself at risk, but the basic idea is fine - it’s just certain players have gotten used to their safe, easy and predictable resource fountain.
So yeah, maybe some “cowards” who can’t handle the idea of losing to another player will be quitting or moving back to highsec. Oh well. CCP said they are going to look at all PvE rewards in the course of this economic rebalancing. Sure, CCP says a lot of things they don’t end up delivering on, but I don’t think it is impossible for CCP to tweak the rewards across the board so that nullsec ratting is still lucrative enough to put up with this additional hassle over the more attention-intensive, and lower paying alternatives elsewhere. There might need some more nerfs to highsec though!
And if the cowards leave, there will at least be a viable stick now to force a fight with braver ones that remain (or take their stuff if they decline). Some of that famous ‘skin in the game’ and all that. That is probably a better state than having your “most dangerous” space be a farmer’s paradise, for both stimulating conflict and the long term economic health of your game.
Finally to digress some, I think finally the people in charge have decided that juicing nullsec activity numbers isn’t the primary metric they should be shooting for - getting every “coward” and farmer into nullsec has not grown or made for a better game. Instead, the powers-that-be have (correctly in my opinion) decided a healthy and sustainable economy is the ticket to a more successful game.
I expect the changes to resource distribution are only about half over. Who knows how this will all shake out when things settle in a year or two?
All of that could be said of black out, and yet we see how that turned out.
There are idea (“risk reward” yada yada) and there is reality. There is one old, hard reality of this game, and no one likes it, but it’s the truth: Human nature dictates outcomes.
In this case, that means that no matter what, most people don’t like to lose or fight. it’s why even in a game with all this freedom, where nothing real except time can be lost, most people play in High Sec… EXCEPT for the people who play in nullsec because through various means (the most important being local), those players can make nullsec safe enough to exist in with out too much loss.
This is why 10 years of buffing low sec hasn’t resulted in population increases (low sec is mechanically impossible to secure to the level you can null sec). It’s why the most interesting space in the game (wormholes) STILL take a back seat to sov null when it comes to population and activity.
It’s why blackout turned null into a wasteland that only a few of us kept logging in to out of stubbornness. And it’s why these changes most likely aren’t going to result in a healthy economy or anything else. You can say that people suck and are cowards or whatever, but the truth is, this is a video game and (again, as has already been seen in blackout) people don’t put up with BS for too long before they just go do something else.
The only reason I’m talking about it is because this change and the reaction to it means that people honestly can’t learn. CCP saw what happened 11 years ago with anom nerfs (and had to un nerf it months later). They saw what happened with the incursion nerf (and had to unnerf it later after almost all the incursion communities went the way of the dinosaur). They saw what happened with blackout (yep, another unnerf after a few weeks). And yet they keep trying to direct behavior through convoluted game design ideas that by now they should know won’t work and that they will just have to roll back later.
Watching people you admire make the exact same mistake over and over is maddening.
thats the point where you are wrong
the “braver ones”, which spent there ratting isk on pvp ships, will now stop ratting and also stop doing pvp (no isk = no pvp).
I’m one of these people and at least three of my corpmates will do the same.
and what we will do, when the changes will not be reverted? leaving nullsec will be an option.
As it was explained in the DEVblog the main bank is instant robbable (funny word) while the reserve bank pays out over time (and as far as I have read will still payout whether you are there or not, so you can rob the bank once you have been near, as long as you have the mysterious key, which even CCP doesn’t know where to get it from).
The money robbed will be “paid” in items (so called bonds) and I read they take 1m³ per billion. 60% are robbed, 40% are destroyed in the act of robbery.
So from the point of view from the ratter … the ratter has all the risk, while the robber risks nothing but has all the reward. Great change
Terrible wrong, as I am a customer. If they ■■■■ up the product, so that I don’t want to be customer anymore I will just quit. And btw … I don’t know how you handle guests, but my guests don’t have to pay a bit for being my guests.
Someone is going to rat in nullsec. And if no one does, CCP can crank up the faucet to entice some braver ones to rat. But I have no doubt the current groups that can organize defence fleets will have no issue defending their ESSes.
I mean, CCP could screw this up of course, but there is nothing intrinsically wrong with opening the window to interact with other players a bit from the tiny crack right now in nullsec. I guess, unless you are an OCD farmer with a fragile ego who can’t handle losing any efficiency, accepting any risk, or actually having ISK taken from you by another player. But there is always highsec for these sorts so I don’t see a problem here.
Let’s hope CCP keeps a close eye on this and makes the necessary adjustments promptly though. As Jenn points out, this is a complex system and players may react in unexpected ways, and I while agree with this, but I don’t share the implied assumption that sending some farmers back to highsec is necessarily bad. Players should play where the risk level is comfortable for them, not have the risk dumbed down is the supposedly most dangerous space to pander to the loss-averse farmers.
Nope … since the ISK are “paid out” as an item in your cargo hold. So if your rookie collector dies, so does your ISK. No gain here. So far its still “all the risk to ratters, none to robbers”
You are entirely missing my point.
if it is not worth the time to farm, then I don’t do it
atm ratting means 100m isk/hr which i can throw into pvp
when I get less then 60m/hr from ratting after the update (and this is likley) then I won’t farm and so I won’t throw ships into pvp. so no content for roamers…
Then perhaps direct that feeling into asking CCP to make activities in EvE fun and not a grind?
Look, CCP could reduce the amount of isk in the system more efficently if the act of earning was fun in of itself; the isk payout could be as low as they want without needless obfuscation because people would want to actually do the task.
Dull grinds are exactly the problem; a game should be fun to play, not a list of ridiculous chores that the pain of is alleviated by big payouts.
Why not? Just farm and use a cheaper ship? Ships will be more expensive for everyone, including the roamers.
This is one of the major points of this rebalance - to make everything more valuable. Ships were not always as easy to get as they are now, and many people will they’ll you the game was better when losses mattered more. Not everyone will agree on this, but it kinda makes sense from a game design perspective - why use anything other than the “best” ships when you have near unlimited resources?
These changes are going to be unpopular, and do have issues in that they favour established veterans with stockpiled resources, but where CCP is aiming at with these changes makes sense. However, it is true that unless safe and easy ISK sources in highsec are not also looked at, there is the danger risk-tolerant, but efficiency seeking nullsec players will just move to highsec to make more ISK.
I wonder if that will be the subject of the next devblog…
Lol. Who cares if you can’t afk rat for 100m isk/hour you wont pvp? You only done pvp if the value of your ship is so low that you can easily replace, so no real pain if you loose it. No balls needed.
