Recently Upcoming Changes to Drone Aggression is disliked by many ppl. I am one of them. CCP claimed they are trying to make players paying more attention to the game with this updates. But this only affects legitimate players and it’s helping and encourage botting. Don’t feel it will make people more engaged in null space PVE content, but push people away from null space and make null sec emptier.
While I have a great idea that may can make semi-AFK player more active, reduce the isk incoming of botting/or punish them, encourage more PVP activities and also helping reducing isk inflation. @CCP_Paradox
Here is my solution
- Make bounty not paid directly to players’ wallet. The players need to collect bounty proof items, like bounty tags, from NPC pirates and turn into ENCORD NPC station to get paid off, like ESS isk check.
- How to make this change in compatible with ESS? This is quite simple. The isk goes into ESS stay the same. Player still get paid off every several hours. The rest isk will goes into bounty tags and players need collected from NPCs wreckages.
PROS
This will punish bots, since player need to collect bounty tags, bots cannot just ratting they need to collect wreckages, and do the transportation. If the bots warp away, neutral player can warp in and blow up their MTU. Bots need load a new MTU from station and it’s an 8m isk lose.
It doesn’t force current players change their playing style, but make semi-AFK playing harder. We don’t need to change drones mechanism. So it causes much less damages to the existing player base. Semi-AFK players still can be semi-AFK but they are facing more hunters and need to manually collect bounty tags from wreckages from time to time by themself or using MTU, and stock them safely back to stations before cashing out, otherwise if they get caught and lose all the bounty tags in their ship cargo or MTU. Then player need reload a new MTU from station. This can’t be done by AFK ratting for normal players.
It sinks more isk to the system. So, the player at least needs to collect wreckage and transport those bounty proofs to NPC station to get paid off. During transportation, there is a chance player ship can get destroyed and part of the bounty tags will be lost during this PVP activity. Or if the bounty tags in MTU is destroied, part of the bounty tags can still be lost. This is another way to sink isk back to the system and help reduce isk inflation
It encourages PVP, because the bounty tags can be taken away by other players during PVP. Now hunter players are more motivated to engage people not only in ESS but also in Anomalies/combat sites.
It doesn’t make the null space emptier. Null sec ratting is still profitable and not as tedious as what it will become after we have upcoming Drone aggression changes. I am in one of the biggest alliances, as far as I know many players are considering to do missions to replace ratting in null space for isk. That means they will spend much less time in null space. Null space will become emptier. So if those null space PVP players (hunters) can’t find ship to shoot, they may properly leave the null space or leave the game.
It creat a isk buffer for the current economy system. Since isk is in the form of bounty tags, it takes time to cash out.
CONS
More development work. I think it worth the effort considering so many pros. This system is like a mini-individual ESS system. Should not be that hard to implement.
It may introduce isk spikes to the system. If people stock the bounty proof item and cash them out in large amount in a short time. This can be easily solved by add expiration time to the bounty tags.
This change may be not new player friendly. It may only be applied to Null space. In High sec space, for low value bounty target, majority bounty can still be paid direct to players. For high value bounty target, split part of the bounty into bounty tags, the other part paid directly to player. So it can help new players learning this system. This part of design need some tuning to make it new player friendly.
The original post is a reply to Upcoming Changes to Drone Aggression. I move it here so more ppl can see it and we can improve the idea together. Please pardon my English.