Let us go back to about 2 months ago, before the Abyss expansion kicked in. Until the very last day before the patch went live, people were discussing the possible implications of Mutaplasmids. We’ve seen noteable threads here and on r/EVE about how those weird little enchanters from Abyssal Deadspace will completely destroy game balance, entire EVE markets and finally the game itself.
CCP reacted.
Pre-release the nerf-bat hit Mutaplasmids hard. Then came patchday and after the dust of the early-days goldrush settled, so did the voices of those who feared Mutaplasmids were going to destroy the game. From now on it was all about the difficulty of Abyssal Deadspace, how safe or unsafe it was.
Since then, I’ve run a couple of sets (100 each) with Decayed Mutaplasmids. My short conclusion:
Instead of going to fit a 400M Meta4/Decayed MWD onto a T1 frigate, you’ll probably just switch to a more pricey frigate - wouldn’t you?
If I take a look at the market history for Mutaplasmids in Jita there is one question that immediately pops up: Was it really worth the effort, player testing and Dev time to introduce these things to the game?
Pick any Mutaplasmid and see how laughably small the amounts are, that have been traded so far. No wonder the fear-mongers, tinfoil-hatters and faction-looters went silent. No surprise, that we didn’t see any fury about how Mutaplasmids broke game balance.
It’s almost as if Mutaplasmids don’t exist beyond market speculation.
It’s almost as if the people who did the math beforehand were right in their prediction that people won’t suddenly start spending several tens of billions for their regular subcapital PVP fits. It’s almost as if the Mutaplasmid Angst led CCP to turn a major part of the expansion into something so niche, that it is theoretically still there, but has no practical use.
Well done fear-mongers.
Now let’s wait another few months and then start blaming CCP for how it is all their fault, how they wasted Dev ressources and so on.
And that’s how it supposed to be: Garbage that should wither away like Resource Wars.
Has it occurred to you that people don’t put their mutas on the market and instead use them to mutate modules?
Besides, CCP is bad at balancing existing, non-RNG modules. We don’t need useless random garbage that makes their already apparent lack of development resources even more blatantly obvious.
A few months? The blaming started before it was introduced because the implementation was terrible and CCP should have concentrated on existing PVE instead of these useless experiments. You are behind the time.
I don’t share that opinion, but it’s certainly going to happen unless CCP tunes up the proliferation by factor 10 or higher.
It kind of sounds like you don’t really believe it yourself, taken your first statement.
Alas, market trade volume is a pretty safe indicator for drop rates. If you don’t believe it from looking at Mutaplasmids, look at Faction Items of the same type, that people need to run the mutations with. All the DED/Faction loot is dropping hard in price, after people realized there is no way to acquire enough Mutaplasmids for a even remotely reasonable price.
Second, once you’ve run enough tests you’ll realize what everyone realizes: you’re better off selling Mutaplasmids than running mutations. People simply don’t fly 20B ISK-fitted T2 Cruisers. It’s not happening.
So what? Mutaplasmids could have offered a way out of the balancing-trap. After all, the complexity of the sandbox calls for a non-typical balancing approach.
The same people who successfully pressured CCP to nerf Mutaplasmids into uselessness, are also the ones who then blamed CCP for Mutaplasmids being useless. The same for Abyssal Deadspace in general.
That’s part of my point or question: did CCP listen to the wrong crowd? Should CCP show more courage in introducing expansions? Or should they continue to let a vocal minority of haters destroy their every effort?
By introducing a random item generator, which was initially creating completely op modules? Yes, sure.
If CCP would first concentrate on fixing EVE and what is broken or in dire need of fixing in terms of mechanics and features, there would be a lot fewer haters to trash new features proposals because EVE users would generally be happier. So … Yes, CCP is listening to the wrong crowd, evident by them introducing more and more crap while not fixing and improving existing mechanics and features.
This was never true. Not now, not before the pre-nerf patch.
People just ignored the thing called math and made-up examples that were simply unrealistic for any practical purpose. Could there have been someone who now would be flying a 50B+ 5MN MWD Garmur? Sure. Would it make any difference for the game? No.
That’s weird, because it seems the haters are hating no matter what. It would seem that anyone who passionately hates a game company over long periods of times, only sticks around to spread the hate. Any reasonable person would at some point accept and let go.
The problem with that is simply that there are no comparable hobby softwares like EVE. Even if you hate it, you cannot find anything similar. This amplifies the hating when you see the dev deliberately taking steps to ruin your preferred hobby.
This is EVE: More and more people have several titans in their hangars (although it was originally meant to be an alliance effort to have them) and people die in their AT ships to T1 destroyers. Nothing is impossible or even unlikely with the determination that EVE users put behind a thing.
And yet it seems that all the hating only makes it worse. See Mutaplasmid proliferation.
Just because someone has several Titans in a hangar, doesn’t mean they will casually fly Garmurs with 50B+ MWD into PVP. Most people, even those who can afford it, don’t casually solo roam their Titans eithers.
So, while not impossible, highly unlikely to happen. And if someone would fly said Garmur, it would not affect the game as a whole.
The lesson here is CCP took away gambling and threw those players a bone by giving them item gambling in game via a legal method.
But instead of those players being happy they were thrown a bone they have to complain up and down they don’t like the odds.
The real lesson is when you take something away CCP that is hurting the game, don’t bother to try to care about those people since they aren’t going to be happy anyways,
100% disagree. The sites have done what nothing else could in destroying assets at an astounding rate. Every day there are 4 pages or more of losses and that is not including the many that aren’t linked to zkill.
Keep on with this, this has been desperately needed for a long time
Why wait? Blame CCP now. And it wasn’t “players”… it was r/Eve.
Trying to magae a game based on the expectations of r/Eve is a dicey proposition at best.
My personal issue with the mutaplasmids is that the probability to have defects is just too high.
Some items have like 80% chance of having defect (eg in fitting). Maybe it’s balance, but I think this is the reason mutaplasmids are not interesting.
I still need some time to make my filaments, but when I looked at the numbers, the loot chance on sisi and the cost of modules, I just realized that you could not create a better and cheaper item with mutaplasmid than the items a rank above. and the chance to havee simply a good item were sooo low just because of the defects.
I wait for CCP to make the “gambling” interesting. ATM we still need the carrot, the stick seems to give many pleasure to people looking at zkb.
Faction/DED loot hit a high in anticipation of mutaplasmids this is true. However when the price started to slip people still realized they were pretty high and started to offload what they had stockpiled, I know I did. You cant jump the value of an item and not expect people to sell.
Ship destruction of this scale was supposed to be the job of players, not of NPCs. In the past, people cried out when someone even thought about moving some form of player interaction and destruction over to NPC … times surely change.
Indeed. The logical conclusIon of years of buffs to player safety - things start to stop being destroyed and players start to stop playing the game. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Regardless of this though, while the destruction seems impressive on zKillboard, there isn’t even a blip in destruction to be seen on the last MER. On order of of 10T ISK worth of stuff has been lost in the six weeks in Abyssal Space since release, barely noticeable amongst the couple trillion a day background loss in New Eden. If you squint hard you can see a little blip in destruction the week after release and then nothing but the summer doldrums.
This feature isn’t going to save the economy from chronic overproduction or even make a noticeable change.
There’s a reason why companies such as Blizzard, Bethesda, Square Enix, NCSoft and such constantly show the middle finger to various community requests and cries while maintaining one of the highest profitable online games…Meanwhile CCP that caters to almost every community demand is on the verge of lifesupport…
As much as I hate EA, sometimes I think their statement about how “companies know best what players want, not players themselves” dropped at E3 does have some merit to it…
But it does help foster a culture that feels losses are a normal occurrence in gameplay. I think many people have developed a culture that sees losing ships to NPCs somehow makes you a bad player. People seem to like running these for the entertainment and rewards and obviously don’t seem phased to lose some rather expensive hardware in the process.
“People” as in “about 1% of the player base”, assuming there’s 3,000 dedicated abyss runners (20% of the players who ran at least one site on Week 1).
The elephant in the room has been for years “what do we do with mission runners, miners and other soloer highsec PvE scum who refuse playing with others, PvPing and moving to null as they should?”.
So far, CCP’s answer has been lacking, to say the least.
