I am stealing the idea from a guy on this sub, who though it will help combat bots. It won’t impact them that much, but it will be very useful mechanics to limit afk ratting. Well, still gives a chance of bots losing their ships more frequently, but that’s not the topic now. Can’t find the thread sadly.
Ideas:
Make rats drop special kind of loot that can be exchanged or sold. Maybe tags or tokens (resembling the ESS ones) in the battleships that aren’t worth ■■■■ all and should be exchanged with CONCORD for isk. The drops cannot be faction drops unless a faction (e.g. ‘Dread’ Guristas) spawns (deadspace loot) or T2 loot, because this will break the markets supply and price for those items. Hopefully this change will eliminate insta ISK printing, that currently is served to carebears in the form of 20 minute ticks out of thin air (usually worth around 20M isk on average form heavens or forsaken hubs). You’d still get paid, but you will have to haul the goodies to stations that accept them. This will also add risk and incentive for ate campers and pipe bombers to feel great again. Additionally boson ratting will be useless if you wipe out the wrecks alongside the rats. Super ratting will still be feasible, but might contain NSA or other risks as stated below.
Remove bounty prizes for killing pirates (aka ‘ticks’) from the game. Those will be entirely replaced by what you loot from the rat wrecks. Whether you loot them by bouncing wreck to wreck or use MTUs and scoop them every 2 sites or so you run - choice is yours. bottom line is - if you need iskies, you loot them wreckies. this would be also incentive for ratter hunters to go after VNIs and get awarded, if they miss the ship but get to the MTU, which will be a pinata in a best case scenario.
Revamp the difficulty levels and risk/award values of the anoms . Everyone who has basic understanding of the game knows that 90% of non newbros only rat in forsaken hubs, heavens and sanctums or their equivalents in other regions across new Eden. The rest are junk and the incentives to run them are nonexistent. So I propose - either reduce the amount of anom types and/or change the mechanics and difficulty of running them. Abyssals are a brilliant example of how PvE can be hard and engaging, excluding afk mechanics at all. So maybe apply this to heavens or sanctums - making them very hard, but very rewarding in terms of loot/rare drops chance. Right now heavens net you an average of 33-35M after taxes. So making that value of the entire site go up will make the risk-reward worth it. Also the chance of losing your ship should also be higher, but not as high as abyssal sites.
Anoms should give you aggression timer of 2 to 5 minutes when running the top tier (9 and 10) anoms. If you were shooting rats in the top tier anosm, you will not b abel to dock and will give hunters a chance to catch you. The latter can simply use their brains and make safe sports, but if the hunters that have probes and are fast can still get a chance to catch the isk-printer VNI/ishtars.
Alternative : The exact contents of what is dropped can always be something else that is valuable and actually tangible like a building material, but one has to be careful, because that kind of ratting will drive that material’s price into the ground. Another option is merge abyssals with standard anoms or make them similar in terms of difficulty and variance. Anoms can alternatively drop whatever is dropping from abyssals now, based on the site tier, but not make those abyssal pockets unreachable by players entering the system. The triglavian ships don;t seem to be going anywhere and will be heavily used, it seems, so maybe standard anoms can help with the Crystalline isogen’s supply and price balance. It will be a problem lore wise though.
Or…
Swap low sec and null sec anoms.
Null then gets lower value but easy to farm in safe space, while low is high value but a chaotic mess since no bubbles, lots of stations and more traffic makes it far harder to try and control like sov.
Farming is not bad. Farming the best isk in the game in a safe zone is the bad part.
Some of you are too young to remember drone alloys.It was basicly the same thing and we had bots killing the rats and bots collecting the alloys after having bounty tags drop won’t do anything
Exchanging a portion of bounties for loot is an excellent idea. Since scarcity determines the value of loot the activity would become self limiting.
An option not mentioned would be giving anoms the Abyssal treatment with procedural generation, weather, effects and smarter AI (but not instanced or time limited). Maybe make expeditions filaments in the loot instead of bookmarks.
Remove all bounties from rats and give them tags to be sold to concord, like sleepers currently work.
Rebalance anomaly dificaulty.
Give a weapons timer to players who shoot rats in highest level anoms. (its currently the only timer that prevents docking in null, as there is no crimewatch there)
If my understanding is correct I can make few predictions on what this would achieve:
Salvaging would become mandatory, this would make smartbomb and boson ratting invalid tactics.
Everybody would need another alt to salvage after the rest of their accounts.
Afk ratting with multiple VNIs would still be a thing. Now the ratter just has to play one account actively, the salvager, VNI accounts could still be afk. (or he could pay someone to salvage for them to be completely afk)
Everyone would have to sell their loot to get the isk, but not neceserily to concord. Haulers would put up local buy orders (slightly undercutting concord) for the tags and then haul them to concord station to collect isk. Even those haulers not buying the tags would still get a huge increase in courrier contracts.
Those alliances that have the best infrastructure for hauling would benefit more from this change than cassual alliances.
In conclusion, this would have zero effect on afk ratting, it would increase ccp income (more alts) and it would be a huge relative buff to goons and friends. I could get behind the idea, but see no reason how it would make eve a beter or more balanced game.
how about these changes op suggested are part of a new ‘upgrade’ which can be installed by nullsov owners? This will give more options to sov owners also, while providing incentives for pvpee’ers.
but get some better loot quite nice 