I have to agree the issue is mostly the rewards. This game encourages or even mandates spreadsheets. So the playerbase looks at the time to isk value of things. There are always some people who just does odd thing anyway. I fly into suns for fun. So they may just do things to do them. If there is not a massive increase in the time/isk factors people are reticent to leave current tried and true activities. So 100% delivery mechanics in ai. Not so much in time to get isk value.
When people learned roqs in null make lots of isk how many rorqs have apeared out of nowhere? Many go to where the isk flowsâŠ
Funny thing is that back then there were no incursions, capital escalations in WH had not become a thing, and null sec anoms were pretty different wrt to availabilty. People in that thread were talking about changes to missions and belt rats. Hell, even missions were not as profitable as they can be now.
Its funny what suckling at the ISK rich teets of teenage EVE has done to its player base.
Iâm not agreeing with the logic. Iâm explaining to you the thought process of CCP and why, currently, that wonât happen. Changing something that fundamental is something beyond my own power. Anyway, I donât want to delve into this too much more until the minutes come out - It will explain my position more.
The problem is that the wheel takes YEARS TO TURN.
Those ships were OP for YEARS without ccp even TRYING to balance them.
Games like World of Warcraft release TWO ENTIRE EXPANSIONS in the time it takes ccp to even FIRST ATTEMPT to make a balance pass on a ship like Ishtars or the old rifter/drake
As it is, the majority of players, who are primarily chasing ISK, will run the most efficient, that is the old and tired content and ignore the new stuff. Not only this, theyâll tell new players to do the same putting large amount of work on the development of new content to waste.
Personally, I think the Sansha Incursions have run their course. Just delete them since we now have Resources Wars and Pirate structures and perhaps reintroduce the Drifters as well for those used to how Incursions work. That, plus a few tweaks to the most egregiously blitzable regular and Burner missions would make the new content more attractive in terms of payout and I am sure increase uptake.
That said, given how difficult it seems for CCP to maintain even a ship balance team, I am not especially optimistic that CCP will find the resources for a proper economic balancing team that would provide oversight and re-jig payouts from time-to-time as players become more adept at farming them and make economic space for new content. Perhaps it is just best that devteams release their pet projects with seriously OP rewards (at least for the first while) to juice player uptake and let the economic chips fall where they may.
Probably. Still, even if it wasnât Dr. Eyjo providing useful input on game design, it seemed in the past that there was some overall vision and a real attempt to build in balanced economic systems by the game designers. Probably that should be credited to previous lead game designers and producers more than their famous economist, but ever since the Summer of Rage, it seems CCP lacks the ability to stand up to players and rebalance their overly-lucrative candy. The tears of both Incursion runners and ratting nullbears were enough for CCP to walk back needed changes to income streams to placate frothing players, something that Eve developers of old would have calmly explained were needed for the health of the game, and then added a HTFU to the crying players.
Maybe that isnât fair and a misremembering of the past, but it really does seem that CCP is unable to react with any speed to balance issues that arise because of game changes they make and new content they add, or administer unpleasant medicine to the player base. Further, they seem to lack any interest in changing other parts of the game to deal with issues like the inability to provide an economic incentive to run new content. From my reading of things, this is because of a general lack of developer resources leading to the laziest, or perhaps more charitably, the most economic changes being implemented.
Thatâs fine and all as we all have to set priorities for limited resources but it is a problem if CCP starts to attribute all player behaviour to player preference rather than just player incentives. Many Eve players would suddenly become miners if you quadrupled mining income tomorrow (we saw some with the original Rorqual changes) but that doesnât mean their 15-year old mining mechanic has suddenly captured the imagination of a whole new cadre of Eve players - it just now pays better than the alternatives so more players will do it.
This is so obvious I am sure most devs at CCP must know this, but given that, it is befuddling to me that new, showcase PvE content is released without any economic incentive for players to try it out and stick with it. I really have no clue what thought process is going on there at CCP HQ. Perhaps the CSM minutes will shed some light on it.
Your logic is totally faulty. You think âstarve them and they will move to the greener pastures of EVEâ, but time has proven over and over again that starving players of their rewards just makes them quit.
Letâs say you donât love croissants but thereâs a bakery making fine croissants right by your job, so you buy them those croissants each day. Then one day they change the recipe and quality goes down. Will you buy them other pastries or will just skip the croissants and the bakery altogether?
People hate change. They will gleefully take any improvement, but change, or change to the worst, just forces them to reconsider the situation. And on trivial matters, they will rather quit than fight or adapt.
I think the truth is somewhere in between. CCP would need to break the stale PvE missioning meta. Introduce something original, play with system in new way. Maybe make it progressively harder, maybe make it procedural, maybe just shift the blocks, or everything at the same timeâŠ
I would like something like this: risky âepic missionsâ taking people from high sec to low sec and even null sec, sites spawn far away from the agent and with greater rewards, something like escalations that is a very good game mechanic in my opinion. These epic missions should be rather rare and difficulty between lvl 4 and 5, but still soloable, for a reasonâŠ
There are other ways to reduce income streams than blunt damage reduction or aggro shifts on drones/fighters, which hurt other ratters more than carriers and super carriers. You could, as I suggested, exclusively make it harder for super-/carriers pilots to rat beyond a certain time limit. Not impossible, and actually more challenging, but harder without impacting any other ship or game area.
Besides, didnât CCP follow through with at least part of the changes? As far as I remember, fighter craft lost at least 5% of their damage and only the increased aggro on fighters/drones was not introduced. And yet, after these changes, income for players rallied even more out of control. In fact, ever since CCP changed capitals and introduced citadels, ISK growth turned from a smooth increase into a mad rollercoaster.
At this point, CCP should have done a thousand things, but probably theyâre working to add the new AI to the NPCs spawning at the old missions. This is utterly stupid and will be a complete disaster, but CCP has been saying that they will do it for the last three years and they never change their mind until devs lose their jobs.
So we could say that the appropiate degree of hope is âlessâ, as in âhope-lessâ.
I think something is rotten there. Maybe their internal tool for designing mission system is so old that nobody wants to touch it anymore, or the dew who was good at it is no longer with them. Because why would they leave it in that point for such a long time? Something must be bad, but what? We dont know.
