Scare city?

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
1

Or should I better say scarcity? Either way if you’re a diehard farmer this’ll probably trigger you.

We have too much stuff! There I said it.

From mining to missions , combat anomalies all the ‘old’ resource gathering activities respawn too fast with no end in sight.

What does the game need? Balance,balance of creation and destruction.Right now we have too much creation and too little destruction. It is too easy and convenient to sit in one spot and monotonously farm the same agent for missions the next ore site that respawn or the next haven.

How are people supposed to fight each other if there is no reason to do so?

What if for example your favourite lvl4 agent only gave you 5 maybe 10 missions every 24hours? Ofcourse greed may compel you to go to another agent or mix your activities up with something else-forcing players into a nomadic lifestyle makes them encounter other players more and greed over resources leads to fights and destruction or it leads players to taking risks .

Let’s say your favourite mining system has no more ore it’s due to respawn in few days,in fact there is hardly any ore around as its been gobbled up by others.But you want ore! So you begin looking in more dangerous places you weigh the risks and accept it’s the only way to get it.Ofcourse the risks could be mining in a wormhole even tho you live in highsec mining in lowsec even ninja mining in nullsec.

But what of nullsec? What if your favourite krabing system didn’t have enough to sustain your personal or alliance’s greed? Wouldn’t you suddenly go and kick your neighbor out? You want that isk and that ore,you want more resources, you want to be in a position of power do you not?

Hard scarcity spreads players out.You can’t have 100-200 people mining one belt,or maybe you do and no one gets much of anything so you break the herd up and if you’re not careful some big bad wolf will make a meal of you.It may seem unfair to you as a ‘defenceless’ farmer but the wolf has to eat too and if you’re smart about it you’ll come ahead stronger and better.

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2

Feel free to be the first to get out there and kill stuff until you die gloriously in the name of fixing this imbalance. By the numbers, the source of most of it is null, and most of that is Delve. Good luck have fun!

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Higher scarcity equals lower risk taking and lower destruction. Remember that.
Yes you want some but it can’t be timezone based or alarm clocked or it’s games by a few people and others never get a chance.
And too much scarcity leads to too little creation. Especially if isk sources remain high.

4

How are carebears supposed to stick in their safe personal space if there’s too much risk ? We’ll lose players.

The sole ressource given out by Missions is raw ISK, if we don’t take in account salvage and rarely loot. And missions are mainly ran in Highsec, which mean if you want to shoot whoever is “stealing” your missions, we’d have to get rid of CONCORD first.
Plus you didn’t mentioned if an agent have a limit for each player, or a stock open for everyone. The former would force player to move around in highsec, which mean they won’t be PVPing much, just getting shot at by the regular ganker, and where the agent run out they can just log out.
The later will just penalize players that are around on late time zones, which mean pretty much every agent will be depleted. Losing players once again.

“No more ore ? End of the day then ! log off”. Carebears don’t really think far, and we all know they are combat averse. If their little spot is depleted, well to bad, I’ll come back tomorrow. And if it piss me off too much, I’ll just leave forever to go on any Korean MMO to farm like hell.
The part about ninja harvesting in nullsec or wormholes is interesting… but won’t be done by the carebears.

“How big alliances are just gonna come around that idea and hit the smol groups because they don’t have the balls to attack each other 101”

…or make them leave.

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5

I like this idea but for a different reason - it would kill lv4-5 mission blitzing that doesnt make any sense, imo: capsuleer comes to an agent and acts as a whiny spoiled brat until agent gives them the mission they want, rinse and repeat. Although instead of hardcap on missions/day agents need a timer of ~15-30 min for them to be able to offer another mission regardless whether you accepted or declined previous one.
Edit: reduce the timer depending on corporation/agent (NOT faction) standings to player whichever is higher. At 10.0 standing it could be as small as 3-5 min.

HS blitzers and Lvl5 mission runners will rise with pitchforks against that idea tho.

I have proposed this several times in a form of reversed military and industrial indexes: the more you do anomalies and mine ore in a system the less and lower quality anoms spawn. iHub upgrades in claim NS would slowdown deterioration but not able to completely stop it and systems take their sweet time to recover if activity in them is below some threshold.

6

I shouldn’t need to remind you or anyone else that the current state of unchecked farming is damaging the economy . We are headed toward the ‘everyone’ has a super in nullsec and since the server does not support huge fights those supers will remain.
Look at current supercarrier prices 17-18 bil over a year ago and 10-11 bil today.
Despite the huge intake of isk we can clearly see on the MER we’re headed toward the levels of the last big mineral price depression when drone npcs dropped alloys.

7

Currently plain T1 modules are not used much because complete meta modules (that come from “gun-manufacturing” as compared to “gun-mining”) are better in every part and are often cheaper. There are ways to raise mineral consumption manifold.

For example: make every module that drops from NPC or player wrecks a “broken” or “malfunctioning” type of item and in order to “fix” them you need a T1 module to transfer modifications. In effect those meta/faction/deadspace/officer modules that drop in the game will act as an “upgrade” for T1 modules (we do have foundation for this in the form of mutaplasmids but this “upgrade” will have static effects).

“Broken” status of dropped modules will also explain their lower salvaging yield.

That will mean that EVERYTHING that players fit on their ships will come from manufacturing. This will significantly boost T1 production (something even Alphas can participate in) and mineral consumption.

Note: (packed)modules that were in cargo of a player’s blown up ship should not change their status to “broken”. Repackaging “broken”-tagged modules will turn them into scrap metals.

8

People would just log off.

Just lower requirements for decs and ganking. Lots of production, but lots of destruction too.

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9

Completely agree with that! I do a lot of FW. You’d think this is exactly the solution! There are opposing militias fighting over the same systems and the more systems one militia controls the more it benefits them.

However this is a common scenario:
I’m sitting in an enemy plex. Nobody in system and I’m just watching the timer tick down. Suddenly a war target pops into local. I see a Tristan show up on d-scan a few seconds later and I’m sitting in the plex with a Tormentor. I could probably take this fight. But why? Capturing a plex can pay out 17,000LP. Killing a Tristan will give me 90LP if I’m lucky. The only reason I’ll take the fight is if I’m done plexing for the day and have a lot of replacemet ships ready to go. Otherwise risking ship loss for 90LP is a stupid proposition.

There is just no reason to fight, even in faction warfare! It pays more to avoid fights and farm, just like in all other aspects of the game. I’m not sure limiting resources would do much though. If there were only a few systems and plexes to capture I think I’d just not play FW because I obviously wouldn’t be making enough to cover losses.

10

That’s a wonderful idea! But the problem is that seems like too much fun and this game would need to go in a new direction.

If only.

11

For once I agree.

12

And your Idea or Feature or Goal is… to encourage people to pvp? or what?

13

To encourage people to spread/move around.

14

OP … your idea is good. The potential execution seems flawed, though.

Nonetheless …

It’s just impossible to sell it to the people, because they’re all either super-spoiled-brats (from all the easy wealth), don’t understand that scarcity has not once in history caused less fighting to happen, or effectively declare it a game for farmers and carebears.

That’s honestly depressing, but whatever.

Here’s a hint to you:

This is a change that would see realisation over many months, maybe years, but definitely not weeks. CCP would slowly increase scarcity of resources (one way or the other), to adapt the game’s population towards it. New players wouldn’t mind anyway simply because they wouldn’t know any different.

What you can and should do is trying using the Triglavian Invasion chapters (yes, apparently the coming is chapter 1) to bring forth the idea of scarcity adapted to the Triglavian situation. If you can sell your idea as a feature in the game, even better. You might actually manage to hit a nail with that hammer you’re swinging.

15

Ah okay, well Spreading is dependent on our motivations; some people are explorers, some dwell only in high sec for ever; some are pumped up on day 1 to pvp. In my case; I used to be a pve’er, but continuous war decs and wh evictions changed my perspective - did want to cower down anymore, so I went to live nullsec, and started pvp, refined my skill, and joined mercenary corps, and so on. Though my former corp mates continued to pve. So I’ll say it’s based on personal motivation and the goal you wish to achieve at the end of the day. So, wolf or sheep? :grin:

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See it from a perspective of a society that isn’t super-well-fed and rich, full of spoiled and lazy assholes playing the game just to get to feel like they’re rich achievers.

Or, in better words …

When this game started, people had nothing. The game was growing, because the people playing it wanted to have something. People who want to have something, in an environment where everyone wants to have something, tend to try to take it away from others to prevent them from having it, or simply to gain it faster themselves.

Hilmar himself told a story about how he mined for a Thorax, because he “lost” a borrowed one while auto-piloting. He wanted to have resources he couldn’t just buy from the market, because everyone needed the resources to build ships. No, simply spawning them wasn’t a good option for him.

I know, that’s probably unthinkable for many, considering that most people nowadays wouldn’t give a ■■■■ and just spawn it so they wouldn’t have to put the work into their own fuckup. Sad, but I digress.

Ships are needed to gather resources and project power. During scarcity, the one thing everyone needs most is food/water and other resources. On an island with a few tiny, seperated societies, inevitably war will break out due to the fact that you might turn into a problem if you have more/stronger ships than I have.

People are not wrong to say that the bears and farmers would leave, but that would not be a bad thing at all as long as it happens slowly and steadily, just like continuously CCP drives people away slowly and steadily by making changes certain people don’t like.

What people in this thread seem to be missing is that such a change would happen over months or years and not suddenly, meaning that “players would quit” is not an argument at all.

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17

Hmm scarcity to have people move around… man we already have enough threads to deal with, scarcity will encourage massive protests most likely, and most of the power blocks will have the ability to move around and take over, while the minority would have to back down and hide (stay docked) or stay out of the game (as many said here). But it’s a good concept, and maybe applicable on a test phase for eg in wh, or npc regions.

18

The blitzing thing makes perfect sense the way it is. The higher ups (faction standing) like you, so your agent, a pencil pusher, is forced to deal with your annoying s**t. They have to give you missions unless you get to -2 and they simply take a stand and refuse to deal with you. Real life is a lot like this. A favor to the big bosses is worth a million times more than if your direct superior likes you.

19

“i want to kill Scarlet!!!”
“But you have just killed her”
“I want to kill her again… and again… and again”

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20

That’s the problem with fighting just for isk. It is easier to just farm and evade and it’s never worth fighting to the death for. You see your opponent on d-scan long before they’re on grid and the two of you have a mutual agreement before any shots take place, if not, someone warps off. It’s consensual.

Meaningful pvp is when your’re fighting for your home/livelihood and making the other bastard die for theirs. You’re willing to stay to the bitter end. What you stand to lose is worth much more than your ship and maybe by staying to the end you may do just enough dps for your mates to finish them off. You don’t have the option of saying ‘not today matey’. Pvp is far more engaging when it’s non-consensual.

Unfortunately that is just the type of pvp that is becoming more restricted.