now that is a big interesting question I don’t know if I can even begin to answer. That would have thousands of possible variables that correlate with however you decide you want to interpret the data.
However for some of the main income sources I’d mostly say no. Burners/incursions seem equivalent if not superior to capital ratting. if we want to compare braindead mission running to braindead VNI ratting then ratting probably wins. Then there’s Lv5s, FW mission blitzing, Wormholes, DeD complexing, and possible other things that have all generated large incomes but I don’t have the data to really compare them.
So what’s your definition of casual? And how would any of this help them?
Slightly better belt rat loot so they can live in npc null and be self sufficient? that’s what I’d call batshit crazy hardcore in any other game.
Not to me they are, Incursions are a pain to run at times due to competition and when only one is ongoing and finding a decent fleet can be painful and there is a lot of waiting around because of that. Burner missions become too samey after a while. But capital ratting is always an element of unknown risk, gets the blood pumping…
Casual stuff basically…
Level 5’s, I know people who run them, currently being camped to shite by Snuff so they are back in nullsec instead.
WH nah, not for me, it got nerfed too much, better ISK in nullsec. DED can do them, but sometimes it is a drag, with all the people trying to kill you, at least where I am that is.
Someone who is playing the game more to chill out doing something for the fun of it and stuff and not looking for a second job with having to work really hard to evade all the danger that comes with such stuff, the sort of people that left the game in droves and who were paying for their accounts with subscriptions.
Better income, more stuff to play with and perhaps a feeling that CCP values their custom.
Well that was a fun niche that I was doing for the challenge, was especially fun when you were in systems with people fighting over the stuff, but that niche got squeezed until it was not worth doing which was my point… But the same issue applies in a number of other areas such as low return stuff which is simple and that you can just pick up and do in a spare hour.
Some changes would be nice. Both slightly more yield and shorter training requirements, but if I had to choose one it would be the training, not the yield.
But i do know the mission Dread Pirate Scarlet use to at one point give up a minimum of 55 million in loot, salvage was just bonus…it is no where near that anymore.
Simple statements can very easily lead to something bigger. “Balance the game” is a simple statement, yet a very small component of eve created this whole thread.
just because you like/dislike certain content doesn’t change possibility of the rewards. likewise being out muscled from a lv5 hub doesn’t make lv5s worthless.
Good answer. But I suppose eve has never really had something to cater to them long term anyways. I would love to see the numbers and trends for that kind of player over time. There were a bunch of mission hubs with tons of ravens back in the day, and doesn’t seem like too many these days. Although looking at the main SoE hubs there are still a ton of destroyed NPC ships.
Definitely raises some demographic questions.
How many casuals moved to a different hub, null, or just quit?
what are the unique logins vs multboxers like? My chars have more SP so I typically only use one at a time rather than multibox things, and it’s hard to multibox things like carrier ratting.
what about bots/farmer accounts? A lot of the characters in mission hubs were pretty fishy. I remember a big wave of 3-5 month old ravens running around.
If it’s just meta loot I don’t really see it making a difference. Buff it too much and the sheer volume will make it not worth it in short order. A lot of it is already near mineral value. I guess there’s nothing to lose by trying it, but doesn’t seem like it would gain much either.
Most of the meta loot isn’t worth very much these days. There are a few exceptions, like compact medium shield extenders and some meta4 guns.
The reason you can’t have (much) meta0 in the drop table is it will make it pointless to manufacture said loot. Look at hobs and compare them to warriors. Missions drop hobs like candy, but a lot fewer warriors (and other drones, like vespa and valkyrie). If you’re an industrialist, you don’t want to make hob Is ever. They’ll occasionally drop a meta0 invuln, but not nearly enough to saturate the market.
… which goes back to what CCP was planning to do about it a while ago. Instead of having the meta mods drop assembled, they’d drop meta parts and have us feed these parts to blueprints, probably with a meta0 mod and RAM. Eventually.
Well the statement was comparison to other areas in the game in terms of easy ISK generation, that being generating effective levels of ISK without a massive injection of time and capital.
The comment was about casual players and their choices, that is why I picked up on VNI ratting as compared to level 4’s, which is why Incursions are not a good comparison and nor are the other ones you suggested.
Level 5’s are good however being out muscled means that they are mainly off limits to casuals, thanks for making that point. It certainly is not a question of not liking, more like looking at what people can do with a small amount of play time and limited resources.
Yes it did, there used to be a lot of players like that when I joined the game, many of them were mining, most of those casuals quit.
Well for a casual its chill out and make what seems to be a reasonable progress, not go backwards, the minerals reprocessed is part of that, someone suggested increasing the value of that reprocessing skill to 4% and that is a good idea, it is meaningless in terms of carrier and super ratting as most of them don’t salvage anyway. As I said it is really a case of make it more attractive to low level chill players.
100m/hr for HS exploration seems unduly high, given the minimal SP and ISK investment required to spin up an explorer, and the extremely low risk inherent to the activity. It is an activity that effectively has no significant barriers to entry, so it makes sense that it’s relatively low value. Ease of access means high competition, both for the sites themselves, and at the marketplace when offloading goods acquired through exploration. These are pretty natural traits for a low-income activity. I wouldn’t be surprised if the aggregate value of all HS exploration has actually gone up, however, even if the per-capita earning has fallen off.
I am curious as to what you think average hourly earnings “should” be in HS/LS/Null/WH on a per-activity basis.
You people need to let it go, that was a side convo and I was referring back to a half dozen or more years ago. Like the few years following after Apocrypha Expansion in 2010.
Anyway, this topic is about Scrap Metal processing and the attributes associated with that skill. Personally I don’t think the skill is worth crap anymore due to loot drop and salvage from wreck tables being nerfed to hell and back.