Current model is very exploitable, and, like ghost training, doesn’t bring anything to the game, only hurts it.
Zombie farms
a) are infinitely scalable
b) consume 2x the amount of plex (one player with 40 zombies ~80 months worth of plex per month)
c) log in for 30 seconds in station, 0 interaction, 0 content. Bots at least provide killmails.
d) allow for basically free (and huge) PI farms, pushing PI price down.
and more.
My ideas are:
extractor only for $$$
cooldown on using extractor on a toon (to prevent it from having “brain damage” or whatever), it would prevent toons from being kept at 5mil SP and make the farm not profitable (or at least not free).
The PLEX used to buy the extractors and sub the accounts was originally purchased from CCP with real world cash and anyone with 5 million SP or more who consume an injector is throwing at least 20% of the skillpoints in the garbage.
A virtuous cycle from CCP’s vantage - I really don’t think they have a problem with it.
It does push up the price of PLEX which is bad for people who want to buy it to sub their account but good for those who want to sell it to finance in-game projects.
If injectors get too expensive, people may decide instant gratification isn’t worth it and earn their skillpoints the old fashioned way. If PLEX gets too expensive, the farms become uneconomical. Either way, it’s self limiting - one side or the other will eventually opt out.
With a 40+ toon zombie farm that uses plex real players could use? I got nothing against using a few extractors or injectors here and there, or scrapping a toon to inject SP into something with cooler name.
If the only thing you do is babysitting the farm, you can have dozens, if not hundreds of those toons. Afk “activities” were supposed to get a nerf. This is the paragon of afk-ism. You don’t even have to be logged in.
If plex gets expensive, injector price follows. It’s not self-regulating as long as isk faucet/ sink is out of balance.
Pilots borrow isk to get into carriers, skill inject (paying the farmer and contributing to rising prices), than crab, again contributing to inflation, keep injecting to get mastery 5 on a super, than crab even harder because in the meantime sub price has doubled. At this point anyone who’s not crabbing in a carrier is out of the loop. I don’t see how that’s healthy for the game.
Never going to happen because that would both be hilariously unpopular with the playerbase and be a good way of driving injector prices up ridiculously, which would also be unpopular.
At which point you get even more characters, extract only Alpha trainable skills, and let the account lapse while it’s on cooldown or something.
Also between that and real money only extractors you’ve probably just made one injector cost like 1.5x what a PLEX costs.
Extractors for only $$$ doesnt do anything as CCP sets the price and the ratio between PLEX and extractors for real money stays the same unless CCP changes it.
A cool down? Say what… a month. /me snickers
Youre barking up CCPS money tree Blade, it wont happen unless CCPs bottom line drops out and thats the only solution they will care about.
Farming toons, of which I have several, all of which I use or have plans on using in the future ultimately consume a lot of PLEX to stay active. More than just the 500 you would normally have to use. This is good for CCP and keeps things in check.
BTW the market you want to control to screw up farmers is the skill injector prices. Youd want to keep that artificially low as if its not profitable to have them they wont be used and mothballed until it becomes profitable again. This is the only market that CCP doesnt have a real money vested interest in, yet, I can guarantee you that they do still have a very large interest in this one too. But good luck knocking that market around. Ill watch your efforts from here.
Unless it was only a first 5M skill cap you can’t extract?
If there isn’t a specific block on alpha skill extraction & it is just that first 5M you can’t extract you may be right.
As there’s nothing to stop anyone training 5M omega skills, un-subbing, extracting the alpha skills, retraining them & extracting again (rinse & repeat as often as desired) if that is the case.
You cannot extract alpha skills. It will even show a little lock on the Alpha skill set or on any skills you cannot extract. So once trained those alpha skills are on that account forever. Only Omega skills can be extracted and only after that 5.5mil magic mark.
So your idea of training 5mil omega, training the 5mil alpha skills for free, and then extracting the alpha skills will not work, nor would it infinitely as you surmised would be possible.
Money over quality gaming always does in the long run. Depends on if CCP just adds more in the long run or builds the game. I hope they do a bit of both and that the player base helps them by injecting $$$ into the system, without TOO much grief, to help pay for better development of the game. In that scenario players and company both win by having a quality product and the money to make it better quality over time.
Heh go on… try an injector mang!! First hits free!! If you think youre not man enough for a large injector I got smalls here too, we gotcha covered!!
You’re barking up the wrong tree. The problem is undersupply of PLEX.
The PLEX on the market originated from people that bought PLEX from CCP to exchange for isk. Considering the current pricing the low trade volume surprises me. I blame easy isk generation plus nothing to spend it on.
Killing SP farms will only make the problem worse, not better. It would drive the cost of injectors through the roof and the cost of PLEX down. If people aren’t adding new PLEX to the market now they certainly won’t if and when the price crashes.
Yes there would be a short-term oversupply of cheaper PLEX from those panic selling but those will likely be snapped up by the speculators.
You are very, very wrong. People needed to put 3 old PLEXes on the market to get 1,65 bilion ship 2 years ago. Now they only need one 500 nuPLEX (one old PLEX) to get same ISK. You see? They need to sell 3 times less to get same ISK, why whould they sell more? And since they have far less opponents (almost entire east block will soon stop playing due to inability to PLEX their accounts), they also need less ships now.
Game is losing content (PLEXing real players stop playing), CCP loses cach, game is getting into most serios crisis in its history, IMHO. Cause unlike any other commodity PLEX is a blood for it, it lets more people to develop sandbox. Game is bleeding now and bleeding hard.
The only solution is to devide PLEX from extractors, skinns, dual training etc. So that PLEX can only be used for game time, as it was intended some time before. Plus give expiration date for that plex. After say 3 months it will not be valid any more.
TL;DR: one fitted Machariel 2 years ago required 60 euros. Now only 20. Less RL money for CCP, less targets for that Machariel, less players paying even that 20 euros (no targets in dull empty space)
The only solution I can see to eliminate SP farming is to eliminate extractors completely. Of course that will never happen because they’re so profitable for CCP. You would think that CCP could just sell injectors for people that want to get SP fast and eliminate the extractors since most of the SP is from farms and not real characters anyways. Of course if they did that then the farmers wouldn’t be using up plex for all the farming accounts…
Whether they’re selling extractors or injectors, CCP will probably make their money (and rightfully so, they are a business after all).
While injectors would only profit CCP, extractors profit both CCP and the skill farmer. Extractors make skills a commodity, something in finite supply - as supply and demand change, there is also the option for market PvP to take place.
Personally, I’m a fan of the current system. I like that SP has to be made made by a player (trained by toons) and isn’t just created by CCP out of thin air. I feel like it adds more than a few dimensions to the game, that would be eliminated in CCP started simply selling injectors.
