Ah, the Merkelrant.
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Keep it on topic and civil. Thank you.
u still not reading python guide for dummies?
Return the ice belts to their normal state, what kind of nonsense did you come up with how to dig now normally if the ice does not respawn normally, come up with something else, but not this garbage
Iâd be more okay with that if the overall state of PVE in Eve wasnât what it is.
Most mining and ratting activities are mind-numbingly boring. Thatâs why we found ways to AFK it in the first place â why should anyone pay $20 a month to spend hours actively focused on something that tedious? On the flip side, Abyssal sites rely on loot that gets easily devalued. Exploration might as well have a waiting list for relic sites, and incursions literally do have a waiting list.
An easy counter argument is to say that if I donât like those activities I should just do something else. Except, in nullsec you literally have to mine and rat in order to keep up ADMs. I helped an ADM fleet the other night and it was eye-opening â we had a small gang of dudes running anoms in Vexors while praying that somebody would try to gank us just to give us something interesting to do. It was bearable when we could run fleets on our main accounts while doing ADMs on our alts, but having to pay attention to that crap feels like a massive waste of time (which weâre paying for). And itâs not like the isk payout was very rewarding for the effort.
Iâm not pretending this is an all-inclusive analysis, but my point is simple: If you want to force us to be more engaged in our PVE activities, fair enough. But please make those activities something worth focusing on before you do. Or else a lot of people are just going to go pay for a more interesting game.
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Itâs not a bad thing per se.
The unreasonable income some people can generate from simply stacking ratting clients on top of each other, while paying zero to no attention to most of them, is the issue.
If you tell a new Alpha player they should start working on getting multiple Omega chars ratting anoms to be competitive in null sec, they probably wonât stick around if they just came to the game after hearing about the immense PvP wars that happened there.
You also canât compare liquid isk generation to something like PI, which has isk value attached to each generated commodity determined by players, so if itâs overfarmed, the market will adjust according to supply and demand, and profits from it will fluctuate.
If what CCP is trying to achieve is adjust the risk/effort/reward ratios accross the entire New Eden ecosystem, then this time they tried the approach of effort for ratting, but they didnât find it good enough, or it simply created issues they couldnât solve by meddling with the code a bit more.
Maybe they will try to approach it from risk or reward next, and weâll see similar complaints again, even if itâs not a change about drones, because isk is the main thing most players care about.
Some players just got too lazy over the years on how easy it became to generate isk in-game, and too used on how easy it is to replace a 1B ship once it blows up.
While losing such a ship in somewhere like 2012 would hurt like hell, and take you a while to replace if you werenât prepared beforehand, nowadays itâs mostly a small inconvenience, and an endeavour of a few hours AFKing to get a new one.
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mass low attention game play that runs up inflation, IS bad for the game. the collective grinding out of trillions of isk without contributing any content to the game has a significant impact on the game in inflation without contributing anything back to it. It doesnât need to be a high attention game all the time, and this doesnât increase attention that much. when I use drones, I always manually fire them, and have run two accounts in two different sites, flown logi in a stratop and mined with two procurers, all at the same time. Granted that was a significant amount of input to manage all together, but doable. Everyone agrees that botting is bad for the game, but there is functionally little to no difference between botting and large scale afk multiboxing in how it impacts the ecosystem.
From a business perspective, CCP has made it clear they are focusing on long term game viability more than short term revenue objectives. Making a lot of money right now is not as good as making a moderate amount of money for many years. Whether anyone likes it or not, the old guard of eve players WILL eventually stop playing the game.
compete against what? there is no competition in ratting.
And what happen with bloodlines and tribes for player characters? There are sebiestors, civire etc? No history, no tradition, no variety left?
think getting faction warefare fixed would be huge
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We can simply see the impact by checking ESS bank for surrounding systems. Most of them are 0 isk, that means no one is ratting, which will further impact those PVP players and no one to hunt. The online number of player is decrease about 7000+ on my play time.( 24000+ to 16500+). This is another blackout if they donât roll it back.
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for the sake of the ones that dont seem to understand why multiboxers wont keep accounts to rat without assist function let me explain the process. domi number one sets up at a patrol at range and drops an MTU. and launches drone domi number 2 launches drones and sets assist to domi number 1. domi 1 targets and directs aggro until the site is complete (not afk at any time) move to next site after about 15 minutes and repeat. third accont starts salvaging .
so yes. domi number two is low attention. as is the salvager.
however, take away assist and domi number two would be forced to target and generate aggro for each kill as would domi number one. the level of micro management for those waves of frigates would not be worth the bother . espeically now that a chunk of the bounty will be lost at times.
if i was only fighting batttleships, i would fit diffeently and going back and forth is more reasonable givin the duration of the kill cycles.
so. if assist is going away eventually, the right answer is more engaging anomalies that warrant the action by the player.
and no, that doesnt mean more triglavian crap. just like the worn out tired missions need some updating, consider adding anomalies that are heavy ship combat. or even capital combat.
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I have to play the game now? what the heck CCP.
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Relax, just wait a bit, next downtime you will have it usual way.
The fact that those accounts are out there engaging in activities means PVP groups have potential targets.
In this thread alone many MANY people have pointed out that they use the money to fund their PVP habits. I am one of those multiboxers that uses the money to fund my dumb PVP roams. I lose more often than I win but it doesnât matter cause I had fun and a source of money for replacements. If the boxer is just buying plex then they are still having an effect. By paying for accounts with plex they are effectively paying CCP more per account than someone paying with traditional currency. They also help drive demand for PLEX which motivates people to buy PLEX with real money.
Botting is vastly different than somewhat AFKing (full AFK isnât possible w/o a bot). Bots are vastly more efficient at farming and evading potential hostile players.
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I âthinkâ (hope) he was being âsarcasticâ. 
No, it doesnât. because krabbers just dock up.
Mass afk drone ratting is almost exactly the same thing as botting. Bots may be quicker to start getting away, but they are also predictable and can be more easily trapped in a bubble. The distinct also doesnât matter. even if a real person afk ratting does get caught more often than a bot, it is still extremely rare and someone only have paying attention and dying on grid without moving isnât what makes PvP fun.
No one is advocating that PvP alone is what eve needs and whether afk farming is being used to buy stuff for PvP is irrelevant. Ratting income is unarguably completely out of balance and mass isk printing is bad for the eve economy.
annecdotes are not evidence. Nor is a decrease in login activity going into holidays, nor are ess banks that are empty at some times, very few of which ever would have had anything put in them before because they werent one of the âratting systems.â