EVE General Discussion

can i haz officer spawn in high sec plox plox

As has been pointed out to you, officer spawns are so rare you are lucky to see more than one a year.

So rarely that they have no impact at all on your isk/hr and thus, cannot be counted as a reliable income.

I've said that no less than 15 times in this thread and no one seems to catch it.

Even running a pair of 800ish DPS Domi's (both interface V spec IV Gal BS V) I get around 25mil ticks.

I need my thanny in sentry trim, my mach or a vindi to push 30mil, the thanny in a combat fitting with fighters tops about 23-24 IF I have happen to have the fighters that are the right type for the region...and that is a big damn if because who the hell carries fighters in a suicide thanny.

Risk vs Reward is a single balancing metric. If you want to give higher rewards to greater risks, where's the ISK going to magically appear from to reward people who solo pilot a freighter load of frozen food through Amamake? Surely that's a high-risk endeavour?




Old style exploration (pre-Odyssey) rewarded intelligence quite handily. The barrier to entry was also convenient for preventing exploration being super-saturated with point-and-click monkeys.



You almost get it. Intelligence is a balance factor: anyone who is intelligent can figure out how to get more ISK from a given activity, or even find ways to get ISK from an activity they're not participating in. There are many examples in game of where the people doing the "manual labour" aren't the ones reaping the rewards of their efforts: the miners aren't the ones to profit from mining. The haulers, manufacturers and market manipulators are the ones that profit.



Don't confuse effort with attention. The high sec miner has to spend more effort keeping lasers going, since asteroids in hi sec are smaller than asteroids in low sec. Two cycles of a strip miner and a hi sec asteroid is gone. The null sec miner has to keep an eye on intel channels and local. One has to expend more effort in clicks-per-hour to keep their activity going, the other has to pay more attention in eyes-on-screen-duty-cycle. Neither deserves more income. The market determines what is a fair income for both miners, and it turns out that there are enough null sec miners successfully returning ores to market that null sec mining pays the same ISK/hr as high sec mining.

So there's another balancing metric we've exposed: attention vs reward, where attention is simply the proportion of time that the player must have eyes on screen to successfully complete an activity.

Effort: clicks per hour
Attention: duty cycle of eyes on screen
Risk: how inherently dangerous is the activity (this is a metric I do not agree with, since freighter through low sec is inherently more dangerous than mining in null sec)
Intelligence: how well the player knows the mechanics and the second & third order affected systems.
Utility: how useful a particular activity is to the player, their team, the rest of the population in general

Any activity which produces "stuff" is going to valued by the effort required to produce the stuff. No matter how risky mining is, you won't get rewarded more for producing more stuff if there is no demand for that stuff. Thus mining Veldspar in null sec is not as rewarding as mining Bistot.

Any activity which injects ISK is going to devalue the rest of the economy through deflation. Thus any purely ISK-based income stream has negative utility: sure, you're making MORE ISK/HR, but by doing so you're devaluing ISK itself, so what we will see through the rest of the economy is inflation of prices for everything.

I despise the "risk vs reward" metric because you're only interested in measuring risk in the way that you want: "I claim this space, I live in it, therefore I should be rewarded for that." That's not measuring risk, that's measuring effort and occupation. Risk is the ISK measure of the danger of an activity: how much you stand to lose, multiplied by the probability that you will lose it. Thus, technically speaking, hauling a freighter load of PLEX through low sec should be an extremely rewarding activity because it is stupidly risky. In the meantime ratting with no hostiles in local and nothing in intel channels should be unrewarding because you have no risk at all.

Find a different metric. Quit the "risk vs reward" nonsense.

Mynnna and Aryth were at one point trying to raise the idea of a "minimum wage" which is what a dumb capsuleer mechanically repeating the lowest paying activity in EVE (the proverbial "burger flipper") should expect to earn, to be used as a baseline for determining what other activities should be "paid". Thus if you put forward mining as EVE's equivalent of "burger flipping," and compare that to running missions or ratting, what should the effective income be based on the things that ratters do that are different to miners?

Planned economies don't work though. Sure, it's nice to have a measuring stick so game designers can measure their expected income for a particular activity against the most boring job in the game, but as the FW "forex" scandal showed the game designers aren't perfect, and there are many more players out there looking for an "angle" to play against than there are developers.

Simply improving the rewards for shooting red crosses is not going to improve the situation of the null sec resident. Note that the majority of the reward for the hi sec mission blitzed doesn't come from shooting red crosses: it comes from picking the right corporation to shoot red crosses for. It's intelligence vs reward at work again.
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This is actually a pretty good point.

Actually, people who perform menial tasks do get paid more in places where there is a labour shortage and cost of living is high.

See: Fort McMurray

Yea, but the Bumblefuck BugerFlippper still has a right to keep and bear arms I know, im from there.

You'll find that labourers in EVE also get paid more for providing materials and services in places where there is a labour shortage and the cost of living is high. That is why folks jump freighter stuff down from Jita rather than buying it locally. Local labour is too expensive, so they outsource to the locations with the lowest wages.

And while we're playing that game, who gets paid more: the guy building luxury cars and busting his gut to get everything fitting just right and polished to mirror-shine, or the girl from Wall Street buying the car who sits on her arse watching numbers on a screen all day?

Economics 101 one-upsmanship aside, I though The Bronx, Queens and Wall Street were geographic subdivisions of New York city, New York?

Carriers don't bring in that much isk, dreads and titans were nerfed years ago from doing anoms and supers haven't been a thing in anoms for almost as long.