Player Features and Ideas Discussion

There was a lot of talk about monetisation in the recent CSM summit notes so here is an idea for how to monetise Planetary Interaction.

PI is ok but it doesn't work very well, it's a huge amount of clicks to set anything up and then it's just kind of boring to keep resetting the heads all the time. Here is what you could make it into.

The game is on mobile (and also accessible in the EVE client). At the most basic level you rent a production facility on a planet for some time. So for example I could pick a solar system and go to a gas giant and say "rent oxygen plant for 48 hrs" and it shows me the cost. The cost is determined by the number of other people using that system. If I accept the cost then some oxygen is deposited at the customs office over the 48 hours. That's all I have to do, it's very simple. Each player can have 5 planets by default. So if you are a casual EVE player and just want some extra income then you can set things up like this. Like now you get more yield for shorter cycles.

If you want to make higher tier products you can do this, it just shows you that you are renting more production facilities. So for oxygen it says you need extractors and you need a basic processor. Say I want to make oxides it says I need to rent 2 extractors and 3 basic processors on the gas giant. However it takes the same number of clicks to rent all this machinery. If you want to produce products that require multiple planets of production you will need to have products in the customs office which can be used as inputs.

You can make buy and sell orders from the customs office so you can interface with the rest of the EVE community directly. Moreover new resource pockets spawn on planets over time so if you want to play the game a lot you can spend your time looking for these bonus pockets and exploiting them.

The next level is characters. If you want more than this simple production you can buy + train characters. If you get a drilling engineer you get faster production, if you get a chemical engineer you get faster processing of certain products. There are different types of engineers and scientists (electronic, biological etc) and there are explorers who help you find good resource pockets on planets. They each have a character card (a sexy anime figure with their stats). The more hardcore players can get into their characters and train them up to improve their yields.

Then finally there is the PVP element. So you can have characters which are spies. Spies let you see other players production networks and characters. There are thieves that let you steal production from other players. Each time a thief steals you might get discovered! If you get discovered you can hurt the other player by using an assassin to try and kill their characters. There is also the saboteur who can shut down their facilities.

If you really want to hurt someone you can use a mercenary captain to trigger a DUST match between you and the enemy. This is an outright attack on their production and if your mercenaries win the match their facilities are destroyed. DUST teams can bid on the match and you get to select the mercs you want from a list (best team for the best price). If you defeat someone in a DUST match then they are banned from that planet for a month, however if you lose you are banned! So it is a good way to corner the market. Be careful about making too many enemies though, their assassins will be just around the corner!

Where this makes money is you make it pay to win. So with Aurum you can buy new characters (and maybe clothes for your characters) and train them super fast. You can also use Aurum to see special bonuses that appear on planets and gain protection (if you pay you can make your characters immune to assassination for a while). The thing is it doesn't break the game at all because when you pay a lot all you do is make a lot of PI, which is fine.

You can have rules like you can't use spies, thieves, saboteurs, assassins and merc. captains on someone who doesn't yet have a spy. So that way power players won't just crush all the newbs.

I think this would be a cool way to play EVE, you can do it from your phone any time. Moreover it will get people checking in every day to reset their production (for their higher yields). It allows for people to pay a lot of money for special characters and bonuses which should make money for CCP.

What do you think? All feedback welcome, thanks for reading.

Get.

The.

****.

Out.

PI resources directly impact other prices in the economy. The impact of the pay to win scenario would reach much further than just PI.

Well it's possible. If a lot more PI products were produced the price might fall. That's the main effect.

The whole point of pay to win is CCP gets a whole new income stream to pay for development. Who here will say that someone paying to be the king of PI is going to be a problem to anyone?

I'm sure a lot of people saw "pay to win" in the title and immediately decided against the idea without reading it. However these people probably wouldn't read it anyway and so there opinion doesn't really matter.

Honestly I have no intention of paying more than my current subs for the dubious privilege of engaging and staying competitive in an activity I can only bring myself to partake of because it significantly reduces my T2 production costs.

On top of that Pay2Win is anathema to many players in any form so I think you'll find more players who like myself that say yes, someone paying to be the king of PI is a problem, especially when you consider the effect that may have on the market.

If my costs go up expect to pay more, I'm not a charity and neither is anyone else I know in production.

Not supported.

There is already a way to P2W PI: buy more accounts, install more PI characters.

Mobile app to do some things in EVE would be nice, but there's a controversial discussion around it. I think we've had another round of it a few weeks ago.

-1

You lost me the moment you stated this would be available anywhere outside the game.
If you want to interact with the game and the things you have in it then log in.

I'm open to the idea of a PI mobile client, but not completely sold on it.


The idea of "pay to win" needs to die a horrible, painful, slow, gruesome death, preferably involving dismemberment, acid, fire, gouging out of the eyeballs, and countless hours of "I'm not touching you...I'm not touching you.*"


*Yes, the whole "I'm not touching you" thing really does bother me THAT MUCH!

Sadly I only read the title.....


All I have to say is, play something else...

Get the frak away from this game

Mobile? So the App works on WP/W10M, iOS and Android, and maybe even FFOS, Ubuntu Mobile and Blackberry? Because, if it only works on one or 2, it excludes a lot of players from being able to access the app. That in itself is already a major reason for a no. Second reason for a no is that the development for several platforms would require a lot of dev resources, which would consume most of the meager income they get from this pay to win. (sidenote: I am still waiting on CCP to release numbers on the income from the NES to see whether the dev time investment is really worth the additional revenue. CCP constantly complains about "how projects that would actually make the game better are expensive in terms of dev resources", but they waste these resources on the NES)

Furthermore, you do want characters pop up out of no where, already able to undertake PI and train them further to become better at PI. Your comparison with people setting up an account and buying a character in the Bazaar is in no way comparable to that, because these Bazaar characters were trained up by players before and required subscription money to be paid for that training time, as well as 2 Plex as payment for the transfer. You just completely remove that and replace it with an even bigger advantage for people with deep RL wallets who can buy dozens of characters and potentially even use several mobile devices to at once. Good job. Or how do you train them? Get the chars for money out of no-where and then pay a subscription in addition to that app purchase to train them further?

The way you set this up moreover completely removes the variability of PI directly in the game itself. And you (apparently) even want to get rid of the transport aspect (ie. risk) by magically(?) transporting the PI goods from one planet to the next and from stations systems away to the next(?) and sell them from the Poco to other players in stations or the same poco without you having to transport a thing.

You also mention that PI is a huge click fest and thus cumbersome. Do you really believe that the rudimentary and inadequate controls on a mobile device are in any way better than a mouse and keyboard at this? With all the clunky menus, restricted UI and menu paths and organization, the limited space on a phone to display information and so on? I call this delusional.

All in all: Mobile and Pay2Win are crap.

What CCP needs to do -- instead of this garbage P2W that you want and other publishers and developers seemingly flirt with a lot -- is provide reasons to players to want to get an EVE account, are panting to get an EVE account. All these cheap tricks like NES, P2W apps or arenas are not what this feeling creates. Intriguing mechanics, deeper and meaningful events in the game in your space (I have posted a couple of examples in the past) and in general things for people to do are the only way to achieve that.