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Constructive posting at it's finest. Would it strain you overmuch to elaborate on what I said in the last two pages or so that is incorrect? Or would that be too hard?

it's far weirder and more convoluted than that.

basically every system in the game will now have a personal ratting bank account attached to it.

anchoring an ESS allows income to accrue in that account and be accessed. if it gets taken down or destroyed the income will still stay in the ethereal system bank account.

it's kind of like the lighthouse problem in that as long as the lighthouse is there (ESS) there is "mutual gain" -- but then it is forcibly contorted so anybody can smash the lighthouse and take money, randomly.

so strange

normal human beings would never build a device that functions in this way. ever. it just doesn't make any kind of sense.

So a squad of pilots doing ratting might deploy an ESS, but they'll want some of their number to hang around and protect it from other squads (or solo pirates).

If we're a small 2-3 pilot squad, we might not bother with deploying one, but might get twitchy if someone else does.

I'm starting to see how this might promote more conflict.

It looks like it's intended that way, but no it's a 30million isk speed bump. If you drop it in a hostile ratting system, it's only useful as long as it lives. If you camp it to defend it, ratters stay docked up anyways, you may as well AFK camp without the ESS. If you leave it, ratters in their high DPS ships will make short work of the 150k EHP and go back to ratting.

As for the ratters themselves, the high risk low reward keeps being brought up, but those are even ignoring the greater point which is that using an ESS draws hostiles to your space. You're not just losing that isk each time the ESS gets robbed, you're losing the ratting time as more hostiles show up to rob your ESS.

Protecting the ESS isn't just difficult, it's both impossible and counterproductive. Attackers will know what you have guarding and will be able to bring a proper counter(or simply more guys). And once again, like paying hostiles to come interrupt your ratting, offering fights to anyone who comes into your system only brings more hostiles, making your space less secure not more.

The ESS in its current form serves no purpose for anyone and exists as apparently nothing more than an excuse to justify a nerf to nullsec bounties.

Where exactly did you point out any source that said I was wrong? CCP said their is too much isk coming out of nullsec, which is entirely possible. Where exaclty is your up to date source that contradicts this, oh goonsire?

So, in light of "reduce nullsec inflation" being a design goal, I submit a humble proposal. Really, I echo the proposal several people have already made, but in a much more thorough manner.

• Eliminate the 5% penalty. If we're able to make it attractive enough, you won't need this stick to beat players into eating their carrots, so to speak.
• Rework the payout of this unit such that it reduces bounties to 80% of their value, but replaces them with LP at a reasonable exchange rate. This exchange rate would ideally be calibrated to the value of easy to buy and move items in the LP store, such as +3 or +4 implants. Given the extra supply we'd see here, something like 800 isk per LP would seem sensible. Thus, killing a million isk bounty rat would now reward 800,000 isk as well as 250 LP.
• As inflation is no longer a concern, the bonus payout can now increase to an acceptable level as to balance the risk inherent to putting 20% of your income on the line, potentially putting your ratting ship on the line (if reshipping to defend the ESS isn't an option, as it will so often be), etc.
• As is the case now, a thief can come along and access the ESS after some appropriate length of time. Should they do so, they receive LP tokens.

By using LP and calibrating to something like 800 isk per LP, you maintain the income level for players who just want a fast cashout. However, the unit becomes more attractive to people who are willing to put in the extra bit of effort to find higher yield cashouts, which is generally a plus. This also has the added perk of making the factional choice for ones ESS more meaningful, and opens up the future possibility of ESS modules from other factions as well - naturally, the Sisters of Eve might want to get in on the action, or perhaps a special version of the ESS issued by one pirate faction rewards even more handsomely than the Empire versions, but only for kills against their rivals.

In the worst case, no one uses this - as many individuals and even alliances have already sworn to do with the current version - and nothing changes inflation-wise. However, in the best case, they see widespread adoption, dramatically cutting into the faucet that bounties represent. A followup bonus here is that LP often as not is redeemed with an additional isk payment, so we get the added bonus of an additional sink as well.

Now the largest obstacle here would seem to be that LP is corp based rather than faction based - it's not "Caldari State" LP, it's "State Protectorate" or "Caldari Navy" or what have you. Technically speaking that should not be difficult to overcome, as mechanics to convert one form of LP (CONCORD) into another (almost anything else) already exist, though of course I know nothing about EVE's code. Conceptually speaking though, there are many solutions, perhaps the simplest of which is simply speaking to an agent of the appropriate faction, and trading either your faction LP or your tokens for an equal amount of that corp's LP. That also offers yet another chance for savvy players to increase their income further still, as even within a faction, not all corps are created equal. If access to certain LP stores in this manner is undesirable (FW stores and their special ship offers come to mind) they can simply be added to a restricted list.


e1: Going to call back a much earlier post in this thread: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=4108628#post4108628

Elements of this could be incorporated, most notably the somewhat higher EHP and the short, fixed duration reinforcement timer as a means of governing access, thus committing someone seeking to steal from the structure to both having a decent amount of DPS and giving defenders a reasonable amount of time to reship and respond.

Yea...seriously how much more tedious do they want to make earning the money so we can afford to keep doing pvp...I feel like I spend enough time grinding anomalies as it is.

Despite my general acceptance of the way things are currently stated, this is a good compromise and would eliminate many issues with the design that people seem to have. I would ask that any LP being generated be redeemable in NPC low/nullsec, however, as to not accidentally preclude those with negative security status.

To roughly quote somebody else in the thread...

"Any deployable that takes more than seventeen bullet points and seven paragraphs to justify is probably a bad idea."

I don't think your changes improve anything. If anything it might make it worse just because it's making it even more complicated.

Should ratting REALLY involve interacting with the Holy Space ATM?

Is that the kind of direction that is good for the game?

Most of the deployables I really like are ones that are easy to understand, easy to use, and with a clear, defined purpose. Something new that is enabled.

This thing is like "We're taking something away, and then making you anchor a stupid black box to give it back to you."

That's not new. It's not even a feature. It's just spacetrash.

Our source would be the CSM summer summit minutes, where Dr. EyjoG specifically stated that isk faucets are not a problem in their current state.

You know, the guy actual economist they hired to know this kind of **** in the first place. I'm pretty sure he understands the economy better than codemonkey dev who'd rather be working for Sega.