Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hello

I made a small announcement last night on the 1.1 live stream but I'm sure many of you missed that so I wanted to make a post to let as many of you know as possible.

We've been thinking for awhile about the issue of cost to power ratio for the Sisters of EVE ships, and especially the Nestor. A lot of your feedback has been on this issue, with a large focus on how difficult it is to justify paying the price of the Nestor, and we tend to agree. There are a few reasons we ended up in this position to begin with. The first is that we wanted to set the high sec LP offers for these ships above normal pirate faction LP prices. This still stands and the reason is very simple; you should get a better deal for pirate faction ships when you take the risk of leaving high sec. The second piece, which ties with the first, is that Sisters of EVE LP is very valuable because of demand for Sisters Probe Launchers and implant sets. That means the ISK conversion on ships like the Nestor would never be worthwhile as long as demand for probe launchers was higher, which will likely always be the case. Last, we could have tried to make the Nestor powerful enough to justify the huge price-tag. We really didn't want to go with this option and create a ship basically in a class of its own which would cause a lot of balance headaches.

So, here's what we're going to do: starting in the next major Rubicon patch (which I don't have a date for, but is not very far off), Rogue Drones will start occasionally dropping nexus chips which you will be able to trade in at any Sisters of EVE agent for a one-run BPC of either a Nestor, Stratios or Astero. The chips will be called Rogue Drone 46-X Nexus Chip, Rogue Drone 43-X Nexus Chip and Rogue Drone 42-X Nexus Chip respectively, and they will drop at a very similar rate to other pirate faction BPC drops in null sec.

This should provide a nice pressure valve for the prices on Sisters of EVE ships and also give a little boost to the drone regions, two things we are happy about.

Have fun out there and take care of all those new people this weekend

So are high and low sec drone sites still worthless then? Or will these nexus chips drop from those also.

Sounds cool

So this is gonna drop from rats?

I like that drone space is getting some attention but you may be fixing something that doesn't need fixing right now... The rats aren't that broken, you can make a decent living of rat bounties, what needs more attention is exploration in drone space.
How about putting them in hacking sites or something similar instead? the loot in those are pretty much useless compared to other regions at the moment. You're better of taking a wh to another region (or just run whs) if you want to have a chance of making more than a couple of millions per week from them.

Just saying

Will there finally be a purpose for running drone DEDs in lowsec?

Another option that I'd like to see is: Have each cosmic anomaly/site have a very small chance of spawning a SoE ship which you can assist in a simple objective (hack a specific canister, protect it from pirates etc), or fight (if that's your thing), in exchange for loot.

It would show the SoE pursuing their goals in game and provide an alternate game-play mechanic to obtain SoE loot, seems like a Win-win to me.

That would be so cool lol.

This is pretty much perfect. Go you

I love the drone regions btw... I was in FREGE!

Oh, and Rise, another thing.

Way to go on letting market forces dictate economic costs.
Nice to see you let the game be a "sandbox", as you so like to say, except when you want to help out a null sec area, and nerf the **** out of another high sec income stream.