CSM Campaigns

I know! The Republic of Iraq! Everyone voted Baath.

As someone who endorses his re-election, I give you thanks for destroying your own credibility so that your posts will in fact support Mynnna's campaign

Post in haste, repent at leisure.

Since CCP doesn't allow polls this will have to do.

If faced with having to do the following to make ISK what would you choose and why?

[ ] Ratting in Nullsec
[ ] Ratting in Hisec
[ ] Planetary Interaction
[ ] Jump Freighter Running
[ ] Scamming
[ ] Checkbox

OH GOD RAN OUT OF WORDS...


I have no idea. I haven't gotten a whole lot further on that aspect of the problem. The personal income side of it is comparatively easy - it already exists (just not necessarily to the scale it needs to) in the form of the military and industry indices in a system, and the obvious approach is to simply build atop those mechanics to build higher & taller at the expense of sprawl. And to a degree that's a partial solution to the problem of organizational income, if you accept "renting" as an acceptable resource - if any given system can support a heck of a lot more people so long as it's active, then you can obviously charge a lot more for access to those systems, put more people into them, or both.

It's more problematic when it comes to considering moons though. As long as we're doing the handwavey thing we can pretend industry is now a viable activity in null, so perhaps that drives mining (which can be taxed) and more lively markets (ditto) in addition to mining and POCO fees, but something more is probably needed. Given the somewhat delicate balance moons are designed for going and saying "okay now there's this thing that jacks the output by 1000% but (handwavey limiter so they can't be everything goes here)". Even if the limiting mechanics work, suddenly you've got a bunch of different groups sucking way more goo out of the same number of moons and the balance goes out the window. If that can't be worked around then moons wind up turning into bonuses rather than a serious income source. So what replaces them? Something new, no idea what just now...haven't really gotten that far in the brainstorming.

No one except maybe the dust bunnies themselves is a fan of completely losing control of infrastructure and having to rely on players in another game. When and if such a link is other established it's probably far better that it function like the link in FW, where having them is beneficial, even dramatically beneficial (as I recall the ground fight can swing a system by up to 25%), but not required. In the context of the existing system, this could look something like the actions of dust mercs being able to increase or decrease the HP of sov structures (bad idea but it's just an example), or sabotage being able to throw off the timer for structures which would have to be defended against, or something along those lines.


"Make moons shift, more fights will happen" is one of those things I've seen thrown around before, and I really don't think it would accomplish what people think. Taking moons can be expensive - a single modestly sized battleship welp can cost the entire monthly value of even an R64 - but they're worth fighting to take or defend because of the reasonable assurance that a few months from now it'll still be there. On the other hand if you know that it'll vanish out from under you six months from now, why spend the money to take it when you may not hold it long enough to recoup your losses? I rather suspect "stay where you are and just take what comes, if you get a bad set of moons this time maybe it'll be better next time" would become the normal practice. And that's really only exacerbated by the increasing prevalence of renting as an alliance income source.

Not that that says very much, right?

Hi Mynnna, you know your stuff and seemed very logical / not trying to be too pushy at CSM8, I didn't expect that from you to be completely honest.

I am again slightly disappointed with the choice of candidates this year (not to say I could do it any better of course), and only have maybe one/two persons I would actually vote for at this time. So in an attempt to still make something of the new CSM and get a little excited about it, I guess I'll have to make a little more effort to see where you stand and if you can hopefully turn this around.

What do you think about lowsec in its current state?

How do you personally feel about one man corporations / actual solo players?

Finally who do you think was the most valuable candidate (apart from yourself) in CSM8? And who do you feel was the least valuable candidate (again apart from yourself)?

Can you pick one new(someone who hasn't run in CSM8) candidate for CSM9 that you believe should be seriously considered by me?

Mynna -

*IF* moon minerals / static sources of isk are an issue, due to distribution / ease of taking advantage of them across large areas, is there a way to change that dynamic? For example, Ice Anomalies or PI resource depletion.

Having small(er) quantities of Ice in anomalies that spawn in specific areas, means that there is a driver for types of folks to be at a place at a time. Doing that means you reap the rewards of being able to gather that resource. You're not there, you miss out.

PI resource depletion means you can't just put something down and forget about it, collecting a specific predictable income over time. You have to continually adjust your setup over time in order to maintain that income.

What if moon minerals worked in a similar way?

Lore wise, it could be as simple as the past years of moon mining has extracted all the available X in a moon, and static emplacements simply can't efficiently extract the materials anymore. Consequently, the yield from static moon miners decreases over time to an arbitrarily low number (say, 25% or so of current as a SWAG).

At the same time, demand for minerals as part of T2 production has spurred innovation in moon probe technology, allowing these new probes to find smaller pockets of the same materials. Furthermore, advances in mining technology have allowed mining lasers designed to extract moon minerals to be fitted to specialized mining barges. These are accurate enough to extract these smaller concentrated pockets of minerals that aren't feasible to be gathered by the larger less focused static POS-based arrays.

This could open some interesting mechanics.

First, moons could be "typed" in the same kind of way that planets are, with different types of minerals potentially available. Scanning a moon could be done along the same lines as PI resource scans, or like cosmic signatures - resolving the really good mineral pockets (in order to be able to lock on to them and extract them) would require significantly higher skills than being able to identify the less valuable ones.

Each "pocket" would have a certain amount of moon minerals in it, relatively small - not sure how much would be enough to make it viable without being destabilizing. Once it's mined, though, it's gone - and won't necessarily respawn in that moon anytime soon.

This would, theoretically, drive a few different things:

1. If you own a high-end moon now, you get less income from it via afk exploitation. This reduces the incentive to spread far and wide, since the reward per mining tower is now so much lower that the logistics don't justify it.
2. It reduces the amount of materials available to drive industry through afk gameplay. This should conversely increase the incentive to actively gather materials.
3. It reduces market bottlenecks due to one / few coalitions controlling supply.
4. IT GIVES A REASON FOR MINERS TO BE IN LOWSEC AND NULLSEC. If anyone can get lucky and find a pocket of Dysprosium, with significantly higher chance in lowsec and highsec, then it makes sense to go there. If the amount per find and amount character hour for extraction is good enough, they'll come.
5. IT DRIVES CONFLICT. You obviously get a higher isk/character with this endeavor with fewer characters, so there should be more groups of smaller numbers of pilots in space. This means there's TARGETS, ones that can viably be engaged by small gangs. This also means that it's viable - even optimal - to actively defend the miners against such threats. It's the same kind of principle as put a scout on a WH while you're running the sites inside.
6. Since this requires folks to be active in space to exploit - scanning and gathering - it may be less efficient to do it over a large sprawl. This could be an incentive for smaller alliances to take a shot, or for larger alliances to shrink their holdings.
7. It changes which systems are valuable, or the value of those systems. If "find" type is determined by moon type and not truesec, then systems with larger numbers of moons offer more chances of finding something good (depending on moon type distribution). This means that space that used to be relatively worthless could become much more valuable. That should be a conflict driver.
8. All of this depends on players deciding to take the risk to get out in space and exploit the potential. More folks in space moving around means more opportunity for conflict, all else being equal.

After reading this last page or so, you have my vote. I truly doubt you need it, but you have it regardless.