CSM Campaigns

Warning: This post is going to get slightly wonkish, as it prompted me to dig back into numbers and statistics.

Converting moongoo into personal income has three basic problems.

• What moongoo has what value is based on a somewhat delicate balance; that balance would need to be carefully minded or rethought entirely.
• Measured on a per hour basis moons aren't all that valuable.
• There isn't necessarily anything wrong with top down income in and of itself; it's how what forms exist today influence (and are influenced by) sov mechanics and other factors that's the problem.

I think the third point is pretty self explanatory. In some ideal world top down sources like moons would be perks - great to have, worth fighting to take, but not crippling if you lack them.

The first two bear a bit of elaboration though - they're probably what make the idea unfeasible. The value of moongoo ultimately dictates the cost of Tech II, and that value is somewhere between 8 and 10 trillion isk per month, current market prices. Sounds like a lot though it's not so much; 3.8 trillion isk worth of Tritanium passed through Jita alone in the past 30 days, 2.3 trillion isk of Pyerite, and so forth. Haven't had reliable numbers on mining since Diagoras vanished, but even using those old numbers the total value mined a month in minerals alone was over 12 trillion isk (Isotopes were another 2.5T even at pre-odyssey prices), and that was a year and a half ago. Anyway, despite the large number, the per-hour value of that is really low, as mentioned - a Dysprosium moon right now tops out around 6m isk per hour, 5.5m after fuel. That's obviously too low to just convert straight across into a regular income - it doesn't take much training for a newbie mining veldspar in a venture to turn his nose up at that, to say nothing of a veteran miner.

So what do you do? You can't go and handwave something to make the goo all more valuable, because doing so by enough to make goo mining competitive even just with other kinds of mining means you increase the cost of Tech II by several hundred percent. So that's out. Clearly the solution is to just make it a sporadic, incursion-like activity right? That would make it valuable enough, surely, and give you a means to preserve the bottleneck that gives R64s their value in the first place to boot.

Except say that the total market value of the game's entire moongoo output is ten trillion isk per month. Now say that one thousand people per month take part in this activity - you average 10 billion isk earned per month, or 14m isk per hour. Not very much. Already we established that that's too low to be worthwhile, and this is supposed to be an "incursion-like" activity. So let's say they make 100m per hour instead. Each of those one thousand people spends just 7 hours a month doing this. And as a final blow to the idea, with statistics like almost 3500 people training Mining Barge at a given time, or over a quarter of active accounts owning at least one Mining Barge, or several thousand characters flying mining barges (and over twenty thousand flying exhumers), odds are very good that far more than a thousand characters would be interested in this goo mining, meaning value or available time mining per month or characters that can participate (likely all three) drop significantly.




I think I just destroyed the concept of ring mining.

Thanks!


Was allowing smaller corps to have revenue streams a goal? I don't recall seeing it mentioned in the devblog on the subject and CCP Soniclover was rather dismissive of fears that they'd be monopolized by *cough* certain parties at the summit. Doesn't speak to allowing smaller corps to have revenue streams to be the primary goal to me.

That said the amount spent on taxes was a pretty big number a year and a half ago (that's number from one random day!) and there's little reason to suspect that's changed (or if it has, upward) so there's certainly income for the taking, and there are a bit over ten thousand of them out there in highsec. CCP has been rather mum on statistics about them lately though.

As to content? We own a mere two dozen or so POCOs in highsec, something like a quarter of a percent of them, and two lengthy wars over them have provided content for hundreds of pilots. If even a fraction of the other POCOs in the game have seen action like ours, I'd say they're provoking plenty of content.

What I'd change, if anything, is something I'd have to give more thought, and that'll have to happen another time, as it's late and I need to get off to sleep.

Shouldn't necessarily take my post to mean I disagree, I'm all in favor of more ways to leverage bottom up income, and/or new and different forms of it, I just also don't think top down is inherently bad and in fact ideally, both would be worthwhile.

Something that's actually been rolling around in my head in the "wild ideas" category is hybridizing the two. For example, delete the goo from half the moons in the game (proportional to the overall number of each) and then implement some mechanism by which their output can be increased up to a maximum of double (better still, a small amount above double) the normal rate based on activity and use or the system. Idea would be an empire that was more spread out would use less of their space to its fullest (or at all) which would limit the value of moons in those systems, whereas an organization that was more concentrated for its size would reap a larger harvest... but if you you attack their activity, you also indirectly attack the moon income. Idea would be tying back into what wrote last week - make holding a relatively smaller patch of space an option worth considering.

That particular idea is quick, dirty, and full of mechanics holes you could drive a bus through but the concept is there.

Hello Mynnna,

There's been a lot of discussion on this thread about fixing nullsec, many ideas bounced back and forth. however theese discussions to me seem pointless as all we ever hear from CCP regarding nullsec and sov is a wall of silence. As you have been on CSM already I wonder how much does CCP really listen to you about such things.

I imagine you guys have been to CCP many times and said to them "Look , nullsec and sov are broken, are you ever going to do anything about it?"

I guess what I'm reying to ask is do you think CCP will ever going to get around to fixing bigger issues like sov, or is all we have to look forward to are more deployable gimmicks? I think this is important as most CSM campaigns seem to be run on a ticket of pushing for a nullsec revamp.

Anyway, as someone who doesn't like goons I'll still be voting for you anyway. Good luck.

Rather than struggle with trying to answer this one without breaking NDA, I'm going to just quote CCP Fozzie.



There's the ever-present question of "what is small" in this context, but we'll set that one aside for now.

Anyway, more small gang in null. Two aspects there, one is the roaming looking for fights or ganks, one is actually having an effect on sov. "Into 0.0 warfare" makes it sound like you're asking the latter.

No reason they can't be connected though. I've already written at some length about the whole wide vs tall thing, and something I've kept coming back to since is how you'd prevent wide and tall. Most common suggestions like "exponentially scale sov costs" or similar are pretty trivially circumvented. I keep winding up at tying usage in. I'd be hesitant to go the full distance and connect the outright sov capture itself to that, but certainly tying the economic value of a system and possibly some defensive benefits, sure. Think IHub mechanics, where increased activity unlocks more and better anomalies, but taken to the Nth degree, and with benefits standing on their own, vulnerable to attack and perhaps pillaging, rather than ensconced in an otherwise invulnerable hub. Want to preserve your space's value and defenses? People come knocking, better fleet up and kill 'em.

This is, admittedly, only about halfway there - a group choosing to go wide instead of tall would have dramatically less valuable space on a per system basis, so less of a reason to be out in said space, fewer of those crunchy upgrades to kill or steal from, thus less small gang stuff. Kinda problematic, not quite sure how I'd address it.

regardless, tl;dr: Get people to want to live in their space and undock to do stuff and roaming targets create themselves, all the better if the "doing of stuff" bestows improvements and perks people will want to fight for and defend.

On the other side of the coin - capture mechanics - I'm admittedly not really sure. I would be violently opposed to FW-like mechanics though. Capture buttons are flat and boring and just like FW encourage running away from a fight as much as sticking around for one if you're trying to take the space.

More of them, with group level deployables, would be a good start. Beyond that? While some of them are controversial or disliked as an overall concept they do a lot and little if anything wrong.

Stations: Should they be destructible or not, and if they are able to go boom... should the attackers have the choice of making it go boom or not. (keep it and control.. or just explode the thing?)

Mynnna, a serious question and a silly one:

First, about: your post on the mittani. You basically made the valid point that large groups seize large amounts of space because that is the optimal thing to do. You propose that there should be an alternative - for a large group to hold, instead of large swaths of "so so" space, rather control a small area of "high quality" space.

Won't that lead to a new optimal being large (or larger) groups holding large amounts of high quality space? If this is somehow not possible, won't that strongly reduce conflict incentive?

Secondly, I've recently been informed that I'm a CFC pet. No CFC officials has bothered communicated with us however and our main source of information about this surprising development is a blogger of dubious persuasion. We are confused. Are we supposed to vote for you first, or is voting for Mang still ok?

Hello everyone,

You can find Mynnna's interview which he had with me at the following link:

Mp3 Download Link:
http://www.legacyofacapsuleer.com/mp3/CSM9_interview_12_mynnna.mp3

Watch It On YouTube At:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xq78Yl4CfZo

Hope you guys enjoy the interview and I hope you get to know Mynnna a bit better.

Greetz & thanks,

Tyrant Scorn

I'll probably vote for Mynnna again. He's a little rough around the edges in forum smug, but he has good ideas and invaluable insights and experience.

But now we have renting on a massive scale as a method of top down income, which at least in my opinion is equally if not more detrimental to the game as whole than money printing moons ever were. In the 6 months the only real conflict driver was acquiring more space to rent out, to the point of being ridiculous in PL's case.

In your envisaged view of how you think null should be revamped, how do you see renting and top down income in the future? How do CCP increase conflict drivers? Would you also support moves to increase top down income as part of this? After all, the farms and fields concept in relation to upgrading systems for ratting in sov nullsec is really rather daft when you put it in context. Have CCP dug themselves so far into a hole that they can't get out of it in terms of game design?