EVE General Discussion

Way of the world brother, and it's understandable, people don't like to think that the thing they like could be a source of things they don't like.

But yea it is ironic as hell, the people who claim the game is dying and needs changing are at the same time advocating for things that would speed up the games demise.

But isn't a good part of the raw ISK from incursion sunk back when dealing with the LP store?

Must be an Indian Summer this year.

Right because the people running multiboxed incursion fleets are really adding content for the rest of us.
As are the ones that purely logged in to update a skill queue.
Or alts that are just alts for the sake of using cheap plex...maybe spais, maybe cloaky campers, maybe cloaky scouts, etc....
Most of them you'll never see except as names in local.


Or as I already said, PCUs are a flawed statistic in a game of alts.

e: I'm not refuting that people might have left the game - I personally know of at least one person that left HQ incursions and took 40 accounts with him along with multiple others running VGs that no longer play on any of their 12 accounts - what I am saying is that you can't ascertain the extent of the change from this particular metric.

Rest of your post was very poignant and informative, but I wanted to focus on this anecdote in particular.

(I dont want to make this a nerf HS thread, as the range of problems throughout EVE in all sectors contribute)

HS safety is a matter for dispute, and complicated, but ultimately the real problen imo is the lucrativeness of some HS activities, under HS security. Its the profits that are off, not primarily the security.

Someone operating permanently in HS has no problem making consistent profits, at very little risk.
The profits dont NEED to be this good, because risk is so low, and this inversly is causing players usually located elsewhere to relocate back to HS rather than deal with local issues.

As an example, I shamefully lost a ship when I wandered into a HS 4/10 someone had triggered all the spawns on.
I should have realized when the first gate was open that something wasnt right.
Nonetheless, I then warped into a fully triggered spawn with 2 stasis towers and blew up almost instantly.
NPCs did this. Not players (which prompted discussion in chat btw, about idea of deliberately triggering HS 4/10s and then harvesting the wrecks of hapless combat explorers as they die on entry, which was very cool).
Am I concerned? No (though ashamed) Cos I can make it back, in relative safety, in HS.
Its too easy to profit, even for me, with my own (notable) stupidity as my only primary obstacle.
Due to HS, I systemically have far less risk from player intervention.

Not only does this raise the threshold for me to move out of HS (which I dearly want to, but am scared...) but it also commensurately lowers the threshold for players to return back to HS.

Though it is also true that someone deep in alliance secured space quite possibly enjoys even greater profits at less immediate risk, but that is an achieving result of players, not of the ruleset. Community provides that security, not CCP.

The current HS problem, is too high profit in some activities, for this level of risk and commitment.
HS is bleeding action out of the rest of EVE, in both directions.
HS doesnt need this degree of profit, in and of itself, to sustain HS activity.
Life is cheap, safe and predictable. Its manageable even with a significant income nerf.
Furthermore transit of materials to market is also safe in HS, and doing business in HS competitive markets is safe (and lucrative, due to no extant modifiers, which is another topic along the lines of higher taxes for doing business in HS than other sectors).

Returning to the impetus of the topic, as per Jenn aSides anecdote, HS with its profits (and security as secondary), is emptying conflict regions of EVE, in favor of HS, especially when things get hard OR things get boring.. Its currently a buffer, a profitable fallback, above and beyond what it should be. The irony here being that if HS profits were lower, we'd probably have an even lower activity rate atm, as players tired with NS complications would either leave the game, or some few move out to LS or WH (which bothhave their own integral issues to boot).

While I agree with the statement that incursions generate too much ISK, you are changing your goalpost here from ISK faucet to generates too much wealth.

If you want to go down that road you also have to include wealth generated from, faction, deadspace, officer mods and other loot into the equation and I doubt that this would work in favor of your argument.

On your initial statement that the incursions as ISK faucet being in need for a change: There is a rather easily solution.

Lower the ISK payout and increase the LP payout + add new items to the concord LP store to prevent that the prices of items from all the LP stores are completly crashing (keep in mind here that concord LPs can be exchanged for other LPs as well).

There are lot´s of items in the game which do not have a faction version yet and adding concord versions of those could very well prevent that the prices for faction items completly crash.

examples:

- Warp Disrubtion Field Generators
- Micro Jump Drives
- Target Lock Breaker (those suck in general, but maybe a pimped version of them could actually make using the module worthwhile)
- Resistance Shift Hardeners
- AARs / ASBs (For ASBs I would rather like to see the t1 versions be nerfed a bit and having faction versions with the stats of the current ASBs, or just give the faction versions space for 1-2 extra charges)
- Damage Controls
- ECM Bursts
- ECCM Modules

And I guess there are quite a few more items which do not have any faction counterparts yet.

What form of work in EVE, specifically?

Are you talking about earning enough isk to PLEX?

176,862 characters accepted missions over a month's time.

Yay mission pulling alts right, every L5 runner loves them.

For me personally, the yearly cost for multiple subscriptions is a non-factor.

The "work" aspect to me varied among the various tasks I was doing at the time. One example that spurred me away was ~playing the market~ aspect. I would create my own personal formulas for buying and selling stuff. So I used to have some off the wall prices going. Some market areas appear to have bots running with them because there were times whenever I would use the broker, almost an exact x amount of time later, there would be a higher or lower price of 0.01. And this was constant if I varied whenever I used the market (real life time differences). After a while, forget it - too much like work to me to go against a computer...

Will try to find it, from memory, the last time everyone pointed fingers at HS incursions, this report came out from CCP and it pretty much killed the debate. Although, if i remember correctly, it resulted in CCP making some changes to spawn rates as well as the reduction in the number of HS incursions. Even at it peak HS incursions represented only a minute amount isk that was generated. That might have changed fractionally, in my opinion it is all in proportion.