Player Features and Ideas Discussion

This game is in desperate need of isk sinks. more and more people have nothing to spend their isk on, so they are sitting on it, which means that they are willing to pay more for items such as PLEX, and higher prices of PLEX means less and less people can afford to play this game.

TL;DR: Large increase in jumpclone prices and implant salvaging.

So here are my Ideas:

Jump clone Prices: Clones are the epitome of technology in EVE. it made capsuleering possible, which means that this tech should be stupid expensive. Each jump clone should cost 50-100m isk, seeing that everyone uses them. i was talking with some people and they were saying that the first clone should cost 50 mil, second 100mil, and scales up to where the last one is 250mil. i dont think its a good idea, but its still an idea.

Implant salvaging: Bodies should have more significance. you should have the ability to salvage implants. The skill would give you a 2% chance at every level to successfully salvage an implant component, and it requires x amount of components to rebuild implants (for implants of great worth, high grades, +5s, 6% utility implants,etc there would require more components) A specific NPC corporation could corner this market and charge 25million for low grade, low percentage or lower quality items, and that would scale up to 50-100mil for the higher ones, however, it would be a one purchase thing. you may have the components to build 1 low grade slave, 25mil, you may have the components to build 10, 25 mil. This could also be expanded to have a chance to rebuild implants, so its not 100% of the time, the skill could add something like 12%~ per skill level chance of rebuilding implants, so even if you have the components, its not guaranteed that you can rebuild them. this mechanic would also help keep the amount of rebuilt implants low, keeping the 'player made' implant supply low in the markets, you'd still need to go to mission runners or whatever for the implants, and it takes more then 1 salvaged implant to rebuild one, therefor the recreation isnt a 1-1 ratio. This will give dead bodies some use when people get podded and it it would be a good isk sink due to the high chance to failure on both levels of the process.

Thoughts?

Pay money for your sub and stop bitching about being able to freeload?


Also, as LP items implants are already an isk sink, getting them another way literally undermines the original sink. No.


Frankly what the game needs is more conflict. More things explode, the less disposable income people have as they are replaced. More danger, more fun. It's win win.

I have a rather off the wall idea for an isk sink. Make ships explode. Get rid of insurance. Rejoice!

Making pvp fun and meaningful would generate more explosions. Don't nickel and dime w/ tax this and tax that. Make poop explode.

Current problems:

1. HS pvp is meaningless. Large war dec corps (seriously - wtf) farm HS players not interested in being farmed (sux). Anyone in HS w/ a legit beaf w/ someone else doesn't really have an option to WAGE WAR against them due to the current proliferation of assists.

2. Large null fights are teh suxors. Really. They suck. During the fight 8 dudes on each side enjoy the high end garbage. The 500 guys actually doing the fighting for them spend hours waiting out lag. Surfing the internets. Checking out of game kb to see if what they are trying to kill died 20 minutes ago. 20 dudes get all juiced up during the fight thinking it's awesome. Individual pilots feel a sort of detached excitement when 'their' alliance supplied ship gets primaried and they wait for the lag to clear to see if they caught reps or perished. Then SRP erases that feeling. Days later olks read the news article and if they don't know better think being in an epic space fight would be awesome. Large coalitions compete in an isk/ship piling arms race so that they can survive the next BR. (woo hoo I say). The current END GAME pvp is a huge (NOT FUN OR FUNNY) joke. What was the outcome of BR? What was gained or lost? Other than some insight on killing titans - nothing.

Progress is being made to put some meaning back into pvp. It's being slowed by the lobying of large null blocks (CCP please have some faith in yourselves and this great game and just quit giving concessions to the tittybabies) to temper needed changes. Tweaking market stuff to provide overall game balance just moves eve closer to forage and build games and moves it away from destruction.

You wanna make an isk sink? Make ships explode. To do that pvp has to be fun and meaningful (worth the potential loss). To do that you need to make blob hoo haw not the norm. Allow individual groups to settle differences w/ out 3rd party interference (in HS). Make the large scale SRP garbage just not practical (botting and moon goo I'm looking at you).

Buying a ship does not remove ISK from the game. Destroying a ship removes minerals, and a small amount of ISK if it was a faction ship.

What is needed to remove ISK are services and consumables.

Sadly, they elected to take most of the stuff that would make a wonderful isk sink and attach it to Aurum instead, because yay microtransactions.

Make some simple changes, like changing ammo so that you buy basic casings or something from npcs to make the rounds.

Make a certain amount of ship HP unrepairable by reps. You have to go and pay station services to fully repair. The longer you let it go, the worse it gets.

Mechanics that can apply buffs to a hull for a limited time, like a 'recalibrated' rep that cycles faster for 500 cycles, or similar things that allow modest bonuses for a small fee.

Those sorts of things, priced so that even a new character could get them, that would drain isk from the economy.

Jump clones are one off expenses. Not a continual sink.

Destruction encourages players to put more isk into assets, rather than sit in a wallet, and gives greater incentive to partake in research and manufacturing (isk sinks).

The alternative is to also look at isk faucets. One thing that sticks out is the massive amount of isk generated from incursions despite the small amount of people who run them and how low the risk is when running them.

Whatever services you "pay" a NPC station for is a sink, taxes are a sink and with much love even the LP store is a great sink that could sink more than it does now.

But as always my wallet is the best isk sink for everyone, I'll take cash, ships and modules all donated to Amarr. Help a poor girl out will ya?

Blowing stuff up is not an ISK sink though. Lets go through the numbers.

We have a N "person" economy*with 2 types the PvP/PvE guys and the industry guys.

PvP/E guys go and run an anomaly and get 500 ISK. They then go spend this on PvP ships. So lets look at the wallets.

Before the transaction:

• PvP/E guys: 500 ISK
• Industry guys: 0 ISK (they spent it all on making PvP ships: say 400 ISK).
• Total ISK in the economy: 500

After the transaction:

• PvP/E guys: 0 ISK
• Industry guys: 500 ISK (they spent it all on making PvP ships).
• Total ISK in the economy: 500

Now the PvP guys go and shoot each other and they all lose their **** (I know probably can't happen), ISK in the economy

• PvP/E guys: 0 ISK
• Industry guys: 500 ISK (they spent it all on making PvP ships).
• Total ISK in the economy: 500

Why...it looks just like it did before the big fight. Huh...

This is why ship destruction is never listed as an ISK sink on CCP's tables for sinks and sources.

Edit: To head off a possible distraction, assume the 400 ISK is via a sink--i.e. it is not paid to other players. Note this assumption changes nothing really, but it lets us work with a simpler model. Basically, we'd have an N-person economy with 3 types, PvP/E, industry, miners. Now the 400 ISK goes to the miners who provided minerals....note this ISK does not leave the economy either.

See we're back to eve needs more explosions. Every player out blowing up other players doesn't have his gaping maw sucking on some isk faucet. PVP permanantly removes stuff from the game AND it occupies folks so they aren't running incursions or carrier ratting in some upgraded anom laden system.

You want to remove isk from the game - get rid of those pathetic system upgrades. The pandering that allowed them is a bane on the game. No need to fight over good space.... just deploy this upgrade to make all space worth not fighting for.

You shouldn't be able to 'rent' good space from CCP via system upgrades. You should have to go take the good spots and then have to hold them.

No, actually they do. Using my example above, note the PvP/E guys are now not only ISK poor, but also ship poor. Assuming they have their PvE ships still it will be back to the anomalies to repeat the process. Another spin around our little simple circular economy would add yet another 500 ISK to the economy.

And removing system upgrades is not a sink, but constraining or limiting a source. Not that this is bad, but it is looking at the other end of system. In fact, it is the approach I prefer. Instead of trying to find ways to find ways to drain ISK from people's wallets, find a way to keep the ISK from getting in there in the first place.

One approach would be to reconsider all of NS income flows. Instead of using the anomaly model shift over to missions. You'd still go kill your local rats but now you'd get some ISK, but also LP from CONCORD. You could then designate an LP store you'd purchase from, so I could purchase from Fed Navy while another could go with whatever the Minmatar version of the Fed Navy is (sorry, never ran many missions in HS). You could switch as well, but there'd be a lag in doing so. The LP store would need some re-working so that prices don't crash through the floor.

Now instead of just injecting ISK Into the economy via anomalies NS ratters would also be injecting "real" goods (I know the real/nominal distinction sounds weird in a virtual economy) into the economy via LP store items. Further, the lower ISK payouts would help insure that there is a positive growth rate to the money supply. We don't want the money supply to actually contract, IMO.

Blow up more ships is the way to go. I just want to point out that there are many many many 'smart' economists in the real world and in the eve world. I'd also like to point out that most of the world is horribly in debt and eve is absolutely drowning in isk. I'm not saying that collectively you guys don't have a ton of cool things to say - I'm saying this kind of crap is putting the real world in the toilet.

I'll bottom line it for you. It's a epic space fantasy game. Ships need to blow up in fun and interesting ways or the game dies. You can talk about details all day long and if ships aren't blowing up in fun and interesting ways in the background then the details really don't matter. It's not an economic simulator - it's a space fantasy game. You don't remove isk by tweaking taxes and hanging npc leeches on a guys wallet. You make it fun, you make it interesting and you blow stuff up.

Please take your scholarly economics crap and shove it where the sun don't shine. I'll speak for myself. I don't want to be taxed to death in eve to keep the isk flow down. I want stuff to explode. As long as players are farting around w/ npc crap instead of doing bad things to each other, then everyone will keep making way way way more isk than the tax man (or any form of npc isk sink hoo haw) will be able to take away.

No one (well except maybe 30 or so economist nerds) wants to log into a space game to shoot little red geometry things, stack some isk and then have some npc transaction take it all away. That's not how you balance a game, and if there is one thing I'm sure of - this is a game.

(read this slowly) BLOW SSSSHHHHHIIIIITTTTTT UP.