Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Except, it really isn't. There are many mechanisms that introduce isk, raw materials, and usable items to the game. They're all appropriately referred to as faucets. Pretending that only ISK is subject to the concept of faucets and sinks is a simpleton's perspective.



Myriad things. For one, there's the actual frequency of it happening. In the latter case, you actually have to find 100 players willing to mine for a player's worth of income each. In the former, you only need to find 10 players to mine for massively scaled out personal income. For another, 100 pilots will generally consume 100 pilots worth of economic resources themselves, as they're all actually players. 100 miners controlled by players will never have a consumption rate remotely near their own economic output, as 9/10 characters involved don't need anything more than a barge, and never will.

Again, if that's okay, why not just scrub the concept of an economy entirely? 100 isk Titans for all!



What part of, "The recently released Dogma rewrite and accompanying BIAB significantly reduce the load these calculations place on TQ" isn't resonating with you?

The potential changes to OGB were explicitly mentioned in one of the mass test threads. Since then, they've specifically said that they're looking at an AOE buff model for the link rewrite. Never mind that, though, $randomforumguy knows better!

When people talk about sink and faucets on the forums, everyone's first thought is isk, because generally it is quickly followed by a discussion about plex prices which is the gold standard.



So what's the difference between them having extra accounts and you? I would be willing to bet that a healthy portion of the Eve players have a couple accounts. What about these people? Are they plagues on the economy as well or is it just the people who use a number greater then you are comfortable playing with? Have you ever thought that the number of miners do balance themselves out? The cheaper the minerals become, the fewer people there are willing to mine, and move onto other activities. As the prices go back up, more people are willing to go back to it. There are always the outliers which will be the people who refuse to do anything but mine, just as there are people who refuse to mine.

So sorry to disappoint you, but titans won't be 100 isk.



Its funny how you have to throw insults in almost every post to attempt to demean the person you are having a discussion with in an attempt to envoke an emotional response.

Did I not say that it would be an increase in the server load? Did I mention how much it would? Did I say anything about with the new efficiencies that it would or wouldn't be doable?

I did say that I would say I would be impressed if they managed to pull off a smartbomb like effect for the boosts. I'm not an employee of CCP, so I do not know the details of, this action will take this much RAM and processing power to accomplish. I do not know how these good or bad that these actions will scale in an actual fight. I can tell you that it will take more processing power though, whether or not we will notice it on our end, is up to the devs to tell us.

But with this entire discussion, the TLDR is I disagree with removing OGB because I feel that there is already a counter to them, and you disagree.

When simpletons talk about sinks and faucets on the forum, their only thought is isk. Other people understand that it is a general term that refers to the mechanisms by which things are introduced to the economy.

Quit trying to make it my fault that you inserted words into my mouth. Say, "Oops, I misunderstood, my mistake." Because that's what happened.




Scale. Aren't you paying attention?



Except we know that that isn't what happens, with the history to prove it. This is because the operations can be endlessly scaled to compensate, as the marginal increase in effort for adding an additional miner is far lower than the marginal increase in income for the aditional miner, even in a declining, over supplied market. This is largely attributable to the very small value of marginal effort required. This could effectively continue until the point where the marginal increase in isk for the additional miner is insufficient to plex the character.

Meanwhile, you make mining utterly infeasible as an economic activity for some guy who's just trying to play the game.




First of all, you threw in a, "THINK WHAT THAT WOULD DO TO TIDI!" just a few posts back. Want to tell me you weren't suggesting something about the magnitude of the load? Really?

But let's pretend that you weren't.

So what do you imagine the utility in saying, "That will increase server load!" is without any understanding or even vague ability to make a ballpark guess at the magnitude of that load? What's the material contribution to the discussion in that?

It will increase server load! Well, no ****. Pretty much EVERYTHING "increases server load" to some degree. If it's a manageable increase, it doesn't matter, now does it? Those new micro jump generators? Increased server load. Frostline sites? You think those are magically consuming zero server resources?

What do you imagine to be the argumentative value in, "Hurfblurf it will increase server load!" without being able to, at a minimum, suggest that the increase is beyond the reasonable scope of what could be managed, particularly given that everything suggests that new technology and rewrites now mean that such a change CAN be made with manageable increases in server load, where this was not previously the case?

I'm assuming you hadn't secretly engaged me in a "State the Obvious" contest, so there must have been a reason for your keen observation that it would involve increased server loads. What was that reason?




You disagree with removing them to the point that you are willing to try to genuinely argue that legal botting would be totally legit and harmless to the game. That's not a reasoned form of disagreement, that's just grasping at any excuse to keep a clearly broken mechanic in its clearly broken state.

The primary role I see T3s have over command ships is blending in, in a T3 fleet. If there are 250 Tengus on grid, it will take a bit to thumb through the blob manually to find the one with the boosting subsystem compared to calling the 1 or 2 sleipnirs on grid primary.

It is not solo if they have offgrid or ongrid links.

So your position is basically that, since the ban didn't result in an instantaneous massive speculative price spike in tritanium, specifically, having one person running 30 miners at a go was basically A-OK and not something that needed to be addressed.

Or basically, "I know better than CCP and, also, literally everyone else!"



You're treating pilots as a bottomless resource. Why not skip right to a million? Or ten million?

Furthermore, as already mentioned, 10 players tend to bring with them 10 players' worth of consumption, but 100 players' worth of production. 100 players bring 100 players worth of production and consumption.




Yes, you have more or less successfully recapped the conversation so far. What you haven't done is answer the question.

You have listed some calculations that would have to be made. Well done.

You haven't given any actual cost for those calculations. You don't even really have the ability to do that. Then, based on this entirely unpriced list of steps, you've clutched your pearls and said, "THINK OF THE TIDI!"

What possible argument do you imagine you could be making by stating the painfully ******* obvious fact that there would be more calculations involved, without actually being able to make any assertion about the cost of those calculations?

What is the relative computational cost of a boolean check Vs. dividing one by the square of a distance? Relative both to each other, and to the total cost-per-tick of all operations?

I know you can't answer that, you know you can't answer that, so why are you pretending that you can make a meaningful argument in terms of "Server load"?

Great, there will be more of it! Put a number on "How much" or it doesn't actually matter.




So, you're going with semantics, then? Fine. I'll humor you.

Yes, command multiplexing and command automation are technically different things, and command automation was banned first.

However, from an actual substantive perspective, it's quite immaterial, and the net result is that, by making this distinction, you've wound up with an internally inconsistent position.

Can you see it? No? I'll help.



100 pilots botted by 1 person does not produce anything in the game that 100 pilots piloted by 100 people cannot, either.

Or a thousand. Or a million.

If we accept your assertion that one player utilizing command multiplexing to generate MANY times the normal output that a single player could generate is in no way problematic for the game, why would we not also accept this claim as it pertains to command automation?

If we accept your position on multiplexing as a given then, by the same logic, automation is also not a problem, so explain the basis for your arbitrary, self-serving distinction between the two, please.




Anyone who actually viewed this as being just as attractive an option as OGB would shut the **** up and do it. Instead they complain about losing OGB, and threaten that they'll just use Falcons instead, indicating that they really don't view it as being an equally attractive option, most likely because it requires more attention to manage and more risk by virtue of having to be on-grid.

That, and it's a lot harder to **** yourself off about your "solo" PvP career when your helper-monkey actually shows on KMs.

Is there a dev tag next to my name? If there is then CCP owes me some paychecks. How are any players supposed to know that it will take 4 bytes of ram for this action and 28 bytes for this action and those take x amount of milliseconds to calculate, unless CCP gave us their source code and told us the hardware of their servers and how everything is connected?

Boolean checks are nice and quick and not resource intensive compared to what they would need to do to calculate falloff. Do I know what the actual resource cost is? No. But I would rather implement an idea that doesn’t stress a server that is already needing to slow everything in game down to 10% speed just so it can keep up with everything the players are throwing at it.

The other thing with keeping at as a Boolean check is that each individual pilot wouldn’t need to have a customized boost strength calculated for it. It either checks it on, or off. It doesn’t have to figure out how much the attributes need to change at the individual level.

So just looking at the basic level of it, it doesn’t seem to scale well. But like I said, I’m not a dev, and like I said previously, if they managed to pull that off (especially adding falloff) then I will be impressed by the work that they put out rewriting the wonderful code that’s been being used for the past how many years.


How is it a self-serving distinction? I never broadcasted myself and in fact if CCP did allow broadcasting to come back, I would probably be faced with more competition, so if anything I would be nerfing my own income.

Anyways, the difference that I personally see is that with command multiplexing, the person is physically at the keyboard, making all the commands. This person needs to take breaks from the game just like any person controlling 1 pilot needs to. That is the distinction between botting and broadcasting, and that is why they are 2 separate definitions that are now both bannable offenses.

From there, you are looking at it from the level of the person. How many people play the game is not how any subscription based game is measured. It’s the number of subs that they have is what determines the health of any game, and how many of those subs are logged in at any given time. So if instead of looking at it at a player level, let’s look at it from a corporation level.

A pilot makes a corporation and this pilot manages to get 99 other pilots to sign up for his corp. The CEO then siphons off 10% of everything the pilots do in the game, and through deception and number fudging, he only gives 5% back to everyone although he ensures that all proceeds go back to everyone. He pockets the remaining 5%. Suddenly this one person has the income of 21 pilots. If this seems too extreme, how about take a look at the larger organizations in the game, and now they only have to siphon off 1% or less. So should we ban corporation tax as well?

What a lot of people don’t know about ISBoxer, is that it is not plug and go. You don’t just install it and expect yourself to be able to do what you want with 200 pilots with a single mouse click. It can take hours if not days and many versions to get a setup going that works efficiently.

You are correct, that your PI alts do not consume as much as your main character does on an individual level. But they are all part of the same group, and your main consumes more then what someone else would if they had your level of activity and only had 1 account. But since you have 3 PI alts instead of just one you must be flooding the economy as well. What about the person that has 1 PI character and he has chosen to make a career out of it?

And who cares what specifically your alts are generating. Everything in the game is either a liquid asset or a hard asset. Anytime you produce more of a hard asset then you can personally use, you liquidate it and turn it into something else you can use. So all that extra PI gets turned into a deadspace fit Bhaalgorn that you took out to lowsec and got whelped (Just an example, not going to bother trolling through your killboard, and I don’t really care what you do with the extra PI).


You were the one that suggested adding falloff to links instead of having a link that works off grid and one that works on grid in boolean fashion. You have not provided any metrics proving that it wouldn’t add meaningful server strain while the server is already under peak load conditions. Where did I mention that we would be under 10% Tidi anytime boosts would go up. My concern is when Tidi is already in place that it could just make it worse when the boosts could just be a simple boolean check and be done with it. So why shouldn’t I question it? Because the forum lord of the F&I has decreed it to be?

It is not my responsibility to provide you with numbers to back up your idea in a conversation. You are the one with the burden of proof. I have given you a run down version of the additional things the servers would have to do if falloff were to be added, to address my concerns about your idea. It’s up to you to go back to your drawing board and come back to me and say “I looked into your concerns, and it would or wouldn’t be an issue because the servers are awesome and with the optimizations CCP have performed, we would still see a decrease in Tidi through server magic at the quantum level during the course of a large scale fleet engagement.” (Just more technical of course). At which point I can either agree or disagree and then we move on to another topic. it's not like we are congress trying to pass a bill here, we are on a forum throwing around ideas.

I mean at this point in the conversation, you are trying to pick apart why I disagree that falloff on links is a good idea and not even debating off grid vs on grid boosters at this point, which was the main point of this entire thread. Don’t you think this has gotten a bit petty and we should probably let the devs deal with if they should have falloff or not? Can we at least find some middle ground and move on beyond this point, because this falloff thing is just going to go in circles until ISD comes in and figures we are just ranting at each other and locks the thread.

Now, to go back to the original debate we were having...

You feel that on grid boosts would add more dynamic gameplay and offgrid boosts are essentially a plague on the game.
I feel that off grid boosts are able to be countered and that there is no need to outright remove off grid boosting. Now, that's not to say that on grid boosting shouldn't be more desirable then off grid, but off grid boosting should always at least be an option.


But you do care about the income of one person because if 99 characters are funneling their income to 1 character, and they just happened to be boxed, then it is bad for the economy. But if 99 characters are just producing away and doing with it as they please, it’s ok for the economy.

Have you ever thought that when people box, they generally generate shiny killmails on their main that is worth a lot of isk more frequently than people who don’t box? Boxers don’t look at production and consumption at an individual level, they look at it like a CEO managing corporate assets.

The only issue with this limitation is, with the current fleet setup, a fleet as small as 4 people could receive off grid boosts (Fleet Commander, Wing Commander, Squad Commander, 1 person in the squad). CCP would need to add a minimum number of pilots eligible to receive boosts to make something like that work.

Admission time here. I did not read any of the rest because my comments go directly to the OP.

Off grid boost and bonuses in any form need to go away period, why?
Simple if you have something in the fight that is affecting the outcome then it needs to be in the fight where it is at the same risk as everything else in the fight.
No I do not care about how things are in real life or in any other game. Here in EvE I believe that all of this off grid crap needs to go away. The recent expansion of the size of the girds is a good step, but now it needs to be matched by the removal of system wide boost and bonuses and yes that even includes those that would affect all aspects of the game like miners, mission runners and the Incursion folks. If it affects what you are doing then it needs to be on grid with you.