Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Currently, ratting while holding sov increases the military index, which increases the number and value of ratting anoms. Which enables more, and more profitable, ratting. If you get a lot of ratting ticks, you can get more, bigger ratting ticks.

What if this had a different effect? Higher military index causes the new anoms that spawn to be "routed forces", ships that are not worth as much bounty (less the higher the military index is) but have more and/or better drops. So instead of pumping more money into the economy, it creates more stuff that can be used or sold.

I'm probably going to feel like idiot once someone finds a should-be-obvious flaw in this idea, but I've been meaning to welp my ego and today's as good a day as any.

Things tend to be valuable because they are scarce. The problem with ratting anoms isn't the quality but the quantity. You can essentially farm them continuously because they respawn instantly. A 4 hour respawn timer wouldn't reduce what you could earn per anomaly but it would make the anomalies themselves a limited resource. If you want to run another one - you need to find a nearby system that has one and move there.

If these people are essentially farming an inexhaustible resource, the reward should be something you exchange on the market for ISK, not ISK itself. That way overproduction results in lower prices, people stop doing it, the price recovers - self balancing. Right now they have a license to print money and that never ends well.

Concurrent with the slew of changes, whether to loot drops or PvE asset efficacy, this idea makes perfect sense and opens more choices for making ISK in game.

The olden empires would adjust their bounty schedules based on a desire to destabilize each other and for seeing no imminent victory against faction rats. Were this bounty workaround taking place, it might affect players in one of the following ways:

• One empire's assortment of stations might react negatively to a rival power's ESS or other PvE augments in that player's transaction history, prompting fewer exchange of loot beyond one's home region.
• Faction ammo might be cheaper to source in blackmarket (null / low) conditions, but are hit with huge hisec tariffs, compounding the first point.
• Cynosural beacons lit by a capsuleer with poor standing of that low / null sov holder are auto-aggressed by station guns. This further reduces imports of outside faction loot.

Reducing incentives to gameplay are synonymous with retroactive cuts, in that players have invested previous PLEX bundles to get where they are. Now is a good opportunity to instead focus on smoothing over fluctuations in player market and PvE reward dynamics through inventive storytelling and NPC reactions.


+1 I highly recommend OP's style of argument. Great to be thinking outside the login box :)