Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I'm seeing a lot of assumptions here based on not a lot of evidence or actual fact and a few blatantly incorrect things here.

First off, rental and moon empires have little to do with PLEX. Most of that income goes to Alliances and Corps to allow them to replace losses incurred by members during the group's operations, not towards PLEX. PLEX is generally bought by individuals and outside of a few very notable individuals (FCs and other high level officers) rich players in Eve tend to make their money through the markets not through moons.

It's also not really true that Eve is purely a blob fest. If you don't want to fight in or against blobs there are places you can go and ships you can fly that will let you do that. Whether it's flying something small and fast in Low and Null to just run away from blobby fights or flying in Wormholes where fights are pretty much capped in practical size.

Also CCP doesn't have a Laissez-Faire policy with regards to the game or PLEX. CCP makes changes all the time with the intent of affecting the market, they just don't go in and directly interfere with the market directly. Not doing that though is not the same thing as an actual Laissez-Faire policy. CCP holds sales and does other things to increase the PLEX supply and also makes changes to regulate the flow of ISK and other economic conditions.

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As for your actual suggestions:

• An SP based tax is a pretty generally terrible idea. For a start that's not a great way of determining how powerful an Alliance is or how much money they have. On top of that it's not actually targeting any actual problem, it's just punishing players for grouping together which is contrary to one of the main goals of Eve specifically and MMOs in general. The game format relies on players meeting and grouping together both for cooperation and opposition.


• As for a "blues tax". Okay, my 'blues' are now all 'reds' and anyone who is neutral is shoot on sight. I've now completely circumvented your system. If you make it based on blues and reds everyone is neutral and I'll use a third party tool. Again, this isn't a particularly good mechanic it's just punishing players for cooperating.


• Changing Logistics and Fleet Boosts like this would fundamentally break quite a few play-styles and parts of the game. No more purple fleets for one, and the groups that hold those Ops are some of the most active in Eve. I don't see this ever happening.

Basically these ideas are pretty terrible and hamfisted. Players would find ways around these pretty quickly and then CCP has to run around playing whack-a-mole to enforce something the majority of players wouldn't even be happy with in the first place.

In general if you want to discourage the escalation of a behavior that is otherwise desirable you need to do it with incentives, not punishments. The balance of carrot and stick here is way off and it's questionable whether or not the goal being sought after is even desirable in the first place. After all a large part of Eve's appeal is its scale and single shard universe. If you want a small scale and hard-limited fight then you're probably playing a different game.

Valkyrie is a separate game and has little to nothing to do with Eve as a whole besides being based in the same lore. There's no reason to expect that people that enjoy a twitch-based VR fighter game like Valkyrie would also enjoy Eve in any significant numbers.

Alphas had a pretty significant impact on the population and got a lot of people to try the game. That most of these didn't stick around isn't really surprising...

On top of that Eve has always been a fairly niche game. CCP knows it and admits it, the players know it, and pretty much everyone is fine with this since the alternative is jettisoning most of the things in Eve that make it interesting and unique.



Except if you look at the volume of PLEX being traded on the market the amount listed hasn't gone down much if at all, so the cause has to be something impacting the demand side of the equation, so the idea that the current market conditions are caused by fewer new players has to be false even if you accept that new players are the majority of the ones buying PLEX to sell, which I personally find questionable. Most of those I know buying PLEX to sell are older players who are more invested in the game but with limited free time compared to the depths of their wallets.



It discourages working together period the way you've phrased it here, and really it's discouraging it period even if you include something like a point where no tax is applied. Though that opens up loopholes and further makes your idea infeasible.

This is still something discouraging working together with other players no matter how you try to qualify or justify it, you're putting a penalty on being part of a corp.

Also this sort of size limit encourages a sort of elitism. That's why in-game organizations rarely have meaningful size restrictions, because the goal of these sorts of limits isn't really to limit the size of the player group it's just to moderate growth and put a cap for backend code and performance reasons. The devs of any MMO don't want people going "well, we need to kick this guy because we found someone better" since that just creates bad blood and a bad social environment.



Working out this sort of thing is dependent on the base concept being sound. That's why CCP is getting rid of POS shields, because the base concept and mechanics of POS shields makes it open to exploits, abuse, and weird interactions of mechanics. CCP couldn't fix everything so they just banned everything they couldn't fix as a stop-gap until they could get rid of the whole mess.

The more rules in a system the more likelihood of an exploit or issue. This is a universal fact of systems design. The less desirable it is to work within the limits of a system the more motivated people are to find exploits. Your system is both undesirable to the majority of players and will require a large number of rules to be workable. This basically guarantees that people will both find and readily exploit loopholes in it.

In short it's a bigger assumption to assume that a system like this can be designed perfectly than it is to assume that there will be problems and exploitable loopholes in a system like this.

1. PLEX does redistribute wealth. Players who buy ISK in game and use them for game time, dual training, etc. (i.e. where PLEX leave the game) are moving ISK from those who have it to those who do not. Further, my guess is the recent run up in PLEX is at least partly related to small skill injectors.
2. First off what evidence do you have of this? Second so what? I buy PLEX and I use them (i.e. they leave the game). I also buy PLEX as an investment, which takes my ISK and puts it in the hands of those who feel they do not have enough (which likely correlates with low wealth players). Your second sentence is a non-sequitur, I could just as easily note that on a few men have landed on the moon and it would be about as useless. Similarly your third sentence. Moons are typically alliance level assets. That is to take and hold a moon you will need the resources only found at the alliance level. Yes, the largest and most well organized alliances will tend to hold the most moons. My guess this will be true after the patch for moon mining as well, although the groups holding various moons might change. The idea of a small group holding a moon probably will not happen.



You suggest a false dichotomy of laissez-faire at one end and….IDK at the other. In fact, the reality is a continuum and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that a more market based economy is going to have a higher growth and improving standards not just for a few, but for everyone. And an additional point of fact, socialism is every a complete and utter **** show. Look at places like Venezuela, our newest and current failed state where socialism was tried…and failed. The human misery is appalling and was totally avoidable.



That is a nice variation of Benito Mussolini’s viewpoint on freedom. “We were the first to assert that the more complicated the forms of civilization, the more restrict the freedoms of the individual must become.”



What I would like is an explanation of why this will accomplish a reduction blobbling. Yes, I see the “obvious” explanation, an alliance with more SP will be taxed more and thus will face pressure to break up. Similarly with the allies. But players have proven to be rather adroit at finding ways to solve such problems. For example, using personal blue lists by FCs and target callers might accomplish a work-around.

Seriously, I wish the technocrats and social engineers in the world would kindly **** off and let the rest of us get on with things.

Well I think you do not understand the nature and philosophy of a sandbox game. That is why I think this is a bad idea.

Oh and before you go full bore stupid...look at my corp history. If that doesn't help you, ask and I'll explain why a "Grrrr, Goons!" response would be full bore stupid.

Aaaand another thing, your suggestion does not just punish "big groups" it also punishes smaller groups of older players. Why would you want to do that when that, smaller groups, is precisely what you want.

Sorry, crap idea is crap.

-1.

Edit: And it punishes smaller corps of new players using skill injectors to improve their skills relative to older players. Again, why would you want to do that?

This idea gets worse and worse the more I think about it.

Look your idea is bad on many fronts. Your views on laissez-faire are largely irrelevant (by the way, according to economic historian and economist Dierdre McCloskey the average wage from 1800 to today has risen about 30 fold, or about 3,000% That did not happen because of larger and more pervasive government, but due to economic liberalization). But hey, you threw it out there....

Do you have an answer to my objections? A corporation of 100 guys with 100,000,000 SP each will face a far, far higher tax than on a corporation with 250 guys and each one having 32,000,000 SP each...why? Why should long time players be screwed over so badly in this case?

Oh wait, I know...you'll just modifying the formula to account for the number of players...gee, I don't see any problems with that.

Bravo Sierra. I have a 140 million plus SP. I tend to take my alts with me. I alone can boost a corps taxes signifcantly in that I can bring probably close to 300 million SP in doing so. If I did that with say a small corp of new players, say I wanted to help out a batch of new bros we'd be hit with a very large tax bill....so I tell my merry band of new bros, go rat, mission, and mine we have to pay the tax bill? Remember it is exponential so it can get large very fast. Or in joining a larger corp that already has a fair amount of SP, I might be rejected due to the tax burden.

BTW, you did not address my point about a smaller corp having a higher tax bill due to each player having more SP than a larger corp with a lower level of SP. The smaller corp will be "blobbed" by the larger corp.

Annnd yet another problem....

Why should a HS industrial corp face a tax for having high SP members? Yes, lets make our escapist video game more like real life where we have to work to pay the SP tax.

It is hilarious how on the one hand we have a whine thread about big corporations/alliances and on the other we've had whine threads about people going to NPC corps...which this change may very well exacerbate.

Of course an Industrial Corp / Alliance should face the same exponential SP tax / ally tax.

I would think it's a strategic decision that any organization / country has to make - how much to allocate to infrastructure, how much to military, how much to education. Also who do they want to establish an alliance with, instead of just making everyone an ally.

Why are you penalizing a group of players that is not even part of the problem?

Here is a thought experiment. Next time I get some bad news, can I take $100 form you? Seems reasonable, right? You have nothing to do with the bad news, so yes I should be allowed to take your $100.

It is not punishing a group of players who is not a part of the problem. If you are an alliance administrator it is your choice how many industrial pilots to recruit, how many industrial alliances to set blue, etc.

Also in your scenario: "if a 250 man corp is going up against a 100 man corp and they each have say a 40% participation rate, you'll have 100 guys going up against 40 guys"

Then that is their problem if they are outnumbered in this situation.

Like I said you still retain most of the freedom as you did before. So I'm not sure if you are intentionally trying to twist around what I said in my OP. The solution I talked about is to have at least some degree of control over the Eve landscape - and to encourage smaller alliances or power blocs (whatever you want to call it), instead of massive alliances and blue donuts. The decision of who to set blue will be much more strategic, instead of bluing everyone in sight.