EVE General Discussion

I see there are some obvious pros and cons raised and I'd like to address a few points here.

Concerning the global cap on everything:
Yes, putting a hard cap on every resource coupled with the lack of introduction of new content by CCP's means the game dies when there are no resources left. Even if there would be new content, we would start seeing "ghost towns" systems completely drained of harvestable resources. Following the notion this is, after all, a MMO, it would be a bad thing.
This is why I suggested that a mix of both soft capped and hard capped resources works best. I'm sorry to say, but the only limit to this concept is your own imagination on how this could be solved. CCP could for instance:
- Introduce sun harvesting (as far as I know, some suns in-game will last longer than the one in our own solar system)
- Introduce new technologies to gather minerals (comets *lol*, planet core mining...)
- Introduce actual trading relationships with NPC planet denizens (DUST 514 anyone?)
- Favor more "escalation" types of NPC rats encounters (gives the player a clear objective and final goal that last longer than your average mission or anomaly, get's him/her ISK in the process and force more traveling)
To be honest, a soft cap could be controlled by the players while CCP controls the actual hard caps "Incursion style". Coming back to the Guristas example, say CCP notices that this faction has been over-farmed for 5 years (in 2015 let's say), we see a live event titled "the last flight of the Guristas" into Caldari highsec or something.

Concerning day-to-day depletion:
I'm not suggesting belts would deplete in one day and NOT respawn the next. I'm saying that if all belts were depleted in a system, the next day when they respawn (like they already do), you would only have 99% of what there was yesterday. Deplete them all again? They re-respawn the next day again at 99% of the previous 99%.

For those who want to see this in mathematical form:
Resource quantity at day 1 = 100%
Resource depletion = 0.99
Days after day 1 = x

100 = 0.99^x

after one day you will have exactly 99% resources available when compared to day 1
after one month (30 days) you get about 74% resources available
after a year of sustained farming you only have 2.5% of the day 1's resources

As you can see, if the region next door was not drained of resources and respawns remained at 100%, even your miner toons will hop into PVP ships when war is declared :P. Now while the new region begins to be drained of resources, the original region would start slowing increasing its respawn quantities (this is one iteration of the soft cap).

Entire alliance should not be able to deplete a resource only in a single day or even a week. Only through a sustained complete farming of said resource would you notice a significant difference in about a month, while a year would make it near 0. It would be CCP's call at this point on how to manage hard capped resources based on player actions.

Please understand these numbers are for the purpose of giving an example, just like any other numbers I posted. The actual values/rates should be CCP's design and/or economic team's area.

At the moment I make my ISK by mining and running lvl 4 missions. This gives me sufficent minerals to build ten battle cruisers a week with out having to buy any minerals from the market. life atm is easy and the ISK is flowing in. I agree with what other people have posted in this thread. The endless supply of minerals from belts that respawn endlessly de-values the loss of titans and supercaps and capital ships... if an alliance has cleared out most of it's belts to build a titan and know they will not return to normal for many months this would make the loss of this titan a real loss. Minerals running low in hi-sec due to overming would encourage hi-sec miners to organise more low-sec mining Ops, something I think the many pirate corps would like to see

I think you have it backwards.

Leaders who control the resources, as would be the case of state-owned subsidiaries, or those in more capitalistic structures who are influenced (or "bought off") by special interests go to war over scarcity, but will use the media either through direct control or indirectly through the special interests to feed all kinds of lies to the people to motivate them to support the war effort.

The USA for example.

You bring up gold rushes, which is good. I sense that 0.0 was supposed to be comparable in some ways to the "Wild Wild West" as we call it where resources are there for the picking but people will fight over it. Claiming a system to mine the resources is like "staking a claim" and going into it to take resources from someone else is "claim jumping".

Except we do it all with space ships instead of horses, 10 gallon hats, and revolvers.

@everyone posting nonsense about resources drying up overnight and EVE becoming a ghost town.

Nobody is saying that resources should be limited in such a fashion that one asteroid belt dies as soon as downtime hits the day after implementation. Fact is, there is more wealth in this universe than anyone can imagine.

I believe the OP said as much as a decade or two for a moon to dry up.

Currently in EVE, we have asteroids that get chewed up in a matter of minutes sure, and belts cleaned in an hour. These are all mostly small rocks with no resources in them.

Have you ever heard of the Kuipur Belt and Oort Cloud? http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=KBOs

On Earth alone, we have resources that have stretched out to encompass construction and manufacturing for millenia; and we yet have resources available for potentially another thousand years without considering recycling. The fact that these resources have suddenly been recognized as limited; has been the majority of the push to recycling and reusing decommissioned objects.

In EVE, take a look at planetary Interaction in its current condition. What we have here, is resources that are stripped extraordinarily fast and all but used up with limited production. This is rather odd as an example; because mines on Earth last for years or decades, and produce much greater quantites for production.

The production we get out of PI is probably a lot less than realistic, as is the PI process.

What I'm saying, is that there are plenty of resources available if some changes are made. Asteroid belts are unrealistic, and each consists of less than 1/1000 of a percent of what we would find orbiting a planet like Saturn. Planets hold far more resources than we could expect to pull from the ground in 2-3 Eons; and there is more Ice in one Solar system than 10* the population of the Earth could every hope to use in 10 Eons.

It doesn't have to be a situation where the resources get burned up overnight or within a few weeks; but more a situation where they are suddenly recognized as limited.

Whoa there buddy! That's not true at all. Everything comes from something and those somethings do deplete. The biggest example in modern history is oil.

Whoa there yourself. All those commodities (except ore, though that's recyclable in a way not possible in Eve) are examples of renewable resources. Those commodities come (directly or indirectly) from Photosynthesis, which will produce food (sugar) from energy (sunlight) until the sun burns out.

Oil is not listed, and Oil is not a renewable resource.

Resources can have a broad definition.

Scarcity does exist in EVE.

Scarcity. I dislike the word personally... makes me think of those games by Maxis....

I'd wager anyone in the market for few Gotan's Modified Large Proton Smartbombs would be able to attest to the scarcity of resources in eve.

Scarcity is reflected by price.

CCP regulates Scarcity, as has been mentioned previously in this thread, by means of timesinks.

Given enough time, and enough accounts, any amount of anything could be acquired theoretically, but that's not reality.

So, the argument here is really are things scarce enough in eve? If you think no, then is the answer to put a hard limit on what can be had?

Will this limit be tied to average folks online? Will it be tied to number of active accounts?

If not, then this hinders server population growth, as people want things, and if people don't get what they want, they'll likely play less.

If yes, then this become possible to manipulate, and puts you back where you started.

The hard truth is that the only real commodity in EVE.. is ..the players time spent in the game.

CCP correctly uses this to create scarcity in certain items.

Deadspace loot, faction loot, t3 components, and even t2 components are pricey, because they are more scarce, because they take more time to acquire and turn into usable items.

T1 stuff and lesser loot drops are not all that scarce. It would be a mistake, I think to make the very basic items needed to enjoy the game either costly or scarce.

Effectively this was ALREADY tried by CCP some years ago, and it failed.

Whenerver a resource would deplete in one region or system, and be abundant in another-- it did not generate 'exciting PVP and war', it generated petitions, player complaints, and people who would rather go play some other game.

EVE is not the only video game in existance; if you remove something people are used to and generate a sense of unfairness in its place, all of a sudden /other/ games look a whole lot more fun to play.

The exciting thing you are imagining would happen... did not happen.

Not exactly, this is not a discussion about highsec vs 0.0 - although I understand that a poorly balanced mechanism could create the issue you mentioned.

Consider that only systems that have reached a certain established threshold of depletion would gradually get depleted. Let's take for instance 90% and asteroid belts - if all of the system's belts have less than 10% left of what they had at DT, only then would you see the 1% decrease.

While I do agree highsec is very crowded (too crowded for my liking - woops, did I say too much?) and having lived in all zones of space except w-space (which I only had the pleasure to farm sleepers in occasionally), I honestly doubt ALL of highsec belts get depleted to less than 10%. If this was the case, people would be going into low-sec or null to mine asteroids in the final hours before downtime...

This change is meant to stimulate seasonal movement across your own comfortable security zone. It is meant to stimulate fighting over a resource available NOW to prevent me from moving to another area SOONER.

Here is a discussion about limiting ore belts. It should help refine this topic.