So CCP has been cracking down on gold farmers hardcore. Players have been complaining about the macro miners in Eve almost since day one and they are finally getting their way. I'm not entirely sure how CCP is catching them all but with their advanced stat tracking it would probably be easy enough to tell if someone was macro mining based on their lack of system jumping, excessive play time, only flying mining ships, etc.
Players are claiming systems that were once hot zones for macro miners are now vacant and the belts are plentiful. I would love to see a statistic on just how many players were banned in this macro mining massacre.
The interesting side effect of banning all the macro miners is that the market is no longer flooded with cheap minerals. This is great for the industrial players as they can now sell minerals for a much higher price. With the jump in mineral prices many of the larger corps have taken time off from the pew pew to do some massive mining ops.
However with the massive jump in mineral prices, everything else gets a price bump. Ships, modules, rigs, are all jumping up in price again. It will be interesting to see if this sets eve back.. Will players want to risk PVP less now that their ships cost so much?
The industrialist in me likes the banning of macro miners. It means more money if I choose to go into the mining business. The Fighter in me doesn't like the change as now its even more risky to do PVP. Perhaps this is the flaw in current risk vs reward setup as it hardly pays to pirate.
To balance this out, CCP should allow pirates to commandeer enemy ships. This is how it could work. There would be a new electronics warfare module that can be activated when a ship has no armor or shields left. When activated it will have a 15 second cycle that gives the players a 25% (percentage variable based on skills and ship sizes) chance to eject the pilot from their ship. Once ejected the pilot can try to flee but cannot redock with the ship for an allotted period of time. Once in low armor a ship can only be hacked by this device once.
This would make pirating much more realistic. In real life pirates take the vessel and then can sell it or use it for themselves. If a team of cruisers goes after a battleship there is now a significant chance of winning a 100 million isk ship.
Posts
At first read, this idea doesn't necessarily have much appeal. For one thing, I think it would be overcomplicated to implement in a balanced way. For another, dedicated pirates can profit even if their earnings only come from piracy. 3.6 billion in loot sales for the Bastards last cycle and many hundreds of millions in successful ransoms and passes sold speak to that possibility. If anything, the upward trend in mineral prices and modules has helped us profit more. Loot sells for more, people are more willing to pay for ransoms and passes to save their ships.
ReplyDeleteGreat topic...I look forward to seeing what others have to say about it.
Interesting points. I definitely have more thinking to do on the subject. But I can't deny that the idea of a poor player being able to jump into a nice battleship from their cruiser sounds somewhat appealing to me. I mean if the guy isn't going to pay the random why should you be forced to obliterate his perfectly good ship?
ReplyDeleteLets throw the "realism in EVE" argument out the window. EVE can have immense depth without having to cripple its design with real-world analog.
ReplyDeleteI don't see the situation requiring additional balance in favor of pirates. There's mention of risk, but then balance of risk is.. more risk? As you say, more risk runs the -- ahem -- risk of players just not bothering to take changes with their hardware, so ultimately it's a self-defeating proposal overall.
As with everything EVE, the addition of a new feature invariably would be accompanied with some manner of counter. Assuming for a moment that the idea is sound, what would be the effective countermeasure? Suggesting some sort of anti-skill which reduces the percentage chance of forced ejection would be an easy cop out.
Ship boarding has been something folks have asked for in EVE for years, I just don't see the progression of logic from Gold Farmers to Pirate Woes to Boarding Parties.