Daddrobit
PFB Pink Fluffy Bunnies
466
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Posted - 2014.02.11 12:41:00 -
[1] - Quote
This post is going to be long, so prepare yourself. No TL;DR, just read it.
And a forward apology to Renegade Alliance. I have nothing against you guys personally, but I'll be using you guys for examples a lot here.
Alright, so I've put in a lot of thought and have had a few discussions with others on the matter, and in my opinion, the current iteration of PC is deficient on a few fronts. I'd like to cover them here and highlight a few ways they might be improved.
How Deep Is The Rabbit Hole Again?
Answer: About a foot and a half.
One of the parts that was supposed to be part of the intrigue of the game was how you could either play the game like any other shooter out there and just play pubs to your hearts content OR you could dive down the rabbit hole and see exactly how much the game had to offer through planetary conquest and the integration with EVE in that endeavor. And once you did that, you could really reap in the rewards.
First let me start with the surface element of PC that nags at me: It's a skirmish match with optional orbital support from EVE, not so optional friendly fire, looting, more isk reward, and a set time for when it's going to happen. But that's all there is to it. There's no Feeling of you actually defending your territory and there's no Feeling of you actually conquering an area. The only feeling you get is that your buddies are slightly more uptight, and the feeling that you're seeing slightly more proto gear than a normal pub match.
The solution here could be mildly simple. This is the perfect place for Skirmish 1.0 to be re-introduced. There was only one MCC, which would make sense in the scenario of PC. If you already own an installation then that is your command center, therefore you would have no use for a MOBILE command center. Whereas someone who was attacking you with no or very little foothold would. Skirmish 1.0 really promoted the feeling of moving in on a defended area, and that you were there to take it. And defending made out in much the same way.
You guys over at Shanghai have smoothed over most of the glaring technical problems that were going on back in the early closed beta, come on, it time to bring Skirmish 1.0 back.
Next is my problem with the system we currently have with the EVE integration. Currently the way it sits is that it really doesn't promote or require an EVE presence to speak of to be really successful and I see this as a two part problem with a possible remedy I'll give after I'm done with explaining the problems.
Now of course EVE support helps it helps but it's nearly completely unnecessary to take and hold districts. Let's take a look at Renegade Alliance for our example. Head over to http://www.dustcharts.com/ and click on 'District Ownership' in the sidebar on the left. What you'll see is that they currently own just under 45% of all districts in the game, that's 109 districts.
Now lets take a look at what their EVE side is doing. https://zkillboard.com/alliance/99002832/page/1/
I only went back 10 pages into the history of kills/deaths but that's still nearly 2 weeks of data to draw from. I'll paraphrase what I see happening there. I could identify roughly 24-25 different battles going on where there were EVE strikes involved, However there were only 4 that were done by Renegade Alliance pilots. And yes, while they are up there killing lots of ships, they were still getting massacred as evidenced by the huge streaks of red dropsuits indicating their losses on the ground.
But regardless, by only utilizing EVE support in the endeavor of actually killing other mercs in roughly one out of every six matches, they are able to control half of Molden Heath.
And you know what, I wouldn't even have a problem with that if it weren't for...
The Rewards.
The income generated by one clone sold is 150,000 isk. RA owns 109 districts, 14 Production Facilities, 8 Reasearch Labs, and 87 Cargo Hubs. This means that if they were to be producing clones out of all of them, they'd have an income of 1,338,000 isk per day.
That's 1.3 Billion Isk Per Day!
That's not an isk faucet, it's a goddamned waterfall.
And how far down was that rabbit hole again? The integration required to be overwhelmingly wealthy and successful isn't really like diving down the rabbithole, so much as it's more like sitting on a comfy pillow next to the hole while occasionally bending over to stick your arm in to push a button. |
Daddrobit
PFB Pink Fluffy Bunnies
466
|
Posted - 2014.02.11 12:42:00 -
[2] - Quote
So here's my proposed solution to this in 3 parts.
First off, dam up the isk waterfall. Hard. I'm talking make the isk payouts 1/5 of what they currently are if not less. This still puts some money in your pocket, but we need to stem the flow, we'll never have an open player market with something like this producing billions of isk for a teensy percentage of the population of Dust.
Second, make the reward not so much the isk gained, but make it into a gear production system. Here's a tentative idea of how I would make it work.
You could give a corp role to a member(s) of the alliance/corp like Equipment Manager or some such. Then that person would go into the district control tab and select a district. He would then select the type of gear he wants that district to generate. Then, every day that the district is unlocked, it's generating gear that would go into the alliance/corporation hanger to be divvied up to the members as necessary.
While this might seem like a tedious and or boring task, quite frankly everybody's gotta take their lumps and you have ditricts to manage. And you could give the role to multiple people to make the work load lighter. This role would not include the ability to let go of the district or anything silly, they would just simply be the guys that tells the districts what to produce.
This is (again, tentative) idea on how the gear production would work.
Each district would have 8 production areas: Suits, Guns, Suit Modules, Equipment, Vehicles, Large Turrets, Small Turrets, and Vehicle Modules.
At any given time, each district can produce from 4 of those areas.
Each district would produce only prototype gear, (or standard vehicles since that's the best we have) and it would produce it in sets.
So if you chose the Dropsuits category, and selected the Gallente Assault, it would after 24 hours produce 15 or so prototype Gallente Assault dropsuits.
You would then be able to select 3 other categories and get a set of 'X' amount of that gear after 24 hours as well.
I would top off the maximum value of any given set produced at in and around 1,000,000 isk. So you could be generating 4,000,000 isk worth of gear off a district at any given time. If this seems low when compared to the 12-15 mil straight isk they earn right now, I'll explain why in a bit.
And here's the third way to help make the rabbit hole a little deeper: better rewards for the EVE side folks.
Make the EVE folks Want this game to succeed, and make them Want to be a part of it. The EVE bonuses we have right now are ok, but that's all they are, just 'ok'. We can keep them as they are, but here's where we can really start making that EVE/Dust connection.
Make it so that you can give that Equipment Manager title to an EVE side person and then if that person does the gear management from a station in the same system as the district that's generating it, give the gear generated a bonus of up to %100 based on the EVE characters Industry skill.
So now that 15 dropsuits we were talking about earlier just turned into 30. And that 4 million isk tag turned into 8 million.Not too terribly far off from the straight isk made now actually.
But how does that make the EVE guy want to do this?
Simple: give him isk. Nothing in EVE motivates people to do things more than isk. Give the industry guys more things to do other than sit in a belt mining watching their strippers cycle and wait for their production timers to tick away, all while giving them a small isk faucet. Have some lore about it making it easier on station staff or some silly thing, (you guys at CCP are good at making that stuff up) and toss the eggers a couple mil for jumping around lowsec doing district management. They'd probably be all over it.
So In Conclusion!
Doing these things would help kill the overwhelming income of straight isk that PC currently brings in, while still producing the gear corporations need to function at that level even without EVE support, all while making PC more than just a glorified skirmish match and increasing the interest level that EVE players have in the game, as well as encourage Dust players to seek them out.
Anyways, it's 5:30 in the morning and I'd love to hear your input on my suggestions here. Especially if they have a blue tag. 
Have a good one! |