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Kristoff Atruin
Subdreddit
Test Alliance Please Ignore
2017
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Posted - 2014.04.07 14:42:00 -
[1] - Quote
Couple of thoughts here. Owning land should be profitable, which means passive isk needs to be part of it. The big selling point for Dust is that you'll fight to keep something you built. Without some means of earning a profit from owning land, why do you want to take it in the first place? If the answer is prestige and bragging rights then the battles are as meaningful as a Quake deathmatch. That idea turns owning land into glorified pub matches. I don't want to take control of territory so I can pound my chest and yell about how great we are. I want to take it because that particular piece of territory provides a strategic and fiscal advantage - something it needs to do on both the Dust and Eve sides.
Now, my main point. Reading through this thread the biggest problem seems to be that a very tiny number of players can control massive territories and collect all that isk. It seems to me that the biggest issue is that Dust mercs don't exist in New Eden, but on some ethereal plane that lets us teleport anywhere. This is a big problem that the Dust team needs to figure out a design for in general so that we feel like we actually exist in New Eden, but in PC it would drastically change the strategic landscape.
For example, lets say that your corp owns districts in MH. What I propose, until a proper transportation method is created, is that if you want to participate in PC that you have to select one of your districts as your home base. When you do this, your local changes to that system. You can change your home once a day (or two, or whatever), and another corp can invite you to base out of their district. If a battle occurs anywhere in that system, or a neighboring one no problem...you can deploy into that battle. If you're on a research lab SI, you can go one or two jumps further. This one simple change would drastically increase the opportunity for players to participate in PC. You wouldn't be able to have a handful of guys run around and throw piles of ringers into battles all over the place. You could still use ringers, but you'd have to do more than press a couple buttons and it would commit the ringer to your location for a while meaning they can't fight elsewhere.
Some kind of similar treatment would need to happen with clone packs. Letting them only attack within a certain distance of Genolution stations, or something like that. It would be ridiculously cool if something like this was part of Dust. We'd have news reports about the opening of a second front in a war, etc.
PC 1.0 was a science experiment and it's been a big fail. I think the whole thing really needs to be scrapped and replaced with something better, but making your location matter would go a long way toward making the system we have now actually interesting. |
Kristoff Atruin
Subdreddit
Test Alliance Please Ignore
2017
|
Posted - 2014.04.07 14:59:00 -
[2] - Quote
Soraya Xel wrote:Kristoff Atruin wrote:Couple of thoughts here. Owning land should be profitable, which means passive isk needs to be part of it. This isn't true. It should, in fact, cost money to hold a district. However, active combat in PC should be extremely profitable. So your income comes from actively using the district, either via attacking or defending and winning. This encourages people to fight instead of sitting on what they have. Therefore, you want to massively increase the payout in PC for clones lost in combat, while massively nerfing the payout of excess clones generated from holding the district (or eliminating it entirely). Then you have more reason to fight than to blue up.
Fighting as the only income source makes it a glorified pub match, and it only works when mercs are gods who can be everywhere at once. If you were smart and captured territory in such a way that you had districts that were difficult to attack, you should receive some kind of profit from those districts. The fact of the matter is that taking districts is a HUGE investment and I shouldn't have to hope for people to attack me and us to win in order to see a return on that investment. That would make it a bad investment, since there is no guaranteed date for when you'll go into the black.
The only way this would work is if there was a taxable form of PVE available on the districts. This could become the kind of timerless PC fight so many people have been begging for. ie: people are roaming around on a district hunting drones and suddenly, bam...ambushed! No risk of losing your land while you're asleep, but the attackers could do a small amount of damage and make some isk out of it. |
Kristoff Atruin
Subdreddit
Test Alliance Please Ignore
2026
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Posted - 2014.04.09 04:43:00 -
[3] - Quote
We can buy as many clone packs as we want without penalty for a good reason, it's impossible to actually stop us from buying them using shell corporations. I think the solution there isn't to limit the purchase of them, but limit the usefulness of them without making them weak.
Something like this: buff the number of clones in the pack, but only allow them to be deployed to planets within 2 jumps of a Genolution station or highsec. If you want to own large chunks of territory then, you need to attack and defend with the clones you made yourself. This makes the lab bonus meaningful, limits the usefulness of them but still gives new corps the chance to carve out a piece of the pie at the edge of the region.
I think the problems of PC can be boiled down to the fact that the design was built around the idea of location / geography being an important factor, and then the system we got threw that part out the window. Without that the mechanics required to make it work at all caused the system to become unstable and collapse. |
Kristoff Atruin
Subdreddit
Test Alliance Please Ignore
2034
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Posted - 2014.04.10 03:00:00 -
[4] - Quote
Another idea would be to cut down the value for automatic clone sales by quite a bit, and have one particular SI that holds a lower max number of clones but receives more isk per clone on manual sales. ie: the facility is better at preparing / storing clones, so a higher percentage of them arrive at the destination in good condition. So what you would ideally do is have some factories, a central cargo district and sales points to get your isk out. If you want to make isk then some point of your supply chain gets weakened, and due to clone movement attrition you want them close together. If someone takes out part of that chain or locks it by attacking, your income goes down.
To go with that we'd need to be able to transfer clones to other corporations, so if I didn't have a sales district I could sell my clones to someone who does with them taking a portion of the profit.
Not hotfixable, but it's an idea. |
Kristoff Atruin
Subdreddit
Test Alliance Please Ignore
2094
|
Posted - 2014.04.16 14:59:00 -
[5] - Quote
Duke Noobiam wrote:Let me start by saying that I don't have a complete understanding of how PC works, so please forgive any false assumptions that I may have made.
So let me start by defining the problem as I understand it, please correct me if I am wrong... From what I understand, the current "problem" is that....
1. Corporations that hold districts in MH can sell unused clone packs / biomass to an NPC entity (Genolution). This is only really a problem because of #2.
2. Corporations are colluding to lock districts in mock battles to ensure other corps cannot challenge them for their districts.
My idea is to fix the price of clone packs and biomass to the demand generated by PC battles. In other words, more clone deaths reduces the availability of clones and raises the price of clone packs for both selling and buying. The opposite would also be true, fewer clone deaths increases the supply of clones therefore reducing the price of clone packs.
The actual price could be set by the NPC entity (Genolution) based on ratios along with upper and lower limits to the price range.
This would make it cheaper for corporations to buy clone packs to attack when there is little action in PC as well as discourage district locking as this would drive down the price of clone packs.
I think this idea is basically where CCP has been going all along, but instead of a back end system managing the price it would be a player market. They've said many times that they want clones to be something that players trade. I think once we have a market and a set of PVE systems that inject enough isk to keep the economy afloat, what will happen is clones will be something a corp will buy from other players. Then instead of injecting massive piles of isk it simply moves it around.
Problem is right now the producers and consumers are the same group. |
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