KalOfTheRathi
Nec Tributis
1259
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Posted - 2014.04.30 01:47:00 -
[1] - Quote
What used to happen was the ISK payout from 5-16th was decent. If you didn't die Excessively then you could make a profit and play the game. Since the first of 2014, possibly earlier, CCP/Shanghai has been dramatically reducing the ISK payout for the lower positions. There is less ISK paid to the losing side and the maximums are more based on doing material damage then anything else that is apparent, to me anyway.
One might suspect that they got nervous about the vast amounts of ISK in the current Dust economy and decided to reduce it by making playing Dust a money losing proposition. Of course the reasons there are huge amount of ISK is only because of CCP/Shanghai and some of their earlier practices.
Now new players are struggling. And players that have not been aligned with a Corp that was raking in the huge ISK payments from the Broken For Months District Locking Exploit In PC that was something else decided, coded and installed in the game by our very own CCP/Shanghai. What goes around comes around doesn't it.
The current throttling of ISK is a detriment to fun. It makes Mercs even more concerned about earning enough ISK to buy Skill Books (at their obscene prices that have no rhyme or reason beyond EVE does it). Then the gamers become more concerned about gaming the F2P game by ensuring that they will not spend a penny on the game itself. Yet, boosters are not a bad investment overall. If you have a little spare cash you can buy a few and tweak out three to five days of booster and get an extra week of SP for the price. Just start with the full SP cap waiting a few days before shutdown, SP Cap the first week, server shutdown Wednesday, SP resets and SP cap the next week. 190,400SP extra.
But, CCP/Shanghai doesn't understand people wanting to spend money to support them. They understand extorting money from new people by refusing to pay their mercenaries a living wage. One might wonder what they are modeling the Dust economy on, it is partly P2W (Pay 2 Win aka 'not enough time not enough skill - buy AURUM today') and partly on some punitive scheme to make players focus on the 'worst part of the game'. Basically losing money day after day and then needing to AFK farm to get enough cash to buy enough gear to play with.
This is less of a problem once the Merc is a vet. But it definitely is a problem there as well as it is easy to lose money is this game about Immortal Mercenaries in Spaaace.
Welcome to Dust.
And so it goes.
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KalOfTheRathi
Nec Tributis
1264
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Posted - 2014.04.30 06:12:00 -
[2] - Quote
Thumb Green wrote:
Seems to me, the isk made at the end of the match has more to do with one's ratio of the team's total WP's.
Not really. I have done charts on it with logs from before the first of the year*. And WP does make a difference but the High Rewards have been closely tied to destruction of equipment; Installations, tanks, jeeps and Derps and PRO suits seem to make a difference (at least they used to).
What I recall was that we had more fun when we would occasionally lose ISK in a match. Now it is rare to make ISK and the game is decidedly less fun. Who wants to play a game where one of the main rewards you have to have is dribbled out such that you have to play very conservatively (to not lose suits/gear) or AFK to catch back up so you can play again. Seems wrong to me but Dust has fallen to that level. And it seems planned.
Games are less interesting and squads are raging more. Although it is probably because of climate change. 
* I was logging everything because Dust was failing to give me WP for kills. It would show (for example) 6/0 the results would be 6k/3a/0d and the WP was 250WP. WTF? I filed a petition and several bug reports. It doesn't appear to be as bad as it was before but I have not tracked it like I had back then. Since I was logging anyway I logged everything, ISK, WP, kill board position, battle type, win/loss and it told some interesting tales. Not all of them good. The only people in non-PC battles that made 500K or more were destroying tanks left right and center.
And so it goes.
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