Vrain Matari wrote:CCP Rattati wrote:Vrain Matari wrote:
In terms of my personal playstyle, power cores are a net gain. In terms of my investment in New Eden, magic bpo dropsuits are a net loss. In terms of the player experience in Dust, power cores are valuable if they improve performance/content.
How much, in terms of in-match frames per second, menu loading times & new assets, will implementing power cores bring to Dust?
OK, they cost one ISK because they are mass manufactured and the power comes from the modules that are expensive. Now they are no longer BPO's. Does it change anything in the economy? No. Does it no longer violate New Eden's rule of no BPO's. Yes. Then it must be better, right?
The real question is do we someday want players in New Eden manufacturing Dust assets from in-game resources?
When i say immersion-breaking that's really what i'm getting at - the idea that someday we will be integrated with EVE. In which case the 1 ISK dropsuit doesn't make much sense, except in an arbitrary technical 'letter of the law' sense.
Why not design Dust in a way that is consistent with the universe it's embedded in?
I want you to do something:
Do some research of what 1 ISK is supposed to be worth in New Eden.
Hint: You could buy Google with 1 ISK, from what I last read.
1 ISK is not peanuts. That's why the BPO makes sense - 1 ISK is nothing to immortals, meaning that our employers are likely to just throw the suits at us for free, as the complicated parts are in the power core.
At the same time, even a BPO (i.e. a suit that is so cheap that you don't even calculate its value) suit might be 0.01 ISK, which would still be an insane amount of money for any non-immortal. Enough to buy your own ******* island or something like that.
Always keep in mind the scale.
Just look at your real clothes. A shirt is ten bucks, maybe.
The material for the shirt is maybe one buck. And then there's two cents or so that go to the person who made your shirt.
Ten bucks is nothing for you and for two bucks, you'd buy t-shirts in bulk. The two cents for assembling the shirt are so cheap that you'd consider them a rounding error. You'd throw those two cents away if they didn't fit into your wallet.
The price of the shirt stems entirely from the material and the shipping. The assembly never factors into it.
And that's exactly how BPO dropsuits work. The price of the dropsuit is so neglegible that it's nothing to an immortal. Meanwhile, the person who assembled your t-shirt actually considers two cents per shirt to be real pay. Similar to how 1 ISK could buy you Greece.
Note: I took these numbers out of thin air and based them on past exploitation scandals. I have no idea if they are actually that bad, or even worse.