Iv been calling for passive only gain since day 1 they will never do it though

It's a good idea and I'd be all for it, the worry that pops up for me though is the sheer number of people that would just create tons and tons of accounts (since they are free) and farm farm farm SP. Then sometime later when you CCP starts to allow the sale of characters these people will make ISK like crazy selling all their still - unallocated mercs.


/c

I am presuming that this has already been done on a mass mass scale. Its the only thing that makes sense with the number of characters created but actual small playerbase. At its peak Dust only hit 9k players.

But won't it make getting active SP a grind with no bonus SP? The split between veterans and noobs is already there and never going away. I think its just time to uncap SP and increase the rewards for actually playing i.e more SP for more WP. At least with this noobs only have to grind for a month instead of six to be competitive.

A better solution would be to eliminate the SP/leveling system all together.

Not only would it solve the AFK problem but would solve a 100 other problems this game has.

Iv been calling for passive only gain since day 1 they will never do it though

Is OP saying remove passive SP gain?

Is OP saying remove passive SP gain?

interesting reason to make basically all SP gain passive.....but this will never be done. CCP set up the game so that time in game is how you earn most of your SP because they want ppl to have to spend hours playing their game to max out. If you got a reasonable rate of return for your WP/SP conversion then I would probably only need about 10-15 games to max out in a week.

I like the idea but to be fair the passive SP should decrease if one doesn-¦t play regularily. Also should there be a active part.

The thing is, the reason a lot of us log in and why a lot of people AFK is artificial. It exists because of in-game time-based SP gain. Take away that artificial reason and yes, fewer people would log in every day on a religious basis. However, they may come to enjoy the game more and see it as less of a job, which will extend the life of the game by reducing player burnout/frustration.

A long time ago in an Internet Spaceship game you're all familiar with, pilots were unable to directly warp onto gates. Instead they could only warp 15km distance from them. The reasoning behind this decision was that CCP wanted to make travel hazardous, provide opportunity for those that wished to fight and kill, make the galaxy seem larger, and gates were that natural chokepoint that would allow this.

People, however, have an inherent tendency for risk aversion and to seek any and all advantages to survival and time, and so some enterprising pilot soon came up with the idea of bookmarks that would allow him to warp directly onto gates. The mechanics of how bookmarks worked are not as important as the effect on the game. Bookmarks sucked up server/database resources, and as more and more pilots learnt of the advantages of bookmarks the number of them in game grew exponentially until the load on the server became catastrophic.

The devs of course tried various workarounds to prevent the use of these bookmarks, but without success. Just as soon as a stopgap solution had been implemented the players found a way around it, until eventually CCP learnt an important lesson about player behaviour and allowed warping directly onto gates and removed the bookmarks. Overnight the lag reduced and EVE is a much better, faster game for it.

Dust has a similar problem in AFKing.

AFKing exists because mercs are able to draw an advantage from it, increase their rewards while minimizing their risks, making use of their limited time for competing tasks. Currently, the problem with AFKing is mostly limited to the irritation it causes the other players on the AFKers team. However, any merc in game is using server resources, and as the total number of Dust mercs (hopefully) grows, the amount of load that these inactives put on the server will also grow.

CCP will of course attempt to fix the problem in various ways, as they tried with bookmarks in EVE. First they will remove skillpoint gain for mercs in the MCC. So players will simply AFK on the ground beneath the MCC. Then to counter that CCP will remove skillpoint gain for those in the redline. So players will simply AFK one step outside the redline, behind a rock. After that, there's nowhere else to go really, other than to remove skillpoint gain for time spent in game. This, of course, would increase the perception of Dust's grind. So you might increase warpoints to counter that, but this would increase the skillpoint gap between active good and organised players and casuals.

My point is, as with bookmarks in EVE there is no way to keep time linked skillpoint gain in Dust without players finding a simple workaround, whilst removing it altogether and increasing the rewards for activity just increases the gap between the better and older mercs versus newbies. Newbies, of course, are the lifeblood of any game and if they stop coming the game dies a slow but certain death. So, rather than jump through the million hoops that CCP did with bookmarks in EVE before capitulating to the logical thing, CCP ought to do it with Dust early on in its history. And just what is that logical thing?

Remove in-game time based skillpoint gain and add that 'lost' weekly 190k to passive skillpoint gain. No more AFKers. Reduced load on server. Reduced teammate irritation. No greater increase in the gap between better and older mercs versus newbies than exists currently. Players log on because they WANT to, not because they feel they HAVE to in order to stay competitive, which reduces the perception of grind and thereby burnout