Originally by: Morcam

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T1 production is messed up because there are many T1 products you can get for cheaper than they cost to produce, sure. However, that's not because of new players underpricing their modules.

Regardless, I'm not going to argue on this topic.

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It can't be argued that regardless of the specific amount, a LOT of isk comes from L4 missions. For the amount of risk the users take, I think that the amount that comes out is too much. EvE SHOULD be a dangerous game, and it is by design. Risk versus reward should be a part of the game. However, It seems to me that if you theoretically put EvE on a factor of risk/reward, you'll find that L4 missions don't fit.

1/10,000,000
2/20,000,000
10/100,000,000

Missions are more like 0/15,000,000

I am fine with the reward, I just don't like the risk.

So, after that rant... why do I care? I just said it. They don't fit in.

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Originally by: Aldee

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Hmmm I didnt believe the figures ppl gave for running lvl 4 missions so I had to try myself. Running a lvl 4 qty 6 agent with a t2 tanked domi and t1 drones I made about 35-40 mil per hr and that time included picking up loot but not reprocessing or selling that loot but just mission and bounty isk.

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- all L4/L5 agents should be moved to low-sec or 0.0.

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Running a lvl 4 qty 6 agent with a t2 tanked domi and t1 drones I made about 35-40 mil per hr

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Originally by: Straight Chillen

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Simplest fix is to have agent levels determined soley on the secruity of their systems

1.0-0.8 Lvl 1 Agents only
07.-0.5 Addition of lvl 2 agents
0.4-0.3 Addition of Lvl 3 agents
0.2-0.1 Addition of lvl 4 agents
0.0 Lvl 5 agents

problem solved

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Originally by: Soporo

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Edited by: Soporo on 09/08/2008 07:53:53

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- all L4/L5 agents should be moved to low-sec or 0.0.

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Won't happen, thankfully CCP has more sense than ****ing off 3/4 of their customers causing a mass exodus. Those that don't leave will just zerg 3's.

They tried that with level 5's, it was a resounding failure, no one hardly went. Nerfing Empire has never and will never bring people into LowSec.

Why not call for a freekin boost for once, instead of nerfing someone elses palystyle?

Btw, I (and most other people) can make a LOT more money (30-60 m) ratting in a halfway decent 0.0 than level 4 missions. The usual nerf-Empire crowd figures are inflated. 20 is hurrying. 15 is about usual.

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Running a lvl 4 qty 6 agent with a t2 tanked domi and t1 drones I made about 35-40 mil per hr

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Simply bs.

But the nerf Empire crowd has never been about the truth, just their crazy agenda.

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Originally by: Lucy'Lastic

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Moving all lvl 4 agents to lo sec is a great idea.

With a few tweaks it could work.

1- Make these losec lvl 4 missions deal significantly less DPs. Reason being if you are going to run lvl 4s in losec you need a PvP fit because if anybody scans you down you have no chance with a mission fitting.(You need to fit Web, scram, injector, ECCM ,neut etc)Raven pilots are especially effected by having to use mids that would otherwise be used for tank.

2-Nerf scanning. Reason is that Drone users are at a disadvantage because Drones are easy to scan.

3-No standings drop for failed missions because if you're scanned down you will have to abandon the mission.

4-NPCs in losec missions auto aggro everybody that comes into the mission area. Reason is because the NPCs will be targetting the mission runner and he will be fighting the NPCs and the people/persons who scanned down his mission.

5-Make them two or three times more profitable because you have less chance of completing them if scanned.

6-Increase the time you are given to complete the mission to 3 days rather than 6 hours because there is every chance you will be disturbed and have to leave.

7- Add 100 more lvl4 Q20 losec agents because players will be probing in the systems with the decent agents.

There. That's a bit more balanced.

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Originally by: Ruze

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Edited by: Ruze on 08/08/2008 22:10:02

Originally by: McDonALTs

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Edited by: McDonALTs on 08/08/2008 22:01:30
AGENTS ARE MEANT TO BE INFINITE RESOURCE BAISED ON TIME- There are resources you can compete for and those you dont.

Agents NEVER were meant to be a compeating resource. Its all part of a risk v reward balance. You want to make a crappy 15-20mil per hour doing lvl4's? Fine. Youi want to make 10 billion/month spending 3 hours managing a POS (thats approx 3,300mil/hour)? Well, you take the risk putting a billion isk putting a pos up then in hostile space and pray RA or bos's 500man capfleet blob do not see it.

Its Risk Vs Reward, not Compete vs non-compete. Eve NEEDS uncompetitive resources otherwise noobs can never progress beyond a noobship since everything can be compeated away from them.

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I just came back, and started doing level 2 missions to get back 'in the hang of things'. Level 2 and level 3 missions provide a nice reward. For new players, at least from those I've talked to, earning a few mil per mission, like in level 3's, is damn good profit.

Level 4's seem to be less oriented to new players, and more oriented for older players (over three months) as a cash resource. That is perfectly fine, and I don't think anythings wrong with that. But I don't think a counter argument to changing level 4 missions is that they are a new player resource is a accurate or legit.

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Originally by: Dzajic

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Sorry, but that seams highly unlikely. T2 tanked Domi with T2 drones, I top out at ~15 mill/hour. Little worse agent but... not that worse.

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Originally by: Aldee

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Originally by: Dzajic

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Sorry, but that seams highly unlikely. T2 tanked Domi with T2 drones, I top out at ~15 mill/hour. Little worse agent but... not that worse.

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Well maybe I just hit a few awesome missions in a row. I ran missions for 3 hrs and made 120 mil so <shrug>. Maybe my average would go down doing it 23/7 but I'm not willing to risk my sanity to test that. =p

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Originally by: Aldee

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Well it turns out I was lying. I didn't know I had anything on the market and a 50 mil isk sale happened during those 3 hrs. Well I guess thats a relief at those insane profits I thought I was making from missioning I was trying to figure out how to run them 23/7.

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Originally by: Malcanis

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Originally by: Atlas Oracle

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dead horse is dead, but hey don't stop beating it at 2 days of whining, go for a 3rd consecutive tomorrow.

best of luck

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3 days? Oh I'll be doing this until my account expires. Hope you're ready to "adapt and survive", freshmeat.

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Originally by: Somealt Ofmine

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That's wise of you, because you clearly have no clue what you're talking about. I don't mean that as a slight, but you're clearly ignorant of how eve's market works.

Ok, cool, so at the end of the day, your answer comes all the way back to "I don't like it". You don't want anyone in eve to make good money while not risking gettting shot at.

Hate to break it to you bud, but I make far more building stuff and in the market than I do running L4 missions. Should we nerf empire manufacturing and trading too? I mean, afterall, I don't even have to undock to make money trading. Barely even have to undock to make money building. Where does that fall on the Morcam approved risk/reward scale?

Your argument, taken to its logical conclusion, leads all the way back to basically getting rid of Empire altogether, and making it a noob "starter island" like other games have that nobody stays in past their first couple of weeks in the game. You have an interesting game in mind there, but that game isn't Eve. There isn't any point arguing this with you any further. I think we've pretty much hashed it out.

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Originally by: Ruze

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I personally consider the vulnerability of traveling in a hauler or in a freighter to be pretty high risk, even in hisec. These guys aren't free from PvP by any means. In fact, they are (by design, at least) prone to be completely on the receiving end of it.

This is a pretty horrible reasoning, I guess, but it's why I personally don't put trading on my list of 'easy money'. That, and trading requires players in order to even work, as the players are the one contributing buy and sell orders. It is complete PvP, meshed at every step with other players.

So yeah, between the billion isk ship with a big target on it and the cuttrhoat nature of trade in hisec, I don't see 'trading' as an issue.

I've said it before and again, I do think missions being used as an isk grind ARE an issue. For a 90-day player, that's one thing. Getting your feet underneath you, I'm right with you. But as a lifetime endeavor, it should not be as profitable - IN HISEC - as any other profession, especially for the lack of risk. Want to make a profession out of missioning? There are losec agents and even 0.0 pirate corporations.

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Originally by: Amateratsu

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Edited by: Amateratsu on 09/08/2008 18:15:18

Missions have risk...

You can scan down mission runners and enter their mission...
You can steal their loot...
You can salvage their wrecks...
You can steal the mission key item preventing them from completing the mission...
You can bait them and otherwiase generally harass them...
You can aggro the whole room making it more difficult for them to manage...
And you CAN STILL suicide them if you want to...

Having said that, I actually like the idea of limiting the number of missions you can run per agent per day, 1 mission every 4 hours or so.

This would force runners to move around between agents instead of huggin the best Q agent and reduce the lag in the major mission hubs.

Also if you read the features and ideas forum, there is a thread where the devs are concidering the removal of t1 items from loot drops and replacing them with componants for manurfactoring TI and possibly T2 named meta items.

Which will reduce the reporcessing of loot for minerals boosting their value and mining.

Removing missions from hisec is not the answer and will cause more problems than it solves.

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Originally by: Dzajic

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There far too many pirate corps with Moms and dozens of Carriers for it to be possible for any new character corp to "go there themselves and make it safer" (the lowsec that is). It is simply that its far more profitable and easier for them to either individually or jointly as a corp find a zero zero megabloblag alliance willing to take them in.


Best imaginable way to boost low sec imho would be "NO capital ships in lowsec, period." So that when you do gather enough people to break that sensor boosted HICtor camp (great way to go CCP, make blocade runners and WCS completely obsolete), you dont end up with carriers and moms hotdropped on you.

And CCP, do something about drone region minerals, plz, kthanks.

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Originally by: thisismyalt

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While we are on the topic of fountains of endless isk - lets not forget to mention all the moons which are essentially never ending asteroids and the endless supply of officer mods that are plexes.

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Originally by: Ruze

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Originally by: thisismyalt

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While we are on the topic of fountains of endless isk - lets not forget to mention all the moons which are essentially never ending asteroids and the endless supply of officer mods that are plexes.

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Both of which are finite in number and spread out amongst all the stars of nulsec, so that they must be fought and controlled. The number of 'useless' moons far outweighs the good ones.

The chance of getting an officer mod drop is also fairly rare, as is using rats to grind. These are part of that nulsec 'risk' equation, right? The reality is, there are many systems in nulsec that don't give it's owners squat diddly, and there are a spare few that players bank billions from.

Meanwhile, in comparison, Agents are not only stable, infinite, and completely reliable for medium-gross income, with little-to-no risk to the mission runner (besides the mentioned threat of loot and salvage stealing, as one poster pointed out).

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Originally by: Malcanis

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This question came up in another thread, and I started to do a back-of-an-envelope calculation.

Let's say that an agent can serve 175 players at any one time. (Observed in Isinokka recently... a bit laggy, but perfectly managable)

Each player can earn 25M an hour - some more, some less, but lets take that as a kind of average of the figures generally cited on the forum.

175x25x24 = 105 BILLION ISK PER DAY.

That's 3.2 trillion ISK per month.

1 titan every 14 hours.

A fully T2 fitted battleship every 130 seconds.

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Originally by: Veldya

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Originally by: Malcanis

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This question came up in another thread, and I started to do a back-of-an-envelope calculation.

Let's say that an agent can serve 175 players at any one time. (Observed in Isinokka recently... a bit laggy, but perfectly managable)

Each player can earn 25M an hour - some more, some less, but lets take that as a kind of average of the figures generally cited on the forum.

175x25x24 = 105 BILLION ISK PER DAY.

That's 3.2 trillion ISK per month.

1 titan every 14 hours.

A fully T2 fitted battleship every 130 seconds.

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Isinokka is one of the major mission hubs but tends to average about 135 people, tends to fluctuate between 120 and 150 when I an on.

It is not remotely possible to average 25m per hour with level 4s, not even close. Only a handful of missions play anything remotely close to that and those are very long missions. The vast majority of L4s pay significantly less so the base math is way off.

Missions payouts are dynamically calculated, it means the payout of a mission is adjusted based on the average time it takes to complete the mission, there are low and high ceilings. Payouts are then adjusted based on security level and Isinokka is 0.7 so it is not remotely close to a 0.5 system.

Isinokka not only has a very good L4 Spacelan agent but has a very good L1 agent so a chunk of the population aren't even doing L4s.

Probably less than a third of missions have the target in the same system so you have to factor a chunk in Oipo which also has a very good L3 Spacelane agent. Oipo averages 80-100 during my normal time and there are 13 odd agents in that system.

I think overall, on average the agents would be paying similar to mining return. There are a lot of people with sub-par skills that take a long time to churn out the missions, see the number of drakes doing L4s, they would take forever.

CCP would monitor what is earned and the missions are dynamically calculated so the faster people do them, the lower the payouts.

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