Ashaai
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Posted - 2011.04.19 20:34:00 -
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Let me be perfectly clear that I think anomalies are a god-awful boring pve mechanic. The greatest danger to me in an anomaly is that my intel channel is bad/behind and in the 30 seconds it takes me to kill a random spawn of scramming frigates, an entire gang of reds piles into the system, finds me and kills me. In other words, not dangerous at all. They're also not interesting, because the faction spawn and escalation mechanics are completely random and fairly rare. They might not be rare when you can see the big picture (for all I know it's a 1/10 or 1/5 chance), but as a pilot, I have gotten 1 escalation ever from an anomaly and a negligible number of faction spawns.
All anomalies are good for, then, are fueling the war machine. Pilots need isk to buy ships to get their ships blown up in fights. They're not serving in and of themselves a major source of entertainment. People are upset because their means to an end have been removed, which causes them to be less inclined to participate in the risk aspects of EVE. That might be too meta for this thread, but whatever.
For me personally, once the change was announced, I decided to train up my exploration and profession skills (scanning, hacking, archaeology and salvage). I now spend my nights flying around looking for random crap to run instead of pushing butan on my built in scanner and lazying through anomalies. I'll still run one occasionally, but it's no longer my primary source of income.
Overall I feel like exploration content has been a net gain for me. It's certainly much more random and dependent on what drops I get, but when you find a nanite control skillbook or a nice faction mod or deadspace drop, it makes up for a LOT of bad sites.
Which brings me to my suggestion: I recognize that inflation is a major source of concern in the EVE economy and the rampant isk faucets like anomalies are a major reason why it is a concern. Regardless of any of the reasons listed in Greyscale's devblog, I would wager that the anomaly change was made almost exclusively because of inflation concerns and other justifications were created later because inflation is a really boring reason to make a change like this one.
Along those lines, I think it would make sense to buff faction, deadspace and officer spawns and drops (by "buff" I mean their frequency, not their power), along with associated cosmic signatures in which to find these sorts of things. Players love finding mods because they're shiny and exciting (MUCH more exciting for my purposes than a wallet tick) and they're better for the economy for two reasons. First, they have to be purchased with existing isk instead of magically created faucet isk like bounties. Second, unlike isk, they can be destroyed (either in transit or in combat), and destruction (or conflict), as we're often told, is what fuels this game.
So, long story short: anomaly nerf changed my gameplay, though arguably for the better, but a good way to maintain the fight against inflation but keep players happy would be to make fewer bounties and more "special" mod drops. This puts a damper on isk inflation while making players feel like they're getting something in return, instead of where we are now, where entire regions of space are worthless and lame.
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