Dersen Lowery
Drinking in Station
1424
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Posted - 2015.01.12 18:29:00 -
[1] - Quote
Your theme is "chaos and hilarity," but your main concern seems to be min/maxers who reduce everything to a handful of optimized numbers and then complain that they're not having any fun. That's their problem, not anyone else's.
Your great example, Barleguet, already happened. It happened before the latest round of buffs to lowsec, if memory serves. Chaos and hilarity are already available to anyone who wants them. The people who are running high-sec incursions instead of living in wormholes would rather run high-sec incursions than live in wormholes. They might not want to admit that to themselves, because it's ~so hardcore~ to live in a C6 (or sov null, for that matter), but there they are. When I lived in W-space, I actually lived there, because I wanted to. I took an income hit relative to running L4s in high sec, but that was worth the trade of not having to run L4s in high sec. I would rather throw RL money at PLEX than do that, especially if I'm by myself.
That said, I don't disagree with the idea that especially NPC null-sec needs some love. The main problem there is that simply buffing rewards won't do: null-sec anomalies are already the largest ISK faucet in the game, by a comfortable margin, so bumping up the bounties just makes the biggest single faucet even bigger. Not to mention that, because the bounties are fixed amounts, the rewards are divided by the number of participants, and so you have lots of solo anomaly runners and very little teamwork. (It didn't stop us from running anomalies in PVP fleets, but YMMV.)
So the question of how to restructure the rewards in nullsec is an interesting one. If you look at the current model:
1) it penalizes group play;
2) it's a giant ISK faucet;
3) nearly all the rewards are teleported magically into the player's wallet, so interaction with other players in the arenas of the market and logistics are limited to the occasional shiny drop;
4) it's the same old thing, over and over and over again;
5) unlike the L5 agents in Barleguet, they don't scale with population.
So, given those (and feel free to dispute them, I'm open to correction), how would you approach the problem of structuring rewards in null-sec?
Proud founder and member of the Belligerent Desirables.
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