Hakawai
State War Academy
Caldari State
61
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Posted - 2017.02.26 09:44:48 -
[1] - Quote
It's obviously possible for players with plenty of SP and personal connections to make a lot of ISk by Alpha standards - the in-game demand for PLEX proves that.
On the other hand the income from PvE activities at Alpha-level SP is badly out of balance at the moment IMO.
What defines EVE is
- "Ownable" territory and POS's to defend and/or improve it
- Permanent loss of equipment when PvPing
The second means that you have to "pay in-game resources to PvP". This can be viewed as either "hardcore PvP" or a paradoxical disincentive for rookies to participate PvP. Either way, Alphas are definitely vulnerable to being forced to grind too much to pay for PvP.
The EVE economy is interesting, but much less so for PvP-interested players at approx 5 mill SP. Excluding scamming or participating in a large group that e.g. blackmails or steals from other players, there's a big SP gap. There's no room in 5 mill for both skills that support combat and for even the basics for participation in the economy that doesn't involve theft, deception, or banditry.
As this thread shows, there aren't all that many options to pay for disposable ships larger than standard T1 destroyers. Since it's easy to show that mining, missions, combat sites etc pay top little, the usual answer is "Wormholes", but the actual average income per hour from wormholes (especially if you can't cloak your ship) isn't enough.
Neither players nor CCP care about providing enough cash flow to low-SP players to pay for PvP. I don't think this is smart for CCP, but in the (approx) ten years I've been away from EVE all they did in that regard was add Ventures (which are (just) enough to pay for disposable T1/T1 Destroyers. At a guess I'd say they'd prefer to let the economy self-balance, and won't do any other targeted economic tuning without input from the player council. Which, since it's somewhat democratic, has enough "fun-vampires" to block anything constructive. Fun-vampires get more tears (and player time wasted) per rookie ship ganked, and hence prefer rookies to be too poor to fly disposable ships any larger than a (conveniently fragile) Destroyer.
On the plus side, this leaves players who aren't happy with the time it takes to fund their PvP with easy choices:
- Try to find a Corp that will solve the income shortfall for you. This requires patience (it could be just a few days, but it could as easily take months), but sooner or later you'll find one that suits your needs
- Try scamming (solo activity, scammers claim it pays well), begging, or perhaps even honest trading
- Buy a PLEX every now and then, as a time-saving income substitute. Note that a PLEX will cover e.g. 30 to 50 combat cruisers for an Alpha, but it probably won't cover a month's worth of BC's (Gnosis for an Alpha): if you use up a PLEX every two weeks you'd be better off subscribing
BTW - Faction Warfare isn't there because I don't have any data. OTOH the earlier post has figures that don't add up. If a PLEX costs 1 billion ISK, and you can make that much reliably in a week via FW, every Alpha looking to fund a PLEX per month (and there are plenty of those) would be doing this. This kind of dissonance is usually caused by something like mistaking "best ever income / time unit) for "average income per time unit" - or by deliberate forum PvP. Asking never leads anywhere, but I'd suggesting "pretend to trust but verify very carefully".
Last point: there have been posts lately (in General Discussion I think) that "Red vs Blue" is becoming active again. Worth checking out - for example as a complement to looking for a nullsec corp. Remember two Alphas costs no more than one. |