Hatchet Annie
Insult to Injury
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Posted - 2008.11.27 22:13:00 -
[1]
Prism - as a principle, boosting isk-making possibilities in lowsec WILL increase it's population. I think you're complicating things unnecessarily and over-psychologizing by making the opposite prediction.
HOWEVER, the problem is not as binary as "increase rewards or don't increase rewards" - we need to be more creative about this.
I think this poster is on the right track. As it is, missions are too static, the best mission systems simply become mission busting hubs (Egghelende is another excellent example), and no boost in the world will ever entice intelligent mission runners to start doing missions in such places.
Thus, I believe part of the solution, and a totally necessary one, is to make agent locations more dynamic. Maybe by using a system where an agent that goes unused accumulates more and more earnable rewards over time. This would mean that mission runners would have to travel more to find the real goodies, but at the same time, pirates wouldn't be able to catch them anywhere as easily as in mission hubs where they have BMs that put them in pursuit probe range at any given warp gate location.
Also, how about storyline missions where you can choose in which direction you want to go, for certain stages in it - like, one way puts you in hisec, and the other in a nearby lowsec system, but with a way higher reward.
I also agree with the people calling for more content in general in lowsec. The booster production thing was a step in the right direction - but don't stop there!! And more exploration in general is good - in particular as it isn't static as far as location is concerned.
Lastly, to Prism and CCP in general, how about a change in how you look at introducing changes in general? Don't wait for years until the perfect solution appears. In a game as dynamic and complex as this - how can you ever hope to perfectly predict player reactions to game changes? In the case of increasing lowsec activity, if you want to know how people react to increased rewards for instance - just test it!! If the reaction is negative and it turns out that it actually just lessens the population in lowsec - just roll back and set the rewards to how they were before!
Small incremental changes, studying player reaction in between....rather than thinking too hard and too long and ending up with massive changes that are hard to recall due to them for instance having massive impacts on the market (like nerfing damps by not only introducing scripts, but also nerfing their strength in general, as well as their corresponding rigs....AT THE SAME TIME!! - here you could have stopped at the scripts, seen how that went down, then taken one more step if necessary....etc.) |