Bad Bobby
Ugly Toys
Zzz
   |
Posted - 2009.02.04 11:44:00 -
[1]
I have been known to run missions occasionally with my pair of Nightmares.
I do this partly to gain standings and make a little extra isk, but mostly I do it to raise my sec status in an easy and relatively predictable way. I need to do this in order to allow myself to yarr while still being able to attend to my hi-sec activities.
I don't even bother to loot as the time required to do so exceeds the time required to gain the same value of isk from shooting more targets. There is rarely anything interesting or unusual in the loot that would make it worth my while looking through the normal dross for the odd shining nugget. Your milage may, of course, vary as a pair of gank Nightmares is a setup particularly balanced towards this style of missioning. With lower DPS vessels the value of looting compared to shooting is different.
What this is leading to is my suggestion that mission loot is, by and large, very dull. You get a lot of low quality stuff that has little value beyond reprocessing. It is also the case that T1 loot drops compete with player produced T1 so as to make it comparitively difficult to make isk from manufacturing these entry level items.
My suggestion, therefore, is:
1. Remove all T1 loot from drops. Players can make it, NPCs don't need to drop it. This helps entry level industrialists and also reduces the amount of vanilla loot that gets automatically reprocessed by mission runners.
2. Reduce the overall volume of loot dropped (and by doing so reduce the reprocessable mineral content of the loot dropped) while increasing the average quality of the loot. Replacing the removed T1 with smaller drops of named items achieves this.
3. Introduce low probability drops of rarer and more desirable items like faction, implants, skillbooks etc that will not be reprocessed and will instead be used or traded. This will also make it more desirable to actually bother checking wrecks due to the chance of finding something of significant value.
I see these steps resulting in the same value gained by mission runners who already loot, but with less to be gained by reprocessing of that loot. Less minerals enter the marketplace from mission loot which allows supply & demand to raise the price of minerals. Miners then get more of a monopoly on mineral creation therefore making their profession more valued and attractive.
However, for this to work without encouraging more macro miners and sweatshop farmers we will need to take steps to allow the EVE community to police the mining community effectively. To do this we must be able to comit concord sanctioned aggression against miners, which means we need to be able to war dec them, which means they need to be outside of noob corps. This element is not something I've given a great deal of thought but my first thought would be to prevent players in noob corps from undocking in T2 ships. This would allow noobs to continue being noobs for as long as they wish but prevent them from moving into hulks or anything else advanced before they move out into a player or FW corp. |