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Thursday, March 26, 2009

You're doing it wrong

I dipped into the eveonline forums yesterday. And I noticed a similar thread of comments coming out of various rather pessimistic trolls that Apocrypha came "pre-nerfed". Ahem. To all the trolls who say that, I point to the title of this post. They're a bunch of twits.

Last night two of my pilots went to town on a few sites in the wormhole we've set up shop in. After duo'ing for a while they took a break and packaged up their loot and salvage in a can for eventual shipping to high-sec. Later on they went out again with 4 other fellow pilots.

At this point I do a run into the wormhole with my hauler to get the goods out. Segregating the loot by op picking up the reaction results and other stuff, It all gets out and over to where the stuff has to go. Side note we're running a share system for the T3 resources since the turn arround on that risks being rather long as per my last post - serious demand will wait till more manufacturers come online. So count up the resources and send out the shares. Then I take care of "the blue loot"...

That's when I ask them how long they were at their duo kill fest... 1h you say... Holy f**k...

First op blue loot: over 100mil split 2 ways. 2nd op over 100mil split 6 ways. Note that this is without selling a single piece of salvage or converting it into components. Just the Blue loot. Just in isk (from the equivalent of bounties) they made 50mil each in an hour then made 17mil each more in a probably much shorter period of time. Now both these pilots are rather skilled at drake tanking. And a system with shield bonuses helps that out immensly. But still that was a solid income. Not to mention when we get this stuf converted into T3 components they'll have a share of that and eventualy manufactured sub-systems and hulls.

That flat out beats ratting in 0.0. It flat out beats level 4 missions. I've come to the conclusion that wormhole space is NOT pre-nerffed. The trolls simply lack skill to take advantage of the oportunities offered. I'm glad I didn't listen to the nay sayers. I suspected they were blowing smoke up peoples asses, glad that my suspicions proved correct.

I suspect that w-space income is going to scale much better with player/character skill than the mission system. There are a lot of pilots in my alliance that would not have been able to duo what these two did. The rest of us need to re-fit and re-arm to take advangate of the situation and learn from these two. But even the lower income level was very respectable when compared to level 4's. My conclusion is that if your skills allow you to sleep thru level 4's then wormhole space potentialy offers much greater rewards. If not it's simply another option compared to level 4's (should those get a bit too repetitive).

I have come to the conclusion that Sleepers, although they definitly are better than the standard rats and you do need to come in groups to reap the benefits, they are sill not PvP equivalent. For one thing they do not warp out when they notices they are taking a pounding. CCP needs to start having the rats do that if they want to truely get things on a PvP footing. Not sure it will happen. What they need to do is once a wave has taken 50% casualties they need to warp off and then come back with wave 2 and warp back onto the battlefield. And the 3rd wave needs to warp off and re-inforce another site randomly in the system. Then we might start seeing closer to PvP fits in W-space.

4 comments:

Kyle Langdon said...

Great post! And there really is no point in reading the General forums of EVE-O. Trolls are always whining about something.

I do have to disagree with one point though.
"For one thing they do not warp out when they notices they are taking a pounding. CCP needs to start having the rats do that if they want to truly get things on a PvP footing."

This would be a problem in my opinion. Since AI never has, nor ever will, be as good as a human pilot the fact that a string of commands notices that the ship is getting low on armor/structure cause it to warp out. By doing this you will have every NPC or in this case Sleeper warping out near the end of its life. This will breed boredom and soon players will stop doing this because you can't warp scram every single NPC, which in my opinion seems like a needless addition.

Benoit CozmikR5 Gauthier said...

But there could be all sorts of AI traits: NPC that warp out at the first sign of damage; NPC that fights to the bitter end; NPC that's very aggressive and goes all out and gank at point-blank range; NPC that jams you and snipes you from 50+ km. And everything in between all that.

The day I see an NPC throw a warp bubble I'll probably jump for joy even as I get popped :))

Letrange said...

@Kyle You scale the rewards for the rats being much tougher to actually kill so it would even out and it would be MUCH more PvP like

@Coz As my ex-Cyclone can attest they tackle quite well thank you.

Kyle Langdon said...

I don't know. Maybe it's me but the fun I get out of PVP is just that: fighting against other players. I can brag when I beat someone for whatever reason or learn a lesson from a loss. When I got against an NPC I am looking for a challenge but the point of the NPC isn't bragging rights. Trying to turn PVE into PVP seems impossible because AI can never truly emulate the creativity of humans. Sure you can set parameters for them to do certain things but if you fight them enough you can start to get a feel of how they act. That's what seperates us from them and it seems pointless to try to bring the two together completely. Now don't get me wrong. I love fighting the Sleepers, they keep you on your toes and are a great new challenge. But if I found out that they warped out when they took a certain amount of damage seems defeating.

Oh and Cozmik they've got a lot of that already :) the Sleeper turrets are truly scary and if changes the way you approach complexes.

P.S. I don't think that scaling the rewards will balance out the effort put into PVP like NPCs. I don't think there should be an incentive for PVP besides what there already is. Excitement, glory, and all of that. NPCs just seem blah.