My opinion being, if you can't afford all of your new space, then you probably own too much of it. And if you want to continue to own all of that new space, then you're going to have to look to pruning programs or seeking out sources of income that you wouldn't have had to consider during the boom.
EVE Online is a game of choices. It's about prioritizing. We see this at every level of the game. Ship fitting, for instance. You cannot simply fit all the things onto your ship of choice. You have to make decisions, prioritize the important over the not-so-important. This module for that module, because your ship being able to do thing A is a tad more important to you than it being able to do thing B.
The same should apply to owning sovereignty and managing the alliance that controls it. What are the priorities of the organization? Is doing thing B more important than doing thing A? If so, then thing A will have to be cutback or eliminated.
Let's take Goonswarm Federation as an example. During the last State of the Goonion on September 14 2012, The Mittani stated quite strongly that he felt alchemy should not have been introduced as a solution to high technetium prices without adding in a replacement source of income. In other words, Goonswarm should be able to continue affording all the things. It is unfair that they would now have to start prioritizing and making difficult choices. OTEC made everything very comfortable and cozy, and why should that not continue?
What sorts of things were Goonswarm affording during the technetium boom?
- sovereignty, plus expansion
- jump bridge network
- peacetime ship replacement for all members
- super-capital subsidies
- PLEX fund and payroll
- New Eden-wide bounty program on mining ships (member and non-member program)
- expanded wars in Branch, Tenal, Delve, and Tribute.
So now, choices have to be made. Perhaps they'll have to cancel their peacetime ship replacement policy, move to a wartime replacement policy only. Heavens forbid, that pilots may actually have to work like the rest of us for their non-war related hobbies (freighter ganking, general PvP, Blink, etc.). They may actually have to run missions or anomalies or incursions, or *gasp* mine asteroids.
Maybe to earn more, they look to non-sovereignty entities who hold technetium moons and tell them "We have operating costs. You barely have any. We'll take these moons off your hands, you can go mine neodymium." Fire up Goonswarm Intelligence to start sussing out all these tech moons that could be helping their cause, not fattening the wallets of folks who don't want the headache or expense of nullsec.
Alchemy has so far been good for the game. That doesn't mean there aren't fundamental problems with technetium (the industry bottleneck), and that there needs to be a grander overhaul of the system. But for now, it brings certain large nullsec alliances back to earth with the rest of us. Your game is going to be a lot more interesting now that you're once again faced with that thing we call decision-making.
***
As a faction warfare player, I'm more than familiar with money trains. I've 10B ISK in ships and modules sitting in Egghelende (mostly cruiser-sized hulls and below.) Another 11B ISK sitting in the wallet. Another 6B ISK in assets, waiting to be sold. And 12B ISK in loyalty points, waiting for a potential T5 cashout. All this due to some kooky financials in the faction warfare system. This mad cash disappears come winter. I'm not going to suggest that CCP replace one money train with another. I'll certainly miss that train, but I won't complain in the slightest that it's been taken away.
"Heavens forbid, that pilots may actually have to work like the rest of us for their non-war related hobbies (freighter ganking, general PvP, Blink, etc.). They may actually have to run missions or anomalies or incursions, or *gasp* mine asteroids."
ReplyDeleteNo way, Stan! :l337PvP: is :l337PvP: and ANY form of carebearing [at least on your main(s)] is a red badge of dishonour that no :l337PvPer: can bear! ;-)
They used to all do it before. I'm sure it's just like riding a bike or masturbating. I'm sure Goonswarm is good at one of those things.
DeleteSo you can avoid pvp as a pver but not the other way around? I think I'd rather just play Guild Wars or something.
DeleteWhat goonswarm does is not 1337 pvp. Rote and co are 1337 pvp. Goons are as powerful as they are because of their mighty carebear backbone just like real life western civilization.
DeleteWe make more money off of freighter ganking than we do from tech moons. Hope that helps.
DeleteHaha. Only in your dreams.
DeleteThe problem is that our ratting income doesn't cover even our sov bill with a 15% tax (15% tax on Tengu pilots in anoms gives around level 4 payouts per hour to the pilot, after tax, which is honestly terrible bad considering that the alliance is supposed to run off of these taxes). This is due to CCP not having any way for an alliance to have a Bottom-Up income scheme for covering operating costs in nullsec and instead everyone uses a Top-Down scheme (renters/moon goo) to help fund the war machine/let players have fun instead of grinding for 5 hours to replace their one (1) ship.
ReplyDeleteAs for sizing down, at the time of this post we have 9491 members and 137 outposts. Now, if we knock off even a large chunk of that number by calling 1/3 of that inactive (giving us 6264 players), that's ~45 players per system. Now, only the best truesec systems can support ~12 players doing anoms + belt ratting (2 sanctums, 2 havens, 3 forsaken, 3 forlorn, 2 for belt ratting assuming the system has 20+ belts so they can both rat full time) this leads to quite the descrepency between those two numbers, does it not? That means only 1670 of those players at any one time could be making money while the others are shit out of luck.
And that's with 137 systems (assuming all with good enough trusec to produce up to Sanctum anomalies).
Reasons like this is why we own "all that space" and we have Top-Down income schemes (it's likely we'll switch to renters after tech starts dropping too far, so we'll keep all our perks, just on the backs of players having to pay us rent so they can have access to anoms that barely pay out more than L4 missions in empire).
I'd write more but I have to leave for work now~
Players have to sleep. I'd suggest that you allow 8 hours for a shift so those systems could support three times your numbers.
Delete*Gasp*
DeleteSo you're basically saying that your current membership is too large for your sov? And that without Tech that said membership couldn't support themselves? Man, I feel so sorry for you right now...
You do realize most alliances have to make do WITHOUT either Sov or Tech? How do you think Nulli or BL get buy??? That's right, they actually have to work at it. Suck it up, as far as I'm concerned they need to nerf Tech a lot more.
To elaborate on what Endie is saying - the problem is that to the individual pilot looking to make a living, nullsec isn't worth living in. Outside certain somewhat gimmicky setups in somewhat imbalanced anomalies, ratting doesn't pay any better than L4 missions. Mining is in the gutter, with scordite and plagioclase just as lucrative to mine (in empire) as anything but arkonor in nullsec. A pilot can make good money making P2s on planets, but not any more money than he can make doing PI in empire.
DeleteThis is what needs to change. I fully support nerfing tech. Remove moons entirely, shift it to something that players mine in ring mining or an adapted PI system or whatever. But when they do it, give us a system to tax mining (and make nullsec mining worthwhile), make ratting compelling compared to L4 missions. Give station owners both the taxes and fees from market transactions in their stations, so on and so forth. Reward alliances who create an environment where there pilots are willing to make their living in instead of logging in on their L4 farming alt, in other words. And hell, as long as we're talking ideals, this should all facilitate a population density such that even the largest of alliances (y'know, us) can fit in a region or two. Without a need to hold a bunch of space as a buffer around moons or to give your membership space to make money, there would be more room in null for more groups, which means more conflict, fun for all!
Right now, that's far from the case. But, if CCP were to competently revamp nullsec such that everything I described happened, we could live on it. An alliance our size could afford its sov, a decent reimbursement program, so on and so forth. We'd certainly have to tighten our belts, but it'll be far from a situation where the available bottom-up income sources can't pay for sov, either.
And regarding "too large for your sov" - SOLAR owns something like six regions. Their own pilots live in perhaps two of them (and I suspect many of them prefer empire for moneymaking, too). The other four, they rent out. How, exactly, is that any better than tech, or better than a proper bottom-up system where an alliance lives on what their pilots produce?
I agree with bottom-up income for alliances.
DeleteI strongly disagree with L4 missions versus 0.0 income. You easily make 60mil an hour running anomalies in null (100mil is doable), whereas you bust your ass getting to 30-40 in l4 missions.
I agree that null-sov needs to be made more valuable, and more isk-making opportunities per system is an easy way to do that. The issue here is not the possible isk-making, it's the availability: once you have 10-20 people ratting, even in an upgraded system, no one else can make isk.
If alliances didn't have to spread out over 20 systems to make decent isk opportunities for pilots, you get much more valuable systems that most of an alliance can live in, with some sov systems held for strategic reasons, but fewer held overall.
And SOLAR have the opposite problem of goons: too much sov and too few players, which is why they have to rent most of it out. That is an entirely different issue than tech, as it's player driven. Because SOLAR are so spread out, and their renters are just that, renters, it'd be easy for large coalitions to push them out of their space.
Tech is an unnecessary step towards making sov valuable. Make ALL sov more valuable, and you'll have a lot of alliances contracting (sov-wise, I think we're already seeing that with a lot of alliances), lots of smaller alliances moving to null, and given less spread out alliances you'll have more frequent, intense battles (no need for two or three-step bridges to get to a fight).
60m/100m is "doable" in certain setups that take advantage of the fact that certain anomalies have weird balancing quirks or by dropping carriers on them.
DeleteI know CCP isn't keen on the latter - they've said so - and I figure its only a matter of time before they catch on and demonstrate non-keenness regarding the former.
You can also yield high payouts by supporting something like a Tengu with fighters, but at that point you should be getting a better payout - you're using two accounts!
I agree that simple ratting may not be much better in income (if at all) than L4 missions, but what about the plexes. After all you can get all those crazy expensive drops in nullsec exploration sites which you get nowhere else, right?
DeletePlexes require specialized setups, multiple players, or both to run, and require an additional set of skills (probing) to find. Likewise, as valuable as those crazy expensive X-Type and A-Type drops are, a drop of nothing but Overseer effects is all too common, meaning that while the isk/hr does average out to beat L4s or ratting, its not by as much as you'd think. More importantly, they're also quite limited in supply, so while they do offer that nice income to players, its a nice income to a very small group of players.
DeleteAs Poet mentioned, when the ISK faucet gets turned off in FW, that's not something to be complained about. Similarly, if Goonz have more fail-players than they can support, they need to adjust their system. I'm certain they will. This is all just smoke from Mittens anyway.
DeleteMy "big idea", I'd like to see the big *potential* money be from something like mining in low sec. It can never be done with the degree of security that it could be organised for in null (yea, wasn't a joke...Goonz could foreseeably end up shooting space rocks for ISK), so PvP must follow.
I think you completely missed TheMittani's point. He's asked for a tech nerf for a long time, so the fact that it got nerfed was not a problem. It was the way it was nerfed that he was making a point about. By nerfing it the way CCP did, they lessened a big conflict-driver in nullsec. There are already few reasons to have sov at all, and now there's even less to fight for.
ReplyDeleteA big thing for Mittens, is the way that nullsec has all the risk, but very little reward compared to Empire. He wants a nullsec where powerblocks fight over resources, and having sov is something to fight for. Just look at NC. right now. They're willing to lose all their sov just to have a few months of fighting, because it's simply not worth hanging on to. That is what the problem in nullsec is, and that's the point Mittens was making in regards to the tech nerf.
Mittens point about the Tech nerf was that he wanted it to happen WITH an expansion in personal income streams to pilots. The nerf to alliance income should have been supplemented with an increase to pilot incomes. This wouldn't have only benefited GSF pilots.
ReplyDeleteHey, good job on misinterpreting what I said then writing a blog full of 'analysis' based on your misinterpretation. EN24 will eat it up.
ReplyDelete