Topic: My take on the state of the game
What I am going to be talking about today is the alpha-beta-gamma risk/reward balance.
Alpha
As there is no pvp allowed here, the risk is minimal. As such, players always use the best equipment as possible, many times t4+.
When it comes to ratting, the robots dont do any explosion. As such, a guy like me with a bunch of accounts can easily and reliably do 3 star mech beacon. Yes, 3 star mech beacons. As such, i make 150-200 million nic and hour. This is game breaking and needs to be fixed. A note to take: i have no t4+ and my skills arent even that high.
When it comes to harvesting/mining, alpha provides all the resources in the game anyone ever needs but epriton. Which is in beta. Gamma has colixum, which could not have been more useless to this point in the game.
As you can see, anyone can be self-sufficient in alpha, with beacons fueling the player's nic income to buy epriton.
Beta
It serves for 3 purposes:
It is the only island with epriton, highly profitable.
It has outposts and the sap loot is great.
The most important part of the beta are the terminals and its role as the first line of defence of the gamma islands. When the opposing faction that assaults gamma islands gets wiped, they have to attack again from alpha islands, making the offensive much more managable.
Gamma
As the pinnacle of power and prestige, it is the best island in the game. I thought. I was sorely mistaken. I could not have been more wrong. Now I know why Jita doesnt care about Gamma.
With absence of epriton, the resource repertoire of gamma is the same as alpha. Although it does have bigger fields, with the recent update, it will also feature red mobs, making the mining and harvesting on gamma a joke.
I personally dont believe there is a need to set up a base of operations just to artifact.
When it comes to production, gamma is the icing of the cake. But then again, are you ready to lose a bunch of rivelers to reds just so you could produce with a couple % better efficiency? (or haul your *** off from alpha to gamma) Not to mention the bases are extremely power hungry.
For the absolute protection of gamma island, you need 12 terminals. The resource cost is immense and i do not know if it is worth it to set up the base with extreme resource consumption just so you could produce a bit better with the constant threat of reds, players and mineral consumption.
So, to summarize:
As a multi-account kind of guy, i can make a billion nic in meager 5-10 hours in alpha, that will fuel my needs for anything in the game. I will have enough pvp bots for a month with a quarter a day of beaconing. Alpha is freaking op.
With the release of iron shackle CIR had on beta islands, epriton has lost value and now, almost everybody can ninja mine epriton. What this means is that even less ratting is required in alpha to be the top gun.
So, what's the main reason for me to be in gamma? The ease of mining and industry. I have to change fields less and i need to haul little to get a good production going. NOT ANYMORE. With the NPCs being reintroduced to gamma, that will not be happening anymore.
In essence, for a multi-account type of a guy, there is no real incentive for me to stay in gamma. Mostly due to the recent nerf. I am not going to say bug fixing, because if it took devs at least 9 months to fix this, then that is not a bug, but a game feature being removed/added (depending on how you look at it)
Now, where am i going to be at? Unless my awesome corp has some megasuperduper plans, im staying in alpha. What does this mean? We have another carebear that the veterans will not be able to pvp with. The majority of the population will go back to alpha. In alpha, the pvpers cant pvp. Hence, the activity of those people will lower, until they quit. When the carebears get a milestone of for example a thousand scarabs, they'll call it a day as well.
Due to extremely overpowered alpha and gamma being lackluster at best, this game turned from a pvp-industrialist game to a hoard game that the vets told me about.
So unless you fix alpha and gamma (reintroduce epi as beta should serve as a line of defence), the game will plummet. For real, why would anyone want to get a moderate reward/high risk on gamma if they can get high reward/no risk from alpha.
So fix it, before i settle down in alpha, wait for a while and then finally pull the plug on my 15 accounts.