Re: Revert the kernel nerf.
stuff
If you think I don't care about the solo player, your totally wrong. ALL my posts are from and about the soloist view point.
The reason I say you stopped at WOW is because the rest of the post is about how to make research for the soloist viable, without reverting the kernel drop rate.
With 100% kernel drop rate, the amount of NIC gained by farming NPC's is way too much. If it was reverted they would have to nerf the 'goo' to the point where its more of a nuisance than a NIC source.
And, it looks like I'm going to have to elaborate on the balance discussion, because your still only seeing 'WOW' and not the way I am using it as a comparison.
Paragon, for the WOW illiterate, is one of the top 5 ranked guilds in the world. Out of millions of players and thousands of guilds world wide, these 40 or so players are at the top of the game. The currently released raid content for Cataclysm, this guild finished the content in about 5 weeks (if you don't count the cow kill); short hand for this is 13/13 or they killed all 13 bosses on hard mode. 5 months later, ONLY .28% (no, I didn't misplace the '.' that's .00028) of the thousands of guilds have reached and killed the 'last' boss. But about 20% of the guilds have killed the 'first' boss. (note the %'s only include registered raiding guilds, not the casual 4 newbs that think killing hogger is epic)
Blizzard admits they tuned this tier of raiding a little to high, and they have been nerfing the encounters periodically.
In Perpetuum M2S displays the same qualities of a Paragon. They have a roster full of beta players with months of beta experience that know how to play, excellent leadership, and the ability to work as a team to complete goals. These traits aren't exclusive to M2S, but the fact they finished the research tree first is just one of the things that puts them in the top ranks.
Blizzard balances around only about 20% (guesstimate as they don't actually release this information to the public) of the guilds being 11/13 by the time the next content patch is released, which they are going to miss because they tuned it to hard. But they did not tune the encounters so that it would take a Paragon like guild until the next patch to complete. Also, after the next patch is released, new tiers of gear will allow current raiders to get to 13/13.
There will always be those guilds that lead, and complete content long before the remainder of the guilds even get close. But the game difficulty is balanced around a % of the guilds reaching the goal by a given time.
A corp like M2S will always complete content in Perpetuum long before the majority of other corporations, if they continue to operate in cooperative play, and that is their reward for being good at the game; but its not something that just ANY corp can do as it requires a lot of good players and leadership. M2S is just ONE example, but the number of really GREAT corps in the game is small (and would still be even if there were more players as great players tend to join with the top corps).
So, my analogy is: Perpetuum can't balance the game around the top corps in the game, or the remaining 99% of the corps will be unable to compete.
Reducing the kernel drop rate isn't a straight attempt to nerf research, as its mostly about keeping the NIC gained from NPC farming down, but it IS going to affect kernel research.
Further, my argument with the state of research went a step further, to imply that it is something that needs to get EASIER to do as time passes; or more accurately - There should be a time limit on the lead corporations get from being excellent at the game, or they will never be challenged in the game.
That assumes of course that more content is coming. If T4 is the end of the line than eventually all corps will get there. But assuming there will be T5,6,7 and the current status remains, than a corp like M2S will have T7 while the rest of the corps are still back at T2.
So sure, T1 to T4 at this time is not a terrible gap, but T2 to T7 will be.
Not all corps are created equal and it disingenuous to just say "get better".
Over time as players get experience the general level of play will get better, but so will that of the leading corporations. Even though this is a sandbox game, it is still a game. The framework of the game in combat is set up to eventually allow players to even out extension differences, there also needs to be a game mechanism to allow researches to get significantly better over time. There are also extensions to help miners get better, and builders, but only 1 small extension for research.
More research extensions will help corporations compete and make the game better.