Topic: Lack of End Game Balance and You
First, don't troll up my thread and get it closed... *i'm looking at you*
From the start I've been saying that the current outpost based "King of the Hill" model is broken. There needs to be ongoing persitant costs to owning an outpost and not just benefits or once a corporation has gain the hill top for any significant time, there's no way to unseat them.
The game REQUIRES there to be an end-game NIC sink of some sort. Maybe the devs assumed they would have more time to implement it, but it's clearly become an issue.
The ability for 1 corporation to gain dominance in the game has nothing to do with exploits or cheats, it does involve social engineering, fairly common game strategy game tactics, and taking full advantage of the broken end-game.
Something many players have not figured out is that sand-box games are not about bot vs. bot combat, or mining, or running missions. Perpetuum is a Stategy game, a multiplayer game of "Risk".
It's disingenuous to blame the current state of the game on any one corporation, as its the action of all corporations that effect the game play. It was 'inevitable' though, due to the mechanics, that one dominant corporation could eventually gain an advantage that was insurmountable, and do so through completely legitamate means.
A few of the 'mechanics' that I suggested earlier;
A Syndicate Tax on wealth, basically a Corporate income tax combined with a property tax.
An Operation fee for outpost ownership, with a multiplyer for more than 1
And as many others have said, the POS system.
This isn't a call to penalize anyone for being good at the game, these checks and balances should have been in the game from the beginning to moderate growth while the server was gaining population and economic stability. Nor is it a slight against the strategic manuvering required to gain dominance, but in a game that has no unavoidable penalties, its a simple strategy to acheive dominace (although implementation of the strategy does require skilled players).