Radars you're talked about can be not a part of own outpost, but producing only on it and then transported and placed wherever you want. It can be destroyable and repairable so you may need to care about your radars. Such radar can be our first little part of POS system.

xactly, something like that

There is a very nice mining area on Tellisis, with all sorts of minerals that sees lots of Riveler traffic.

With the roaming addition, I've been taking a combat bot to the area each night trying to get a sense of the new pattern, to avoid random roam death.

Last night, walking right up the middle, was a Superior Observer; Kain.

This is the very last thing I waned to see. I'm not sure how frequent this type of bot roams through that area, but because of the Kain's speed, getting my 50kph Riveler out of his 400m range is going to be hair raising. Based on my quick probing with my assault, and getting dropped to 50% armor and ECM'd in just a few seconds, if it does catch any miner they have no chance to escape.

Now alpha mining is dangerous. GJ.

I'm sorry, did you read my post as sarcasm?

Let me try again;

Good job making Alpha more dangerous to mine on; this still falls in the 1 in a 100 chance of meeting one.

Observers are the last thing any miner 'wants' to see, and if your out mining with 10 alts, there's a good chance your going to lose one before you can get them all moving.

Edit: I talked to Alex in my head, and he said soloing a Superior Observer Kain was easy.

Yep, Hair Raising though )

The kain moves a little under 80 (not sure how much, but I was at 80 and it took awhile to catch up to him), so it really doesn't take very long for it to move 600 m and it's certainly fast enough to run a Riveler down. I was in an assault, so I'm not sure at what range it 'notices' and attacks a Riveler which it will also see at 1km. The 400 m ranges was with the assault, so basically as soon as it 'saw' me it attacked.

I'd guess, you have about a min to react and start moving, unless you use slots for non-mining modules like masker or eccm. The good news is it doesn't continue to chase you for very long, unless you run along it's path, you have a good chance of living if you do have some defensive mods installed.

I was going to write a long post, but I decided against it. However, thank you for bumping the thread. I will now post a generic rage against the casual player agenda.

Eventually, I hope you understand that Perpetuum is a game about conflict. Don't believe me? What do you do when someone posts their ore for a lower price than yours? You lower it? Why, that's competition! That's Player Versus Player interaction, that ever-so-feared pvp you decry as ruining your game!

In conflict, you have to take a risk in order to be rewarded. You could have quick-sold your ore, but you're willing to take time (and time = risk in a volitile market) to sell it for more NIC. You're risking more, you're rewarded!

Compare this to alpha versus beta:
-- The same ores at the same rates, with the exception of titan ore only on alphas, and epriton only on betas. Betas have mechs hunting your miner, alpha has 35kph roaming spawns that can catch you if you decide to go out for a night of partying while you make money.
-- Alpha has 90% of the kernels that a prototyper needs. I have t4 gear that I've only needed alpha kernels for. So the l33t zomg kernels are more or less a farce, because if you farm npcs on beta you're waiting for a roaming player spawn to come kick your mass at 80 kph.
-- Betas get a grand total of 5% average bonus on some outpost versus Tellisis/Hershfield/Shinjalar.

It's not "our behavior of KOS" that caused my corp to simply leave our outpost on beta. It's the total lack of benefit for living in it as compared to the risks.

The question really isn't if beta islands have more benefits, because they do, it just takes advaned EP and group play to get the best returns off it. Now if the question is it worth living in an outpost, then that's clearly no at this point, but it could be after being able to set docking rights.

Edit: Also the term "Risk vs Reward" is used alot, but risk is 100% relative to the person or group taking the risk. 1 person bringing a 10M nic bot to beta is risking more than a group of 30 each bringing a 20M NIC bot.

That really depends on how you are using the word endgame. In a themepark MMO, endgame means your character is at max level, and is doing activites designed for max level characters.

Based on that definition is no endgame in Perpetuum. Even if you were to bend the definition to just say that only endgame is only playable by characters with the Highest EP, Foom owning an outpost is a perfect counter to that. Players of any level can 'participate' in the beta islands, it doesn't require you to be at 'the end game'. Of course it's more difficult, but no player is excluded based on any critieria.

MMO leveling games, if your level 5 and attacking a level 20 your going to get killed very quickly, but that doesn't make level 20 end game. If you in an arkhe going to beta, that 5 star mech isn't going to have much trouble killing you, but again that doesn't make beta end game.

And if you didn't notice, I'm also supporting your arguement.

There's no reason to scale Beta rewards up based on the 'risk' level of single or small groups of players, when a large group or a a smaller more experienced group, has significantly less risk but would recieve the same reward. In other terms, don't give the level 20 super loot just because it's hard for a level 5 to kill, because a level 30 or a group of level 10's can kill it easily.

The thread though isn't about the definition of endgame, its about how to get more players to beta, and increasing the reward is one way to do that. I don't think it's the correct way, since given time alpha simply gets too easy and those looking for a challenge will naturally move to the beta islands. All an increase does is give more reward to the players already there.

Mammoth. Your over simplifying PVP. Out of 600 players online, only 30 or 40 of them will be EA.

Your not in a corporation, that makes PVP 100x more difficult right there, regardless of your EP.

6 months or a year from now, you'll have about the same surviablity solo on beta that you do today.

Mammoth's Alt, your still over simplifying PVP.

Listing all the benefits that EP gives other players is misleading, as they don't all have all those benfits at the same time. That's not to say that PVP is easy, because that dedicated Tank fit character can still put in T4 weapons to make up for a little less EP in DPS.

When your fighting characters with EP, equipment, and experience advantage, then yes your in trouble. In that triad though EP is has the 'least' effect, but combine either EP or equipment with Experience and that opponent is still going to be difficult to beat, even if you have more EP.

Foom doesn't really own an outpost. Their name is on it, but they don't use it anymore.

In WoW, I chain killed a 50 something shaman on horde with a 40 human warlock on a pvp server. It was mighty hilarious. He kept repopping and coming at me, only to get his *** beat once again. This was Burning Crusade. Also had a lot of fun surpize buttsecksing a group of 40 somethings on a 35 horde druid; they'd split up to chase me in sneaky cat form, I'd bounce out and nail one and then disappear.

Course, I also got stomped by a pair of 70s on one occasion, and that was hilarious as ***. Anyway, careful play will let you beat the numbers even when the deck is stacked against you.

Most of the suggestions seem to be based around increasing the reward per unit of time rather than the potential reward. As an example, someone suggested increasing the rate of ore extraction and moving the fields further out from outposts. So, fields would be easier for us roaming gankers to nab people at before they can flee, and they'd have the same amount of ore BUT it would take them less time to clear the field. We've nabbed the occasional solo miner, so it ain't safe.

Another suggestion had to do with faster build times. A faster build time means more volume at the same margin; the player isn't going to be able to outcompete alpha indies on that measure alone, because those guys don't have to haul it to market through a dangerous area. And before you say it ain't dangerous, we've nabbed a few sequers attempting to return after an alpha run.

Where there's risk, there's a risk premium on the activity. If you figure you'll lose a Riveler or whatever every fifth mining op, then every run needs to be slightly more than one fifth of a Riveler more profitable than on alpha. One way to do that is making the stuff you're doing flat out more valuable. That's how rats were handled in beta. The other is to increase the time efficiency of your money making actions. That's what is being suggested here.

Will players in big groups gangmining in beta with mech support make more? Well, yeah. Duh. They're also putting a huuuuuuuuge amount of cash in the field, organizing a bunch of people and generally making things happen. It's fair that they also make more money, because if that op gets gatecrashed they are gonna die in a fire. And they're also putting way more effort into it than some guy logging in and wandering out to an alpha field, where he's at no more real risk than if he were logged off.

It's a reasonable idea that might get a few more people to brave the wilderness.

The obvious problem is risk/reward.  Anytime a small corp tries to take an outpost, they get curb stomped. Its like taking an outpost comes with a sign saying I live and mine here now, please come kill me. I am not saying that it shouldn't be like that, but there has to be some line drawn that offers people some incentive. Maybe its station defenses, maybe its opening up a "free trade zone", maybe its saying only the OWNING corp can use the faculties, but there has to be some mechanism that allows people to fight and SURVIVE on beta. More money/resources/kernals is only going to widen the gap as the beta corps will be able to grind out even more stuff and the alpha corps will only be able to ninja stuff. I think that the effort should be focused on beta survival, not beta rewards. Hell, maybe its removing the epi requirement from mechs. I honestly don't know what the answer is I am just throwing *** against the wall hoping something sticks.