Pros and cons both ways...

Pros

Encourages other players with more time but less RL cash, this can help the game

Cons

• If it isnt done right in a safe and secure manner, the game gets opened up to RL fraud etc.

• As above, powerbloks can solidify their position through funding many alt accounts and bringing new players into their fold with promises of paid gaming, this detracts from the smaller corps

• It can diminish the sense of attachment to the game, things given away for free generally don't hold much value to the holder of that asset/char etc

• Encourages botting/powermining/grinding etc which can burn people out

• Non PvP activities become primary to those using NIC for game time.... Lost a H.Mech?? OMG that was 0.5 of a timecode!!

Given the small dev team, i would err on the side of caution at this point in the game and concentrate on building more tools to keep players playing and interacting rather than looking for more ways to quickly garner cash.

Wrong forum....

Specialist > generalist in all games like this but in order to specialise you make yourself weak in other areas. Depends on your gamestyle. I have specialised and in the current round of 'balancing' i am doing okay, one day it will be my turn to have the uber l337 robot of doom!!

I would like to reiterate something.....This player panel was to discuss the view of CEOs/Influential people of the current game and also to look to the future.

There have been significant events recently and I, for one, would be immensely happy to do a show on it. This has a number of constraints however.

1) My objectivity (and that of Gremrod) would be questioned because of the corporation tag I wear, people will also make rash statements emotionally with no investigation or research themselves e.g.

This post provides the background as to why, after much discussion between Grem and myself, WE decided not to just rush ahead with a show on the M2S topic even though WE discussed it at length.

2) We will never please everyone. Now this is a fact we all live with, however in the small community which exists right now, sensitive topics have a tendency to get blown out of proportion and cause damage. I would rather approach things in a more considerate manner and get it right rather than jump in with both feet and get it wrong and hurt the game.

3) There is nothing stopping anyone else putting their time and reputations out there and doing something on their own. I always considered it to be Gremrod's podcast, I was just there to help out, but even Grem spoke to me the other night and said this was OUR podcast, if you don't like how WE do things, don't listen or do your own.

Both our virtual 'doors' are open to the community to contribute to what we do and we get very little actual support except for a small number of individuals who I graciously thank here and now, you know who you are .

I would hope that after 6 episodes, we had earned enough respect to not be thought of as being the type of people to 'bash' anyone. If that's how people think we would react, then something has gone missing somewhere.

If you want to influence what we do and how the community grows, man (or woman) up and step up to the plate.

In my opinion all.

Group 1 should be harassable by roamers - what a lot of the PvP junkies want is to turn up in cheap crap and blow up 100m NIC of stuff and run away, this is unbalanced. Taking my 100m POS should take 100m of bots and time - see stEVE and POS with Siege Mode (not saying we should have that here, it illustrates a point)

Group 2 should be able to supply materials to beta corps they work with and harass the enemy when they want to, they won't be taking POS but they can assist or do guerilla stuff such as concentrating on the Group 1 roaming gangs.

Group 3 is like Group 2 without the mining, they just don't want big stuff because it means having to get away from the "oh *** too many bots RUN AWAY" mentality and thus don't want Group 1 to exist as it would mean certain aspects of PvP would be effectively closed to them.

The only Group which feels out of place is Group 3, Group 1 can live with 2 and 3, its part of their gamestyle. Group 2 can be content in being part of the larger game by working with friendly Group 1 and fighting enemy Group 2 and 3.

Group 3 turns out to be the socially awkward ones because the only people they think give them 'real competition' are other Group 3 and then they whine there's no targets.

If all we get is more stuff for Group 3 and mechanics tending to that playstyle, you might as well fire up MW2 or COD and take that whole boring losing stuff and having to build stuff out of the game cos it gets in the way of Group 3's playstyle.

Grem valiantly punished the RL foe and vanquished the thought of ITP being 'on a break'.....

We shall continue!!

Quoting myself lol

All great points guys.

Needs moving to features....

On topic... Personally I would like them to allow me to tie my current accounts to one master account. I log into the master account and then choose which sub account I want to log into the game with...

In terms of account management, it also means I could buy £200 of AC Credit and apply it to my sub-accounts (having account renewals out of sync bugs me....) as needed, it would also be great that if I wanted to hibernate an account, I could pull the AC credit off it back into the pool and use it there, I could also then use the AC credits for micro-transactions, again being able to buy with the master account and then assign 'paintjob tokens' or whatever onto my accounts/chars.

Btw did I mention this was in the wrong forum

I tried thinking about this for a few hours and came up with some nice concepts to balance it but they all kinda had some form of issue, here are some anyways:

* zulu base is quite easy to capture 10-15 mins with a small - med group

* zulu base is only capturable on a corporation basis, similar mechanic to destruction SAPs

* once captured, the corporation gets NIC/EC every 30mins in increasing amounts e.g. n, 2n, 3n, 4n, .... xn

* however, the corporation also receives debuffs each hour, this could be -5% armor then -5% acc, then -10% HP etc etc. This makes it increasingly harder to hold for the corporation as they get gradually more and more debuffed - this is only on zulu base island - These debuffs could also have a multiplier based on # of holding corps members on the island as an anti-blob mechanic, however this has to be balanced by some form of balancing against a non holding corps turning up with 4x as many bots and wiping the holding corps.

* other corporations can attack at any time HOWEVER you can only attack the current base owner corporation members, not other corps on the zulu island. This is to prevent you holding the zulu base with an alt corps then defending with no debuffs using another corps.

* once you lose control of zulu base, you cannot attack it or the current base owners for 3 hours.

Hopefully this adds some balance and being honest i frankly stole the idea from some old FPS mods i used to play. It should add some spice, there's a competitive element in terms of who can hold the zulu base the longest (maybe another list to add to most dangerous agents??) and also the ability for smaller corps to run in and steal some time in off peak or between other groups attacking...

Discuss

This is what I don't get... The only reason T4 became mega important was because we had enemies who dropped it like candy, everyone thought it was the only way to get even.

This is not the case anymore... I STILL don't have T4 laser on my Artemis, I generally fit L1 when i go out and I know FOOM are doing the same. Sure kernel research is important and will always provide an escalator of improvement but it isn't the be all and end all of everything now. I am hoping that more small corps will venture out and maybe form co-operative groups to start out on this path together, this will be good for them and good for the game.

I also think the more established corps have to step up and realise that right now is not the time to grow an ePeen and try to step into the vacuum. The game state is fragile and we should be working to help the game grow, not trying to replace what has gone before in order to be top dog.

Just my two penneth.

I dunno as a developer in the past, test and live are two things you don't mix.... Ever.

Loved the Earth 21xx games, nice mechanics. The thing is, if you are going to do testing you need to add in things such as skills, ep and modules all of which may need to change when something needs to be modified or fixed due to a bug. I for one, do not want daily downtimes on the live game!!!

Having done plenty of alpha and beta testing in other games, I would certainly put some of my time to a test server if there was one, it also means players can do some of the testing on existing islands and find the bugs/exploits on there rather than a blank island which wouldn't make it into live gameplay.

Or you mean like having a test server?

The problem with terraforming isn't the mechanic, it's the limits you have to impose to stop it being game breaking. Even if you do something like only +\- 5 height, you now have to test every map to look for areas which could be terraformed to a breaking point. Suddenly testing is longer than development