Mmmm.

getting last post is going to be more difficult than I anticpated.

I'm going to have to leave it up to Glimpse.

/fail at forum pvp

Crafting an Item and selling it to a vendor is a time honored MMO tradition.

In most cases the price the NPC offers is much lower than you could sell it for on the auction house, and always less than the cost of the materials.

If you gather your materials however, you still make a positive gold profit when selling to the vendor.

The formula for pricing the buy value is usually based on the effort to produce, but is always significantly lower than what any player thinks is fair.

The difference is those prices are FIXED.

Here, the game tries to be fair by using a dynamic payout formula. The problem is they didn't take into account server player base, which resulted in an abundance of resources and a lack of bot destruction.

As long as anyone was willing to accept less NIC for materials than they could get on the market, and the insurance payout exceeded the fixed production costs, there would always be profit in build'n-bash.

Its really only Fraud because the dev's did not intend Insurance to be an NPC vendor to sell bot over production to.

And I fully believe they where overlooking small scale fraud because on the whole insurance does promote more PVP which is what they are trying to do.

I have now said the same thing 5 times. Just let me be the last in the thread and I'll stop... I will win 'last post'!!

Actually, I recall reading that a capital ship can't even lock smaller ships at all. They need 'fighter' support or frigates along. But the smaller ships also can't even scratch the capital ship.

Again, Ewar/light bots not being killed by mechs is different than Ewar/light bots killing mechs.

What exactly is the balance issue?

There are Assignments that do give NIC for killing NPC bots ... but you have to spend EP on assignment based skills to make it worth while.

T4 bacon comes from Spider Pig kernels

I know some of my posts are TLDR, but I make the point that Build'n-bash, which is where you mine resources and sell the bot to the vendor (through blowing it up with insurance) seems like a natural way to turn ORE into NIC quickly.

Where it got out of hand is when it turned into Buy'n-bash, and corps no longer put any more effort then needing to move the ore from alpha to beta to build with.

With buy'n-bash corps were able to keep large reserves of resources as well as generate large sums of NIC.

I'll say it again, I don't hold anything against any person or corp that actually used this method. Its removed now, I just want to make sure that both players and devs take away a learned lesson so the game can improve.

Something looks wrong with this math.

If Intact does 17.4 DPS and Mech regens for 23 per sec, how does it ever kill the mech?

Even without regen 4500/17.4 is almost 4.5 minutes to kill.

(174-230/10) I think what you mean is 17.4 - (230/10) which would yeild the DPS - HPS (heals per second).

I would like to see a Fraps of a Mech dying to (4 or less) light bots/EW, or even a tale from someone that had it happen to them and how.

I don't need to hear about how a mech couldn't kill (4) Light/EW because your never going to keep lock and/or keep them in range.

NOT Killing a Light/EW is not the same issue as being killed BY Light/EW. Lets not get them confused.

Too bad we can't battle syn-tech equipped insured mechs for profit ... *gallows humor*

It wasn't JUST Infestation, it was corps that had huge wallets and/or stock piled resources... because there was nothing to expend those resources on.

Devs can't list out everything explicitly; there is something in the EULA about missuse of game mechanics. Also, getting a little more NIC back on insurance than the cost of a bot + insurance is not a game breaker in and of itself.

The exploit itself is not even fully exploitable to the majority of the population, and it wasn't until it was fully and truely exploited on an industrial scale that it became an issue the devs needed to deal with.

When it got to the point it needed to be stopped, they had no choice but to penalize everyone that had even a small profit from the exploit to make it fair, even though only major corporations could fully exploit.

Players buying bots off the market and insuring them and losing them in PVP may have made enough NIC back to buy and insure another bot + a few thousand extra, but lost NIC overall because of the module costs.

Corps with large scale mining, dedicated industrial characters, and EP in insurance could quickly convert bots to cash without waiting to sell on the market. This isn't even a matter of the insurance payout being played versus the current cost of the bots. It was just more expiedient to build and scrap bots than it was to sell them.

There was SO MUCH ore and SO LITTLE pvp that there was just no market for the volume of bots that dedicated players could produce; something like 36 Mechs every 3 days per dedicated industrialist alt.

It was wrong and against the spirit of the game to build'n-bash but it still points back to the game itself

1) having too much and too easy resources
2) not enough reason to pvp and lose bots the right way
3) crafting designed to support massive pvp, again without the pvp

CS didn't have the production capacity or resources to mine and build or even buy and build so didn't have anything to do with this, but if we had, we probably would have also. I can totally see why a CEO sitting on the NIC and resouces to produce 100's of bots a day wouldn't just want to 'waste' time by not making them.

I really really have to point the finger back at the game here, and by extensions the devs. I don't think Infestation gave a sh*t about the NIC. If there was any reason in the game for blowing up more bots legitimately, they would have done so.

Also, build'n-bash is not the same exploit as manipulating the insurance payout so you could buy bots straight off the market and blow them up for profit. If there is insurance, and you build bots using gathered resources, you're always going to make a profit. The question is if you would make MORE NIC selling the bot or selling the ORE then in making a bot; which you may if the market could stand it, but its INSTANT NIC with the insurance...

of course after while you get enough NIC, and bored of gathering, so you just buy the ore and switch to Buy'n-bash. This is where its a real exploit, because you are doing very little work for the profit.

Once Buy'n-bash became prevalent, insurance became totally broken and we get the dev post.

I and my corp didn't do this, but I find the 'high-horse' attitude of some players just truely miss the mark in the "spin the wheel of blame" game.

Lets hope that not only the players that let their greed run away, but also the devs, take away from this that the game needs attention; and keeping your loyal players informed of what is going on in the grand scheme is invaluable.