Topic: Economic woes
Guess who's got more to say? The factors that drive the economy in this game are another big problem for me. I'll start with the most recent system introduced...
Noralgis is necessary in T4 production and the production of a few lower-tier modules. You invest in them but you can't defend them. They're safe only from an enemy that doesn't seek them out. Fortunately the feature is so boring that most people on the beta islands stopped persistently searching after about a week. I suspect this was expected to be a new, interesting source of conflict. Strategically, depriving the enemy of a precious resources is well worth the effort. But as a game mechanic it's missing a key element... fun. Frustration, sure; fun, no.
On alpha, you can hover over it and make sure it gets the proper sun, even play Mozart to help it grow. You can also watch someone drive up and harvest your precious plant and not be able to do a thing about it. On beta, you plop it in some corner and hope that hostile arkhe you can't stop from undocking from your outpost doesn't find it, or your blind (signal detection) harvester doesn't get ganked as you drive 2-3km to your plants.
And the increased Espitium requirements for T4 production along with the addition of Briochit (I so want to say something other than "chit") simply makes production of some T4 modules silly when weighed against their performance improvement over T3 or where else you could use the Briochit.
On to the redistribution of raw resources... I'm not a miner, so I really can't speak first-hand about what happened. But I suspect I know the reason for the change; to encourage people to stop vertically-integrating (doing every step of the manufacturing process, from gathering of all materials to final production in-house) and start specializing in their regional resources and start using the market sell the excess and buy what isn't so easily gathered locally. But I talk to others who are miners. They're convinced the change was done just to piss them off. It should have come with an RP explanation from the Syndicate (suggest to the players how they're expected to adapt) and offer a carrot along with the stick. E.g., a 4% reduction in the VAT (with a floor of 0%) on an island for sales of raw mats that are scarce on that island.
And the distribution of resources to begin with... In a comment I made on the dev blog about the updates to overseers, I said making them more difficult or giving them escorts doesn't make them more risky for all, it simply reduces the size of the playerbase that can take them down with nominal risk. When my buddy rolls out to mine Epriton, he does it no differently than if he were mining HDT. My buddy and I make some modules that use Epriton and others that don't. Because of the quantities of resources needed, they require about the same effort to build. To us, they're pretty much equivalent and we treat/use them as such. But I can turn around and sell one to an alpha-dweller for eight times the price of the other. I cannot fathom a reason why someone would play this game just to live on Alpha. They don't just get the short end of the stick, they get the end of the short end of the stick (especially the non-miners).
Maybe beta-dwellers are supposed to have easy access and ample supply while alpha-dwellers are left starving? I just hope it's not meant to be "incentive" for people to move to beta. One of the most important lessons I think can be taken from stEVE is that the vast majority of alpha-dwellers are not there because the economics make sense, they're there because they're (pvp) risk-adverse. It doesn't matter if the goose the laid the golden egg lives on beta; all they'll ever see is the axe poised to chop their head off.
A system with built-in frustration that dictates a huge divide between haves and have-nots doesn't seem the way to go.
