I agree but for different reasons.
You make it sound like standard fit robots stand no chance against big T4 fit players and most of the time you'd be right but the issue isn't smaller corporations not being able to catch up or join in it's there is no reason to.

Why would a 10 or 20 man corporation want an outpost? What else is there between nothing an outposts? Nothing. There needs to be some form of "Home Base" bonus to corporations that live out of alpha outposts. There are many outposts just not being used right now for the simple fact a blob can just wander through and ruin hours of work.

Kernels are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to why new players feel left out. The new player experience is terrible, the need for gear is minimal and the desire to improve just doesn't take root in most players because there is no reason to. Market dominance just isn't worth it when someone can come along and ruin all your plans just by mistake.

The game needs more players but at the same time it need alliances to desolve. It's needs outposts to be fought over and not shared. The devs need to make sharing harder.

Indeed Mr Syndic and an eloquent post.

Possessing only combat bots, I am most displeased that the gains we are making through organised, efficient ops will now suffer such a huge delay and that I must spend 50% extra 'gaming' time on this awfully dull and repetitious kernel grind.

Are certain corps realising that their dominance will soon crumble and have steered the nerf-bat to hit developing corps firmly in the nuts? Pity. I cannot think of any other reason. Why would PO jeopardise subscriptions in such a way? Enlighten me as to the logic of this decrease in drop rates?

I disagree. Pre-patch you had kernels, modules, fragments and decoders as loot. Now you have Plasma as well which is proportional to the old kernels value. Not every corporation is supposed to have T3 / T4 research, this is the best equipment in the game, these should be hard to get. Not only can you now get kernels whilst farming but you can also sell the Plasma and purchase more kernels via the market from individuals who aren't pursuing their own technology tree.

The money you can currently get from Plasma is significant, an organised operation can quite easily purchase thousands of kernels from the market in order to build up their lower research then farm the higher kernels themselves for the tech which isn't researched from the kernels on alpha. Hell, you can even purchase kernels from your alliance mates on Beta.

You've referenced various information about M2S in your post however you've failed to note the thousands of man hours we put into farming Kernels, the billions of NIC we spent on kernels via the market AND from our alliance members and the many donations we had. Due to the kernel buy orders being removed 95% of them just got significantly cheaper. You can quite easily get your tech tree up in 1-2 months with an organised corporation effort with access to beta, even less with an organised alliance.

EDIT: You say that the kernel grind has been increased 50%, sell the plasma and buy kernels from the market. The kernel grind had been reduced with this change if you chose to play smart and not ignore core game features that you can utilise.

I made some of my points here http://forums.perpetuum-online.com/topi … ns/page/3/

Obviously getting to T4 is difficult, that was acknowledged before this change, but you have to admit that now with kernels dropping only 50% of the time, your previous 1000's of hours would be at least doubled, . And true you spent billions of NIC, but you probably also bought all the kernels you could of the type you needed as they became available. So even with more NIC, from the bounties, you still could not have gone any faster as the supply wasn't there.

The devs have access to more information then we do, and I think what they are doing is looking at the number of kernels that were sold to the buy orders versus the number of kernels that dropped. And estimated that about 50% of those kernels were sold for NIC. What they are missing is the learning curve on the market, where many players that sold to beta outposts learned they could sell those kernels (to M2S most likely) on the market for 3-4 times the buy order. At this time, I doubt there are very many kernels being sold on beta.

One major benefit of the kernels being reduced is that people will have a good reason to sell them now since there will be such a demand. That demand will be met with the new energy items dropped from the bots. This will create an exchange of money between players on alpha or beta, that will help money move.

Whether it be in alliance the money is being traded, or outside there will be a strong demand.

As Styx mentioned there are other ways to get kernels then by just farming. We've already been getting some good headway rather then just straight farming.

The argument you can just buy your way to the T4 gear isn't even realistic.

Why would any of the Beta alliances sell high-level kernels, to gear up their enemies? Its not like there's a lack of money on Beta, with highest-level mobs and best transport missions where you farm 10-20 mil per character per hour. Organized Beta dwellers don't need money, and the ones that do are obviously incompetent enough that they wouldn't be able to figure out how to farm the kernels in the first place.

Plus with the lower drop rate, you spend more time farming on hostile islands = more risk. No new corporation coming into the game is going to survive this technology tree, its easy for my own corp because we're at T3 working on T4 for medium weapons, or for M2S with a fully completed tech tree, or for corps being fed prototypes by other corps.

The new guy however, will simply not be able to compete with this. Its not a matter of intelligence or organization, it is a pure grind-fest for either money to afford overly-inflated prices for kernels (and they will skyrocket when the rest of us finish the tech tree and sell stuff that gives our racial weapon types), via boring assignments or boring mob-grinding to get plasma. The new guy and his new corp will get frustrated and leave the game, and then we can circle-jerk together when more corps that are in the intermediate stage fold, never mind we already aren't getting above ~300-400 at prime time.

Why not comprehensively read my post again. I don't write this stuff so you can gloss over well explained counter-points only for you to then splurge about something I just fully explained. I'm not saying you should buy your way to T4 gear. I'm saying you should buy your way to T2/3 gear and then farm from T3 to T4. You can farm T4/5 NPC's the entire time saving the kernels for when you've completed T3 research. The research prior to that being fueld by selling the Plasma you've been getting. I also suggest saving up kernels, I remember you saying that you researched kernels in 100 or less quantities. It doesn't take much experimenting to figure out that larger batches give better returns.

So your problem is that Alpha corporations cannot get their own T4 research sub six months when not even venturing on to a PvP island? Then I guess we have two differing opinions on progression along with scarcity of resources (which this game doesn't have enough of already).

Not true, the newcorporations may have to make deals, and work with the bigger ones in order to advance themsleves. It encourages interaction politically. By providing that interaction the ones with advanced knowledge already get to do more then just watch tumbleweeds go by as they'll have to work with the newer guys coming in. More people will have to work together instead of being separate.

an MMORPG is about interaction, not about solo play.

50% is harder to get tech though, but still other ways do exists..

Market prcing, availability and the difficulty of obtaining higher level kernels at this point is all guessing and speculation. What I can say is about how this effects me.

I have already spent about 10 m nic on kernel research, which in the long view is not much, but I had a goal to try and reach one specific t4 item. The item isn't relevent, what is however is the idea of goal setting in this game. Setting long and short term goals is the only thing to motivate me to log in.

I feel that goal has just been moved too far. I don't make 10 m nic per day, that is a weeks worth of transport missions, and combat loot doesn't help me at all, so this change has directly effected my long term and short term goals.

Does one player matter... probably not, then again, I'm just the one player posting.

I'm never going to be a threat or target for m2s, so while styx's arguements may be vaild when applied to other beta alliances, they don't mean anything to solo players (the ones that won't see 1 billion nic in a year of playing). I also don't have any illusions of completing the tech tree, but I thought just maybe I could reach t4 in one specific area (not weapons).

This isn't going to stop me from playing, but it is going to stop my researching. And by extension any t4 items that I would have put into the market, since beta corps don't seem to be putting them up for sale.

Then again, in the long run, if syndic's prediction of the average player leaving the game is correct, then the choice of me staying will be moot.

In my other post I did note the extra nic that a combat player can make from bounties, but I don't even own a combat bot on this character. Sure I have a second account with a combat alt, but not every subscriber has 2 accounts, if you have to have multiple accounts to play the game, then it truely is broken.

The point you do make is that I would be competing for kernels at a price that is now inflated under the assumption that I now have combat bounty nic to help close the gap.

What I was saying in the previous post is basically the goal of being a solo indy producer is not acheivable, and I'm now waiting to see what goal I can replace that with.

My other question is what are combat pilots going to buy with all their newly gained wealth? Certainly not tier gear, because again the corps that can produce it have no reason to sell it.

My 'prediction' is that demand will exceed the new supply, and drive the price up well over the amount of nic earned; that includes the players who are sitting on 10000 kernels just waiting for this.

I do agree that the market needs an influx of nic, but I would have rather seen somthing break the money loose from the beta corps that can afford to put up buy orders for 2000 units @ 100,000 nic each (that's 200 M nic for an item that is selling for 1.2M just sitting dead in the market)

I play in a 3 man corporation and developing a tech tree was a big thing to get for us. Now it just got 50% harder. Actualy 100% harder? Noone is going to sell the kernels since they will be rare. Also hard to get, unlike the NIC that is super easy to get, and now you also make it farming kernels.
In the end I got way too much NIC and way to little kernels.
Oh but you can buy kernels -> again who will sell them? Kernel farmers? They got NIC no need for NIC, and why give your opposition the advantage?.....
Do you see the circular thing here?