Let me get this straight, Before the gamma expansion I could deplete a mineral field. Did it re- spawn somewhere else? No.

Remember the ore regeneration nerf? Good old Norhoop days with AXE, CHAOS, JOKE, RG and company there was barely any Epitron left on that island. Can this happen today with more players? No. Sure it could fragment and end up on NPC spawns, but still no need, now we have gamma for mining.

So with enough miners, before the ore field changes mining could surpass regeneration, still infinite if you wait ofc, but we needed it for wars on a daily basis.

The old system (static fields that regenerated over time) was much better then the new one (instant respawn).

I don't care how you wrap it up in devlingo from a coder's perspective, from a gamer's perspective above stated is fact and god honest truth.

Celebro actually knows what he's talking about because he was actually playing the game at the time.

It seems to me, that the best thing for the game would be to just remove Epri from gamma, and make it a Beta only material.  This would make betas critically important for production. If Epri is only on Beta, it would force miners to mine Epri where they could be attacked.  This simple change would cause:

1) Epri prices up to where they should be. 

2) Encourage PVP, because miners are now vulnerable again, and must be defended or risk being killed.

3) Force more thought into logistics, because now not only do you have to mine the Epri on Beta, but now you have to get it off of Beta, to either Alpha or Gamma

4) Make Betas vital to a corp and thus worth defending or attacking.

This simple change would make roams viable again, because now you HAVE to defend your miners and Beta OP.  if you dont, your Epri supply gets cut off.  and the Roamers get to kill your miners.

And if you wanted to be really cruel, make Noralgis a beta only plant.  This would stop miners from planting 50+ pot farms, with no risk of losing it.  This would also cause the Norg prices to go back to where they should be, because now you cant harvest 10+ million every day inside your Fortress of Solitude A.K.A The Taj Mastuart.

This would also have the added benefit of making T2 and T3 gear more viable because T4 gear is more expensive and harder to get/produce.

Some of the Best memories i have of this game, are from the early days of STC when we had to Ninja mine Epri off of Hostile Betas, that *** was terrifying.

That's the sort of thing I was thinking about, Martha.

Line does have a point, though. What's the point of Gamma then? Eventually the T5 and T6 Colixum based modules - just not yet.

Is the T1/2, T3/4, T5/6 pairing system still in the pipeline does anybody know?

I feel dirty, but +1

Again, I have to disagree.  If that were true, more people would be fighting over them.  And the missions really arn't worth it once you have made enough money/research/PVP ammo.  They need to be worth something to the corp, not an individual.  The only thing that is worth getting from SAP loot any more is Cortexes and Officer beacons.

That's because you don't understand how your game was played by the players.

Titan ore (and to a degree, the other resources) were never actively mined by the Beta corporations/alliances on the Beta islands themselves to the degree which would result in oh-noes-island-is-stripped-bare!

The "lesser ores" like Titan and HDT, were almost exclusively procured by Alpha-mining during off-times, preferentially starting on Alpha islands closest to the "enemy" and working towards the Alpha islands closest to "home", as a consequence achieving two goals of a) denying close proximity resources to enemy b) creating supply-depots that can be tapped in the future if needed.

The only exception to the rule were those rare cases where non-epri resources were conveniently located near the home Beta base (EXAMPLE: Danarchov had a pretty big HDT deposit near one of its legs, usually took 3-4 days to regenerate for approximately 45-50M HDT).

Due to the involvement of Epriton in T1-T2-T3-T4 & Bot production back then (remember, you only removed epriton from T1 LATER!) it was only logical and normal that that resource would be the most sought-after, and its fields the first ones to be depleted, since Epriton was the main bottleneck (later on you introduced Noralgis because we were mass-producing past the Epriton bottleneck).

This is why you could find random deposits of Imentium red and untapped all around Novastrov and the other Beta's, not a single f*ck was given when there were hundreds of millions of refined commodities (back when a Lithus carried 1,2M-1,8M of raw ore, we decided to bite the bullet for less refining rates versus having to haul for 9-10 hours a day) flowing in daily from the safety of Alpha. This achieved two goals, a) it provided the lesser resources required b) it weeded out spies as all recruits were forced to meet crazy Alpha mining quotas for weeks on end.

At the time we were brainstorming day after day how to make production effective enough compete against M2S, so I'm sure the rest of the server had similar thought processes. I still cackle when I remember how many tens of billions we poured into crashing the market when we got access to their forums/corp-chat and heard how Styx was "producing off the market".

But I digress, my point is there were enough players to empty whole islands - there was just not enough to gain from doing so.

Most of the players left due to slow development/shrinking population, most of my guys unsubbed after that mass-petition you caved in to, the mass-petitioners eventually got bored without us around (as I told my guys, the surest and fastest way to kill the corps who were built around the idea of fighting us was to remove ourselves from the equation), and whatever was left from the mass-petitioners - the toggies? - we made an example of when Gamma came out.

Now the gamma problem - you cannot solve it without;

a) Severely redesigning(nerfing) terraforming.
b) Introducing a completely new class of bots designed to siege Gamma.
c) Introducing an island turret-cap.

In either case, you will have to take steps to make Gamma worth living on/having (there are no spawns to make money from on Gamma), as currently the only advantages (admittedly huge and overpowered) are perfect safety & infinite ores & beacon pits & noralgis terraces - all of which revolve around perfect safety, facilitated by the fact that terraforming allows for the creation of unbreachable fortresses.

If we had the capacity to deploy ~100-200 man/account fleets like before, it might be a different story. Unfortunately too many corps and players have been alienated by previous decisions/dev involvement with player corps/slow development, so unless you can finally get Steam sorted and miraculously retain 0,1% of Steam's population, you're just gonna have to knuckle down and stop designing your game around needing to have enough accounts/numbers to be viable, and make it accessible across the board.

You have a good point with freighters Zortag.

Yes, Gamma requires a significant investment however I disagree it necessitates a longer period of time to recoup. It's directly influenced by the factor of how many people/accounts contributed to the investment, and how many people/accounts are exploiting the island to recoup the investment.

It's an immaterial point anyway, as in my mind the concept of Gamma is ass-backwards (omage to Hunter!). You gotta be rich to go make it so you can slowly get more rich, how are new corps gonna get their fingers in there? Sure it's a different situation currently because nobody besides 20-30 guys are playing the game, but my point still stands. If all the islands were occupied, it would be impossible for a new corporation to come into the game and set Gamma as one of their goals. They could simply not achieve it, even if they had 500 people and were trying to take a Gamma defended by 3 guys.

I'm not proposing any "complicated" features because I realize (and I think we all realize) that 3 hungryans can only code so fast. Any solutions to terraforming, Gamma, and the game itself in general have to be effective yet simple enough that the aforementioned 3-4 codemonkeys can deliver it in a reasonable time-frame (3-6 months).

Thats not even taking into account they've already got their hands full with their current projects.

On the subject of trade, no trade or market can exist while infinite instant respawn ore fields are in-game. Sure we can trade the odd T4 module or some random tidbits, but if everyone can get everything they want/need provided they put the effort to turn the macro on and empty the field can from time to time, we don't have any subject to discuss as it's a pointless waste of time.

Sydnic: Some of the game issues you mention are valid, but 90% of the problems is just low population. Look at Eve, how many half completed projects they are trying to fix now for 2 years. Still patching it up from utter incompetence from the past, specially the 'Incarna expansion'.

I'm sure 500 players covering all time zones can easily take any gamma, it's just a matter of when they are ready. New players should not be able to take gamma anyways, as Line mentions.

Just need to wait for CCP to f*** up again. I am watching closely what they are planning, like a possible complete change to mining (which has never been tried before). We just need 1% of their population which could jump start the game again. Who knows what can happen these days.

No one expected the Eve exodus, and I bet this game got noticed by CCP as a threatening competitor for a while.. Wondering now who did the DDOS...

Fixed: replace 'gamma' with '0.0' and it still makes sense

I wouldn't go so far to imply CCP DDOSed perps servers, they can at any point simply sue them into the ground if they really thought Perp was serious competition, or if they feel like it, or if the Icelandic Overlord gets up on the wrong side of the bed.