Now that you mention it, I do wonder how much stuff in general is gonna find its way on EBAY. I’m going to go look and see if any javelins are there.
Yeppers just looked and javelins start at 7K. Who woulda thunk it? lol
Oh dude the grey market is MASSIVE, so many ships there. During any PU beta every single high-value resource is going to be mapped and charted and when the game goes live people are going to RACE out there, snag them all, then put them on ebay for RTM.
The only way to stop that is the SWG model…the resources are consumed and move so there ARE no fixed “perfect” spots. Anyone who played SWG will remember how much we had to regularly go out, scan down resources, move our miners, gather and install energy, etc. Being a resource gatherer was a job in SWG, and people sold the mats in-game at top credit.
Yep I spent the first 2 days of each week in galaxies tracking down where and what resources there were and their locations. Made coin selling the info. Usually gave it away for free to guildies. But the problem with that here is that these outposts aren’t made to just move around. There wouldn’t be enough pioneers made to facilitate that kind of migrations. In galaxies once the harvester’s were made they could be collapsed and re-used at new locations in a snap.
Yep I’m a bit slow in my dotage. Just realized that keeping resources where they are would start small wars between corporations. Taking over someone elses mine at a prime location would be a huge pastime for some people. Like me though it would drive me away, because you cant really defend yourself when your at a fixed location against mobile targets. The castle mentality doesn’t work.
Thankfully they can’t in UEE space, the UEE would always eventually come. In the Wilds that’s another story, it’s less of a claim and more of a squat.
There are 3 things I feel CIG needs to do in SC to reduce a lot of the anti-social nonsense that asshats tend to bring in:
- SWG-style resource management. They move, wear out, appear, are hard to find one week and easier the next. Common stuff should be plentiful but the rarest stuff should be in small supply and impossible to squat on forever and make a fortune on, in or out of game.
- Don’t take the Eve model and put the top 33% of the most valuable stuff only findable in 0.0 space. Let people who want to avoid PvP still be able to make stuff, don’t make it such that only PvP gankers and huge super corps are the only ones who can ever get anything.
- Use NPCs intelligently and watch the grey market. Someone puts a “prime” plot up on Ebay? NPC’s come and take it. Someone snags a bunch of plots with rare materials but aren’t doing anything with them? The materials “fade” and the plots are valueless. The world itself discourages that behavior. Only use it when it’s really obvious, of course, like the guy who has 100 plots up on ebay.
TZ and his team will be monitoring the game heavily, it’s 90% NPC, being a douche should be really hard and have serious consequences, IMHO.
I love this list.
1 - I agree. Resources need to spawn at random locations or at least semi random. In other words only certain types of moons or planets should have certain types of resources that make sense. Other than that it should be rando gen. However I do not think the resources should despawn after time. They should remain until harvested to nothing. That way if a resource lays out there for months, someone might not find it for months more. I like the idea of running across an abandoned mine that someone lost the funds to run and yet the resource is still there to take over.
2 - Absolutely. But, that does not mean that all resources should be easy to get. Put the rare stuff in hard to get to places. Eve put it in low sec locations because that was the only way to make it hard to get. In SC they can put it deep in caves where finding it is hard but getting it out is harder. And I am totally ok with that. Put tons of NPC marauders patrolling the area, put monsters in the caves, all things I am totally behind. But not all rares need to be in PvP space.
3 - I could not care less about the grey market as it is today. I have used it to get ships I only had access to through this method. For most of what you find there it is priced under what CIG is charging because they use old CCUs to cut prices. I am fine with this as it is because in the end all of the money still goes to CIG as they are the only source for ships.
Plots are another story. Resource locations as well.
While I am not as hardcore against the idea of a market as Mac is, I can see where he is coming from. There are ways to make it so that information about the location of a resource is only able to be traded in game, that part is easy enough. As for fading resources, I am against. If I want to hedge the market by buying up plots of unobtainium and hold them then that is up to me. The thing is, I am part of 10% of the entire market. CIG can easily see that too many are trying to affect the price of a resource and they can bring in a load of NPCs that have mined it magically. So this is not something they have to address at the resource ownership level. They can do it at the market level and players can do squat about it. And again, I am ok with that. As long as they use it sparingly. There has to be some fun in playing the market and holding on to rare resources.
I would not say that buying up plots with rare resources is being a douche. It is being a businessman.
Selling them on Ebay…ehhh that’s another story.
It will be interesting to see how economy evolves in the coming months when mining and salvage come online
My grey market issues are 100% personal. I couldn’t tell you a piece of data where they “ruin a game”, I just frigging hate scalpers, to the core of my bones and want them all to die in a fire. People who don’t give a damn about the game, concert, sports team, etc, buy up all of the tickets/resources and sell them at 3-10x just to profit for profit’s sake. Ugh, hate hate hate hate.
Yeah sure, but how do you really feel?
Hey, I admit it’s personal, ok 
I’m old, this is a safe space for me to be old
LOL
No judgement from me old man 
Well you guys have issues lol. Another thing to think about also, I have seen that they have started doing this already. That is they are putting a cap by resource at every location. For instance Olisar might only want 100 med kits a day. Once that’s been bought, you cant sell any more there. Of course the larger bases/planetary facilities might have a higher cap, but once its been reached you cant sell anymore at that location. This is going to make resource selling very competitive. I would call it a daily race to sell. I hope there are going to be contracts that can be grabbed for resources you can mine and then sell. Like for instance ARCORP might want 1 mill of unobatanium needed to build a ship. You grab the contract, and mine, then ship what you have to ARCORP. There might even be a time limit to do this. This would make warehouses very important.
Yup, and the larger, more energetic orgs will make a killing and lock it down. 10,000 people with alts logged out on every station. They log in, jot down inventory and prices, upload it to their shared DB, then deploy folks to move the product. The universe may not have FTL comms but a large enough Org can simulate it easily.
True, name any MMO where the larger orgs didn’t have a gigantic advantage over everyone else? This is where I hope the contract system gets hooked into the faction system. That way large or small we all get a shot at making money. Or like a campaign, there is a gameplay system where the higher faction you have with a nation or NPC org gets exclusive missions as a reward for loyalty, not just combat stuff, but mining and trading as well.
WoW, post BC. I don’t care how big your guild is, there is zero content you get to do that I can’t. Sure you can do it at a higher difficulty, but it’s exactly the same.
GW2. Being a huge guild nets you nothing.
FFXIV. Being in a huge guild is just more convenient, but the entire game is available to everyone.
In Eve, being in a big corp gives you access to stuff that a solo will never see, no matter how much they might want to.
There’s a trend right now that CIG is tagging along with that drives me nuts, catering to the “F5 Crowd”, putting something out there that only the people who are up at 3am spamming F5 have a chance of getting, which really caters to the scalpers. I would much prefer things that can’t be “camped” like that, that everyone has a chance of getting access to. Let me give you an example…
Space Anomalies, things in deep space that are content, have riches, whatever, they’re “cool to find”. The more people that are in an area, the fewer of them there are and the harder they are to find. By definition, if you’re in a guild of 100,000 people, lining up and spamming F5 to scan the system you will NEVER find them, but if you’re a lone dude, off by yourself, you have the best chance of it. When you find it, it’s yours, you exploit it and move on. It’s gone when you log off, so you can’t put it on wiki or ebay, can’t profit from it outside of the game, it’s just a cool thing you get to enjoy.
CIG can do this across the game and make the game far more approachable and accessible while deterring the anti-social/hyper-competitive approaches to gameplay that have arisen in the last few decades.
OHH I like that idea. Something else I would like to see too (Pardon my theory crafting.) Is in research, Maybe a planet wide plague that keeps spreading offworld. Following even the simplest CDC models. Multiple research ships needed to find the cure, multiple hospital ships needed to house the sick. Multiple fleets of cargo vessels for resources needed like food and medicines. PCs have developed to the point where game mechanics can have stuff like this. You wouldn’t need to park a research ship for weeks, maybe provide “X” number of research points. That way you wouldn’t get bored watching your fingers move across a virtual keyboard.
Oh absolutely, park 2-3 endeavors in orbit and we work on each OTHER’s ships to find the cure while military ships enforce a quarantine or it spreads worse. Players are showing up and volunteering to do science minigames on our Endeavors until we solve it.
Yep that would be solid.
Haven’t been very active in this forum, but I am looking forward to playing with y’all. Got lots of ships, big and small, to bring to the party. 
I’m definitely in for an OTG planet as it were. Would be reminiscent of the guild towns in SWG, but it would be a lot of fun. I also enjoyed the way resources worked in SWG simply because you could go scan for new resources periodically, and when you found a vein of that ultra rare copper with the highest conductivity you could mobilize your whole guild and get all the extra harvesters out there and stock up on something that wouldn’t be seen again for 6-18 months.
I’m totally fine with people hording resources, but not a fan of hording the locations of resources without developing them. The difference being the resources have already been obtained and are thus available for the economy (even if that is only in back room trading or premium auctions), versus preventing the resources from being part of the economy by putting a lock on where they are obtained. They’d best not allow resources to be kept from the entire player base by a few individuals being NEETs with the land.
Also in on the high sec part. My EVE days of 2 a.m. carrier runs using 6 accounts and constantly refilling towers with fuel and stront are long past. And while I don’t feel like putting in the effort I used to in order to control entire categories of the Jita and Agil markets, I have no problems with players trying to dictate market prices. On the NPC side I’d have no problem if the prices of things fluctuated daily/weekly based on how many of an item has traded hands. At least that way people can make money regardless, but the early birds and the folks willing to go to places less traveled get rewarded for their initiative by having a little higher percentage of profit.