Mail from mindark

Sadly, this does very little for the average player. Sure, it is a great prize to win, but it is not a structural solution for a structural issue...

Agreed, Land deeds have a TT value of zero ped, the money comes from other players who deposit and are willing to pay the markup. It's a cigar from another person's box, not from MA who printed their own money by putting Land Deeds on auction and are now handing out a last batch of Land Deeds in loot.

The "house cut" needs to be reduced by increasing average TT loot returns on a structural basis.

/Slupor
 
Hey, now they know how to make people happy: loot mod mercs in every other HOF. I sure hope they don't plan to address that second point, because the only way to do so is to drive their "delicate economic balance" into the sea...

I'm genuinely surprised that was #2 out of those issues, but I guess I shouldn't be.

I find myself in profound disagreement with you. If it is not possible to loot any more unlimited items, then the item pool in game will be effectively closed, and any chance of getting anything, to broaden your avatars capabilities, would then be to buy some other avatar out. And that is no fun. Looting items does not simply bring markup or just the possession of such, but also a sense of achievement and ownership. If I can't loot any guns / armors from hunting, any incentive to continue hunting is greatly reduced - I might as well concentrate on mining and crafting then where it is still possible to make such.

I personally am very much encouraged by Oleg and Tigerskin "looting" PoTE sets. I can not kill anywhere as many Evis like they do, but I see a path to where I will be able to, and thus have a chance of acquiring higher end items in future events. Similarily, item drops from beacons and boss mobs help make some sense into doing these.

For the record - the best Item I have looted in game is a Marber Bravo.
 
How do people keep getting these email updates and surveys? I have the checkbox ticked on my account and still dont receive them. What is the email address of the sending email from?

~Danimal

For adicted ones and old bones MA dont need surveys.
 
All of the reasons highlighted above offer opportunities for
improving Entropia Universe...


o_rly.jpg
 
Please bare in mind that MA have their AGM in the next couple of weeks and their anual report for 2011 is in

annual_report_2011.pdf

Agreements with Knowit on the development of app
MindArk signed in April 2012 agreement with Knowit on developing an app for mobile devices.
The app will make available a subset of the functionality of the Entropia Universe in mobile devices, such information, auction management and production of virtual objects. An object of the app is to increase customer loyalty, ie. reduce the relatively high proportion of participants who become inactive.

Expected development In 2012, MindArk will focus on the following key projects:
Improve the performance of existing gaming systems, and introduce older game systems that have not established after conversion to CryEngine2.
Develop new, innovative game systems, and provide member functions for mobile devices, and for increased customer loyalty, both to reach new and broader customer groups.
Intensify marketing of the Entropia Universe to inactive participants in our database, with current participants and to potential new participants.
Simplify for potential new participants to become active in the Entropia Universe. These projects are expected to give positive development for MindArk, Entropia Universe and its Planet Partners in 2012 and beyond.

won't post anymore but it looks like we'll see some changes over the next year.
 
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if they inplement the survey thing newbies could get a chance íf they can get 10-50 cent per survey.

hey atleast its better than sweating
 
I find myself in profound disagreement with you. If it is not possible to loot any more unlimited items, then the item pool in game will be effectively closed, and any chance of getting anything, to broaden your avatars capabilities, would then be to buy some other avatar out. And that is no fun. Looting items does not simply bring markup or just the possession of such, but also a sense of achievement and ownership. If I can't loot any guns / armors from hunting, any incentive to continue hunting is greatly reduced - I might as well concentrate on mining and crafting then where it is still possible to make such.

I personally am very much encouraged by Oleg and Tigerskin "looting" PoTE sets. I can not kill anywhere as many Evis like they do, but I see a path to where I will be able to, and thus have a chance of acquiring higher end items in future events. Similarily, item drops from beacons and boss mobs help make some sense into doing these.

For the record - the best Item I have looted in game is a Marber Bravo.

Sorry for wall-o-text but I do think a complete explanation of my comment is important.

This is an ancient point of discussion here, of course. I understand your viewpoint, but this is one of the issues where game economy and player wishes are always going to be at odds. For there to be any economy in game, there has to be a sink for loots, and that sink is in the form of manufacturing (minerals, oils, extractors, etc.), coloring (paints), taming (fruits and sweetstuff). When the persons doing those activities have no incentive to do them, the loots that are consumed by them go unbought, and the markup drops to zero (e.g. paints). What provides incentive to manufacturers to buy loots at a markup and make stuff? Why, the possibility of selling the fruits of their labors at a markup (or, of looting a bp/HOF, but this is poor motivation to pay markup if no manufactures sell for markup).

I know this is all obvious, but it illustrates the importance of (L) items. Economists for decades omitted the concept of limits to growth from their theories, and the success or even survival of the major developed world economies has depended on continuous growth. As a result, things don't go so well when people already have all the tennis shoes, TVs and automobiles they want.

Fortunately in the real world, things break and become obsolete. Almost nothing is unlimited. So even if people stop buying more than they have in previous years, the market continues forward in a cycle of consumption and production.

So what maintains demand for products of manufacture in EU? Again, it has to be either population growth, breakage, or obsolescence. The first would be ideal, but is unsustainable, as we are being forced to address even in the real world where everyone in a population must participate in the market (EU, and using items in EU, are voluntary, so...). The second (breakage and replacement) is the (L) economy, which works fine as long as a huge segment of the participating population is consuming the (L) items. The third is something i've thought may be happening, strategically, lately (obsolescence): making the old weapon and item economy obsolete by introducing a whole new series of better weapons and items. This is a fine approach if buyer confidence isn't important. It's something a company would only get away with once before their customers are unwilling to deposit to buy nice items.

Which takes me back to my comment. Player wish #1 is addressable: MA could increase the average payout without causing harm to the in-game economy. (Whether that would destroy their IRL cashflow and put them out of business is another issue.) Player wish #2 is simply the way things must be for EU to maintain a functional economy. Every MMORPG you see will have players clamoring for uber items, but even in games not based on a RCE, if everyone gets uber items, the game must become boring or up the ante... whereupon there must be new elite items and the whole cycle starts over. If MA were to take that approach (again, obsolescence of a form), it would destroy player confidence in MA AND make gameplay more expensive as mobs get bigger all around.

Kim made a frightening remark in a thread about how he hates (L) and views it only as something for a person to loot and use themselves for a temporary boost above their normal playing level. (If I err in that summary, please let me know). That's a player attitude, not an acceptable viewpoint of a person involved in decision-making about the in-game economy. So maybe Kim isn't actually involved in those decisions, but frankly to have something as disruptive and short-sighted as that come from a developer scares the crap out of me. I don't want to see MA drive EU into the ground completely by trying to cater to the whims of their customers at the expense of the game economy.

So, making a few nice items available through events or extremely rare drops is okay for the near term, and probably worthwhile to keep the player base motivated. Fine, make a few nice items available each year, give us a carrot, but even so, as long as the population base isn't growing, it is a recipe for erosion of the economy. A more wholesale dropping of nice unlimited items because the players demand it would quickly destroy what's left of the economy.
 
Sorry for wall-o-text but I do think a complete explanation of my comment is important.

.....

if the prices of the L weren't so high i.e. max 100-200 ped and they decayed at a similar or lower rate to the UL people would switch far quicker and wouldn't go back to the UL especially if the MU was only 5% or above on the low to mid weapons. For instance the max tt on a Isis HL18 is over 20kped, did it really need to be so high?

Crafters would have a market across the range of weapons giving the players skilling a market to sell the low and mid range to while those with a high skill can concentrate on the higher level weapons. Thus giving those selling resources a market to sell to.

However we've got a situation where MA decided a max tt should be vastly more than that even though the vast cost of a using a weapon is actually the ammo used rather than its decay and the player driven markup on it.
 
So what maintains demand for products of manufacture in EU? Again, it has to be either population growth, breakage, or obsolescence. The first would be ideal, but is unsustainable, as we are being forced to address even in the real world where everyone in a population must participate in the market (EU, and using items in EU, are voluntary, so...). The second (breakage and replacement) is the (L) economy, which works fine as long as a huge segment of the participating population is consuming the (L) items. The third is something i've thought may be happening, strategically, lately (obsolescence): making the old weapon and item economy obsolete by introducing a whole new series of better weapons and items. This is a fine approach if buyer confidence isn't important. It's something a company would only get away with once before their customers are unwilling to deposit to buy nice items.

Which takes me back to my comment. Player wish #1 is addressable: MA could increase the average payout without causing harm to the in-game economy. (Whether that would destroy their IRL cashflow and put them out of business is another issue.) Player wish #2 is simply the way things must be for EU to maintain a functional economy. Every MMORPG you see will have players clamoring for uber items, but even in games not based on a RCE, if everyone gets uber items, the game must become boring or up the ante... whereupon there must be new elite items and the whole cycle starts over. If MA were to take that approach (again, obsolescence of a form), it would destroy player confidence in MA AND make gameplay more expensive as mobs get bigger all around.

You are describing a phenomenon that is called mudflation, that is, sooner or later everybody will have reached the maximum level and looted all the über items and don't have much to do any more. The reverse of this is unreachable endgame, in games where the endgame is unreachable most people invariably hit the wall and leave because they see no further possibility of meaningful progress.

  • Only low level items have ever become obsolete in EU , there are essentially no (L) only or (L) mostly uber items.
  • As a result, nothing beats the old school high level items. No matter how many levels you have, you either shell out for Mod Merc or similar or are screwed.
  • The (L) economy you describe only exists at mid levels at most, because rarity and markup makes anything else utterly un-economical to use. It is the uneconomy of using such, not the lack of skills, that drives what people can and will use.
  • There are no (L) über faps at all. Even if you max all (L) faps at an insane level of 100+ paramedic, you still will not get as many hp/sec as imp fap and none of (L) faps have more then 10hp/pec of heals, never mind that you have to pay markup on top of that.
  • Limiting the number of über items does not guarantee price increase or even price stability of über items even in the case of a growing player base. EU could have as many users as Facebook, and Mod Merc could still be going for TT+100 as a collectors item, if nobody sees benefit to having more than say 40 levels.

And this is why #2 and #3 were what these were and why these are so high. If I will never, no matter what I do, how much time and effort I spend on the game, or how smartly I play it, reach the end game, then why should I even bother? Care to give me even a single reason?
 
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