Info: Game Mechanics That Hurt the EU

There was also a time when people TT'ed Shadow parts and Mod FAPs. But as the player base expands, demand goes up. The goal MindArk has is to continue multiplying the player base, and as that happens, more UL items can become available without over-saturating the market. If the economy moves into a demand-side economy, the system can phase into a UL system with the rare (L) items becoming a part of it. Most of the (L) items I loot now have very little MU as it is, so they become TT food anyways.
 
My 20 Pec.

Good Post. Not just bitching, but solid ideas for solutions.

I'm super newb compared to you, although; I have had long experience in MMO's (EverQuest; 5 years, Star Wars Galaxies; 7 years, Vanguard; 2 years) Games change; you have to decide to change or move on... Here's my take from my awesome 1st year on EU.

#1 Planet Partners: Themed planets are cool as long as the theme maintains the emersion. I LOVE Toulan. NI and RT, not so much. Although, if RT hosted concerts featuring band avatars at Club Neverdie, that would be awesome. People could pay a cover to see a virtual concert...I would.
I'd love to see planets based on different mythos; Norse, Hindu, Chinese/Japaneese

#2 Amped Mining: Amped Mining is a way to "Up the Ante" for gamblers and allows me to get more resources for crafting in less drops. LBML is a fantastic tool.

#3 Ridiculous ATHs: What's ridiculous? Win some lose some. But I see your point about less ATH = better avg return for all players.

#4 Tier System: Customizing your weapon with enhancers is a choice not a requirement. I like more choice, and different enhancers could be introduced such as increased shots/min.

#5 Removing PEDs from loot: I think ammo in the loot is the same as ped in loot. I prefer to see the oils, even if the mu is low. Low mu on materials = cheaper crafting expenses. You can always tt the oils.

#6 Limited items: After reading all the posts, I assume you are referring only to looted (L) items. I agree that (L) items in loot is crap. Let the Crafters craft the L items from the looted materials. Keep the UL rare items in the hunter loot and give crafters drops of (L) bp's for UL items.

SWG had one of the best systems in this regard. Each raw material had stats, the stats affected the durability, range, power of guns and durability, protection, and flexibility/weight (movement speed) of armors. Experienced crafters knew which mats to combine for desired results.

#7 ESI's/Selling Skills: Disagree! Time is money and nothing drives this home better than the ability to buy/sell skills. I like this system as is...it allowed me to advance and balance my skills as desired and needed.

#8 CLDs: Disagree. The investment opportunities are what drove me to this MMO. This also allows the player base to fund the game; ensuring longevity. MA can always buy back the shares (or split them, lol) as needed. Lots of companies use this method to ensure company growth. Many players use the returns to fund gameplay.
I look forward to the political power CLDs are "promised" to have in the future. I was Mayor of a very successful town in SWG and look forward to that kind of interaction.

#9 Miscellaneous: All software has issues after an update. Even the commercial process control software that I used to work on and curse every quarter for 5 years.
Absentee LA owners is a problem, but that's a sticky area. MA has rules about inactivity, but do they stick to them? I own a LA and maintain it pretty well...I think.
Shared loot area's don't bother me. What bothers me is the lack of incentive to hunt with a group because of the mission kill counts. I liked the idea about moving to KP system and awarding KP according to dmg done. That seems like a no brainer....I'd also like to see a need/greed lottery for rare drops. Vanguard had a great system for this.

The Good:

#1 Events: Agree, although I'd like to see some downtimes between planet events to encourage more player run events on LA's and Event Areas.

#2 Missions: I'd like to see more "flavor" missions that explain the lore of the planets or set up a story arc that runs for a month, quarter, or year.
EQ and SWG had faction points/tokens allowing you to gain/lose favor by killing mobs...or other players. (heh heh heh) Rewards could be awarded specific to each faction. I feel that Cyrene already has the lore to bring this in smoothly.

SWG allowed you to select covert agent (PvE only) or overt agent (PvP and PvE). Overt Agents held faction ranks (selectable like current professions) and were allowed PvP in ALL AREAS...even the city streets. Overt agents were allowed to buy troops with faction points that acted like pets for battle support. A bit much to ask, but good food for thought.

#3 Cryengine: Awesome.

#4 Custom Social Interface: Nice. Can't say I've seen better.

#5 SIB: Agree.

Given the overall longevity and projected growth of EU, I'm glad I made the move and sad I didn't do it earlier. Looking forward to many more hours of my RL wasted growing my EU life.

Cheers and Good Luck out there!
 
Just as a side note

Back in time when peds was still part of the loot i never TT'ed anything. Everything was sellable and most trough auction wich costed 1 ped to start per stack. I made more MU from selling hunting loot as i get now and my MU wasn't eaten away from auction fees.

Today i TT so manny stuff related to enhancers and extractors its kinda sad.
 
Just as a side note

Back in time when peds was still part of the loot i never TT'ed anything. Everything was sellable and most trough auction wich costed 1 ped to start per stack. I made more MU from selling hunting loot as i get now and my MU wasn't eaten away from auction fees.

Today i TT so manny stuff related to enhancers and extractors its kinda sad.

Well what you TT toady, was PED in loot in the past.
Just auction only that part of the loot, thats worth beeing sold at auction.
Nothing different!
 
Heard possibly the best solution to (L) items in this thread. Please MA, take note.

The only issue I can remember from back in the day was crafted guns were never bought. This was due to them having worse stats than looted counterparts - essentially to stop a crafter flooding the market with a certain weapon and destroying value in looted guns.

I don't know how it would balance having a move back to unL weapons, for people who craft the go-to weapons atm (breers, omegatreks etc). I don't think there would be enough demand for the enhanced versions (L) outside of events such as WOF or MM (potentially pvp also).

Having said that, I absolutey LOVE the idea of:

Basic / Adj / Imp / Mod unL (at say, lvl 20 / 22 / 25 / 30) then having Basic / Enhanced / Upgraded / Overcharged (L) at the same levels, but with increased stats.

This creates a lovely market model where players are using unL weapons 99% of the time, and rarely looting an (L) weapon, or armour piece, or fap, or detector, which allows them to attempt a more challenging mob or mine a rare ore, while being at the same level.

It's also the perfect way to progress the game past lvl100 as we are now - introduce the new uber-(L) items first, then slowly introduce the higher level requirement unL guns.
 
Well what you TT toady, was PED in loot in the past.
Just auction only that part of the loot, thats worth beeing sold at auction.
Nothing different!

This isn't true.

Back in the day, from mob X, you would loot peds, hides/wool, tt-items and then MU-items. Both types of items were rare, but the big difference is that it took a lot more physical time to collect large stacks of materials.

Animal hide for example used to sell near 180% or something, because it had a per mob max looting stack of 300 units. All items had this "max stack". Muscle oil nowadays is fucked in MU because you can loot 50k units of it easily.

Yes, you can class this as "peds" in the old loot, but the issue is BP's use these items, so MA factors in this into your returns. For the average player, they can't afford to save up 15-20 different item stacks up to a sellable volume (500-1000 peds worth) because it requires a hunting bankroll of $2000.

Previously, you would save everything but reach sellable volumes much more quickly - it was feasible to run on $100-200 bankroll on a lot of mobs and always able to reach sellable volumes.
 
Here's to hoping MindArk will really really take a closer look, find at least some of your points valid, and actually act on it.
Let's see what happens.
I've hit withdraw, too many bads for too long, i cannot but take my money elsewhere if MindArk/EU doesn't change.
Glad to see some ppl still trying to tell them where it goes wrong.


After 11 years in EU (actually, 12 if you include closed beta when nothing worked well haha), I have seen every change this game has gone through, good and bad. After some chatting with friends and soc-mates, I decided to compile a list of game mechanics that changed or were added which contributed to issues within the EU. After the following list of problems, I'll also throw in some of the really positive changes :laugh:

The Bad:


#1 Planet Partners: This has the biggest problem, in my opinion, for the Entropia Universe. I understand the need to expand the actual universe with more planets and space exploration. However, the novelty of having all kinds of whacky, themed worlds owned by people outside of the original company is just not realistic. We had a game of small popularity that tried to expand too quickly. The people who bought in as Planet Partners have mostly failed.

Why is this a problem? It creates a VERY bad image for new players who come in on failed planets. The advertising the Partners did reflects on the game as a whole, and when new players are seeing failures it creates a bad image for Planet Calypso.

MindArk, you want to expand the Universe and the player base? Do your OWN advertising and create your OWN Universe. We had CND, CP, and Planet Calypso, all developed initially by MA. They should have just developed more planets on their own with the care that was put into Planet Calypso. On top of that, their own high-quality advertising would have been sufficient for bringing in new players into a working system. All new players would have started on Calypso, and eventually could find their way to other MA-owned planets.

#2 Amped Mining: Honestly, I despise mining amps now. Why? It leads to ridiculous ATH finds (see the following section). The market becomes flooded by tens of thousands of PEDs worth of ONE ore in a short period of time, which creates a negative flux in market prices during that period of time. A new Chevy Corvette (in the US) costs $50,000. What happens if Chevy decides to manufacture hundreds of thousands more of these cars and they are just flooding the car lots? That price is going to get hacked to pieces.

FOMA/CND and Hell are fine. It's cool that finds are a bit harder to get, but they are usually a bit bigger than normal. Nothing wrong with that, but the scaling of FOMA/Hell with amps is outrageous.

What should we do for mining? Increase range and depth/rarity chances with amps (see why tiers are bad in section #4). Ugh, and separate finder types again (ores, enmat, treasure).

#3 Ridiculous ATHs: Of course we all hope that we'll be the next person to see 6-digits, but it's nearly impossible, and when it does happen we see the loot returns swing very low for most of us. What happens when a player, especially a new player, is lucky enough to pop huge swirlies? A large chunk is withdrawn (therefor removing PEDs from the system) and they go back to playing with very little. Later I'll go into past systems and why they were good.

#4 Tier System: Is having 20 more DPS or 300 more depth awesome? Yes, of course. Is the tier system the way to do it? No. We have amps and plating, leave it at that. As I said in section #2, mining amps should be for range and depth, not size. Tiering leads to lack of interest in higher-level items (not always of course). But without tiers, we could work on having more items to fill in empty areas between other items, and even higher level items past what we have. This would make medium level-gear more accessible and allow uber players to have new, higher level items that don't exist. 30,000+ PED for a level 50 UL/SIB handgun is... silly. I don't say this out of jealousy or anything, because I have owned a tier7 X5 at one point, so I've been there and done that. It's still ridiculous. This is not a complaint about the cost of actually tiering items.

Instead of items stalemating at a certain point on the higher-end, we should have item drops of stronger items for the higher end players to increase their DPS. This means that I'm not looting silly EC-100s from level 82 Vanguards (or Quasar for that matter. Why is a level 540 mob dropping an EC-100?). That doesn't mean every high level loot should have uber items either, of course.

#5 Removing PEDs from loot: This one, to this day, still bugs the hell out of me. Every loot is flooded with materials that aren't worth selling at 101%. This also hurts crafting. There is a recent post on these forums about how the crafting system is jacked up, so I won't go into it. But that thread is dead-on. Basically, as you go up into higher levels of crafting, less materials should be used and more assembled components need to be used. Add PEDs back into loot, make materials worthwhile in loot (they don't need to be 150% or anything crazy, but finding a way to make materials worth selling, even at 105-107% for basic materials would balance the go-between for the professions). HOWEVER, as I said with amped mining, we also shouldn't be getting tens of thousands of oil in an uber loot.

#6 Limited items: AHHHH! This is another awful system. Nothing wrong with SIB, but (L) is painful. I believe it was Kim who even agreed with this. Limited items were supposedly intended to be rare and strong. THIS makes complete sense if you ask me. Limited items would be strong for their level, and not a common sight in loot, which means the markup would be higher and give a boost to the economy. Hunters would find rare gear worth selling and buying for a fair markup and crafters would get the occasional (L) BP for mining and hunting gear. These would have higher crafting costs because of the strength-per-level of said item. With my previous views on UL items being more common (at the lowest level, but getting rarer at higher levels of course), this system of rare (L) items would work very well.

Let's say we're using level 50 weapons. On that same level: UL items < Rare, stronger UL items of the same level < Rarer, stronger L items of the same level.

#7 ESI's/Selling Skills: Just... bad. But why? New players who come into the game, drop insane money into the game, and eat their way up to the ladder from one person's skill sell-out. This is perhaps a personal issue when it comes to games, but it becomes a very "Pay-2-Win" format. But on top of that, I think that having a player who is interested in the game deposit slowly over time is better than a quick influx of money. HOWEVER, the idea of looting ESI's is not a bad plan... BUT what if they weren't ESI's? What if the chips that dropped were skill chips? Kill a Prot, and boom, 10 PED of Rifle! These could still be sold. Same for mining and crafting, their loot could also include the occasional skill chip, allowing them to add into the economy of skill sales.

For those who wish to "sell-out" could do so through a MindArk sanctioned avatar sale. This keeps shady business from being done out-of-game where unknown people are quietly selling avatars and buying avatars. MindArk could also post avatar sales so that we know, as a community, that a new person is now controlling whichever avatar. This, in the past, had create ways for people to scam because people on their friends list didn't know it was a new player.

#8 CLDs: Not much to say here, but I think this was a bad idea. It gave MA a huge, initial influx of cash, but the people who bought them and are idly collecting PEDs without paying back into the game are taking money from the game. I can't say I know the small details of how this system works, but it just doesn't seem like it was the best course of action. I could be wrong on this one.

#9 Miscellaneous: Not sticking with the roadmap, adding new features before fixing old features, server instability still an issue after so many years (client-side vs server-side tool function, creating fails), increased creature evade on top of misses, poor advertising, and ABSENTEE LA-OWNERSHIP, shared loot (really bothers me that most ubers recently have gone towards shared loot), etc.

The Good:
... (not what needs to be learned from imo so leaving it out in my reply)


The Conclusion:

There have been some very good changes to the game, I won't deny that. But there are a lot of looming issues that spawned from poor mechanic implementations. I come from a time when average loot return was fair, and HOFs in the several hundreds were a sight to behold and ubers (upwards of 2-3,000) were amazing. This was, of course, in TT value. But items were more common in loot, and the economy was far more stable. Loot was also better scaled compared to mob levels and player levels. I don't care about chasing some 6-digit ATH and would be more satisfied with average loot being stronger and items being more meaningful, yet accessible (to a degree). Withdrawing was less common 7-10 years ago because people kept their earned PEDs and worked towards moving up.

It felt more like a game and less like a gamble. For those of you who are familiar with casinos and slot machines (yes, that tired equivocation)... EU went from being a penny-slot to being a $5 Progressive Jackpot slot. And for those of you who do understand what that means, it's not good. Regular gamblers know that Progressive slots are the WORST thing you can do. More people play penny slots than Progressive slots, and overtime, that leads to more money spent and more people spending their time in those chairs.

I just miss PROJECT ENTROPIA and would love to see us return to a version of it with what it used to represent.

I hope you're listening Mindark/First Planet Calypso.
 
What I cant figure out is, over the past 11 years of playing, ma has went above and beyond figuring out how to squeeze every pec out of 99.9% of everyone while at the same time loot has gradually gotten worse and worse. :scratch2:
 
So Peds er I mean shrapnel are back in loot now. Will be interesting to see the impact.
 
I dont know, I think all of the points on "the Bad" actually did good things overall when I step back and think about it.

PP - they bring a whole new group, ark has brought alot of players. People would be suprised how many new accounts since PP I would bet. And they bring variety to a 10 year old landscape and mobs. New crafting opportunities more markups for many people who take advantage.

Amped mining - This is important to the economy, hundreds of thousands of peds a month, if you remove it, there would be a massive amount of unused resources, and alot of out of work and bored crafters and miners.

ATH - We all hate when we see the big one hit to anyone but ourselves, its the human nature of it and a big subconscious drive to why many play, and continue to in order to "recoup the costs". It is an ingenious exploit of basic often autonomous human nature.

Tier system - I was hesitant on, but I love it, the adaptability with items is greatly increased. That and again, it represents alot of resources and peds cycled. Another goal will never hurt the human mind. Tiering is a profession/hobby all it itself, and the power of enhancers is pretty awesome IMO from eco racks to damage racks.

Peds from loot - There were some very specific reasons for this. One being that peds representing the currency bought with money was being paid as a return on game play, it WAS considered a gambling payout, so they had to change the structure of the loot. And in all honesty its a better move, I enjoy hunting for loot, as many others do. And as a crafter, I am very glad I can go out and get my own oils and parts, instead of converting yet again after a hunt, ped to loot.

Limited items - They bring a new base of players in, and a new economy overall for more parts, more things to craft, loot and mine, more options for players. Before (L) the high end mobs were selectively hunted by only the best gear.....we would have lost alot of turnover without players being able to step up with (L) at an affordable cost vs the 120k for a laser rifle. We are a select group of players, but then we were just an elitest high dollar value smaller group of players that scared everyone else away. I do think there is an excess of them though, the balance is off IMO somewhere along the line, how to truly balance that right would take alot of work...they need a balancing manager specifically.

Skills - Completely disagree, I love the option to sell them, or buy to hit a prof mark ect. Without skills, I would never have returned, they gave me a tidy impressionable profit my first run. Long long time ago we could loot skill chips that were looted pre -ESI....that was nice, but then again it made many skills nearly impossible to find. With chips at least any skill could easily be found...at a price.

CLD - injected alot of money, investors and players into the game. This was an ingenious move to stay above water in a tough economic time for MA (suits, and a castle that wouldnt sell). Better option than say, closing the game.


#9 I agree with, they need much more structure behind the scenes, a firm timeline and idea on the direction they want to go with and stick with.


But that is me, I see the benefits all those points brought the game. They were all different, I did not like them at first, but they did impact the game in good ways in the end.
 
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