Can we get a Land Area system overhaul?

Dear Henrik Nel, Magnus Ryme, and all others with an invested interest in the land area system,

There are numerous problems with the current land area system. I would like to hear your thoughts on some potential overhauls. Most of these suggestions should be very simple to implement, others perhaps somewhat more complex. All of them are worth taking into consideration.

1. First and foremost, LA owners generate revenue for MA by promoting events and ingame activity, but there is absolutely no reciprocation. Currently land area managers are left high and dry in the MA events (Mayhem, Migration, etc) which results in considerable loss of productivity all through these events. This is highly frustrating.
I understand that it is seen as our responsibility to do our own promotion, but that leads me to the second major problem.

2. The current LA event system is very rudimentary and only allows us to produce relatively monotonous events which often do not even draw enough activity to break even with the cost of promotion.
I would really like to see significantly more options for event promotion. All of the pieces are already in place for this, the keys simply need to be handed over to the players.

For example?

- Allow LA owners to create a token of some sort (like FEN tokens) which only drops on our land areas. These could be set to drop from mining or hunting, along with a slider bar to set drop rate frequency (which would need to be locked in for, perhaps, 30 days at a time). These tokens could then be cashed in at an NPC near the fertilizer station for basically any prize planted by the LA owner.

- Implement a system which tracks various parameters set by the LA owner (global count, global size, global number specificity) and set award triggers based on these parameters. The LA owner would plant prizes in ahead of time, set the parameters, and allow the event to run it's course. This would essentially allow us to operate events much like what you see posted on PCF, but in a much more streamlined and dynamic way.

- Instantize the land areas, giving us the ability to have one instance per DNA on the land area. This would improve versatility of lands, allowing for more diversity in mob selection and maturity offerings without diluting, over crowding, or contaminating our mob spawns.

- Give us special spawn abilities for boss mob spawns. This could be easily done through a system similar to creature control pills. Perhaps offer a "credit" for every Improvement Point which has been consumed by locking in maturity/numbers over time, and we can spend these "credits" on various creature control capsules specifically to spawn on the land area. At the most basic level this could be implemented simply using existing mobs ingame regardless of the mob spawn on the LA. More advanced would be having the option to generate boss mobs of existing mob spawns on the land area.

- Do away with the tax system altogether.
This is easily the most radical concept in my proposal but I think it is still worth consideration.
Most players are turned off by the concept of taxes being taken out of their loot on top of the natural loss implemented into the game's mechanics. LA owners are invested in promoting the Entropia Universe experience of it's players. I believe that a more appropriate approach would be some sort of profit-sharing model similar to what is currently done with Calypso Land Deeds, in which LA owners would simply get a share of the revenue generated by the activity we promote. This, I believe, would lead to a significant increase in player participation on land areas and enable LA promoters to be significantly more creative in utilizing the previously recommended tools.

Thank you for your time and consideration in this matter.

Very respectfully,

- Captain Jack

Magnus Eriksson:

Thank you for your suggestions. You may find that we address some of the issues you have raised here in other questions in this AMA. Suffice to say that we are constantly reviewing existing systems with an eye toward improvements.

I think the land area tax system could be 'assuaged' nicely in the future with a tax free key based system...where land area owners have to pay ped to have and maintain their instance but fuel the economy instead with keys. Look at Rocktropia!

Psynergy said:

I think the land area tax system could be 'assuaged' nicely in the future with a tax free key based system...where land area owners have to pay ped to have and maintain their instance but fuel the economy instead with keys. Look at Rocktropia!

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Rocktropia's history with keyed instances is a far cry from a success story.

Captain Jack said:

Rocktropia's history with keyed instances is a far cry from a success story.

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THE ONLY REASONS IT IS NOT A GREAT RAGING SUCCESS ARE AS FOLLOWS:
1) There are bugs that prevent proper functioning and they are not being patched properly, and Mindark isn't supporting these properly.
2) The craft cost of these keys is not balanced in relation to the economic reward of the resources found within it that provide common and uncommon loots, and the rare items in it are not good enough to bring longer term attention.
3) The economic demand for these resources found in varied types of content needs to be expanded interplanetarily, same with regulation on quantities of it available.
4) The instance content is poorly advertised or explained so many people don't know it exists, or how to do any of it and they don't want to risk a +45 key on a shop's basement instance given there's not a lot of people there to help them if they get into trouble inside.


Robot beacons, before they got tweaked were a great success and I was running them for months stacking up valuable components, but....something got broken lately. The components aren't even available to make the beacons apparently?


In ANY type of content, if there is an economically structured resource that has a demand placed upon it, and people know about it, they will partake in the content in order to get that resource that is demanded in the economy and provides markup.

However there also needs to be regulation to ensure that resource doesn't disappear suddenly like many have lately...including items from robot beacons.

I might add, people including myself do not speak about good content unfortunately because the economy in the game is so rough(but improving!!!), out of fear that people will come and crash the market.
This applies to many things,, so some great content sees slow adoption.

In example, if that Rocktropia key'd instance provided something needed to a single armatrix powerfist series for example, ark got one for clubs, cyrene for whips, toulan for gauss, monria for plasma, and suchforth for all the specialty weapons.....TONS of players would be buying hundreds of those keys from every planet, trade would increase, and the economy would boom.[/B]

Often it is minor changes that would make a system, such as pvp, instances, etc. a great success..or a miserable failure that doesn't get used...

We need more of is interplanetary resources that are in demand by all these armatrix blueprints and components(stuff unique to a single planet), trade hindrances should be removed when assisted by warp travel in a capital ship, and to let the economy's trade flourish as people search out their niche.
Balance with the demand, instead of hindering trade to try to isolate the economies.

Other than poor economic utility in the common/uncommon reward loot in relation to the cost, there's nothing wrong with many instances, and some of them are great!! There are players who run almost exclusively this type of content.

Psynergy said:

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There is also the necessity to craft the keys out of ingredients looted throughout Rocktropia. 2 years ago I was interviewing NeverDie since I was intending to make a large investment into the Entropia Universe. I foresaw the potential problem of drop rates on those ingredients being altered to be significantly less abundant, causing a massive loss of participation.

Sure enough my concerns came to fruition just a few months later, and the Rocktropian instance owners got screwed. Big time.

There are many problems with the Rocktropian instances, the ones you listed above are included but what I just described is the #1 problem with it. I would not buy any instance that requires me to craft keys from planetary loot.

Captain Jack said:

Rocktropia's history with keyed instances is a far cry from a success story.

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Oh god yes only 5 sold and 1 is still broken. The poor owner only get its ND fault from MA. Its MA fault from ND. They are really expencive to buy and to buy the extra stuff is stupiedly priced. They are really fun to do.

Captain Jack said:

There is also the necessity to craft the keys out of ingredients looted throughout Rocktropia. 2 years ago I was interviewing NeverDie since I was intending to make a large investment into the Entropia Universe. I foresaw the potential problem of drop rates on those ingredients being altered to be significantly less abundant, causing a massive loss of participation.

Sure enough my concerns came to fruition just a few months later, and the Rocktropian instance owners got screwed. Big time.

There are many problems with the Rocktropian instances, the ones you listed above are included but what I just described is the #1 problem with it. I would not buy any instance that requires me to craft keys from planetary loot.

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Yeah this is major pain in arse not just for Intance owners, but for RT miners and Hunters. Theres mats with little or no use that could be used. So istead of all intance owners fighting over same mats, some driving them through roof, because of lack of supply.

As for the instance key idea, adding it to the LA shed might be interesting concept... give shed a better use. Could also add em to hangars?