Azgarot
Alpha
- Joined
- Oct 19, 2011
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- Attere Azgarot Dominatum
I am writing this as a last resort and I hope MindArk representatives present here on PCF don’t just dismiss it or take it lightly because of my lack of privileges. This comes from a player who is invested in your game in every way imaginable and who wants to see Entropia Universe thrive and live up to see its 40th anniversary.
MindArk has been deliberately changing Entropia Universe during the last few years in a way that suits their immediate financial goals without any regard to the long term state of the game and the economy in it. These decisions brought Entropia to the place where it is today and quite frankly, I don't believe Entropia was ever in a worse situation than it is now. The current state of the game is a direct consequence of MindArk's lack of vision for the game, lack of fundamental understanding of what a sandbox is, complete disregard for the wellbeing of the game, its playerbase and more than anything else, greed. I don't know how else to explain how we got here but that greed has played a major part in it. There is a thin line between ambition and greed. Below is the breakdown of what, in my eyes, showed that the driving force for MindArk has been greed over the course of the last few years.
- DECISION #1: Introduction of the infamous (or famous) interact action button, commonly known as “FFF” in our community;
MindArk realized that by adding the interact action to Entropia Universe it would make one of the most popular professions, hunting, extremely easy to automate. It doesn’t require any scripting knowledge to automate, all it takes is just a keyboard or a mouse that supports macros. This was done so that the turnover in hunting would increase exponentially and since MindArk makes profit from TT losses of the players, this worked very well for them. This was essentially enabling and encouraging botting in their own game for financial gain BUT at the expense of the entire community as this drove all markups to the ground. Every single game on planet Earth is trying to battle the bots because of what botting does to the economy of a game, yet MindArk does the opposite. They turn a blind eye to botting, not a single macro user was banned and we are at a point where very, very, VERY few people are not macro users so banning them at this point would be a devastating blow to the community. They must have known exactly how this will play out and even if they didn’t, welcome to 2025th, all that you need to do today is to just take a mere glance at the Auction House. Instead of improving the game and growing the playerbase, MindArk took the easy way out and gave our same old small playerbase a way to grind even while we sleep, work, go on a vacation, you name it. For them, it makes zero difference whether there is a 100 players cycling 60k today or one single player. A cut is a cut for them but to get 100 players, you must offer some quality. It was easier to just allow botting to the existing playerbase and be done with it. Worst of all is the fact that they intentionally put the decent player in a disadvantageous position unless they jumped on the bot train themselves, thus forcing the majority of players to start participating.
Botting alone is the direct cause of why all average markups are extremely low.
I believe that you at MindArk saw this coming/happening, this was probably a huge part of the reason why you introduced the Nanocubes and the Explosive Projectile blueprints into the game. Your best hope was for there to be more gamblers than there were hunting botters in Entropia. Sadly, today, no amount of gamblers can consume the amount of materials being accumulated through botting, MindArk.
MindArk, if you want Entropia to have any future, you need to put an end to this. At all costs, no middle ground, no bullshit excuses, this must end. For Christ's sake, find a way to clean it up.
We (the players) just want the game back on track. If you continue with all this, you will lose your source of income and as a consequence of your greed and ignorance, we will lose the game we love for good.
- DECISION #2: Introduction of one deed after the other;
Ever since Calypso Land Deeds were introduced more than a decade ago, we have seen more and more deeds enter the game. These were nothing but a quick cash grab for MindArk. Just another lazy way to make some quick cash instead of trying to improve their game and as a result of that improvement, increase the playerbase.
EDIT (02/16/2025): A step in the right direction was taken in this regard, more on this below. Thank you, MindArk.
- DECISION #3: Turning the game into a tokenfest;
This goes hand in hand with my first point: botting. Once you have allowed bots, having token pull based events only made sense. This way, the army of bots has something to turn the macro on for and everything was fine until it wasn’t. The macro grinding has gone too far and way too much gear entered the economy way too fast. You had to keep restocking to keep people botting but that bubble has burst. Gear prices dropped extremely quickly and caused huge distrust from the players towards the game, MindArk and MindArk's ability to run this game for much longer.
There are ways to have tokens in the game, more on this later but the way you did it, you only did it for your own personal gain with complete disregard for the economy of the game and the playerbase.
EDIT (03/04/2025): A step in the right direction was taken in this regard, more on this below. Thank you, MindArk.
- DECISION #4: Resource Mayhem;
Introducing the Resource Mayhem event after the TWEN hype died down was a desperate move of the company to once again incite cycling, make as much money off the TT losses as quickly as possible and give people hope that there is still markup to be had in the game. Whoever came up with the idea to basically hand out an unlimited amount (figuratively speaking) of Mayhem Tokens through this new Resource Mayhem should never be tasked with any innovation that requires balancing in the future. If anything, this event should have had its own tokens, I genuinely don’t understand how on Earth did anyone at MindArk believe that implementing this event the way it was implemented would make sense? The only thing that it did is it oversaturated the already oversaturated (by botting) market with even more tokens. Once you realized what you did, you started increasing the prices of the items in the Mayhem Vendor. Some of the items' prices were increased without the items ever even being restocked. The next desperate move was introducing that the Mayhem limited items. That was a disgrace, another desperate band-aid attempt to fix the mess, as if this could ever use up the insane amount of tokens you introduced to the game. This did nothing but bring the value of existing unlimited items further down which in result caused even more distrust.
EDIT (03/04/2025): A step in the right direction was taken in this regard, more on this below. Thank you, MindArk.
- DECISION #5: Space Mining resources;
This was the most recent one, yet another cash grab. This was implemented with a new looter profession behind it, meaning that the TT losses will be very high for the foreseeable future. The lure to have people start grinding space mining was needed and you used rare ores and gems from planetside for this. The choice of ores and gems looted through space mining resulted in planetside mining and crafting being nothing but collateral damage. Instead of developing meaningful content for the space resources, MindArk implemented this horrible mining system in space that completely destroyed planetside mining. Planetside mining is now an obsolete system and only a moron would even bother trying to mine anywhere but in space. Rare ores from mining and gems from crafting were placed in Tailings which are a common drop in space. You recycle them into these valuable resources that planetside miners and crafters would have to grind and cycle for weeks and months to accumulate anywhere near the amount that a player with TT gear can grind in one day in space. Yet another source of markup completely destroyed and not only that but planetside mining required miners to know their profession well in order to be able to target the said resources. Crafters had to craft high TT consuming blueprints to hope to get an Opal, Emerald, Ruby, Diamond.
Another piece of content that was made almost 100% redundant with the introduction of gems in Tailings is RDI. Guys, RDI! This incredibly well done instance, possibly the best piece of content in the entire game was made redundant. Why would anyone run RDI now?
MindArk, where does this stop? Does it ever? Does anyone in the company know what they are doing? Or are you doing this intentionally?
- DECISION #1: Introduction of the infamous (or famous) interact action button, commonly known as “FFF” in our community;
This is probably the most important one and most complicated one. This alone is the reason for the average markup in the game being at an all-time low. You must stop this because if you ever intend to grow this game and its playerbase, botting has to stop immediately. I would never advise anyone to touch Entropia Universe before this is put to an end. Botting must be an offense that gets people banned. Whether you can or can not ban people who botted in the past is beyond me. The problem is that 95% of the top players will end up being banned in this scenario, I don’t know if Entropia could recover from this but if you believe that it could, pull the trigger. The reason why doing this is problematic is because you condoned it, MindArk, you allowed it and encouraged it, made it more convenient with new content that you introduced. To ban everyone now would be nothing short of entrapment. What must be done however is the following:
I can already see the arguments of certain people how this would be unfair to the new players, how these old players already have an advantage over them, an advantage that they obtained through botting. There are several ways to fix this, all of them will be unpopular in certain demographics but you should choose your poison and fix your mess:
If you care for Entropia Universe, if you have any desire for it to live on and to continue to grow, botting must stop. Tell this to your board of directors, they may not be happy with the significant temporary decrease in income but if you do this, the markups will go up and activity in general will increase and so will the playerbase and the overall deposits into the game. At this point, new players will without a doubt have a better experience and a possibility to progress and grow their avatars at a much lower cost. The biggest problem the economy has right now is the oversupply of materials produced by botting. Shortly after, a redistribution of oils and materials should be done to fit the mob level / difficulty. This would ensure that each level of player (medium, low, high) will have their own source of markup. Right now, we have certain mobs that drop up to five different oil types. This is just a tiny reason in a sea of reasons why you need a balancing manager!
The opposite of this is do nothing and watch Entropia die. It’s as simple as that. You completely messed up the game and the economy for quick and/or easy cash.
Everything I say after this point, I will say with a premise that you intend to do the only sensible thing to do: REMOVE BOTTING PERMANENTLY.
- DECISION #2: Introduction of one deed after the other;
The damage is done on this one, there is nothing you can do to fix it other than buying back the deeds which we all know will never happen. Increasing the playerbase will in turn increase the total turnover across the universe and may, some day, justify the existence of these deeds.
EDIT (02/16/2025): You have proven me wrong on this one, by introducing the new AI NPCs and their missions, you brought a lot of traction to some of the areas covered by the deeds which will result in higher deed payouts. Kudos to you for this, MindArk. This is one of those situations where you do something great and you make me believe, at least for a moment, that you will get things right. Keep up the good work, Entropia was built on an amazing premise, only you can put things in the the right order. You do that and the players will be there.
- DECISION #3: Turning the game into a tokenfest;
I am not saying delete the Mayhem vendor or delete people’s Mayhem tokens but the format of Mayhem should change for good. You designed it for bots, you didn’t design it for players. As long as you continue to run it as is, it will not work. Mayhem should be re-invented in the form of introducing brand new tokens for the future Mayhem event and a brand new vendor associated with it. But first, you must deplete the economy of existing tokens. You can do this in variety of different ways, some of which I posted in a different thread that was created by Image ZZ Marshall here on PCF. There were many suggestions in that thread and you can draw inspiration from a number of them but the point is that the market should be depleted of the current tokens. In short, depleting the economy of the existing tokens shouldn't mean some trivial compensation in the form of pills only or something like that, you know exactly how many tokens are in circulation, come up with creative and worthwhile items that can be pulled so that the old tokens can be used up before you take a new direction with Mayhem. Anything short of that will only cause an even greater distrust from the playerbase. A wise man once said, trust is the main currency in Entropia (pun intended).
On the subject of the new format for Mayhem, you have different options:
Note (edit): Several people seem to have understood this as a limitation of Mayhem playtime. Mayhem is a time-limited event as it is, the instance is only available for X amount of days. This is not imposing any additional limitations. In other words, right now, we have a Merry Mayhem event that runs for X amount of days, thus this is the time limit for it. What I am suggesting here is to have that same time limit in terms of how much time a player can spend in the instance (playtime), not changed, exactly the same. The only difference is that the instance is available three times longer than the playtime limit. This is to ensure that human beings can use the allotted time, the way it is now, only the bots are taking full advantage of Mayhem events. Humans can't grind 24/7 for a month.
New Mayhem Vendor – I would suggest several hard rules on this one to ensure long term transparency:
One more thing, Mayhem is a hunters’ event, keep it so, you have a way to create something similar to this for crafters and miners, you called it Resource Mayhem, you just executed it poorly beyond measure. The Mayhem vendor should have hunting gear, no mining, no crafting, no spaceships, no nothing, just hunting. It can be any and all hunting gear but don’t mix apples and oranges. Crafters and miners CAN NOT compete with hunters here. You will just put them in a position where they must buy their BiS items from the hunters because they will never be able to obtain them through competition.
EDIT (04/03/2025): The recent announcement (LINK) about changing the format of Easter Mayhem this year gives me great hope that Entropia may finally be moving into a better direction. This is not only significant for Mayhem itself as one of the most popular events in the game but this also mitigates some of the damage from rampant botting. If MindArk were to continue to move the endgame in this direction, we could arrive to a point where botting can be part of our game, albeit useful for levelling only while content that is actually worthwhile must be played manually. This would be a possible state of equilibrium and an ideal scenario in the long run so, A HUGE THANK YOU, MINDARK!
- DECISION #4: Resource Mayhem;
Just never do anything so stupid again! To this day, I can’t believe you put Mayhem Tokens in this event. This event could have been great but it should have been a crafter / miner event in terms of items that can be pulled from the associated vendor. This means that you should either further refine the event in such a way that miners could be competitive with crafters with the turn-ins or create another version specifically for miners. The associated vendor should have only items for the respective profession. Consider how to limit the possible number of turn-ins and whether to limit it or not. Again, consider the economy not your desire to make a quick buck. This solves the issue of the resource mayhem. Bear in mind, use the same principles for the vendor and item restocks in this.
EDIT (04/03/2025): The announcement mentioned above (LINK) also addressed the Resource Mayhem and related issue so once again, I can only salute you for the change, MindArk. Thank you!
DECISION #5: Space Mining resources;
This is mining, in space, but mining. Why on Earth did you implement it the way you did? This should be an extension of the mining profession. You created a completely unnecessary system that is more hunting than mining. On top of that, you screwed up the economy completely, I truly hope you can see that. Mining was the last straw in this game, you broke hunting by enabling and encouraging botting, now every single miner has been screwed. First and foremost, rare resources were made too easy to obtain, you damaged the economy in a tremendous way. Second of all, gems have absolutely no place being in the loot table of Tailings. You must change these things as soon as humanly possible. I don’t understand how can you be so detached from the game that you own and run?
If you took your game as a whole into consideration, you never would have come up with rare planetside ores and gems in Tailings. Please cap the rare ores and remove gems from this process entirely. I am not demanding this, I am asking you for the sake of the game, consider this please, don't be stubborn. RDI has been made redundant because of this. Instead of getting rid of RDI in such a disgraceful way, you should consider building on it and expanding it. You created something amazing, it deserves more attention, polishing and development. Look at what you did to the markups of gems (the pictures were taken on 02/16/2025):
Don't neglect this, act on this, we can all make mistakes when we make changes but show us that you are not oblivious to the damage this has done to the game. Show us that you can do better with space mining. Gems were never obtainable through mining, no reason for them to be obtainable now. This is a crafter's playfield, not a miner's, space or otherwise.
This is what mining and space mining should and could be:
Adding a mining looter profession was a good idea (not three different ones (ore, energy matter, treasure) but one is enough for mining);
Mining looter should influence every type of mining in Entropia Universe, planetside and space. Make it so that the skills have a more significant overlap between the two and just add more skills for space.
I could spend days just talking about all the things that could be improved, that were done bad in the past and so on but just handling these five things is a HUGE start and will get the game fundamentally back on track. You fix these issues (not even necessarily with the methods I suggested here, it's your game, I am sure you have a much better view of the whole picture than a player) and you will see nothing but praise, growth and overall positive effect on the game. You ignore this plea and sadly, I am sure that our beloved game will continue to sink until it dies. It really is just a matter of time, look at the number of liquidation threads on PCF and look at the prices. Everyone is running for the gates, wake up. It’s not hard, just starting doing things right and with each step, things will improve.
I am having a really hard time justifying playing Entropia unless these issues are addressed. Most of all, the botting. I am sure I am not alone in this sentiment. I don’t mean this as a threat to MindArk, this is my personal choice so I don’t want anyone in the comments to take it as such. However, the fact remains, actions must be taken to fix Entropia and these issues that I am describing here are some fundamental issues that can't be fixed by adding “immersive NPCs” or even Unreal Engine 5. Neither of these things will fix the core problems that we are facing today because and only you, MindArk, can fix this. I would rather play a bot-free Cry Engine Entropia forever than a bot-infested Unreal Engine 5 Entropia.
TLDR
EDIT (02/16/2025):
* Reformatted the post and removed all (or at least most) offensive language from the it. The point of this thread is not to bash MindArk, though some bashing is surely deserved, but to try and hopefully steer this amazing game in a better direction. In addition to that, I personally don't want this thread to be read by possible newcomers and have them believe that Entropia is not worth their time because this game has so much promise, just MindArk really need to get their act together;
* Added additional information on the immersive AI NPCs and how they had a positive effect on the game overall as well as one of the issues brought up in this thread (deeds);
* Added additional information on how much space mining damaged mining, crafting and RDI.
EDIT (04/03/2025):
* Added additional information regarding issues #3 and #4 in the thread. In my honest opinion, MindArk deserved nothing but praise for the changes they are making. I strongly feel that this should be recognized and applauded.
MindArk has been deliberately changing Entropia Universe during the last few years in a way that suits their immediate financial goals without any regard to the long term state of the game and the economy in it. These decisions brought Entropia to the place where it is today and quite frankly, I don't believe Entropia was ever in a worse situation than it is now. The current state of the game is a direct consequence of MindArk's lack of vision for the game, lack of fundamental understanding of what a sandbox is, complete disregard for the wellbeing of the game, its playerbase and more than anything else, greed. I don't know how else to explain how we got here but that greed has played a major part in it. There is a thin line between ambition and greed. Below is the breakdown of what, in my eyes, showed that the driving force for MindArk has been greed over the course of the last few years.
ALL OF BAD CHOICES & DECISIONS:
- DECISION #1: Introduction of the infamous (or famous) interact action button, commonly known as “FFF” in our community;
MindArk realized that by adding the interact action to Entropia Universe it would make one of the most popular professions, hunting, extremely easy to automate. It doesn’t require any scripting knowledge to automate, all it takes is just a keyboard or a mouse that supports macros. This was done so that the turnover in hunting would increase exponentially and since MindArk makes profit from TT losses of the players, this worked very well for them. This was essentially enabling and encouraging botting in their own game for financial gain BUT at the expense of the entire community as this drove all markups to the ground. Every single game on planet Earth is trying to battle the bots because of what botting does to the economy of a game, yet MindArk does the opposite. They turn a blind eye to botting, not a single macro user was banned and we are at a point where very, very, VERY few people are not macro users so banning them at this point would be a devastating blow to the community. They must have known exactly how this will play out and even if they didn’t, welcome to 2025th, all that you need to do today is to just take a mere glance at the Auction House. Instead of improving the game and growing the playerbase, MindArk took the easy way out and gave our same old small playerbase a way to grind even while we sleep, work, go on a vacation, you name it. For them, it makes zero difference whether there is a 100 players cycling 60k today or one single player. A cut is a cut for them but to get 100 players, you must offer some quality. It was easier to just allow botting to the existing playerbase and be done with it. Worst of all is the fact that they intentionally put the decent player in a disadvantageous position unless they jumped on the bot train themselves, thus forcing the majority of players to start participating.
Botting alone is the direct cause of why all average markups are extremely low.
I believe that you at MindArk saw this coming/happening, this was probably a huge part of the reason why you introduced the Nanocubes and the Explosive Projectile blueprints into the game. Your best hope was for there to be more gamblers than there were hunting botters in Entropia. Sadly, today, no amount of gamblers can consume the amount of materials being accumulated through botting, MindArk.
MindArk, if you want Entropia to have any future, you need to put an end to this. At all costs, no middle ground, no bullshit excuses, this must end. For Christ's sake, find a way to clean it up.
We (the players) just want the game back on track. If you continue with all this, you will lose your source of income and as a consequence of your greed and ignorance, we will lose the game we love for good.
- DECISION #2: Introduction of one deed after the other;
Ever since Calypso Land Deeds were introduced more than a decade ago, we have seen more and more deeds enter the game. These were nothing but a quick cash grab for MindArk. Just another lazy way to make some quick cash instead of trying to improve their game and as a result of that improvement, increase the playerbase.
EDIT (02/16/2025): A step in the right direction was taken in this regard, more on this below. Thank you, MindArk.
- DECISION #3: Turning the game into a tokenfest;
This goes hand in hand with my first point: botting. Once you have allowed bots, having token pull based events only made sense. This way, the army of bots has something to turn the macro on for and everything was fine until it wasn’t. The macro grinding has gone too far and way too much gear entered the economy way too fast. You had to keep restocking to keep people botting but that bubble has burst. Gear prices dropped extremely quickly and caused huge distrust from the players towards the game, MindArk and MindArk's ability to run this game for much longer.
There are ways to have tokens in the game, more on this later but the way you did it, you only did it for your own personal gain with complete disregard for the economy of the game and the playerbase.
EDIT (03/04/2025): A step in the right direction was taken in this regard, more on this below. Thank you, MindArk.
- DECISION #4: Resource Mayhem;
Introducing the Resource Mayhem event after the TWEN hype died down was a desperate move of the company to once again incite cycling, make as much money off the TT losses as quickly as possible and give people hope that there is still markup to be had in the game. Whoever came up with the idea to basically hand out an unlimited amount (figuratively speaking) of Mayhem Tokens through this new Resource Mayhem should never be tasked with any innovation that requires balancing in the future. If anything, this event should have had its own tokens, I genuinely don’t understand how on Earth did anyone at MindArk believe that implementing this event the way it was implemented would make sense? The only thing that it did is it oversaturated the already oversaturated (by botting) market with even more tokens. Once you realized what you did, you started increasing the prices of the items in the Mayhem Vendor. Some of the items' prices were increased without the items ever even being restocked. The next desperate move was introducing that the Mayhem limited items. That was a disgrace, another desperate band-aid attempt to fix the mess, as if this could ever use up the insane amount of tokens you introduced to the game. This did nothing but bring the value of existing unlimited items further down which in result caused even more distrust.
EDIT (03/04/2025): A step in the right direction was taken in this regard, more on this below. Thank you, MindArk.
- DECISION #5: Space Mining resources;
This was the most recent one, yet another cash grab. This was implemented with a new looter profession behind it, meaning that the TT losses will be very high for the foreseeable future. The lure to have people start grinding space mining was needed and you used rare ores and gems from planetside for this. The choice of ores and gems looted through space mining resulted in planetside mining and crafting being nothing but collateral damage. Instead of developing meaningful content for the space resources, MindArk implemented this horrible mining system in space that completely destroyed planetside mining. Planetside mining is now an obsolete system and only a moron would even bother trying to mine anywhere but in space. Rare ores from mining and gems from crafting were placed in Tailings which are a common drop in space. You recycle them into these valuable resources that planetside miners and crafters would have to grind and cycle for weeks and months to accumulate anywhere near the amount that a player with TT gear can grind in one day in space. Yet another source of markup completely destroyed and not only that but planetside mining required miners to know their profession well in order to be able to target the said resources. Crafters had to craft high TT consuming blueprints to hope to get an Opal, Emerald, Ruby, Diamond.
Another piece of content that was made almost 100% redundant with the introduction of gems in Tailings is RDI. Guys, RDI! This incredibly well done instance, possibly the best piece of content in the entire game was made redundant. Why would anyone run RDI now?
MindArk, where does this stop? Does it ever? Does anyone in the company know what they are doing? Or are you doing this intentionally?
SOLUTIONS TO THE DECISIONS YOU HAVE MADE IN THE PAST:
- DECISION #1: Introduction of the infamous (or famous) interact action button, commonly known as “FFF” in our community;
This is probably the most important one and most complicated one. This alone is the reason for the average markup in the game being at an all-time low. You must stop this because if you ever intend to grow this game and its playerbase, botting has to stop immediately. I would never advise anyone to touch Entropia Universe before this is put to an end. Botting must be an offense that gets people banned. Whether you can or can not ban people who botted in the past is beyond me. The problem is that 95% of the top players will end up being banned in this scenario, I don’t know if Entropia could recover from this but if you believe that it could, pull the trigger. The reason why doing this is problematic is because you condoned it, MindArk, you allowed it and encouraged it, made it more convenient with new content that you introduced. To ban everyone now would be nothing short of entrapment. What must be done however is the following:
- Remove the interact action from the game, majority of the people who say that they use it while watching Netflix are just being dishonest about it. 99.9999% of them are lying and you know it;
- Make a formal announcement that anyone caught doing any sort of automated gameplay, be it through macros or another software will be banned and as of that moment start enforcing the new policy indiscriminately. Anyone caught doing it, should get a ban. After a couple of bans, botting will stop altogether because the moment the community understands that you are serious about your rules, people simply won't risk their gear and avatars;
- The ban structure doesn’t have to be an immediate permanent ban. You can set it up any way you like, for example: 1st offense – 1 month hold on the account, 2nd offense - three months hold on the account and 3rd offense – permanent ban. Records must be kept, of course, to be able to punish repetitive abusive behavior.
I can already see the arguments of certain people how this would be unfair to the new players, how these old players already have an advantage over them, an advantage that they obtained through botting. There are several ways to fix this, all of them will be unpopular in certain demographics but you should choose your poison and fix your mess:
- Take retroactive actions and reset the skills and Codex progress of every botter to zero – this will be very popular with the people inclined to witch hunts, yet it will probably drive a lot of big players away from the game and with good reason. You put them in this situation, MindArk, you allowed and encouraged them to bot for years. Regardless, it’s their knowledge that will allow them to quickly rise to the top again. This is what most people don’t understand, skills are a minor part of the equation, it’s the knowledge that matters more;
- Take no retroactive actions – this will be very unpopular with the people inclined to witch hunts but the markups will rise and hunting will make sense for the first time in a very long time. The game will be in a much better state for everyone regardless.
If you care for Entropia Universe, if you have any desire for it to live on and to continue to grow, botting must stop. Tell this to your board of directors, they may not be happy with the significant temporary decrease in income but if you do this, the markups will go up and activity in general will increase and so will the playerbase and the overall deposits into the game. At this point, new players will without a doubt have a better experience and a possibility to progress and grow their avatars at a much lower cost. The biggest problem the economy has right now is the oversupply of materials produced by botting. Shortly after, a redistribution of oils and materials should be done to fit the mob level / difficulty. This would ensure that each level of player (medium, low, high) will have their own source of markup. Right now, we have certain mobs that drop up to five different oil types. This is just a tiny reason in a sea of reasons why you need a balancing manager!
The opposite of this is do nothing and watch Entropia die. It’s as simple as that. You completely messed up the game and the economy for quick and/or easy cash.
Everything I say after this point, I will say with a premise that you intend to do the only sensible thing to do: REMOVE BOTTING PERMANENTLY.
- DECISION #2: Introduction of one deed after the other;
The damage is done on this one, there is nothing you can do to fix it other than buying back the deeds which we all know will never happen. Increasing the playerbase will in turn increase the total turnover across the universe and may, some day, justify the existence of these deeds.
EDIT (02/16/2025): You have proven me wrong on this one, by introducing the new AI NPCs and their missions, you brought a lot of traction to some of the areas covered by the deeds which will result in higher deed payouts. Kudos to you for this, MindArk. This is one of those situations where you do something great and you make me believe, at least for a moment, that you will get things right. Keep up the good work, Entropia was built on an amazing premise, only you can put things in the the right order. You do that and the players will be there.
- DECISION #3: Turning the game into a tokenfest;
I am not saying delete the Mayhem vendor or delete people’s Mayhem tokens but the format of Mayhem should change for good. You designed it for bots, you didn’t design it for players. As long as you continue to run it as is, it will not work. Mayhem should be re-invented in the form of introducing brand new tokens for the future Mayhem event and a brand new vendor associated with it. But first, you must deplete the economy of existing tokens. You can do this in variety of different ways, some of which I posted in a different thread that was created by Image ZZ Marshall here on PCF. There were many suggestions in that thread and you can draw inspiration from a number of them but the point is that the market should be depleted of the current tokens. In short, depleting the economy of the existing tokens shouldn't mean some trivial compensation in the form of pills only or something like that, you know exactly how many tokens are in circulation, come up with creative and worthwhile items that can be pulled so that the old tokens can be used up before you take a new direction with Mayhem. Anything short of that will only cause an even greater distrust from the playerbase. A wise man once said, trust is the main currency in Entropia (pun intended).
On the subject of the new format for Mayhem, you have different options:
- Create a brand new engaging instance;
- Keep the current instance;
Note (edit): Several people seem to have understood this as a limitation of Mayhem playtime. Mayhem is a time-limited event as it is, the instance is only available for X amount of days. This is not imposing any additional limitations. In other words, right now, we have a Merry Mayhem event that runs for X amount of days, thus this is the time limit for it. What I am suggesting here is to have that same time limit in terms of how much time a player can spend in the instance (playtime), not changed, exactly the same. The only difference is that the instance is available three times longer than the playtime limit. This is to ensure that human beings can use the allotted time, the way it is now, only the bots are taking full advantage of Mayhem events. Humans can't grind 24/7 for a month.
- Do something else entirely, be creative;
New Mayhem Vendor – I would suggest several hard rules on this one to ensure long term transparency:
- Decide the item stats before introducing the items to the vendor and don’t change them afterwards - do your due diligence, never repeat the Swine TWEN situation;
- Decide the amount of each specific item that you want to enter the economy through the vendor – once the stock has been emptied, never restock the said item again;
- Introduce new items slowly and carefully over time as the playerbase increases and the demand for such items is actually there – you have the statistics, you can easily determine this;
- Have some kind of a token sink in the form of pills as we had in the past, just introduce other pills such as skill gain, 5 Mg and 15 Mg ones, new buff pills, (L) buff items, (L) items with reasonable durability and not copies of the UL items from the vendor etc.
One more thing, Mayhem is a hunters’ event, keep it so, you have a way to create something similar to this for crafters and miners, you called it Resource Mayhem, you just executed it poorly beyond measure. The Mayhem vendor should have hunting gear, no mining, no crafting, no spaceships, no nothing, just hunting. It can be any and all hunting gear but don’t mix apples and oranges. Crafters and miners CAN NOT compete with hunters here. You will just put them in a position where they must buy their BiS items from the hunters because they will never be able to obtain them through competition.
EDIT (04/03/2025): The recent announcement (LINK) about changing the format of Easter Mayhem this year gives me great hope that Entropia may finally be moving into a better direction. This is not only significant for Mayhem itself as one of the most popular events in the game but this also mitigates some of the damage from rampant botting. If MindArk were to continue to move the endgame in this direction, we could arrive to a point where botting can be part of our game, albeit useful for levelling only while content that is actually worthwhile must be played manually. This would be a possible state of equilibrium and an ideal scenario in the long run so, A HUGE THANK YOU, MINDARK!
- DECISION #4: Resource Mayhem;
Just never do anything so stupid again! To this day, I can’t believe you put Mayhem Tokens in this event. This event could have been great but it should have been a crafter / miner event in terms of items that can be pulled from the associated vendor. This means that you should either further refine the event in such a way that miners could be competitive with crafters with the turn-ins or create another version specifically for miners. The associated vendor should have only items for the respective profession. Consider how to limit the possible number of turn-ins and whether to limit it or not. Again, consider the economy not your desire to make a quick buck. This solves the issue of the resource mayhem. Bear in mind, use the same principles for the vendor and item restocks in this.
EDIT (04/03/2025): The announcement mentioned above (LINK) also addressed the Resource Mayhem and related issue so once again, I can only salute you for the change, MindArk. Thank you!
DECISION #5: Space Mining resources;
This is mining, in space, but mining. Why on Earth did you implement it the way you did? This should be an extension of the mining profession. You created a completely unnecessary system that is more hunting than mining. On top of that, you screwed up the economy completely, I truly hope you can see that. Mining was the last straw in this game, you broke hunting by enabling and encouraging botting, now every single miner has been screwed. First and foremost, rare resources were made too easy to obtain, you damaged the economy in a tremendous way. Second of all, gems have absolutely no place being in the loot table of Tailings. You must change these things as soon as humanly possible. I don’t understand how can you be so detached from the game that you own and run?
If you took your game as a whole into consideration, you never would have come up with rare planetside ores and gems in Tailings. Please cap the rare ores and remove gems from this process entirely. I am not demanding this, I am asking you for the sake of the game, consider this please, don't be stubborn. RDI has been made redundant because of this. Instead of getting rid of RDI in such a disgraceful way, you should consider building on it and expanding it. You created something amazing, it deserves more attention, polishing and development. Look at what you did to the markups of gems (the pictures were taken on 02/16/2025):
Don't neglect this, act on this, we can all make mistakes when we make changes but show us that you are not oblivious to the damage this has done to the game. Show us that you can do better with space mining. Gems were never obtainable through mining, no reason for them to be obtainable now. This is a crafter's playfield, not a miner's, space or otherwise.
This is what mining and space mining should and could be:
Adding a mining looter profession was a good idea (not three different ones (ore, energy matter, treasure) but one is enough for mining);
Mining looter should influence every type of mining in Entropia Universe, planetside and space. Make it so that the skills have a more significant overlap between the two and just add more skills for space.
- Adding Codex was a good idea, add it for planetside mining as well, you can do it per resource;
- Completely re-work space mining loot tables. Keep shrapnel and introduce new resources found exclusively in space and POSSIBLY even keep some of the planetside fillers in the asteroids;
- Rework the Tailings loot table urgently;
I could spend days just talking about all the things that could be improved, that were done bad in the past and so on but just handling these five things is a HUGE start and will get the game fundamentally back on track. You fix these issues (not even necessarily with the methods I suggested here, it's your game, I am sure you have a much better view of the whole picture than a player) and you will see nothing but praise, growth and overall positive effect on the game. You ignore this plea and sadly, I am sure that our beloved game will continue to sink until it dies. It really is just a matter of time, look at the number of liquidation threads on PCF and look at the prices. Everyone is running for the gates, wake up. It’s not hard, just starting doing things right and with each step, things will improve.
I am having a really hard time justifying playing Entropia unless these issues are addressed. Most of all, the botting. I am sure I am not alone in this sentiment. I don’t mean this as a threat to MindArk, this is my personal choice so I don’t want anyone in the comments to take it as such. However, the fact remains, actions must be taken to fix Entropia and these issues that I am describing here are some fundamental issues that can't be fixed by adding “immersive NPCs” or even Unreal Engine 5. Neither of these things will fix the core problems that we are facing today because and only you, MindArk, can fix this. I would rather play a bot-free Cry Engine Entropia forever than a bot-infested Unreal Engine 5 Entropia.
TLDR
- Remove botting from Entropia – BIGGEST FOR THE ECONOMY;
- Rework Mayhem and be more transparent with items in the vendor;
- Rework Resource Mayhem and run it as a different event entirely, unrelated to the hunting Mayhem;
- Fix space mining and remove rare planetside ores and gems that come through crafting from it – DO THIS, PLEASE! WHEN I WAS COMPETING IN THE PROSPECTOR RUSH EVENT, I DIDN'T SIGN UP TO BE COMPLICIT IN BUTCHERING MINING IN ENTROPIA!
EDIT (02/16/2025):
* Reformatted the post and removed all (or at least most) offensive language from the it. The point of this thread is not to bash MindArk, though some bashing is surely deserved, but to try and hopefully steer this amazing game in a better direction. In addition to that, I personally don't want this thread to be read by possible newcomers and have them believe that Entropia is not worth their time because this game has so much promise, just MindArk really need to get their act together;
* Added additional information on the immersive AI NPCs and how they had a positive effect on the game overall as well as one of the issues brought up in this thread (deeds);
* Added additional information on how much space mining damaged mining, crafting and RDI.
EDIT (04/03/2025):
* Added additional information regarding issues #3 and #4 in the thread. In my honest opinion, MindArk deserved nothing but praise for the changes they are making. I strongly feel that this should be recognized and applauded.
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