As you can see there isn't anything to brag about. This is my collected assets graph, which displays how much ISK I had if I'd pay subscription for my main account, wouldn't have non-business accounts and wouldn't donate to TEST alliance.
The graph has linear trend, serious fluctuations and only 1.17B/day (35.7B/month) growth. The large gap in the graph is when I was AFK for a weekend, that surely taxed my income. Well, I've had much better. My main problem is that despite I made serious attempts to change my item list, half of it is still implants that can be purchased in the Minmatar and Caldari FW shop:
The FW reward system was implemented with a bad design and serious exploitable flaws (AFK frigate can complete battleship size complexes, stealth bomber can complete L4 missions) allowing the participants to practically print ISK in the magnitude of 2-300M/hour.
To make it worse, it's not a constant flood of implants but happen in pre-planned pushes which are followed by a price collapse and then a recovery. Of course I can speculate on it and score several billions in an hour by buying them up 20-30% cheaper than I'll sell in a week:
But my business model above all needs stability and the current market is everything but. Why don't I just leave it and go somewhere else? At first because I'm still not starving. 36B/month is clearly a setback but it's still not threatening me with having to do missions or rat myself. I'm still not sure that there are better ISK/hour activities in the game, including FW exploiting. If it would remain my income forever I could keep giving 20B/month to TEST and still get a titan before my pilot can fly it.
Secondly and more importantly FW will be fixed on Dec 4. Then things come back to normal and my income will go up. It doesn't worth liquidating my assets, get into something new just to liquidate that 2 months later and come back, finding my old field polluted by 0.01-ers. I still remember the early times when I had to deal with them. I don't want to do it again.
So while I'm less than happy, I'm fine with my business and has a clearly positive expectation on the future. Of course to be safe, I started a little side business both as emergency and to check if there is an even more lucrative field than my current.
The post of yesterday has been updated with new data.
It doesn't deserve a post but clearly deserve a paragraph: While the FW disaster isn't even fixed yet, CCP is running headlong into another fail: bounties. Bounties cannot be implemented into any game mechanics. Period. If they try it, it will be exploited. The most obvious way to exploit a bounty on your head is to pick a ship that has good insurance (payout-price is close to ship price) and then get your ship killed by alts/friends. Insurance + bounty + salvage can easily be above the ship price.
For EVE trade and industrial discussions join Goblinworks channel.
If you want to get into nullsec but don't know how, go to the official forum recruitment thread and type the name of the alliance you seek into the search and start reading. I'm in TEST by the way.
No business report today as I'm in the middle of a change in the business.
7 comments:
I can see bounties avoiding that pitfall at least if well implemented.
Say a person has a bounty of x million ISK on their head.
They would be assigned a percentage of, say, 75*X/(10+X) (so between zero and 75). Each time a ship the pilot is destroyed that percentage of the wealth LOST (after insurance payout) in that destruction could then be awarded to the person with the kill.
For the last time: Frigates orbiting buttons in FW is not "exploiting". Bad design? yes. Exploiting? no. No its not.
CCP are quick to deal with exploits once they know about them and not afraid to swing the ban hammer. Given that they acknowledge that everyone is doing this, that they have a fix but are holding it back until the Dec. update, and haven't publically come out and stated that its naughty to do it it is categorically NOT an exploit. Stop posting as if it is.
Bounty can be implemented in a number of ways. I would operate with more caution with the "Ever" and "Period" statements. Here is an example:
1. Player A puts bounty on your head - 100 mil for example.
2. Player B kills you; 50 mil are transferred from A to B, 50 mil are Bounty tax
3. You get a 50 mil penalty on your head that the game will try to take from your wallet. If you don't have the money you get a flag and until you pay you get no insurance (it goes to cover those 50 mil that you must pay) and you drop 100% cargo and modules on kill
This way on a bounty transaction of 100 mil the game deletes 100 mil - 50 as tax and 50 as penalty for having a bounty and being killed with it. Zero sum, non exploitable.
@Anonymous 12:11
So I can put a 100 million bounty on you (without even knowing you) and after player X kills you, not only did you lose your ship but you also get a 50 million penalty...
This doesn't make much sense.
Sounds like a griefing bonanza in the making...
For a bounty system to work it has to be a net loss of ISK.
Bounties need to be ship specific and have limits based on the top insurance coverage and salvage drops. As a consequence you wouldn't be able to but a bounty on newbie ships.
@Spiounos Unono
You don't think I can invent the perfect bounty system in 10 min post, do you? If it was THAT easy someone should have done it already.
The only way that I know of making abuse free bounty system is to make it so that your gain of cheating is zero. In order to have that you must subtract the bounty amount from all participants.
You have bounty publisher, bounty victim and killer. The killer obviously can't be punished for participating. He must get the full amount of bounty visible. Then you have the publisher and the victim and it is up to you to decide what percentage to ask from each one.
As for the griefing bonanza - there are a lot of ways to prevent that. Especially ion EvE, where killing a specific player is not an easy task
@ Anonymous 15:26
Maybe you could only place a bounty on someone only after he/she actually killed you at some point in time.
The bounty could be capped to your loss (or total losses) so that when he/she is killed, the whole sum or a portion of it can be subtracted from his/her wallet.
You still get zero-sum, as per your suggestion, and the player who killed you will have an interesting life with a price on his/her head as well as a nice "bounty score" for bragging purposes.
As a total noob in eve, I have no idea how this could work in a corporation/alliance environment, but I'm just throwing some ideas around.
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