Ok. Time to dive in. I’ve sort of only scanned this thread so forgive me if i make any big presumptions please.
This post will focus on three things.
Deconstructor.
NPC traders.
PVP.
Money Sinks.
- Deconstructor. In my opinion 100% return rate is a little bit high. I’d down it to anything between 50-80%. Or maybe have some sort of scalable upgradeable system, like a deconstructor return rate. But i could be dreaming. I won’t lie that i have processed a crap-ton of power coils. And i’ve managed to get an enormous amount of erestrum and zascosium out of them. But this is only a secondary issue for me.
- NPC traders are very powerful in their current form, and in the long run there may be a solid argument for changing how their costs are calculated. First thing i would do, is have a formula to work out a minimum cost; then after that let the player of the NPC trader decide how much their package should cost. As right now they don’t get to choose. This way you may have people be a little bit more sensible with their pricing.
BUT
It’s important to remember that compared to the old NPC traders, these new ones are pretty tame. The only super duper crazy one is the power coils. 25K power coils for 25 RP and less than a million credits. That’s one hell of a purchase. But in the old days you could literally buy like 25k of large constructors per trade haha. So these days they are considerably more balanced. But there is room for extra work on them.
- PVP. Despite this season having lots of PVE playfields with easily obtainable rare resources there has still been significant PVP, which has also been event based but mostly emergent like the good ole’ days.
For PVP i think SV combat is pretty awesome, and bases feel meaty. My only problem is with CV combat, class 7 cvs everywhere. Would be nice if a couple of playfields had lower CV class size, for some quicker and less forgiving battles like the good ole’ days where core targeting was a thing. (Because let’s be honest, Eleon removed core targeting so they could say that they had ‘fixed’ the lag-shot problem, and we all know how false that is…).
Maybe next season a significant reduction of the amount of rare and semi rare mats in PVE, to encourage more PVP crossover, but there should still be some positions in PVE with rare and semi rare mats that get regularly farmed.
Ok onto the big one, this bit is going to be long so prepare yourselves! MONEY SINKS:
- One thing i’ll agree with Fasgort on is that 2.5mil a day is nice, but i don’t think it should be nerfed, not at all. From my prior experience as a member of HWS i’ve witnessed an 85% nerfed Orbital Auto Miner. A 90% nerfed OCD (500k to 50k) about a 60% nerfed NPC trader (14k cons per trade to 300, but other ones are still almighty, e.g power coils.) And about a 95% nerf in interest rates (2.5mil daily down from 50mil.)
So we need to be VERY careful about nerf suggestions…as some vets (not me) are still feeling the punch from prior changes, it’s easy to suggest a nerf as quick fix measure, but all it really does is hurt the newer players who aren’t quite as intensive as you in their playstyle @Fasgort.
Instead we should have more money sincs: For instance, look at how much money was spent on bunkers between EU and NA…Over 1 billion credits in total. That would take over 400 days of interest to pay that money back…So don’t under-estimate the power of the money sink.
I would propose several ‘high tier’ options for wealthy players with no progression left (Such as those with OCD7 and Bank 5; something to keep them going.)
I would propose basically a ‘prestige’ style-system.
Orbital AutoMiner
For my prestige system here, you could prestige either an individual miner or the entire thing, and as a result all of its levels and fuel would reset back to 1. However upon buying it all back up to 10 you would have say a 10% extra resource income, and a 10% higher stacking rate. And upon each ‘prestige’ it could cost progressively more.
- Prestige 1 5 Million 10RP. (This doesn’t include the cost for purchasing each AM level upto 10.)
- Prestige 2 7.5 Million 20RP.
- Prestige 3 11 Million 35RP.
- Prestige 4 15 Million 60RP.
- Prestige 5 25 Million , 100RP. (This would be a 50% upgrade on the curret OAM. The price is not prohibitive for now, maybe an increase in RP or Credit requirement would be greater, but you guys get the idea.
OCD
I propose a similar system for OCD, but at much greater cost, and only rising in 5% increments. But instead of requiring an OCD reset (which would be extreme), it would cost 10% of the OCD level cost per 5% increase in slot capacity (not an increase in slots).
E.g OCD 5 would cost 500K for a 5% increase.
Whereas OCD7 would cost 70mil for a 5% increase…here there is a problem, as it stays considerably cheaper for the level 5, at some point they could compete with a ‘stock’ ‘vanilla’ OCD lvl 7. So some further thought shall be required for this.
Skill Tree
I know this is a while away yet. But i have a previous skill tree proposal which i’m going to shamelessly advertise here: Skill-Tree suggestion for 9.0
With my suggestion in mind, it could be used to help reduce the cost of ‘prestige-ing’ the OCD and Orbital Autominers.
TL:DR I believe in adding more features for people to spend money for, instead of simply taking away from the current features.
Finally, the argument could be made that my proposal widens the gap between the top and the bottom, and that would be a fair statement, but as you see currently. For a guy to ‘prestige’ his LVL 7 OCD by 50% would require 700 million. Whilst for a lvl 5 OCD merely costs 2.5Mil (this needs fixing and consideration, i’ll leave it to you guys to come up with ideas.)
Best regards
Wise
PS: I hope this post is intelligible, i wrote it shortly after waking up. 