Curious as to what everyone thinks about the OAM balance atm. In my view it is slightly overpowered compared to in game mining because it’s so cheap to run.
I think that the autominer cores needed should be 1/day not 1/3 days. This seems to be the only use for the cores, and despite starting on the server only a few weeks ago (6 days before end of last season) I already have hundreds of them.
On the other side of things, the maximum capacity for the basic ores like iron is very low. I think that should be increased so people don’t have to visit ECM all the time - we have too many “once a day” tasks already (vote, bank, get out your origin gear for RP, get out of tax area, get hws connect daily loot, etc) without adding another.
Thanks for the Feedback - it’s already on my todo list for awhile.
Since we changed that you can’t craft Auto Miners anymore the Auto Miner Cores should be more rare again. For now with this balance change.
Later more.
Regarding the max. cap it should not give you a passive-only income. It was meant as late game content or emergency to get you started after a loss. For storage, use OCD imo.
Duckroll and @RexXxuS It’s most certainly not ‘OP.’ To all players: Be careful about continually suggesting nerfs for exclusive HWS features; right now it is perfectly balanced.
That suggestion would be making it OP. Right now the biggest thing is that it reaches a certain limit and does not go above it. The OAM is a saving grace for players new and old.
Lemme say this in extra big text: IF IT AIN’T BROKE, DON’T FIX IT
That right there is my new motto. What is it with folks trying to nerf everything these days lol? Just leave it be! You’ve only been signed up 18 days, it doesn’t need messing with!
Part 2: We also need to acknowledge the cost of the OAM in terms of credits; it’s an expensive bit of a kit; a bit of kit that folks simply won’t bother buying either through in game or through HWS support if it is simply nerfed. It has been nerfed multiple times before and it has now reached a happy medium where it doesn’t spew out gold or rares like it used to, and the fuel has an actual cost. At first i was sad that the OAM NPC didn’t sell as many OAM cores but now i really like it, there’s a really fun interaction between myself and Ithose traders in the trading and gathering of cores.
If you actively mine you will ALWAYS outproduce the OAM; which is how it should be!
EDIT: If anything needs ‘fixing’ it’s either NPC packages or the old OCD stacks which some people have…like 700 600 and 500k of each. I am happy to see new players make posts; however it is important to get some CONTEXT first, and CONTEXT only comes from experience, which comes from playing multiple seasons! For instance if you had played last season you would have witnessed the scarcity of deposits, which resulted in OAM being relied upon for a large number of people.
I was also going to add that OAM is a donated for option. Players might reconsider donating if there is a nerf to it and those that already donated might feel a bit miffed. I’d agree with Wiseman here. Nothing really wrong with its current setup.
I explained it and it is totally reasonable — I don’t want to show the Auto Miner Cores OCD content of some players and overall fluctuation of that item recently.
It’s an one-time investment. And then - forever easy free resources.
You can’t expect that a feature stays the same if the whole eco-system around that feature changed.
It was craftable previously. Auto Miners were a consumable item you needed a lot of them.
Now, they only have one purpose and some Missions of mine give you 10 Auto Miner cores easily with ~5 min effort.
That is 30 days for that resource.
I have the big data and picture here and what some players said here and there is not un-true: HWS is, if you use all available options you have (daily loot, vote reward, missions, etc.) too easy and moving rather to a different kind of a game.
I have to make sure to know the path of the game and server. And where I likely give smart guys smart ways to generate wealth, I still need to create balance overall.
This has impact to all aspects btw. Be it OCD (old stacks) or other features (NPC Trader). All are always under observation and can always change if the meta requires it.
I won’t change 1 AM Core per day now - but announce it and will back it off with more data.
Yes. What i’m saying is this: The OAM in its own context is perfectly balanced; irrespective of other features. In the context of the WHOLE HWS package i could make a whole analytical post about easy ways to make money/rp.
If you start nerfing one feature as a result of others then you end up stuck in this reactionairy cycle forever ‘balancing.’ until the established uses of certain elements cease to exist.
A good example of this is the Battlefield 3 Game. In which at the beginning a laser guided missile would (rightly) disable a tank by doing 50 damage. By the end it did 20damage (out of 100) to a tank, less than half of that damage needed to ‘disable’ it. (This is a good example of what i call ‘balance creep’, where a well-meant but ultimately flawed balancing campaign leads to a creeping nerf of all features.)
There will always be that (very small) community of min-maxers such as SirKnum who will somehow power through everything/anything and use all features going. That’s normal, you will always have that kind of ‘elite.’ But the vast majority don’t have the time or even the inclination to ‘pull out all the stops’ and access all of the HWS features. So what i’m trying to say here (but not very well) is that by nerfing a feature such as OAM you’ll be punishing those who are just the average player.
What makes HWS unique is its MMO-like nature. Where you have those ‘god-like’ characters who carry over and then you have everyone else. The beauty of HWS is that there’s no pay to play involved, a new player could become a god character if they played enough and worked hard enough. That’s the awesomeness of it. No bad thing in HWS becoming more welcoming and accessible for all players thank to some smart featues! If anything Rex i’d appeal to those elites through the same way you did with the Bunkers. That was a perfect example of a successful admin-led money sink.
So something like that would be cool. Say you wanted to ‘balance’ OAMs. Instead of nerfing them add more levels! And then just bring them in line with whatever values you want. Or…DrumRoll…
Some balancing ideas of mine:
Have a ‘prestige’ system for OAMs, in which you can ‘reset’ your OAM levels and fuel in order for a slightly greater ore gather rate or ore storage rate. (Maybe a choice between both, something to do via HWS Connect?)
Make AM cores EVEN rarer (this would naturally result in a drive up of the price, though if you’re going to wipe them from OCD make sure to compensate them hahah [i have 3500 OAM cores, i’m not a hoarder!]
By careful balancing of NPC Trader packages would make OAM’s more useful and therefore the cores more fought over and henceforth rarer. Especially in the context of the deconstruction of some of those packages.
Best regards, soz for the initially hostile tone, my first post was rather reactionairy. Hopefully this one comes across as a less mean spirited.
Wise.
You decide what is broke and what is not?
For me actually OAM is broken.
The suggestion is to make more and more rare the autominers core or same rarity but only 1 fuel per day.
I have already fueled up OAM for more than a month and i have more than 300 autominers core from THIS season sitting in a crate doing few pois (and you should know that because i am always in the middle of the battles and never or few pve)
I use experience Paxxo, something that is very useful. I remember the old days where the OAM could gather rares at the same rate as normals. It is most certainly not OP in this context. And context is very important!
Something to keep in mind! Experience is king when it comes to these kinds of discussions.
I myself suggested an ‘incremental’ increase in AM rarity but not by too much, Only to push up the standard price a little bit on the open market
After playing since 4.0 I can safely say i know in the general context what is and isn’t broken in the wider context of the many seasons i’ve been playing.
I’m also very happy that there’s another Russian-alliance voice on the forums, i hope we can co-operate in a friendly non toxic manner in order to make HWS a more friendly PVP and PVE community.
Seems like overgenerous POIs are the nature of the problem then
Best regards
Wise.
The way I saw the OAM was to allow players to get building materials even if they don’t enjoy mining. As such, they could get rich by trading or controlling gold-rich PvP planets, then buy auto miner cores, or attack NPC POIs to get the cores directly.
However, what all of these have in common is that the players have to play the game and do something to earn them.
At the moment one core goes a long way so you don’t really have to do anything in order to max out your OAMs.
Making the auto miner cores more scarce wouldn’t fix much because of all the cores people have stored away already - it’s too late. The only way to fix the balance at this point would be to increase the rate at which they are used.
Regarding higher levels of OAM - yes, I think that’s a good idea, but only if it uses more autominer cores for higher level mining.
This is not the whole story though; as people still have to collect/buy the AM cores. So technichally they’re still doing something for it. As well as at some point having to gather the credits to get the maximum lvl, anything less than lvl 10 in the OAM ore list is not really worth paying a core for.
I agree with this though. Say go from 10 to 30 levels. LVL 30 being double whatever the gather rate is now. But at the cost of 1 core per day. LVL 1-10 1 core per 3 days. LVL 11-20 1 core per 2 days. LVL 21-30 1 core per day.
I like OAM as a emergncy store incase i dunno fresh start etc, also gold lvl 10 its like always reliable small decent amount every however many days it gets to max, it defiantly ok for me no worries i like to visit ecc to collect ores it fun👍
Edit i also about the 1 per 3 days etc is like i dunno good for me i guess imo lol i jus load one up and no worry like two week later i bother to get ore mayb refuel barely even use oam honestly but ya gold lvl 10 steady income
Edit 2 ya its good thing to spend gold on after like lvl up the ocd, for when ppl first start on server oam is more used mayb good way to get steady sort of ores but never like to replace actually going out and mine ores like with a hv in a deposit etc
Max capacity is 9000 ore (common) and 3450 (uncommon). These each take 3 days to fill with one autominer core each.
One large CV is roughly 90k sathium. With OAM, this would take 30 days to get. That’s a third of a season to make one CV using a very passive method.
In comparison, today I was able to get the same resource count you can get from the OAM after just a few minutes (less than 3 depending on resource) of mining.
The OAM shouldnt be meant to be a significant resource sink (AMCs) or resource producer. It is nice to have as a backup if i’m a little short on something or, for newer players, a source of rare resources. It benefits casual players too who may not have that much time to play and would rather do more fun activities other than mining in between shuttling their kids to sports or going on work trips.
Upping the AMC requirements would just mean grinding out POIs and competing with others to get the cores. 12 cores a day? 36 cores to fill them up? A casual player could not do that. A new player most likely could not do that. Those are the two groups the OAM benefits the most. What that leaves is veteran players who just use it as emergency material or just some extra stuff when they pass by EGS HQ and, to be fair, it wouldn’t be worth the cores. I’d rather sell them to alliance members so they can get their RP.
There’s no need to make changes to the OAM just for the sake of changing the balance of something.
So after reading this thread gonna throw out some thoughts. I like how the OAM functions now. I feel like it’s a nice middle ground between some extra resources that involve micro managing without being too OP in the amount received.
As far as cores, I like how they are now you get a decent amount from most POIs . What I do think would be cool is to use them as a type of badge system. Have a vendor in ECC so you could trade x amount for other things. For example:
1000 cores for Epic armour
10-20 for 1 yellow rep
70-140 for the 7 rep container
1 for 1-5k credits
1 for 250-500 rare ore minus gold of course
10-25 for Epic weapons.
Obviously the numbers would need to be looked at an adjusted and you could add many things to the list. But it would make finding them rewarding and take the glut of them out of people’s OCDs imho.
