For awhile I've been trying to come up with an idea that could potentially lead to an improvement of our current "money-sink".
These days the biggest money-sink in the game would definitely be the Sci Data. It's price ranges from 3-7 mil. per single Data. As we all know, the Sci Data is obtainable from events or some unique bases that are now either all empty or just destroyed. Now the demand of the said commodity rises, but I think there's not enough Data present at the moment.
The Cultist events were nice and they gave everyone a chance to loot some Sci-Data, we also had trading event, pvp events which were also rewarded by Sci-Data. With those events being so rare these days, people don't really get a chance to acquire Data.
I want to clarify that I am not calling anyone out, I am just trying to present my idea here as best as I can.
Now back on topic. Without Data on the market, what can people spend their money on would be:
- Ships
- Player Owned Bases
- Equipment
- Special Role Play
- Faction
- RP in general
The list may seem long, but after some years of playing you find yourself with a very options . Should I buy another ship? Maybe another CAP8? Oh wait, it's my 20th CAP8... hmmm, let's not.
My idea was: what if a server would actually sell Sci-Data? The devs or admins would set a price on a unit and begin selling it.
The way it would possibly work is that you have a special forums section - like a Trading Post, you make a request on how much Sci-Data you would want to purchase and you do it. That would require an admin to come online and personally give you the Data which can be a hustle to be honest.
The other way would be:
- The Admins/Devs whoever build a base that would be like a Trading Hub of sort on which you can only dock if approved by an Admin. That would require you or your faction to do a required RP.
- The price for doing RP instead of just buying the thing could be lower.
- Though it could be a hustle for admins to go through player requests
Note: Let people spend credits on Data, but also keep the event rewards system which will give players a chance to trade Sci-Data and earn credits instead.
tl;dr: Make Sci-Data available all the time and credits that were used for the Sci-Data purchase get deleted.
Thoughts on this?
Scidata is not a moneysink. For an object to be a moneysink, the money needs to disappear permanently, either by NPC vendor or taken by the administration.
Advocating that scidata be sold by an NPC vendor on the other hand completely tanks what little semblance we have of a player driven economy, so that's not a great solution either.
I would be more interested in sci-data if there were more cosmetic rewards.
The best thing about those sci-data codenames is their actual names, rather than their stats. I love the name THUNDERWAVE
To be honest, I'd love your sci-data changes but they don't really change the actual problem - which is that these money sinks aren't actually money sinks at all. There's very little in the way of consumables, even training for hours only costs you a couple of million credits unless you're the one blowing up exclusively and autobuying nukes as a result.
That's not a problem I know how to solve though.
Personally i do not think it is a bad idea, i am sure some will complain it is. But I am not a player who has done or will ever get in to doing events, so i could care less about Sci-data since it really has no benefits for me personally. But if there was a way to obtain some without having to bother with events it may actually be worth getting some for using.
(07-25-2018, 03:27 AM)Durandal Wrote: [ -> ]Scidata is not a moneysink. For an object to be a moneysink, the money needs to disappear permanently, either by NPC vendor or taken by the administration.
Advocating that scidata be sold by an NPC vendor on the other hand completely tanks what little semblance we have of a player driven economy, so that's not a great solution either.
sci data stops existing when you trade it in for an item and it's stuck as that item forever - sci data is also extremely expensive to obtain and is in limited quantities, how is that not a sink?
edit; ok re-read, you're talking about money, but still. expensive. limited.
So, scidata is given out for no money, but rather for participation, people buy it, but that just means person A gives money to person B, and person B is still in the server. So the money has not left the server, and then the scidata gets removed and a scidata reward added. No money leaves.
Unfortunatley, this does not help the inflation on the server. Interestingly, PoBs work nearly the same way, except for the resources they consume.
(07-25-2018, 03:27 AM)Durandal Wrote: [ -> ]Advocating that scidata be sold by an NPC vendor on the other hand completely tanks what little semblance we have of a player driven economy, so that's not a great solution either.
The player driven economy would pretty much stay the same as people would also be able to buy/sell Data afterwards.
(07-25-2018, 03:27 AM)McNeo Wrote: [ -> ]I would be more interested in sci-data if there were more cosmetic rewards.
The best thing about those sci-data codenames is their actual names, rather than their stats. I love the name THUNDERWAVE
To be honest, I'd love your sci-data changes but they don't really change the actual problem - which is that these money sinks aren't actually money sinks at all. There's very little in the way of consumables, even training for hours only costs you a couple of million credits unless you're the one blowing up exclusively and autobuying nukes as a result.
If they were sold by an NPC the cash would get deleted that way really making it a money-sink which I believe would change things to good. As for the cosmetic rewards, I feel you man.
(07-25-2018, 03:28 AM)R.I.P. Wrote: [ -> ]Personally i do not think it is a bad idea, i am sure some will complain it is. But I am not a player who has done or will ever get in to doing events, so i could care less about Sci-data since it really has no benefits for me personally. But if there was a way to obtain some without having to bother with events it may actually be worth getting some for using.
I've been in those events and I enjoyed each and everyone of them, but there are people that don't enjoy those such as yourself so yeah... this would make players like you be able to obtain Sci-Data by using credits. People that get the Data from events don't have to spend credits and can sell them for such.
(07-25-2018, 03:30 AM)Auzari Wrote: [ -> ] expensive. limited.
Expensive... sure. Limited? Very.
(07-25-2018, 03:39 AM)Unseelie Wrote: [ -> ]So, scidata is given out for no money, but rather for participation, people buy it, but that just means person A gives money to person B, and person B is still in the server. So the money has not left the server, and then the scidata gets removed and a scidata reward added. No money leaves.
Yes, right now that's the situation we're in.
Scidata was never intended to be a money sink, because as Durandal mentioned, a money sink by definition is an economic process in which currency is removed from the economy complete. You take a stack of twenty dollar bills to a kiosk, hand them to the men in black behind the counter, then they hand you a fancy shirt and a blood drive sticker that's hastily had "I bought a shiny thing" scribbled in sharpie over "I donated blood" and throw the stack of cash into the bonfire behind them. Scidata is more like waking up at the crack of dawn every Saturday morning to go to get credits at part-time classes and eventualy turning them in for a piece of paper with with a few letters after your name that certifies that you're really good at waking up at the crack of dawn and not falling asleep at the wheel.
Much like I personally don't take part-time General Studies at the local community college on my Saturday mornings, and prefer to spend them in the warm embrace of my Rei Ayanami body pillow otherwise completely empty bed, I don't really get the way scidata is set up right now. The only thing I have any sort of interest in is the FEUERBALLs, but at 2.5 billion credits equivalent per there's no way I'm going to kit myself a Surveyor with five of those and an Inferno at this rate since I lack the scidata, lack the gumption to get up for every event and hope I get a chunk of the buttload I need, and I actually don't think there's enough circulating scidata out there right now to buy even a pair of them. And even so, for the joke that is a Surveyor with five FEUERBALLs and an Inferno, I'm not really interested in mining for 120-odd hours only to be horrendously disappointed at the likely drastic lack of efficacy of the loadout.
I don't know how we could balance vendor cost for scidata vs player cost for scidata in a way that a) keeps the player cost relatively stable, b) doesn't encourage even more mindless no-RP powermining than already exists, and c) doesn't completely devalue scidata rewards. I suppose we could just do a forced deflation of their value through an NPC sell point but then everyone who's been buying up scidata in the past while is going to be very sad, angry, or both, as they've just bought a three million dollar condo in downtown Vancouver only for there to be a foreign property ownership tax implemented the very next day that tanks the market.
This is probably the reason I'm not an economy dev.
(07-25-2018, 03:39 AM)Unseelie Wrote: [ -> ]So, scidata is given out for no money, but rather for participation, people buy it, but that just means person A gives money to person B, and person B is still in the server. So the money has not left the server, and then the scidata gets removed and a scidata reward added. No money leaves.
Unfortunatley, this does not help the inflation on the server. Interestingly, PoBs work nearly the same way, except for the resources they consume.
I've never seen the issue with the whole 'money into the economy' thing because everything you get you won't get back 100% of the value for which it was first obtained - such as ships or guns, so some money is lost regardless. And another thing is that people do disappear and come back to discovering that their stuff is gone from not bumping it. Again with the whole 'inflating economy' - I probably don't care about it because I really don't like grinding too much, then again I don't keep up with topics like economy or politics. Yes, I know some effort or a bit of grinding will be required otherwise piracy won't be a thing - but goddamn some of you people play this game too much.
But I guess for the people who have grinded too much money or have too much time, the game is essentially boring for them, so now I kind of see the issue with that.