All told, if the odds were ever in your favor, you could bring in upwards of 100 million ISK per hour with optimum drops. But that seems unlikely. Reality is probably closer to 30 million ISK per hour, and that is indirect because you have to schlep back to a market hub to sell your loot.
Basically, you shouldn’t stop ratting in your super carrier to run off and harvest the bounty of Guardian’s Gala. All the SKINs and learning accelerators you want will be on the market in Jita waiting for you and your ISK to show up.
Even my dank 10-18 million ISK ticks in my little Ishtar are a better value as I get that and all the loot and salvage as well.
But as a distraction from whatever you’re doing in New Eden currently Guardian’s Gala probably isn’t the worst thing you could choose.
This is a fundamental problem in EVE and all MMOs that allow free trade of rewards. There is no point doing any other activity than what provides you the best currency/effort ratio and just buy all the rewards from other activities. Back in my days in EVE I was trading implants and boosters and whatnot and never bothered to do ratting myself or run incursions or gank filled freighters, because it would be lower ISK/hour.
Currently the most profitable in supercarrier ratting, just as I predicted 3.5 years ago when I saw the document of shame, the pivotal point of turning EVE into an RMT cashout platform. (I’m pretty smug about how accurate I was in predicting the future)
I just don’t understand one thing. Why does Wilhelm play EVE after realizing its futility himself?
But back to games. This is the reason why free trade must be removed from games, it optimizes 95% of the content out of the game. You either master one aspect of the game and do only that (which is repetitive) or you spend real money (on legitimate token buy or illicit RMT). If you don’t do these, if you actually play all content, you get much less rewards.
Of course having zero trade is bad too, since it forces players to do all activities including ones they hate. On solution is guild-only trade that create guilds that do everything, while players can still somewhat specialize: the guild miners get minerals, guild ratters get ISK, guild missioners get LP items, guild WH-ers get T3 materials, guild industrialists create the ships and guild whales provide the PLEX. The other solution is highly taxed trade, like half of the currency the buyer pays goes away, so if you can get a reward with more than 50% efficiency, you are better off than doing your 100% activity and buying it from someone who created it with 100%. This of course mean that all kinds of trades must be taxed or removed.
.
I play because I enjoy the fights. I do as little ISK earning as I can get away with and try to spend as much of my online time as I can warping around and shooting people… or, absent a fight, tinkering with things like events just to see how they play. I don’t think I’ve actually been back to Delve since November.
In the end you cannot “win” a sandbox game, you can only find something you enjoy and do that if you don’t want to burn out.
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that is why I only troll and grief in MMOs. everything else is communist utopia or flipping simulator. but that kind of impact will be soon completely patched out of MMOs. just a matter of time and snowflakes breeding the next generation of stupidity.
if you want to “try hard” don’t do it in MMOs.
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Why you can’t buy some things….. Ok so yes doing a very specific activity gets you what you want. The question then is why do you want it? if its so you can look at in the hanger/inventory system. you shouldn’t play. if you rat 4 hours a week to support your pvp habit then you are doing it right. These events are not geared to vet’s, they know vets took one look at the mechanics and reached the obvious conclusion. If I want that skin wait till about the end of the event and buy it on the cheap. You can’t buy enjoyment from a game you just spent 40 hours of your own personal time grinding with that super. You can enjoy a game that lets you socialize talk smack for 40 hours while you rat in your super. I too like zero sums thoughts, however unlike you I can process two or more zero sums that are in tandem.
zero sum #1: rat 40 hours
zero sum #2: socialize for 40 hours
zero sum #3: Bling fleet for 2 hours funny kill mails.
all three are working together if you are just doing 1 then you are missing the point. Except #3 that you can finance out of hip national if you want.
I hat solo ratting its boring its unfun there is no point, I can earn lower isk doing something else while still enjoying my game time.
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@anonymous: it is to me interesting to see how most Eve players so easily fall into this communist utopia, and its corollary of preying on the weakest, and cherish paying taxes to opaque organizations while blindly following the elite’s orders, under the influences of their media. Says a lot about our society in general.
Granted, you have to account for a good portion of the players still just being kids, easy to influence through mass-propaganda and displays of powers, and eager to “fit-in”
I have been publicly offering to help people break free of these setup, and yet so far only one player tried it out, without much success as I believe he was more interested to “be a spy or a scammer” more than really trying to break free for himself/herself.
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As a dev, there is no point optimizing a game around people so obsessiv that they are willing to declare “winning” in a sandbox and following that would do a “job” for 1000h+ which is tedious enough to make the majority of ppl quit a real life job over.
Your lack of socialization made you forget how much of an outlier you are.
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@Vizjira: nope, your socialization made you forget how much of an outlier YOU are. I’m more of a mainstream guy:
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You did not leave because the game got too grindy and you are not a “new player”, you left because you felt personally bullied by the devs/community managers, which get’s as close to unique as it can or do you want to walk back on that?
Strictly searching and following the optimal solution to a game is something only very, very few people do – because being #1 on the ladder as fast as possible needs to be more important to them than anything else, honestly i never met anyone who does that as an AI would and you do advocate for this being the “normal” behaviour, which is simply oblivious.
And this is not specific to “trade”, there is always one optimal solution, either its grinding the same spot for the next 200h, doing a specific type of research (like simulationcrafting, analyzing logs), improving your cognitive abilities specifically related to managing “dances”. Now trade is something you are doing well at, so any game that can solved by trading most efficiently (in your estimation, multi trillion isk players probably did not do that by simple station/region trading) is “solved” to you – in reality any game with a clear goal is technically solved – working around the group who goes for non trivially replicable ways to min-max is like balancing top end pvp, a waste of ressources, you keep the illiusion of choice for the average player (you can do that or that or that and its all good stuff! (it never is)).
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@Vizijra: my point with the graph is that most players want to reach some goal in a game instead of socializing. Now most of them set goals that are very limited in the eyes of someone really good (like “mine enough to build my own battleship”), but it’s still an in-game goal and not a social one. EVE drives away most of its perspective players by catering to the socializers who don’t really care about the game, just want to be with friends. They are the 10%.
I’ve left because the game was systematically changed to create the current state where no in-game goal matters and it’s just a glorified chatroom. Falcon bullying was just a fire alarm, not the fire itself. Even when it happened I was more upset because he saved the Goon monument vandals than I was about his words on me. It is true that I started to dig about him because of his words. But after what I’ve found, no amount of apology and asskissing would have changed my decision about him.
I lingered on for a half more year, foolishly thinking that I can raise enough outrage to get rid of him, but he survived everything, the fall of the Goon book, him banning me from running CSM, record low CSM votes. When the citadels were introduced with an obvious moneyprint, it was clear that I’ve lost and the game belongs to the socializers.
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That’s a hypothesis which you would need to test, it is known that people who do join social groups are more likely to stick around longer, not implying causation just correlation. Further the 10% are not by definition “just socializers”, being in a group can for certain tasks be the most efficient way to solve a given problem.
Secondly you black-and-white this beyond how humans work, every action which leads you to your goal has associated costs – being the richest player in the game (goal) vs effort required to create a gambling site (cost), being the best solo pvp-player (goal) vs playing alone, having multiple characters to manage (cost).
This does not end there, on the path of optimization this would start to influence every aspect of your life (optimizing sleep cycles, not doing mentally challenging work outside of playing the game..) to a degree that most people do not even consider this in the first place, this leads to “i want to be x, under *my* conditions”.
Now we are obsessive SOBs and our effort-reward ratio is skewed by looking farther into the future, valueing success in games higher, having less of a social life etc, this allows us to endure more “pain” (there are other forms of neurodiversity which changes “pain” to “not that bad” (p.ex. antisocial by default = willing to sacrifice social interaction making it not “a condition”), grandstanding this as “you suck, try harder social” is not doing the issue justice, is intellectually lazy and more of reflection of your perception of the world rather than a critical evaluation of existence at this point.
@But you can just quit the game if you can not reach your goal under your conditions
Implication being that the only source of positive stimuli is reaching your “one goal”, if someone is happy if he sees the jump animation, talks to people in his group, it would counter intuitive to leave the game after realizing that building gambling sites is the best way to make money and not being willing to do that.
If the thought of not working towards a long term goal in a hobby upsets you/giving you the feeling of emptiness and you can not find anything else in the game, sure switch, but again, most people can derive joy easier.
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Every individual has their own risk tolerance, that is what stops everyone from ratting in a super and keeps some in hisec. If someone finds this event wasn’t worth it, it probably wasn’t designed for them.
@bg The two big societal groups of eve players are 1) IT professional (duh) and 2) military veterans. In my experience the military ones seem to like eve since it simulates what they once knew, an espirit de corp + following orders from chain of command. Very few kids are playing now, average age must be near 40 these days.
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