Akita T
Caldari Caldari Navy Volunteer Task Force
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Posted - 2010.12.11 06:29:00 -
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Originally by: Infinity Ziona Eh. Would increase most peoples income by 600% overnight. (based on a person playing 4 hours per day). I think that might have some pretty negative effects.
First off, the typical EVE player does not spend 4 hours a day online. The average user count is closer to or even below 30k out of a 330k userbase, and the game's not exactly online 24/7 yet, so it's more like 2 hours a day online for the "average user", so the theoretical "income boost" could be much higher. Keywords, "COULD" and "THEORETICAL".
On one hand, you have the oldies but goldies, the mining bots. Even in the total absence of "natural predators" (suicide-gankers et all, which would become far more prevalent since prey would be more than plentiful), they still compete with eachother for asteroid availability... you can't mine something that doesn't exist, and an asteroid belt could be easily stripmined in a matter of hours by an organized mining op... now just imagine how it would look if everybody and their dog mined everything they could get their hands on as soon as possible... the only place you could still find ores a few hours after belt respawns will most likely be only exploration sites. Also, since supply of minerals would become extremely plentiful, per-hour mining income would drop dramatically anyway, alongside T1 ship and item prices... which is arguably not such a bad thing, since, hey, cheap PvP !
On the other hand, you have NPC ratter bots. Now, imagine that each and every system you come into is inhabited by those bots, especially in 0.0... wouldn't that be actually a boon for people looking for a fight, with targets everywhere ? Oh, you mean, they could just safespot and cloak ? Well, yeah, they could... but with so many overlapping possible users, they'd either have to adjust to higher risks or face a situation where they can make no income at all, since, hey, they'd be safespotted almost permanently. So, most likely, that means plenty of targets everywhere, which is not exactly a negative thing either. And since there would be quite a few hunters, you might even manage to encounter another hunter and engage in actual player-vs-player combat as opposed to AFK-botted-ship-hunting. Again, not quite so negative.
Or maybe you could argue that mission-running bots exist, or if they don't exist, they could soon emerge. Well, yeah, apparently, courier bots do exist, and those might be a problem, since there's not much that can be done about it from a competing player side, that is. I hear far less about combat mission-running bots though, and probably for good reason... I'm not quite sure how the almost inevitable interaction between botted combat mission ship and player-controlled mission invader ("ninja salvager", if you prefer) would end up... probably not so good for the bot.
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