I admit I really don’t have a dog in this fight anymore but I still believe in the LA system and how much better it could be. Here are some of my example ideas to make LA ownership better, more engaging to players and to add value to owning a piece of this game.
The biggest and most important issue is the tax system and how it doesn’t work with loot 2.0. The tax system is outdated and stale!
Players don’t want to hunt somewhere with high taxes but at the same time LA owners pay an insane cost to spawn their DNA. So why don’t we fix the cost of DNA spawn which will lower taxes and reduce players shouldering that burden of expense?
remove the cost of fertilizer to adjust the sliders for density and maturity. LA owners should just pay a flat fee per DNA spawn per DNA regardless of adjustments. Make it cost 5-10 ped per day to have active DNA that we can adjust as needed without penalty.
This would also make hunting LA and events MUCH more engaging because owners would have more control of their spawns and not feel locked into choices or pay large fees to switch.
Owners would be free to make better and more varied events like having Stalker size at night for the ubers and Young spawn in the morning for the normal players.
The DNA Bank
Create a global system that LA owners can interact with to change their creature spawn DNA. It is so difficult to create new DNA chips or find them. Players could loot the required pieces to create a chip but be able to turn the pieces in individually to a NPC who represents the bank. Give the players a reward and put the DNA up for sale to the owners when there is a full chip.
Limited and unlimited DNA
With the start of the DNA Bank it will not only encourage more hunting but also add a little more markup for hunters. Keep unlimited DNA in the game but also create limited versions of the chips that can only spawn creatures for a week etc. These could be creatures that are usually special or unique that could be added for temporary events and flavor. Daspletor or Areanatrox for instance.
Creatures spawn locations
When you add DNA it just spawns creatures randomly throughout the land. Change it to give LA two spawn areas and we can choose which creatures to have there. It would separate out the LA for more diverse hunting and also make mining quite a bit easier for people who want that.
LA owners add items to their land loot
Give us the option to donate rewards which could randomly drop on our lands. Toss in some deeds or armor pieces for hunting incentive. The current event system is alright but it doesn’t inspire that dynamic loot feel which gets the blood pumping after finding something special.
Remove the cost of renaming a land
Pretty silly it costs several thousand ped to just change a land name. Reduce the cost so we can add our own unique flavor to the lands. Imagine buying one of the BIG lands currently for sale and having to keep that LA name when the company has folded.
Lands should have player data available to the owners in game.
This one is kind of a no brainer. It is ridiculous to have to rely on third party software or websites to properly manage our lands. Give us global/HoF feed back at the fertilizer terminal.
Hey David, Mindark officials did touch on this subject at the last LAN party (couple of weeks ago) and improvements to the current Land Area systems are indeed coming after summer (that was their plan 2 weeks ago at least).
Both of the subjects you just raised were mentioned
This is a very complex topic to be fixed and since I do have skin in this matter It would be cool if MA actualy would ask for feedback from the current LA owners.
I don’t really think the tax system is bad in it’s essence, it just forces LA owners to provide something unique in order to have a turnover and a good experience for the participants, which right now is really hard to do so.
I also don’t think removing fertilizer from the equation makes that considerable a difference, because in a way it is a means to move the economy some more. Is it ideal? Not really. LA owners already made a big investment in the land itself and being taxed further only hurts the first point, which is taxing.
This post isn’t very elaborate on my part as I am focusing on other matters right now but I would love to have a healthy discussion about this game feature with those responsible for maintaining it.
I would also like to know what happens to people like me, which are invested outside of Calypso, and their assets once the PP’s who don’t adhere to the new expansion system cease to exist. But that’s another topic altogether.
I dont own a LA im just a small time player sitting back waiting for something to happen.
Its the economy/lack of player(s) retention. I dont know the solution. But have a gut feeling if MA moved loot tables around and removed/repurposed old useless/unused items in favor of new resource sinks all the peripherial issues we are seeing would straighten itself out within a few weeks.
I’m not against something like this, maybe a lightweight version in which LA owners could set the locations of the highest density “center of mass” for each DNA, causing the densities of each DNA’s mob to decrease as one moves far away from that location, or maybe something else similar.
In general, I think we need to be more wary of streamlining the process of hunting every single mob. Some mobs should be bundled with different mobs in different spawn locations, so that the hunter faces either a strategic decision about which secondary and perhaps tertiary mobs they want to hunt alongside the mob whose loot they’re primarily after, or a logistic puzzle of using geography, run speed, weapon range, etc., to hunt just those primary mobs within a heterogeneous spawn. Probably the implicatures of modern mission/codex ubiquity and the incentives of planet partners to prioritize immediate gratification and streamlining over supporting richer systems of organic, intersecting game mechanic dynamics have caused or amplified this presumption that everyone should have instantaneous, salient means to isolate and hunt any mob under any set of circumstances. But streamlining away every strategic or logistic challenge via development rather than allowing the ingenuity of Entropians to gradually layer into organic solutions to organically emergent challenges is exactly what results in the modern, stale F-mash atmosphere of hunting. It is not the existence of the F button. The atmosphere would not improve if players had to type a dozen characters to target the next mob instead of one or use the mouse more. It would not improve if we had 100000 missions instead of 1000. It would improve if development stopped trying to systemically tear down organically emergent strategic and logistic challenges Entropians face to erect strategically bankrupt laundry lists of chores in their place.
On top of defending some of the strategic richness of hunting, this measure of challenge would of course be rewarded as appropriate by Market Values, and if you ignore the impact of these kinds of small, convenience-oriented tradeoffs and end up with broad Market Value discontentment downstream, you get some calling for far more drastic measures to perk up markets, on the order of upending core facets of Entropia’s ownership model.
With that said, I do think part of the value LAs can and should offer includes maintaining additional, and sometimes contextually superior, spawn options for hunters. I’m good with making changes to give LA owners more control. I just want to make sure we do it in a way that’s a bit more sophisticated in outcome than LA owners just hard-coding specific geographic or temporal slices of their LAs for specific categories of hunters as though each slice was a separate LA.
This is an unhelpful framing. Third party software and websites are not workarounds. They are a huge facet of what keeps the Entropian experience community driven. They fit with the sandbox ethos of Entropia hand-in-glove. Obviously not all in-world statistics are bad (I am glad I do not have to recurringly recompute my Blueprint Comprehension skill from individual skill gain chat messages), but the more developers allow themselves to include and/or highlight some statistics and exclude or deemphasize others, even if originally motivated by what statistics Entropians were already tracking in the past or present, the more confined we become to those statistics in the future. Giving the community and even the individual Entropian the means to develop their own tools to track the information they find valuable rather than the information developers think they find valuable in a way that allows for paradigm shifts over time is the proper function of Entropian information flow.
This right here is a HUGE problem or am I seeing it wrong?
I am glad these LAN exist as a way to support the game and give us insight as to the future of EU. The terrible thing is in how it is done on Mindarks end. The only people who are clued in are the ones rich enough to fly across the world for an event? The rest of your players with real life struggles and jobs don’t matter? Give me one single reason that Mindark can’t be bothered to record their version of the LAN and make it public for everyone. Just one!
For instance they make a really bad decision post about the future of the planets without elaborating. Leading to massive panic and assumptions. People thinking their LA are disappearing or devalued. Yet if you are one of the rich society players in the game you can have a special party and understand the future.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars of player owned LA investment were put at risk this week with a really stupid forum post. Yet they couldn’t make people whose finances are on the line understand the changes unless they were part of this elite social club?
I want better from Mindark than this and ya’ll should too. Mindark can’t be bothered to click the stream button to reassure and include your whole player base? Just freaking sad and another reason I hope this game changes their management style before it is too late.
The LAN was heavily advertised both in [U]this forum[/U] and ingame, and probably discord too. It was live streamed on [U]Twitch.tv[/U] for anyone to see, 100% public and open, I’m sure someone even has a recording somewhere.
The presentation was also quite vague, they only touched a handful of issues and gave a general hint of the direction they want to go.
In any case, I agree that maybe they could have posted a summary on PCF after they went back home. But it’s also true that in this game information is power and whoever wanted to join the stream had every chance to do so.
I spent time looking unsuccessfully for this stream. There is also a post by a player several days old in the LAN thread asking for a summary.
My issue is that there was details that affect hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars of player investment not made public. How many land owners (myself included) have walked away and given up because the system is 20 years old, outdated and works against the LA owners since the introduction of loot 2.0? How many people are not investing in land because Mindark hasn’t mentioned doing anything with it for ages?
This wasn’t just some sneak peak at a new Sabacuma model. There was game changing details on player investment discussed!
Look, I love and believe in Entropia far more than the average player but sometimes love can be tough. They need to hear when they are messing up so they can fix it. A corporation filled entirely with “yes men” is destined to fail.
Mindark should focus on two things to be successful in the years ahead. Every post or update they give should be the following:
Clear global communication to their entire game.
Support and benefit investments already made in the game. The success stories is what will bring the players to us!
A little over a year later since this thread, and I am touring LAs in Amethera as a returning player gone for 20 years. The system is obviously broken, as in disincentivized for LA owners to actively manage their properties. Even for someone who knows little about the game can see how the collision of the problems of low player population and lack of control for land areas have resulted in basically abandoned LAs.
Not a good player experience to travel out to an LA hoping to fight a particular creature only to discover the tax is 5% and the creature sliders are unlocked. It should be relatively simple for MA to allow more control for LA owners. Several of David’s ideas were ones I thought up myself, a couple of them anyway before I discovered this thread. These are the obvious simple solutions and may be imperfect, but imagine if someone put some real thought into it!
