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Free T5 access, always a good thing?
rinkster
Member Posts: 3,549 Arc User
Firstly, I want to start by paying tribute to those who so generously make their T5 bases freely available.
They don't have to do it, and it's been very helpful to many people.
However, I have a nagging concern about the practise, regarding what I believe to be an unintended consequence.
I think the practise is a strong influence on the rising price of zen.
The fleet holdings act as sinks in the economy, this is well known.
As fleet holdings are completed, the supply of dilithium goes up and prices increase.
We usually speak of how, now the T5s are done, there is more dilithium around.
However, I wonder how many lower level fleets have stalled in their progression, as the incentive to grow is somewhat stifled by the lessened need to grow.
Why finish a tier 2 engineering tier, when you can just get an invite to a T5 base?
Tl;dr
I am concerned that free T5 access is slowing lower fleet progression down significantly, with a knock on effect on the price of zen.
They don't have to do it, and it's been very helpful to many people.
However, I have a nagging concern about the practise, regarding what I believe to be an unintended consequence.
I think the practise is a strong influence on the rising price of zen.
The fleet holdings act as sinks in the economy, this is well known.
As fleet holdings are completed, the supply of dilithium goes up and prices increase.
We usually speak of how, now the T5s are done, there is more dilithium around.
However, I wonder how many lower level fleets have stalled in their progression, as the incentive to grow is somewhat stifled by the lessened need to grow.
Why finish a tier 2 engineering tier, when you can just get an invite to a T5 base?
Tl;dr
I am concerned that free T5 access is slowing lower fleet progression down significantly, with a knock on effect on the price of zen.
Post edited by rinkster on
0
Comments
:: shrugs ::
(UFP) Ragnar
Fleet credit is easy.
Marks generate lots, doffs and so on.
But a low level fleet can easily generate provisions and FC without completing the big dilithium sink projects.
It's the disincentive to donate large piles of dilithium that I see as an issue.
If this is a dilithium issue, aren't most of the higher-end equipment in Starbases require dilithium?
(UFP) Ragnar
Yup, a fleet console costs dilithium
However, a few consoles aren't anything like the dilithium sink a tier three holding is, let alone tier four and five.
And Cosmic makes a good point regarding members of tier five fleets getting FC.
However, wouldn't that situation be eased if, instead of opening a tier five base, said members were seconded to lower level fleets to level them up?
I think that would be a social dynamic in the player community than anything.
(UFP) Ragnar
Bit like the Tier five invites then.
Thing is, broadly speaking, you can do three things with dilithium.
Buy stuff for yourself, donate it to your fleet or turn it into zen.
Fleet donations use it up the fastest and control the amount of dilithium in the system more than the other two
If donating doesn't happen, either because your base is already tier five or because you don't need that tier three thing when there's an open tier five just there, then we get the pressure we've seen recently driving the price of zen up.
And those small fleets are at greater risk of stalling.
The way the system is now, I can take my time with a few of my friends and casually build up our fleet as we go along while still getting all the goodies from higher level fleets. This has actually encouraged fleet contributions rather than stifling them. Before it became widely known that we could buy top tier fleet stuff from other fleets, I had absolutely no interest in the fleet system. I looked at the handful of friends in my fleet and saw an insurmountable grind. We would never, ever finish it all. So my contributions were near zero. Once I learned that I could get the good stuff without being forced into an impossible grind scenario, I suddenly found myself doing a fair amount of contributing to projects and even having fun doing it along side my buddies.
This actually helps small fleets instead of hurting us. We no longer feel the need to try to recruit en mass or jump ship to a larger fleet just to get stuff. If they were to lock it off, I imagine a whole lot of small fleets suddenly and swiftly dying off in favor of people flocking to the already larger and built up fleets. Competition for donating stuff to get fleet credits in those larger fleets is already a problem for many of their members. The sudden influx of new people would further exacerbate the issue.
The end result would be small fleets dying off and larger fleets choking to death with everyone trying to get fleet creds. I don't think that's something anyone wants.
Mine Trap Supporter
Unless they want a higher-tier fleet ship, they don't have to do that. What I see is a lot of the opposite, people in large fleets dropping out temporarily to earn credits in a smaller fleet, then come back.
But regardless of which way it goes, the fleet that has the provisions produced the credits, and the credits came from resources being dumped. It's possible this has influenced the dil exchange- unlike the doff-heavy 1000XP starbase projects, the important provision projects all require a nice chunk of dil.
And the other results of free access are:
I'm OK with all of that.
Me too.
I'm not suggesting the invite system be scrapped.
However, I'm not sure Lans experience is typical.
The red bit, is the reason why I like online games.... you always find greedy people, then along come those who like to upset them / troll them.
All I know is that prices on the exchange are outrageous and much much higher than one year ago. Also the 150 Dil per Zen is the highest it's been in a long time. We need more EC and Dil sinks. With the number of Alts people can create and number of alt accounts one can have we've got players swimming in piles of Dilithium and EC with nothing to spend it on.
For some reason there has always been a lot of negativity towards fleeting up, maybe because there are a lot of douchebags out there that run fleets and take advantage of people.
We need reasons to boost fleet popularity, rather than pushing people further away from the idea of even needing to be part of a fleet.
Well that is sort of it though.
If you have 100x 5 man fleets....
All starting just small projects... they are still dumping in the exact same (aprox) amount of Dilithium... as 10x 50 man fleets.
So yes you may only have 10 of 100 fleets bothering to hit Tier 5... but those other 90 fleets are spending just as much D Per Person. Sure they are not completing the massive sinks... still they are completing the smaller projects. Which when you average out the number of people adding to them ends up being even anyway.
As someone in a small fleet I can say we are up around tier 4 on most stuff and sure on a few things like spire we got tier 1 to unlock provisions and just do provisioning missions on that one.
Still the 4-5 of us that log in now and then have been dumping D in at the same rate we would be in a larger fleet where 99% of the time when you log in there isn't anything to dump anything into to earn FC.
The fleets that give access do a great service for the community as a whole, letting people that belong to smaller fleets run as a small groups of friends remain in their fleet, while staying competitive with the 300+ fleets that have most of the facilities completely finished by now.
That won't prevent those people from building their base with their small group of friends, it's a part of playing the game to experience anyway. They'll just do it at their own pace, without being forced to rush or feeling punished and left behind because of their choice to not belong in a mega fleet.
Stick It To The Man!
Thing is, the dilithium for a provisioning project is a couple of days or so refining.
The dilithium for a project to build a tier, similar amounts.
But you need lots of the latter before you see any benefit, while getting provisions just for one such project.
While it won't be a universal rule, that will disincentive building tiers if alternate and cheaper routes to the shines is available.
As for a tier capping project, that's a lot of dilithium.
I have to be honest, I'm unsure what the solution is.
And i freely admit this won't even be an issue for some
Honestly, biggest thing I feel about the whole situation is that it is an equalizer. Such a thing gives those in small fleets, the fleets that may not ever reach tier 5 without a very, VERY long time. And it doesn't get any cheaper as it goes up.
Heck, presuming you did 2k xp a day on an SB area, with a 24 hour schedule, and ignoring upgrades atm, that'd take you at least:
250,000/2,000 = 125 days. Or about four months. Add about another month on top of that to include the time need for upgrades (and that is presuming they were filled instantly).
So about 5 months at least. An uber-fleet, be they small or large could obviously do it in probably 4, including upgrades if they had everything ready beforehand, and kept to a 20 hour time schedule.
But realistically, not so much.
Getting invites for everything except ships (as that is still rather rare to get), puts those small fleets on a much more even footing to larger fleets, and gives them the ability to get what they might not otherwise have as easy access to.
Also it frees those fleets from being tied down to new holdings as strongly. They know that as long as they get everything to tier 1, provision it, they can eventually get an invite for it. So, because of that, then they can work on what THEY want to work on.
In the beginning we had allot of people leaving the fleet to go to larger fleets to get the gear they needed as they saw an insurmountable grind before them.
As time went on we found people willing to stay and build, many of whome paid for access to facilities before the advent of the serice channels.
Now rarely do we ever have leavers and people often make use of the invite system, (I have informed all my members via fleetmail about the service channels). When it comes to fc generation when we reach tier V we already have plans in place for a new fleet so our members can flit between the two to generate fc in one and spend in another.
With our relatively young (tier II starbase tier I other facilities) kdf fleet I'm finding the invite system to be a godsend as many members are happy to stay and contribute to the mountainous grind knowing they can get their gear allong the way.
I think for fleets with casual or short term players in it this is a useful facility as players can get their endgame fleet gear and still contribute to the fleet as part of their gaming experience. They probably won't stay ingame the whole distance from tier 0 to tier V but they will contribute allong the way and live out their gaming time in sto happily.
Does this impact the zen/dilithium exchange? Possibly. As I have heard of an increase in smaller fleets failing and we've found allot more work is needed to get newer fleets off the ground but it can still be done with the right amount of elbow grease.
There will always be people eager to help build a fleet from the ground up as I have really found some gems in the early days of our kdf fleet, I'm always suprised at the number of members in our fed fleet who are still there and contributing since day 1 considering the turnover of active players I have on my roster. Out of around 490 members I'd say a good quarter of those at least have been there since day 1.
"If this will be our end, then I will have them make SUCH an end as to be worthy of rememberance! Out of torpedos you say?! Find me the ferengi!".
bases are blackholes. they have no use until they are finished and all the options are open. you feed it and feed it but never really make any progress. You can kindo of figure out how long it will take your fleet to finish projects. Its completely unrealistic. Like in a year I can finally buy a console. And pay like 30K more dilith. But to just get to that item cost millions and millions of dilith. The smaller the fleet the more unbalanced it becomes. Like you can spend 100,000s of dilith and have nothing to show for it.
also if everyone didn't have equal access to items then the game gets really unbalanced since only people in huge fleets who have been around a while would have access to any of the high end items
the entire way bases are done needs reworking. I mean im grinding for a vendor so I can grind some more to buy the items it will sell me.
I'm in a small fleet that is over half way to T5 on starbase and soon all holdings T3 (spire maybe 1 day to go). We have gone to other fleets stores and also share ours to others and had friends get fleet ships also if we had enough provisions.