Best Of

Okay.

Devourers: Only three ever spawn, with varying junk drops. Yes, they suck, but it's also only three mobs. You're only really losing money on these if you take several voidgates to go find them. I can agree that they're annoying and it would be great if they'd get a buff.

Leviathans: On hard, these should get you ~15 - 18k, like all other hard organics. 

Easy trinaries: Easy incursions are never a big money maker, and organics always give substantially less than ships. Really though, easy incursions are meant for grinding you up to a corvette. They really shouldn't be used to gauge how lucrative incursions are as a whole.

Everything you've done here were organics. Back in the day, they gave the exact same payout, so there was absolutely no point in being strategic and using different ammo types and running actual risk against ships. Now they give you less captaincy and less marks, and ships give you more captaincy and more marks. To compare, as mentioned before, hard organics net you ~18k. Hard ships get you ~25k-28k.

Incursions generally take 45 minutes to do, start to finish. That's ~15k to ~28k per 45 minutes. Yes, you have to spend money on supplies, but if we assume, for the sake of argument, it takes 30 batteries for one incursion, that's 8,550 at the highest current market price for batteries (285). Repairkit costs are going to be variable, but in general as long as you're not using autorepair (which you should never do because it will actively waste your repairkits), you should be fine. I often go entire incursions without having to repair until I get to a station, and repair while docked at a station uses 0 repairkits. Astromechs are similarly going to be a rare purchase unless you're constantly repairing while being fired upon, which is how you lose them (aside from you know, blowing up and not being able to recover them). All that taken into consideration, you've made a profit on these incursions that are absolutely doable in a stalker, even now that we're out of its glory days.

The final big difference between incursions and bashing is that, unlike bashing, there is no marks cap. You can absolutely outpace your marks gain doing incursions vs bashing, if you know what you're doing. I suppose the only real thing that I can agree with in the OP (aside from that devourers suck) is that, if you don't know what you're doing, incursions can seem like a huge waste of time and money and effort. This is why I wrote an exhaustive guide for Song to try to alleviate this issue for newer pilots. A deeper tutorial somewhere that walks people through the ins and outs probably wouldn't be a bad idea. However, I really don't think the solution is dumping more money into incursion rewards.

Please make it available for all classes, regardless of lesson investment. I'm sure there's some people who'd love to fish up gear for their friends.

Kestrel said:

if I need a brainless grind there are better (graphical) games which will always provide a superior experience, simply by nature.

Yeah, what draws me to MUDs these days is the stuff that graphical games really can't or just wouldn't do, as well as the opportunity to just log on and potentially roleplay with people.

Is likely why low pop is always a concern for me. I've seen just how difficult RP stuff becomes when there aren't enough people to actually engage with.

RocketCat said:

I'm not concerned much with server pop, since I think we will have an influx of players when the game is "launched", i.e. is no longer BETA.

The biggest part of pulling a game out of beta is boring stuff. Bugs. Polish. Some class abilities, mostly in BEAST, are broken.

I'm a fan of the new and shiney... but MUDs have long lifespans. Plenty of time for the new and shiney in the future.

eh disagree, player retention is always an issue for games and your list of stuff to go to "launch" really doesn't cover the things I've seen in convos where people are talking about the, fixable, reasons for why they quit / never picked up SM in the first place. 


Also, realistically, the game is launched. Betas are for testing, you have the expectation that your progression will be wiped at the end of them (as well as regularly throughout).

I play when there's RP.

I stop playing when the RP sucks.

I made an alt recently and had some fun but at the end of the day if I'm emoting at people and just getting presets or one-liner says in return, it doesn't feel like a sound investment of my time. I MUD for story, and if I need a brainless grind there are better (graphical) games which will always provide a superior experience, simply by nature. There is only one thing MUDs do better than graphical games, and that's providing a literary, story-driven experience for people who really enjoy writing. If a MUD can't provide that then there is absolutely nothing it could ever provide to compete with any number of other uses of my time.

So I do not need any kind of mechanical incentive to play, I need a more active, RP-driven community.

Aside from that one of the things that tends to sour my experience with IRE MUDs is the credit system. Promos feel very money-grubby to me and despite being happy to invest in a game I love, when I see constant reminders of "give us $$$", more and more, it has the absolute opposite effect on my desire to spend.

I threw some cash at the August promo and felt pretty annoyed by what seemed like very poor value for money. Buyer's remorse makes me feel like I should avoid playing a game which inspires it.

Not something I imagine the Starmourn team can do anything about, but I wish Matt Mihaly and whoever else is in charge of IRE these days would consider revisiting their (frankly, awful) business model. 

I'd vote for bugfixes but apparently voted this instead.

Not here to critique Nyk's survey methodology.

I'm not concerned much with server pop, since I think we will have an influx of players when the game is "launched", i.e. is no longer BETA.

The biggest part of pulling a game out of beta is boring stuff. Bugs. Polish. Some class abilities, mostly in BEAST, are broken.

I'm a fan of the new and shiney... but MUDs have long lifespans. Plenty of time for the new and shiney in the future.

BIt hard to vote when I agree with so many of the options.
Right now, and for the first time since game opening, pvp is the part I am most interested in.

But in the end I voted for the bugfix pass before going into classleads, because there are abilities out there (many in BEAST class) that are too broken to be able to put classlead input into.

This means that classleads will get used for bugfixes rather than balancing, and at the end of them people will test the skills, say "Oh, I get it now... but it's too weak/strong or the concept just isn't viable" 
And be waiting for the next classlead round immediately.

Prime example: mwp missiles never hits if you fire a new lot off before the first lot strike. It's not possible (beyond theorycrafting) to know if the skill would be useful, without trying it out in real group pvp. Classleads will be wasted if stuff like that can't be balanced in the classleads, and the abilities need to actually work in order for meaningful feedback via classleads.

Hilariously biased poll is biased, but even that shouldn't get people to discount the fact that BEAST is in need of love.