So, let’s please not forget how incredibly broken the “free” ARX thing is over the Crap Credits™ outrage. The current design of earning ARX for certain actions in-game is horribly unfair and a nightmare to balance properly, if that’s even possible at all.
Here are
some of the problems involved:
- How and to what extent you earn your “free” ARX is not disclosed to the public. The only thing that effectively does is lead to lots of confusion and anger until some players put in the time to reverse engineer how the system works. More transparent == better. Period. If you can’t disclose how it works because you fear it will be abused, the system is broken. If you do it properly, it can’t be abused; or rather, “abusing” it would be doing what you intend the “free” ARX to encourage players to do.
- Exploration payouts are broken by design; I’m assuming other professions aren’t much better, but I don’t dabble in them too often. I scanned / mapped some systems on the way back from a long range rat rescue. Gathering ~22 mill in data gave me 47 ARX. Selling the data gave me 175 ARX. That means that you are being shafted on weekly “free” ARX income if you are exploring out in the black for long amounts of time. Additionally and much worse it encourages you to hold on to your data and sell it in weekly chunks when you come back to not “lose out” on your “free” ARX. And to not play in between because you might lose your several billion in data and thousands of things that won’t have your name on them. That’s the opposite of what the “free” ARX were intended to do: incentivise you to play more and more regularly.
- At least for combat I’ve heard (careful, second hand information) that you do not get ARX for killing players in PvP. You do, however, get ARX for dying. Double-U Tee Eff⁉
- The fastest and least involved way to gain your “free” ARX was to buy an expensive module and immediately sell it again x40. Bam, 400 ARX. That has now apparently been badly patched. The next fastest way will be found momentarily.
- On the other hand, earning your weekly cap the “legit” way is basically impossible right now – unless, again, you know what to do to exploit the system.
- I don’t know if many of you guys noticed, but when the store went down on patch day, you couldn’t earn ARX by playing until the store was back up. No comment.
Feel free to add more bullet points to this list below. I’m sure there are a couple dozen more. All of the above are inherent problems with the
design of the weekly “free” ARX. You won’t fix them by adjusting some numbers.
Now, for the fix. You will never be able to properly balance a billion ways to gain ARX by playing the game. There will
always be a way to cheese it for players that want to do so or simply don’t have the time it takes to find out how best to do it in a “proper” way. The current desgin, however you will tune the rewards, will always be an overly complicated mess. Replace it with something much more simple, yet transparent and true to the design goal of “free” ARX: to make people play more, and more regularly.
Give people ARX for playing the game, no matter how they are playing it.
Have a daily login bonus (e.g. 20 ARX/day) and give people ARX for time played (e.g. 1 ARX/minute). You can easily tweak the numbers there to reflect how much time you want players to have to put in for it. No cheesing. No exploiting. No confusion about what to do to actually get your “free” ARX. Simple, yet effective.
Yes, you will get people that will login and just idle for a couple hours. Those are the same people that will find the exploits for your current system, you won’t get them to play nice anyway. But that won’t give them any advantage over just playing, and the rest of the community can benefit from a clean set of rules.
