So we went from a lot of interest and activity surrounding weakenings to ...not so much. Why? The incentive to participate was reduced to a level that it really is not much of an incentive at all.

There are not many auronispheres available and their price is high. 150+ particles per sphere. Selling the spheres at the facility nets about 1,000 gold per sphere. Given that the spheres are rare and are each worth 300+ power in terms of fueling constructs, it would be quite silly to actually sell the spheres. You could rat and gain more gold.

Why is this bad? Organizations still have incentive to participate, right? Not really. Power is all well and good but we have a lot of power. Orgs will stock up on the spheres and once you can use them for other construct related things, they'll have even more incentive to get them. But we have lost out on the individual incentive here and it was the individual incentive that was driving so much interest. You cannot acquire enough spheres to give everyone who helped one. And even if they did get one, it's not worth much.

Honestly, I haven't seen so many people express so much interest in any Lusternian system ever as I was seeing last week. Yes, the gold rewards were too high but they don't have to be THAT high in order to still spark interest. People were learning about aetherspace, learning about PvP combat, interacting with one another, getting gold to acquire equipment and credits to further invest them in the game, etc. All of these are good things. This is the goal of any system. To get people excited about participating.

Rather than drone on about how depressing the changes are I'll just make some suggestions. Allow us to sell particles again but at a lower price. Somewhere in the range of 100 to 350 per as opposed to 200 to 700 per. Still allow the buying and usage of the spheres for organizational purposes. So there are options in terms of what you do with the particles. Have spheres not be worth any gold but worth a good deal of experience if traded to the gnomes. By good deal I mean something like enough to gain a couple of percentage points at level 80. Yes, smaller people would gain a LOT from this. But..is that so bad? The limited nature of the spheres would keep this in check. So someone could use their share of particles to buy a sphere if they wanted and get some experience. This would be great incentive for lower levels.

As the gold proved, incentive don't need to be complicated to get people interested.

Agree on all points, very good suggestions. Bring back the personal rewards, please. It would be a shame to have coded all this cool stuff up and now no one feels like using it.

Catarin striked upon the very thing that I was thinking. The change to using particles for spheres only... at an outrageous ratio (used to be able to get spheres for 5 particles! Now? sheesh!) was a bad move, IMO. Morgfyre once told me IG that the particles are more for personal incentive than for organization incentive. Granted, the orgs were taking all the particles, however they were being used to give people credits (alot of them) AS the personal incentive for getting involved, which IMO was a damn good thing. Granted, it was always a thrill to watch my empath toss a Gnome ship 3k particles for 700 gold per... but if it was that big of a problem then why not just lower the amount of gold they give? Not completely kill off a large reason why people were becoming interested, active and excited.

Agreed

We'll probably do more tweaking. With the amount of particles produced, I think 100 to 350 gold per particle would still even be too much. I think ultimately, if you could sell particles directly, it still shouldn't be as much as buying and selling a auronisphere. In other words, if a trader makes the effort to purchase a sphere with particles and then sells that sphere for gold, it should be more than selling particles individually.

Just off the top of my head (and this isn't something we would do, just thinking out loud):

Gnomes buy particles for an average of 25 gold per particle.
Gnomes sell spheres for an average of 100 particles per sphere.
Facility gnomes buy spheres for an average of 5000 gold per sphere.

I think that would be a better solution.

I think those numbers are probably too low. (and too high in the case of how many particles per sphere)

Here is an example of particle numbers:

Around 2000 particles generated by 15 people focusing negatively for 45 minutes during a mini-weakening.

2000 particles at 25 gold per sphere is 50,000 gold. If the organization takes no share at all, that's about 3,300 gold per person. You could make more at less risk to yourself in other activities. And given that most orgs are going to take something if they're the ones (and they usually are) organizing it, we're talking even less than that.

2000 particles at 100/sphere will get 20 spheres. If the city gives everyone that participated a sphere then they'll each get 5000 gold with 5 being left over for the city. This isn't as bad but given this adds significantly to the work involved. You have to fly around to try to acquire these spheres and given the limited amount available, there is no guarantee at all that you'll be able to get any. Then anyone who wants to redeem them has to get to the facility. So let's add a minimim of another 30 minutes work. So 5,000 gold for over an hours worth of game time. Doesn't seem like much.

I'd say more feasible numbers would be an average of 150 gold per particle, 100 particles per sphere could stay given they have more uses, and 10,000 gold if you turn a sphere into the facility plus some karma and experience. Because of the organizational usefulness of spheres as well as their rarity I really see them as being more something an org would be looking to acquire with its share of the particles rather than something an individual is going to be looking to get. The more people that get involved in this, (and the more uses the spheres have in the future) the rarer the spheres become. Which makes it increasingly difficult for the spheres to really act as any sort of individual reward.

Could allow for the auronispheres to act like powerstones for ships too. You attach it to a grid/chair/turret/etc and power is drained from the sphere instead of the ship.

Would be another personal incentive + another org incentive for weakenings.