Wouldn't all of this unduly penalize people who have really big holds? I can get about 50 tons of dust in a little less than an hour, depending on crew. What if after 1 hour my efficiency drastically decreased? All the people with multiple hold ships would be gimped!

If experience is a problem (not convinced yet that it is) make adjustments to experience. There's no need to create various other penalties for success. The point of aethercraft changes was to make the entire affair MORE enjoyable. Some of these suggestions don't seem to be keeping that aim in mind.

Your efficiency would slowly decrease over time. (like astral insanity) But it would only be limited to ships that are active in combat. (and only affect them when engaged in combat, not while transporting goods or exploring)


You contradicted yourself, so I'm not sure what you mean:

"All the people with multiple hold ships would be gimped!"
"Wouldn't all of this unduly penalize people who don't have really big holds? "

Well, yes, it is perfectly reasonable, but bashing on Astral is a.) riskier b.) depletable and c.) time limited whereas aetherbashing is quite low risk (low enough that people are comfortable writing 3, 4 triggers and then -walking away-), BIG and therefore less depletable compared to astral, and not time limited by any factors whatsoever except maybe ship power, but that goes down so slow and I assume people are using their collecters to spawn beasties, gaining power in the process. I use Astral as my standard because the xp gain is approximately the same (for me at least, lv 91 human Ebonguard).

Idea: Make ships consume power MUCH faster, esp. when using turrets/grid/etc.

I think there is a long term problem of experience becoming too easy once you get "into a groove". Putting a time limit cap on an enjoyable experience does not decrease the enjoyment of that experience! (it just means that you have to get up and go enjoy the outdoors or some other lusternian activity for a while)

I think 2 hours of solid xp gain is good enough, and balancing. But I guess if people dissagree with that point, then 4 hours would work also.

Did you only read the first half of my post? My entire point was that you should make aetherspace time limited, instead of adjusting the xp gain.

I forgot to add that insanity requires 'cooldown' where it's very difficult to do much of anything else save wait. Astral also requires defenses, whereas aetherbashing does not require any whatsoever. Many defenses cost power. Aetherbashing uses (from what I've heard from other people) approximately 2-3 power per hour. I spend more than that in ten minutes of active defenses during astral bashing. Furthermore, for aetherbashing, you don't even have gold expenditures for healing potions/herbs/salves/etc.

In my opinion, the rewards are simply too big for the inputs, especially given that the input is practically zero.

EDIT: Daganev, your idea is great in theory, but what's to stop people from just cycling through a set of ships?

Whoops. Sorry Dag, I mispelled. It should be corrected now.

And I agree with Talan. Aethercraft is fun right now. Don't make me have to juggle all this cooldown business and what not, which I might add, would probably take extra time to code. If you REALLY think the experience is too much, then drop it down, but don't pull all this other stuff.

This. If you think experience is a problem then nerf how much you get. Adding cool down stuff, insanity, or other complications just seem unneeded.

The input is an entire skill set with not much else to it. If you want to kill anything with any speed you need high aethercraft so you can get crits.

I'm more in favor of some kind of time cap over supercharging aetherbeasts as that will affect non aetherhunting activities. Reducing the xp too much will just put things back to no one using it.
I think good xp for limited time would be more appealing than some of the other options.

I think time limits are an uninteresting solution to just about everything. It's a very lazy way out of real balancing.

I think it would be better to increase risk to encourage people to move away from hitting just the biggest things. One way to do this would be to give the better creatures some of the specialized turret attacks. If things like gargantuans and starbeasts start smacking you around with murkle, worble, and sludge, and dragons break out the occasional clarionblast, a highly skilled and slightly more aware crew becomes necessary for the heavy stuff, just like with influence. Lazy and unskilled crews would shuffle back to lixins and slanikks, thus rebalancing the investment/reward ratio.

The other option might be to put the investment on the ship side. If all aetherbeasts got faster and the per-room hull strength bonus was increased lots, fighting dragons and tentacles starts to require an expensive ship and puts premiums on proficiency in the crew to help put the beasties down faster, like we have with bashing.

The input is millions of gold and likely hundreds of credits Tervic!! And 1800 lessons!! What do you mean no input?!

That'd be freaking amazing, your first idea of aetherbeast afflictions. But then they'd also have to give them at range, to some degree.


You don't need 1800 lessons to join an aetherhunt. Try closer to 200. The gold input is from one person, often from an established player who already has several million gold to throw around. Either that or the project is funded by an organization, and thus represents no investment by the players who use it.

EDIT: not even 200 lessons. You really just need the ability to use a battle turret, at 75% inept, which is <10 lessons. Let's be incredibly generous and say a minimum requirement is Master level aethercraft. That's 289 lessons. One of the distinguishing features of Aethercraft, at least in my mind, is that it is not required to be Transcendent in order to still be highly effective.

I thought this too, immediately... and then I realized that this is only the investment for some. For others it's 0 gold and 12 lessons.

Uh, I generally learn 7 so I can fire a turret.

Well let's be generous and say that in order to have decent efficiency on an aetherhunt, you need at least -some- ranks in Aethercraft, not just 75% inept.

Last I knew, crits had nothing to do with lessons and everything to do with proficiency. Or can you not max proficiencies without lessons?

I give novices in my guild... 25.5.

Hey! Admin! Leave that XP alone!


/pinkfloyd

proficiency increaces how fast you can fire, use the grid or chair
we did a fair amount of testing before and after people put lessons into aethercraft and your skill level has a dramatic affect on how often you get crits and the level of crits you can get.