Not quite, I know a few people who are completely hands free on astral and astral is considered one of the more "dangerous" ways to hunt. Aetherhunting has just evolved with the rest of the ways of gaining EXP.

Which is no different than automating targetting, razing, shielding, attacking, and that whole she-bang in bashing or to be direct on your example... you are right.. influencing 50 centaur in a room means you don't have to move. Just type 'inf' and wait 30 minutes.

Add in the occasional non-name-targetable leechything so that people have to target by ID number, but also give the grid the ability to scan for ID numbers.

Then, make the leech give one line for where it latches on to the ship. It does no damage, but once it's latched it slows down the ship. Then, someone has to go spacewalk to manually remove it since turrets can't point at something attached to the ship.

Not actually dead serious on this, but it'd be amusing.

Aetherspace is the demi-faucet for one reason (that's different from influence/bashing astral/hard places):

Infinite creatures to kill. You are never going to run out of gargantuans. (See: Xenthos' all-day aetherhunts during the holiday XP bonuses.) So, while it takes six people to do, when you start getting more than that, you can go endlessly. Literally endlessly. That's the bigger issue here. Astral is limited by insanity; Influencing is limited by the number of influencable denizens (and the reset timers on them). Aetherbashing doesn't have this restriction- Aetherwill exists, yes, but you can always AFK on a siphon.

Normal hunting and influencing tend to be a lot more profitable than aetherhunting. I think I got gold -once- on an aetherhunt. To someone who's always busy being broke, I'd rather do normal hunting.

As for experience...if the crew is too big, the experience isn't great. And sometimes you need a big crew for extras to take place of siphoners and gunners when their willpower runs out. Which it will, especially for the siphoners.

As long as you can code things to make things easier things will be coded to make things easier.

Unless you are about to ban any scripted material in Lusternia then you will always have people automating things. If it is a problem, then have admins AFK check more often. That is the only way you are going to solve the issue without making Aetherspace a worthless entity once more.

You show me a room with 50 centaurs, and I'll concede my point that the two are different animals.

No, no you can't. AFK RULES. If people are AFK'ing on modules then that is the real issue and the only way to deal with it is to have admins check for it.

Either make Aetherspace useless again or accept the fact that demigods are the new level 50.

Solution: no aetherwill regen while locked in a module. If total aetherwill is a problem, add endurance to willpower to get aetherwill (the floor is shaking! I'm a 400 pound Krokani, so I don't care, but my lil' mugwump friend gets tossed around a lot!). Then, up the regen rate on aetherwill on all non-aetherways planes.

Fine, 30 guards. Is that better if you want to turn this into semantics? The fact is influencing is just as easy as aetherhunting and far easier than bashing.

For once, I actually agree with Azoth on this point. You have rank #100 being at titan level already...there are lots of demigods, demigods are what good combat almost necessitates, and demigods are here to stay.

Aetherbashing, compared to normal bashing or influencing, not only requires multiple people who know what they're doing, but also a huge investment in gold. The fact that novices are shooting up in experience means that people are being kind and sharing the investment of a city to help newbies too; there's nothing wrong with that.

From what I can tell, getting demigod still takes a decent time investment; not quite on the scale of what demigod took before, but definitely not just a couple days' effort. And Romertien's point is a good one: the aetherbeasts just keep on coming, and you can control the stream to only handle one at a time.

Maybe scale down the experience a little bit, but aetherhunting with a competent and full crew should be faster than normal bashing.

If you're going to do that then you have to make it so that aetherwill causing you to fail is no longer a percentage but an actual flat rate. Because just making the number larger doesn't even help all that much, heh. You still start failing at around 1/3 of your max.

what? I can combateer and not even drop in willpower at all (given I target the correct one and do not use a trial and error targeting system). putting willpower on the pilot disables exploration which is not really the idea. If anything they should increase the willpower drain on turrets since it are those that switch with the collector, and quite franctly it is the easiest station on a ship. The pilot will lose real life willpower since he actually has to pay attention. Drain on siphoners are spot on.

I like that idea.

Also, Aspace really needs to have a LOT fewer vortexes, something like... 1% of what are already out there. Last time I was out on Ethereal, the map was black with vortex indicators. Maybe put a 24 hour decay timer on all vortexes currently in existence, or restrict them to certain areas a la Astral, or make it so that ships can't spawn them... I don't know, but the number needs to go down.

The biggest difference in automation is that (aside from piloting and partly siphoning)) everything is reactionary on aetherships. You get hit by a beast? Heal. You see a beast enter? Target/shoot. Of course, it's a tad more, but you get the point.

The biggest problem is, I don't think it's possible to prevent automation in aetherhunting to a degree that it prevents it without making it a hell at the same time.

I find this hard to believe given all I do is turret and I have willpower regen from human, iron will, and rocking chair going on. I still lose willpower, at a slower pace but I lose it. Also my target system is not trial and error.

It is a bit weird to see people who admit they don't abash weigh in so strongly on this topic. Anyway.

As far as limiting the experience, some ideas might be:

- Limit the amount of active siphons a ship can have, so that you don't have your crew plus another 5 people who will most likely go afk while waiting for their turn on turret, to siphon, etc. Maybe 2. Your active one, and a backup. Others just won't gain experience. Also, why does the anchor module give experience for the person locked in... there aren't any commands that can be used.

- Eliminate pilot-spawned vortexes. Seriously. As it is now, people can go from vortex to vortex, siphoning 200 power until the first sight of a karibidean (implemented to make it harder) and then just jump to another vortex. Seriously - go look at the aetherspace around Faethorn. It is ridiculous. If people had to actually drain these vortexes before new, fresh ones would appear, that would change a lot. Alternately, keep them as they are now, and just make them contain 100p instead of 1000p. Scale the appearance of karibideans accordingly.

Or just make karibs spawn on a reasonably high % chance that is totally unrelated to the amount of power left in the vortex.

Out of curiosity, what is the level 100 population like in other IRE games? I imagine Achaea has a few hundred of them at least, but I'm not familiar with xp gain rates there.

To my knowledge none of those effect aether willpower though I suppose it is easy enough to check using the chalice after siphoning, someone remind me to do that.

Mine drops 100, then by the next siphon is full again which considering the cheer amount of willpower I have, is nothing