Changing Entropia Universe: FREE-TO-PLAY

Ability to loan items to players for a maximum time period of say, a few hours I put the time restriction in cause I know MA don't believe in a loan economy.

Keeping the time down would keep the loaning player interacting with the game and not just becoming a person who loans stuff out.

- The ability to borrow stuff would better help with mentoring and what not which leads more players to enjoy and take up the game

- The ability to borrow stuff would allow players to try out cool things, a cool jacket, cool armour etc. This may get them to want to own this stuff themselves = deposits

- The ability to borrow stuff would create "employment" opportunities for every player. Anyone can now be a fapper, with or without ped.

For example I could give a low level fap (cause they will be low skilled) to any oranges I find who are bored. I can even lend them some armour too.

The employed players can either benefit through being paid by the employer or simply from the fact they get something to do or that they get skills. You could even use oranges to level items for you so you can tier them.

Now I admit I have not thought this through. But at the moment it sounds sorta win win win. With the time restriction I don't think the short term loan market would kill off the buy market either.

To implement this, I think MA could adapt the existing car interface to apply to items maybe...?

Thoughts? criticism? shoot?

Wistrel

 

oh possibly the short term loan ability could be restricted to mentors with at least 1 successful graduate?

 

I like the loan idea. It probably wouldn't effect the economy too much, especially if there was an hour restriction and maybe other restrictions too. I would make it so lending requires a loan token. Tokens could be given as rewards to mentors for a graduating disciple. Further restrictions could make lending weapons only available to mentors and their disciples.

Space needs some free to play love IMO.

Maybe spacesuits and mining ice asteroids by hand.

 

exploring missions are mostly also free to do and provide sometime with little rewards

 

I don't think a new non-depositing player really has any business being in the loan trade personally. I think also it would be bad if they started charging as I don't imagine a pay for loan service being a transaction that is connected to the system. More a trust thing. You pay me 10 ped, I loan you my master coat for an hour.

For this reason I'd like to see only the more established/invested players being able to loan items. If a newbie really wants to get in to that game they would need to earn trust just like any other established player.

 

I think there are many options on how loaning could work but I like the idea of it being time restricted to a few hours. Hmmm..... there is a potential issue though.

Scenario: I borrow a funky master coat off someone on Caly and then fly to RT. An hour later the timer runs out. Where does the coat go? Does it teleport to Caly?

Actually I guess the answer is this. What happens if you put me in the driving seat of your quad wing and I fly Caly to RT. I then get out of the craft. 10 mins later with no passengers in it it will "return to storage" is that the storage on RT or the storage on Caly? And does it depend on the location of the owning avatar?

The fact that we HAVE a loan system already in that we can pass our vehicles to others makes me feel the fastest solution would be to fit that system to other items that are not vehicles.

Space yes.... I want something else to do there. It will never be FTP cause of fuel consumption (unless we have a space suit with fuel-less jet pack) but I don't want to be only firing big guns. We need something like asteroids in a fully 3d environment (like space) we can explore eg cave systems with creatures in. We could have large caves we can fly round in the ships with smaller guns. They could claim the kismet has no effect so we are restricted to standard guns that fit our skill levels. Make it so we can hot swap the guns on the ship.

I might be possible to make something like stone walking in space too... eg... maybe something you can attach to the spaceship with a scoop. The scoop introduces drag so you wouldn't want to use it in conjunction with A to B travel but it could maybe pay out more than the fuel consumed? Something vaguely like that.

They could probably create a kind of space mining too. Not FTP but say you run a scan in a direction and it might turn up a resource floating in space. The scan consumes like in normal mining and might not turn up anything. You could maybe then equip a mining laser to blast a rock which would be like the extractor.

Just some ideas based on existing things

Wistrel

 

The game needs to add an element of skill. So far it is just a cow clicker with a loyalty card system in the form of skill points. I am not saying remove the skill system, however I am saying there needs to be a skill level to certain styles of play, most definitely to the shooting aspect.

Auto aim and boring shooting mechanics are never fun.

 

Advertising is F2P and still can earn you some money.
All you need to do is add the one on FL for who you advertising recourses or items or anything and find customers by using the trade chat on populated places.
Their are a lot of people needing advertisers for by example events on land area, shop promotions ect ect...

 

Wistrel got a good point there with vehicles "loaning" .. did anyone ever try which storage it goes to? I would guess the planet the vehicle is (otherwise this would offer some cheap safe transportation for stuff...)

 

Bloody hell! I didn't think of that one!

I think an experiment is in order cause otherwise yes, as you say, I could fly over to RT in player A's Quad, fill it with Ore and then "forget" to use it for 10 mins ;)

Player A stays on Caly but does he get his ship back laden with ore? Answers on a post card...

Wistrel

 

Ops... meant to post this some day ago, but looks like it disappeared in to cyberspace, lucky I found it still here to post :P

Overall I thing the "gaming" aspect of the game of received too little attention from MA, but they have improved a bit lately. I believe they could take advantage of the game and the 3d-graphic engine much more and create more fun stuff do to. Often when I drive in my Valkyrie car I often think "This is pretty fun to drive". Even if it's not an exactly "free" activity, it's so low cost so I count it as a free activity. That is what this game need, more free or low cost activities, even if it just some silly stuff. As some already have mentioned, it could be fishing and similar things. Maybe different sports? Some simple system to play football between avatars could be fun.

At the same time I believe we must be realistic, not many activities can be absolutely "free", some cost will like always be attached to it, like oil for driving vehicles and the cost to buy the vehicle. But the key is to create more of this "extra low cost activities", that is, actives besides the main "high cost" hunting, mining, crafting etc. activities.