I just started playing a few days ago and noticed pretty dismal people in Calypso. I have had a few suggestions from nice people I should move to Arkadia for a better experience. So my questions is worth it to move to Arkadia and how is the mining situation? I like mining and will pursue it wherever I end up. :huh:
Hi Nissa, What planet is best is everyone's personal preference, most will say Arkadia is the best on this forum lol! I'm not a miner myself, but from what I've heard it is good here. Lots of areas without mobs to see, so that's a plus for you already. Since traveling is quite cheap, you can get a flight for about 5 PEDs, it sure is worth the try. From personal experience I can say that I was born on Calypso too, in an age when other Planets were inhabitable. One day I packed everything I had and booked a flight to Arkadia, that has been the best thing I did. Ardorj
I tried to reply to this thread at work today from my Android but I cannot make out the Captcha image from my phone, it is to blurry. Anyway I am going to buy a Space thruster for my VTOL and head to Arkadia tonight and check it out. I did have a pretty good experience last night in Caly however. Actually saw people having fun and had a blast at Corinthian Bay. They did a pretty good job on it. Anyway off to login, sell my stackables (damn space pirates) and head to Arkadia for at least a visit.
Made the Flight in my VtOL. Looooooooong flight. About an 1hr 20mins. No space monsters or pirates though. Bed time now so will explore after work tomorrow.
Welcome Nissa. I hope you will enjoy Arkadia, it is a very beginners friendly planet. Although the timing might be less than ideal: there are a lot of people off trying out Monria and competing in the Halloween instance. So if the place looks a bit quiet, that's only temporary. After you did the starter missions (starter area and fire bases), you can find (most of the time) a sweating circle at Celeste Outpost and trading at Celeste Quarry. The staple newbie mobs are Caraboks, which also can be found at Celeste Quarry. I think that's listed the most basic points of interest on Arkadia for starters. Have fun, and see you around.
I explored a bit and dropped 50PED in probes. Zinc 5.70 Caldorite 12.07 Wenrex 1.36 Gaganite 3.00 ----------------- total: 22.13PED tt return. 44% tt return. Ouch. The landscape is much more plain and easy to navigate than what I experienced on Caly. Undecided if that is good or bad. Came across 2 other avatars in the last hour. Pretty dead. Hope everyone is just playing on Calys events and will come back. However Entropia life says only 50 entropia life clients active in all of Entropia. :huh: I deposited $25USD when I started Sunday. As of now not sure it is worth depoing anymore. Under pressure to re-sub EvE. Will sleep on it.
Try the quarry, celeste harbor, or celeste outpost if you're looking for people. About your mining TT return, you will need to drop a lot more probes than that to see a decent return. If you're interested in mining more but don't want to devote a lot of ped to it let me know, I run a mining company and am currently hiring miners.
It is not so much I am searching for people to interact with. I am judging the viability of the planet. If I don't see a lot of active people and the auction is empty then there is not much point in playing here. As for the mining I understand this game is setup with highs and lows, but there should be at least a minimum of 50% TT return with every single drop. Even if it is just tt junk. New players that do not have the money to depo much are not going to be dropping high amounts of probes and they will be dependent on a return on every probe in order to have enough PED to continue playing. This is a severe issue that MA needs to fix or forget about new player retention. I am not sure if the planet partners have any control over loot but people need to get SOMETHING ever single drop that they can sell or TT or they have to wait to play again until they can depot if they have a dry run. Making people wait to play is not going to retain people. Arkadia would have a huge advantage if they could work out a loot system to were you get something every time you drop a probe, kill something or craft something. Anything that easily extends the players ability to keep doing what they are doing. However I have a feeling MA sets the drop rules not the planet partners. It is commendable you setup the mining company like you have. It is unfortunate MA can't see the advantages it provides to new players. Betweeen GW2, WoW, SecondLife, EvE, the Sims 3, Cities XL 2012 and a few other browser games I play Entropia so far isn't cutting it and the only reason is the cost. With that said I still have a lot of investigating to do to figure out why people keep playing this. 4 days playing isn't enough time to fully understand. There has to be something I am missing. I have a bunch of work to do on my Hydroponic garden today, once that's done I will play some more.
There is plenty of activity here... though a lot of our players are doing the halloween stuff on caly atm and checking out Monria. Judging from the number of my miners that went on "vacation" this week probably about half of normal Arkadians are gone. My miners (overall) have a 100% return on the probes they drop (in terms of TT... after considering ore MU, we make profit). Mindark only "takes away" the peds from tool decay and other fees like auction. But you won't get a 95-100% TT return in just a few drops... you have to drop a lot to get a good chance of finding the larger loots that will balance the average out. Currently Mindark has set it up so that you will need to drop at least several thousand ped of probes before expecting to get your 95% TT return. Without globals your return will be about 75%. This is just part of entropia... you can't drop one bomb or hunt one creature and expect to get anything like break even on your peds spent. It's just not made that way, and I think would be a bit boring if it did work that way. Earlier this year we had loot almost like that... each mining run returned 95% and, though it was good for my company, the biggest complaint among miners was that it was too uniform and boring. The PP has no control over loot. They can make suggestions but they have no control over the loot distributions.
Couple thousand probes? That's a lot of USD up front. I already spent $25USD and got 49PED left after 5 days. I could have decked out 2 of my roleplay characters in SL for that and played them for a year. The value for the money just isn't there. I think I will call it a wash and move on.
That's for comfortable independent mining with a full size finder. They've been adjusting loot every few weeks in mining (doing experiments I guess). This month it's particularly rough on miners. So I hope (and expect) it to become a little more newbie-friendly soon. There are other ways to preserve your peds like trading or jobs. One of the things that many of my miners like is that they can basically get steady, unlimited play and profit on $20, so those opportunities do exist though they are rare. I don't know if you have one yet, but a good mentor is important...with the learning curve of EU, it's basically a requirement for most people to survive their first few weeks in game.
I have to disagree. I have played many MMO's and single player games since 2000. There is absolutely nothing hard about learning Entropia. It is by far the most simple 3D MMO I have seen as far a game play mechanics. What is hard about EU is you have to manage your money in order to get any type of value out of it. People don't play for a week and quit because its hard to play, people quit because doing anything that doesn't require significant amount of PED totally sucks. Very few people play games to work. EU is work. What is unfortunate is my 40+ hour a week day job is more enjoyable than trying to manage your PEDs in this game. That's why people quit. Not because there is a steep learning curve. What you consider unlimited play is far from it. In Guild Wars 2 I paid $50USD for the game and have been playing it since it launched a year ago and have not put one more dime into the game. There is no monthly sub, there is only a coin shop that has stuff not needed to play the game, just mostly vanity stuff. There is nothing in that game I can't do because I don't have enough PED. The game mechanic's are superior in everyway to boot. You actually have to have some skill to play your avatar. Not just point and click and hope the slot machine pays out this time. Not to mention there is a lot of fun stuff to do other than killing stuff and leveling. The jumping puzzles alone are worth the $50. I also enjoy just playing dress up. You can color your armor and clothes with inks you loot or buy in the AH. I spend hours just doing that as the clothes and armor actually look decent. There are very few people that will find Entropia enjoyable as it is (hence the low retention rate). Most gamers want excitement and fun, not an RL version of money management that they are trying to get away with by playing games to begin with. Has nothing to do with a learning curve. Other games are hard to learn but they are enjoyable while you learn them. Not the case in Entropia. Out of the $25USD I spent $15 of it was for equipment (vtol, space thruster, TT mining gear), cost to fly to other planets (Arkadia, Cyrene, back to Caly), and decay. The other $10USD was all spent on mining probes. I still have $6USD of that and can extend that out for a while but why? That's not even 30mins a day of mining. There is nothing else enjoyable in this game, other than mining, that is not much better done in any of the other games I play.
You have many good points, and I agree that the cost to play can be high; but you can choose how much to deposit--you don't have to deposit a lot. Entropia, as long as it's a RCE, will always be a bit of a niche game unlike the subscription games where you can "do anything" for a monthly fee (not everyone has the patience or desire to invest time and effort). There are newbie activities that cost little (i don't mean just sweating). But figuring out how to succeed IS a big part of the game, and learning this, and how the economy works, how loot behaves, etc, is all part of the learning curve and one thing I like about the game... it's a challenge. I am not an MMO expert but I suspect that EU is not simpler than other games... it might be that you have not yet learned enough about it to realize its scope. A mentor or soc can help a lot in this regard. When I said my miners get unlimited play on 200 ped, I mean time playing. It doesn't mean they can go out and use level 13 amps on foma as a newbie or drop 24 hours a day. But for example, I have a miner who has dropped well over 60k ped probes over the past 6 months or so. If you add up the hours, that's an astronomical amount of entertainment for $20 plus change... that's what I mean by unlimited. I won't say how much this person has earned but let's just say it's many times the ped investment. If you're playing completely on your own, i do agree with you, it can be difficult managing peds especially if you have less than what's ideal for your chosen game activities. The game is pretty vast and for the most part is what you make of it.
This has always been an issue. MA did seem to change the loot variance for a bit to make the returns more stable over shorter runs but seem to have reverted to the old system recently. My guess is that they have to keep the ATH high loots coming because many big depositors have that gambling mentality. So it's maybe a catch 22 for them - encourage big depositing gamblers at the expense of new player retention or vice versa. As I understand it the PP's have no control over the loot except in regard to providing the list of items that each mob can drop (or types of ore in an area). The frequency and tt amount are controlled by MA.
