The first thing I should say, is that It is a great thing to have a way to obtain gold in game from sector conquest. If a reasonable amount of gold can be obtained in game, there’s no such thing as pay to win. But the amount of gold awarded is not reasonable. It’s enough that GE say that gold can be obtained in-game, but not enough for members of even the best corps to do anything useful with it.
For those of you that don’t know the rewards, they are based on the size of the sector, and they are:
3-4 hex sector: 6 gold or 60,000 credits or 3 artifacts
5 hex sector:12 gold or 120,000 credits or 6 artifacts
6 hex sector:18 gold or 180,000 credits or 9 artifacts
7 hex sector: 24 gold or 240,000 credits or 12 artifacts.
The rewards listed are given to every member of the corp that holds it, every cycle (12 hours), for ~7 to 14 cycles. So the daily rewards are double that and last 3-7 days.
I’ve been actively playing sector conquest for about 2 months, being a member of NASA for most of that time, and I have earned a grand total of 398 gold.
Credit Rewards:
the daily credit rewards of even the biggest sectors are laughable. Even when when holding the “Pot of Silver” sector WX-20 you earn 480,000 credits per day. I admit, that’s enough to make a difference when buying expensive ships, but when you can get 500,000+ credits in 10 minutes doing a T3-5 PVE mission. I guess this would be a fair reward for a 5-hex sector, but the single best silver-sector needs to be something significant.
Artifact rewards:
In my opinion, It doesn’t really feel like i’m getting any reward at all when my corp owns an artifact sector. The small artifact sectors are pretty much just garbage sectors for those who are pursuing the leaderboards. A mk4 upgrade at tier 5 costs an average of 250 artifacts. At that rate, It would take 41 days of uninterrupted ownership of a small artifact sector to make a single upgrade. if you are able to hold the “Precursor Artifact Dump” sector WX-46 you can do it in 11 days, which requires you to own the sector more than once in a row which is practically unheard of for the 7-hex sectors. Considering the fact that you get 20+ artifacts a day from your daily PVE rewards, plus an average of ~10 artifacts for every tier 3+ PVP or PVP match, the artifact rewards from sector conquest are stunningly bad.
Gold Rewards:
The cheapest non-ammo transaction in the game is to paint a tier-1 ship, which is 100 gold per color. The small gold-sectors award 12 credits per day. At that rate it would take 25 days to fully paint a rank 1 ship, or 60 days to paint a rank-15 ship. It would take up to 240 days to have a fully painted team of ships for sector conquest. It would give a day of licence every 25 days or a month of licence every 250 days. The “Pot of Gold” sector WX-40 gives a total of 196 gold, over its 4 day duration. That’s not enough to fully paint a rank 1 ship, that’s not enough to change a single color on a rank 15 ship. That’s not enough to get a single day of license. However, there is not a SINGLE corporation that has achieved an uninterrupted control of a gold sector. Even ESB goes without a gold income from time to time. If you are in a top corp, double all of the previously mentioned times. If you are in a good corp, multiply them by 5. if you are in an average corp, don’t expect to ever get anything useful from your sector conquest gold income.
"Gold" rewards in other games:
In World of Tanks, You earn gold from participating in clan wars, their equivalent to sector conquest. Every single territory on their clan wars map gives gold. There are hundreds of territories to control. probably over a thousand on their Russian server. The top clans in WoT earn enough gold to give their members a premium account 100% of the time plus any needed premium vehicles. There are thousands of players who earn such rewards.
In EVE online, you can use ingame money to purchase your license. I’m going to say right now that that would be a TERRIBLE idea for star conflict. but the point is, in EVE, ANY good player can maintain a license without paying money.
When I was closed-beta-testing World of Warplanes, I was earning over 1,000 gold per week from their weekend events, one week I earned 2,250 gold to my Wargaming account. they lowered the rewards as the beta expanded, in open beta you were earning 50 gold per day. I used my earnings to get a tier-8 premium tank in WoT (equivelant to star conflict’s rank 12). Wargaming gold and star conflict are roughly the same value. Wargaming really did reward their beta testers in a big way. Which makes them look a lot better than Gaijin Entertainment who is instead using the open beta for their own profit + get some input which they don’t have to listen to. (warehouse space). I think it would be fair for the testers to have the ability to earn a useful amount of gold, they DO wait through the artificially-long pre-game-release queues after all.
Imbalance in the sector conquest map:
If you want to earn as much gold as possible from sector conquest, you better not be in federation. there are very few gold sectors located near the federation homeworld and those that are are just tiny 4-hex sectors. The Empire, on the other hand, has the “Pot of Gold” sector WX-40 plus 4 other sectors located in relatively safe areas. Jericho also has a lot of gold sectors but they are generally smaller than the empire ones. the biggest issue if the sector imbalance, would be the three 7-hex sectors that dominate each of their respective sides. one gives the most gold, one gives the most credits, one gives the most artifacts. I feel that the 7-hex sectors should be changed to each include a moderate all three types of rewards. And the less elusive 6-hex sectors should become the best for a single resource. Certain sector rewards should be changed so that each team should have a 6-hex gold sector near their homeworld, and where possible, a 6-hex sector of each of the other 2 resources. I would propose these changes to sector reward type:
The Solution:
for now, increase the rewards to at least:
3-4 hex sector: 20 gold or 200,000 credits or 20 artifacts
5 hex sector: 35 gold or 300,000 credits or 30 artifacts
6 hex sector: 50 gold or 400,000 credits or 40 artifacts
7 hex sector: 35 gold AND 300,000 credits AND 30 artifacts.
the 7-hex sectors WX-20, 40, and 46 should give a 5-hex sector equivalent of all 3 resources. So that no side can have the best sector for a single resource.
change WX-26 and WX-49 to gold sectors, so each side has a relatively-safe gold horde sector.
give the feds 1-2 additional gold sectors.
This could be a temporary solution that will give us a useful amount of rewards, although it still low compared to WoT. I somewhat doubt that this will be enough, but I chose a fairly small increase in order to preserve my credibility. but in the long term, when the game goes live there will have to be either a substantial increase in rewards as sectors become harder to obtain, or preferably, a massive increase in the number of sectors available. and perhaps a tweak in systems in which sectors go up for auction, how long sectors are held, or a complete rework altogether would be a good thing.
Sorry about the long essay post. We’ll see based on the comments how many people actually read it.
If you managed to make it to the end, Thank you, have a sweetroll.
-Smooticus