Open Letter to Mindark

Once in a while I feel the need to express some things publicly. And maybe I will open a support case later and express them directly.

1. We who HEAVILY invested in the Arkadia Moon.... Would have appreciated it if A. You would have waited for the new shares system until AFTER AMD's were tradeable... OR port the AMD's TO the new Shares system so that they might actually sell out and be tradeable finally.

2. The game has a LOT of potential, but only a minimum of it's potential is being reached. I see a lot of improvement as of late, and as long as you keep working towards reaching the full potential of what the game could become, I'd say Entropia's better days are ahead of it still, and not behind it as the case has been for so long.

3. I am still not seeing loot as commensurate to what we are spending / grinding. I have 210K skill points (after some chipping out in the past, I still have 210K now), and I can't get a hunting hof on big OR small mobs. I've had one hunting uber in 12 years. This is not how you retain customers. This is not how you get people to want to grind months long mission chains. Yes people scream about "Pay to Win"; but for crying outloud, when the game costs money to play, what is fair about paying to lose?

4. You need to look at other games that have a space component to it; find the good ideas they utilize in making space so it isn't just a big expanse with nothing to do once you leave orbit. Maybe fill the voids with small asteroids so that you can equip space craft with mining equipment so that these space rocks could be bombed and drilled for ore and enmatter. It would be riskier but you could offset that risk with better odds, you will make it all back anyways when miners have to defend themselves against pirates or other miners.

I am sure there are a lot more ideas to get people thinking... There are so many things that could make the game better for everyone. It is not necessary to make 99% of the player base suffer in order to make the 1% happy. Everyone could be treated fairly and commensurately then there would be much less complaining from everyone on the average.

OH YES, my biggest complaint... I had acceptable loot... Literally until the moment Mayhem went online. Nothing but lose since, and I don't even participate in Mayhem, and when I did I lost even more. I wish Mayhem did not every year punish those players who do not participate. I can't imagine anyone doing extremely well who isn't doing Mayhem and who is actually tracking their loot during Mayhem. Am I in the majority? Am I in the minority? I don't know. But every year it is the same thing. I will not have a good return until after Mayhem goes offline.

After 12 years, while much of the game is still a mystery, and "dynamic" loot can mean anything; somethings are all too predictable. I know if I go spend a year on Atrox or Ambu, I will not uber. I've done it before. I know if I play during Mayhem, I will be broke as fast as I can deposit.

The game is always trying to balance and counterbalance with every update; but there is always an imbalance. Instead of having some developers in a room discussing how to tweak loot, I would say what is wrong with setting up an AI algorithm to balance loot automatically and just let it ride out, certainly it can't do any worse than how loot is distributed all these years already.

I dunno. I've said what I need to say, some of you will agree some of you wont. The point is to get people to think about things in terms they haven't maybe thought of things in, and start discussing them. It is through discussion that things finally will be worked out.

If MA finally gets the game to where much of its potential is finally realized, I will be happy no matter what. It is just the fact so little of its potential is unlocked and untapped, that it hurts to see. It is almost like they are happy with how things are, they make their money, people keep playing thinking there is actually loot somewhere for them, the world keeps turning. But they would make so much more if they would make the game be what it could be, and THAT is what I am pushing for here.

They are the only game in the business, they have no direct competitors. Second Life is almost a joke as for the real cash economy portion of it; yet it has the level of complexity I like to see games have. But as for MMO's running on real cash, MA is the only game in town. I don't know if it is a lack of competition that keeps them unmotivated, but surely the time to strike is when you have the only iron to work, never mind if it is hot or cold.