Shouldn't the drop rate all NPC/bot items be tweaked now that the drop requirements have been radically altered?

I'm open to continue tweaking drop rates and so on. Although I do wonder if people won't yet discover some alternate way of "farming".

Here's a crazy idea: introduce synthetic silksteel either as a very simple, high yield manufacturing mission, or preferably as a new trade good at a few very select stations (Dau D-9 comes to mind). It has always seemed a bit off that capships were so symbiotically linked to the hive. You have a reasonable explanation why these "unauthorized" ships need the Levi Data Aggregators, and as a pair of observer optics are so easy to get they are a non-issue, but to have the backbone of of the construction hinge upon an exlusive hive technology seems quite odd. Just a thought.

Aye. I agree.

introduce synthetic silksteel[...] as a very simple, high yield manufacturing mission

What would the components be?

Farming SSS is pathetically easy - its the size of the drop that causes problems as you can only get 50 on an xc.

I just saw the new update - the drop quantity will need to be tripled to compensate I think....

There already is an alternate method that works quite well... it will go unamed though :) several people know it already.

I think that the Synthetic Silksteel size should be reduced to max 2cu, preferably 1cu.

I also think that all components for the trid parts should be sold in the same system. This would make it a little bit easier to build the trid.

They aren't supposed to be easy to build.

Instead of easen its manufacturing, my vote is to focus on shared ownership.

I wish cappies were possible to be shared owned by a guild with many possible pilots, and possible to trade (sell/buy=transfer).

So, keeping it hard work while making possible trade cappies will lead to real manufacturing and a great reason for trade/builder guilds to exist, almost as ORE. I even imagine something as ORE producing ore, while TGFT provides the commodities and PA delivers the drops to a 4th specialized shipbuilder guild, and sharing profits while "mass" producing cappies, like one per week!

There already is an alternate method that works quite well... it will go unamed though :) several people know it already.

Crusader, can you please submit a support ticket, or email me or some such? We need to nail down these farming issues if we ever want to give any support to the idea of "rare drops" or "rarity" in general.

I'm all for continuing to tweak the drop rate. But I'll be a lot less likely to put in really interesting items if I don't even have a ballpark idea of how difficult they are to acquire.

Instead of easen its manufacturing, my vote is to focus on shared ownership.

I support shared ownership, and have said so on another thread, along with the fact that there are technical caveats to our implementing that (which really makes it orthogonal to this discussion).

Regardless, I'm not going to make acquisition contingent on shared ownership. I expect Capships will often be guild-related things, simply because of the difficulty of obtaining the component items, and because they're processes that scale well in parallel (across N number of people). But, I'm not going to stack the deck in favor of guilds any more than absolutely necessary. Capships are not supposed to be guild-exclusive content.

I think he means pirating them from honest hard working players.......

Oddly enough getting rid of farming severely reduces the chance for piracy of SSS to occur since it is better to harvest it in the sector it is needed in. (no more xc's of SSS)

nah lol I meant killing a certain bot type over and over which some of you probably know can lead to more SSS per hour than crits ever did. It's just super boring.

Crusader, that's no secret. It's not faster by any means. It's actually quite slow, picking up about half of what you could do with the HS farming.
And you can't just afk fly away and have it build up..

All things considered then, I believe Incarnate's tweaks (including nerfing the AFK harvesting of Hive Crits for SSS), were spot on. Fair enough you have to go hunting the hive proactively. AFK harvesting of Hive Crits was an exploit, and we know it.

Even though the total amount of hauling (the sheer bulk in cu's volume) for a Trident is so dauntingly large, it's unreal. The 8,000 units of SSS is only one part of that.

Anything that you need that kind of quantity for (Synthetic Silksteel) really can't be called a "rare" item can it?

I don't now if this belongs in this thread but I'll bring it up any way.

Start selling SS in Pelatus. I think it's ridiculous that you have to go to Verasi to get SS and then you can only make 4 FFSSA. OHP is sold in Latos. Edras or Bractus could also work.