Newbies in Lowsec

Last time I said something about writing down pvp related things. I have not really done this mostly due to apathy, work, and not really having a chance to log into eve and such. That being said, this post isn't exactly pvp related but it's interesting and pretty technical.

I was recently talking with Sugar Kyle and she brought up that someone asked her "What isk per hour is acceptable for a new player?" in regards to a newbie trying to live in lowsec. This caused me to go on a bit of a rant as to how that question is idiotic and why. Basically it depends entirely on what the player is doing: mining isn't going to make as much as orbiting buttons in faction war. If hes scamming or robbing people he could be more or less successful with that as an income source, maybe hes doing market stuff who knows.

The point is that sp and isk investment only decides how well you can do something, and has no bearing on if something is worth doing or not. To see if something is worth doing or not you have to find a comparison in another area of space and weigh the advantages and disadvantages against each other. For example, a new player in lowsec will lose ships, but lowsec missions don't pay enough compared to hisec missions as a new player to pay back for those lost ships. Therefor lowsec missions are not worth doing as a new player. This ofcourse changes when you have more sp and such that you can blitz said missions in lowsec and actually make this potentially viable income.

The main problem is that there is no scaling. You either have x amount of sp/isk investment to make it worth doing or you can't do it at all basically. This is one of the big reasons it's so terrible to be a new player in non fw lowsec, there isn't any real viable income you can easily tap into. Oh and if you pvp a bunch, you can't go into hisec to get your income because of sec status. Missions need to be rebalanced to actually provide scaling and more frigate and cruiser level activities need to be available in both non fw lowsec and nullsec.

Now I'm not asking for the rest of low and null to be buffed to the level of fw, that would break eve horribly. What should happen is more activities are added in that give the income of a small or novice plex runner. This way I wouldn't bother doing it for income as an older player because it wouldn't be worth my time, but the new guy just getting t2 small guns would have a viable income source that he could use to resupply frigs and maybe a few cheap cruisers.

In my opinion people should be able to live in low and null even as new players, compare the income they get there to hisec and think "Why did I ever bother living there, it's so much more fun and profitable here in low/null". If people in hisec want to look at low/null and go "I might die if I go there I will instead stay here where it is safe with concord" then that's fine, but there's no reason they should have a comparable income.

Before anyone gets upset here's some easy numbers to understand: if plex are at 660m, you only need to make 22m isk a day to be able to afford one. Hisec shouldn't be complete trash and 40m an hour seems like something that can be accomplished there. That is less than 15 hours a month (about 30mins a day average) to be able to afford a plex in hisec.

I would love for the entire mission reward system to be rebalanced so it scaled better and gave significantly greater rewards in lowsec and nullsec. I would love it if lowsec anoms were a viable source of income for the amount of investment required to do them. Putting a tag rat spawn at the end of every lowsec anom and adding more frigate and cruiser level activities to low and nullsec would be amazing and really help new players feel useful and want to live in those areas since they have a viable income source that is worth doing.