To them, you are illustrating you don't need it. They still need it. It seems needs and wants are almost indistinguishable in this game.
Zero to hero – 1bn Cr in less than 10 hours on a new account.
- Thread starter HappyMoonMonkey
- Start date
In case anyone is interested, Brother Sabathius has started a bit of a series last night that fits into this topic - he is doing a beginner's guide to the game. No zero to hero stuff, just playing the game, going through the various systems and activities of the game and giving tips along the way. It's still a live stream format, so it's long, but he's planning to cut them down to put them on Youtube as well. You can find the highlight from the first stream (yesterday) here.
There are new commanders and new commanders. I took an hour to do my binds first. Then after 2 or 3 sessions I took another 30mins and redid them fixing the mistakes I made the first time. But flying basics was p easy; compared to needling the slot with pitch and roll only on the original game, landing in ED is breezy. Still took a bit to get used to combat though.One thing you forgot, a new commander would require a day just to learn to land and take-off. I remember swearing blind at Frontier and hammering my sidewinder into the deck trying to get it to land,
Same for me. Well, first thing I did was sit in my Sidewinder in VR for the first time and drool for about 15 minutes, and then I did the keybinds. And then I did them again. I started playing shortly after the new flight tutorial was introduced, so that helped, but basic flying wasn't too bad. Took a while to get the knack on some advanced maneuvers though.
I remember early Elite when your single ship did not start with auto docking and you had to earn the credits to buy one. Docking was hard and I never really got the hang of it.
Even though I now have autodock, I can successfully pass through the slot and land as I have had enough experience via the many hours. I never put as many hours into the game when I had an early version.
Steve
Ya.
Unfortunately credits flow so fast a cmdr ranked "competent" can get Anaconda. Its the engineering now that is going to slow down their progress of slaughtering NPCs ranked "competent" or maybe "expert". Or taking on elite ranked NPCs for better rewards. Obviously the ship flies like a brick with unengineered thrusters. And G5 weapons would certainly help obliterate similarly ranked NPCs and help destroy the higher ranked NPCs. G5 Shields and boosters make up for terrible pilot skills.
And voila... they need a huge ton of mats to engineer all the core modules, 8 weapons, 7 shield boosters, and a bunch of HRPs... a build they saw on the internet for the ultimate combat killing machine!
Such a shame FD set up money as a controlling factor in this game at the start then completely undermined it with multiple unbalanced updates.
Listening to low IQ billy basics and their need to rush through the game and maximise their effectiveness in the clumsily tacked on running around bit has ruined this game.
(This is not aimed at the OP who has clearly played the game and is trying an experiment).
Listening to low IQ billy basics and their need to rush through the game and maximise their effectiveness in the clumsily tacked on running around bit has ruined this game.
(This is not aimed at the OP who has clearly played the game and is trying an experiment).
It's not helped by mechanics that should make sense, not making sense, and the general botched state of the game's economy. Deliveries valuing cargo value over cargo volume and distance being one... high bounty incomes coming from low threat kills, etc...
Did they?
They might have wanted to do that, but it took them pretty much the next six years from Seeking Luxuries to the impact of multistate BGS to get to a point where there weren't massive unintended earning opportunities because players were collectively a lot quicker to analyse both the game and the galaxy than Frontier were ... by which point there'd been easy money for so long it would hardly have been fair to any later players to cut the tap off then.
If they had 'succeeded' then "trade in the biggest ship you can afford for money, fight or explore for fun" would have been the inevitable outcome, given the outfitting model and the rest of the game design.
Credits are virtually irrelevant to maximising effectiveness on-foot, though. Even someone ignoring the credit potential of activities, happening not to do any Exobio or CZs, and never using their ship is not going to have their credit balance be anywhere near the limiting factor on obtaining upgrades for suits or hand weapons, once they've got something better than a flight suit.
Anyway, numbers time: what do you think the maximum hourly earning rate should be? - assuming a skilled player, with access to any necessary equipment, playing with the intent of gaining credits. Or, alternatively, what do you think the minimum time to obtain a reasonably-outfitted Anaconda should be? - assuming a player with access to all "common knowledge" of the game and reasonable genre familiarity.
For me, it's not a case of what the maximum should be, but rather the proportions of overall hazard/effort against reward, which is what FD botches so much.
Take the most recent figures of 2bn an hour from Orthrus ganking at a spire site. It's not the 2bn an hour I care about, rather, the fact it's Orthrus ganking as opposed to 2bn an hour hunting Hydras.
Or the fact it's 500m-1b an hour stacking massacres against competent-rank ships rather than seeking out threat 5/6 pirate attack sites or taking wing assassinations for high-rank.
Or even just the fact dropping in a HGE nets a bunch of G5 materials, but using hatchbreakers/recon limpets to ransack a megaship gives you a couple tonnes of clothing[1] and some G1-G3 mats.
FD just botches this hard. We could get 1,000 G5 materials and hundreds of billions of credits per hour... I wouldn't really care, as long as the activity being undertaken for that reward made sense. Yes, there's an argument optimisation should net better rewards, but that optimised reward should still respect the challenge gradient.
[1] But what about Thargoid Probes and other rare things? They're specific megaships which drop the "rare things"... but the way "rare things" get found is another thing FD botches a lot and a whole other topic.
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The time vs reward numbers are so messed up you can tell they didn't even try and balance things. Here we are with pointless S&R missions and megaships after all these years 
(It's not like they don't have the data - pretty sure they have enough of the journal events to be able to work out the value / hr of most activities. I don't even need them all to be the same, but within sight of each other would be nice)
(It's not like they don't have the data - pretty sure they have enough of the journal events to be able to work out the value / hr of most activities. I don't even need them all to be the same, but within sight of each other would be nice)
I'm more a risk/reward kinda banana myself.
Balancing by time/reward usually causes more problems than it solves and doesn't fit well in a dystopian universe where life is supposed to be hard and unfair, imo.
Balancing by time/reward usually causes more problems than it solves and doesn't fit well in a dystopian universe where life is supposed to be hard and unfair, imo.
For which, the balance remains equally busted.
Yep, it should be the diablo-style damage wheel...The time vs reward numbers are so messed up you can tell they didn't even try and balance things. Here we are with pointless S&R missions and megaships after all these years
(It's not like they don't have the data - pretty sure they have enough of the journal events to be able to work out the value / hr of most activities. I don't even need them all to be the same, but within sight of each other would be nice)
4-6 fire damage
1-8 lightning damage
2-4 cold damage + slow effect
1-3 poison damage/s over 4 seconds
... except instead of damage, it's credits, and instead of fire/lightning etc. it's activities, and instead of things like "slow" it's engineering materials/rep/inf (but valued appropriately)
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I agree...
As a game, ED already has a high learning curve up front, just to get a new player, who presumably knows nothing, to get their first couple million credits. At least that was my take when I started playing in September 2020...
But they also WANT people to play the game AND continue to play the game, and if its too hard, I assume, many/most players would move on rather quickly. So there must be some semblance of balance...
Some aspects are easier and others are more difficult...
So its a darned if they do and darned if they don't situation. I think...Where newer players may find many things too difficult and well seasoned players may find most, if not all, things too easy...and middle of the road players will find a bit of both...
The people I know who played this game for a short while and left didn't find it hard. They found it to not have anything more than cool ships and dogfighting. While that was more true in 2015 than today, you could say too much out of game research was needed to understand the content of the game, since there simply wasn't enough pointers or challenges to take you through the facets of the game. Other than the 3 ranking systems, and the two military rankings, there simply wasn't anything super obvious to a player who wasn't part of a group.
Today this isn't the case as much, but even today if a completely unaware person purchased EDO and went through the tutorial, then started out where ever they start now, you might be hard pressed to learn, in game, about many of the things we do now. I don't know how long you'd be stuck doing the same grindy things and maybe get bored and find something else.
For example, I don't recall there being a tutorial that had me select a different system and use hyperdrive to get there. I didn't know I could go to other systems for quite some time. I didn't know the mission board existed. I just knew how to turn in bounties for payment and buy ships and modules. The tutorial I saw had me escorting a ship and defending it with fixed weapons, or something like that. Another was about entering the station and landing. Even in EDO I wasn't asked to find any exobiology and scan it. I was only asked to go into a building and do something, shoot some NPCs on foot and get into a ship. Imagine I never played ED. How do I know about the mission board inside a station? (cannot recall if that was ever taught).
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I remember in days gone by, when games were on cassettes, floppys or discs, we got a manual of some sort. It would be read cover to cover and referred to frequent for "how to" information.
In more recent times we download games and the manual is online or downloaded with the game. Some of the manuals are enormous and hard to read and may not even cover crucial information. I suspect that many never bother to read or even seek answers to questions. I suspect that this is because many have had years of playing similar games and instinctively "know" how to do stuff or just experiment. RPG MMOs are probably like this as they share many similarities.
Steve
In more recent times we download games and the manual is online or downloaded with the game. Some of the manuals are enormous and hard to read and may not even cover crucial information. I suspect that many never bother to read or even seek answers to questions. I suspect that this is because many have had years of playing similar games and instinctively "know" how to do stuff or just experiment. RPG MMOs are probably like this as they share many similarities.
Steve
ED has (or technically, had) a manual: https://hosting.zaonce.net/elite/website/assets/ELITE-DANGEROUS-GAME-MANUAL.pdf
But it stopped being updated well before Odyssey came out, and when the new launcher came out a few months ago it no longer had a link for players to find it.
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It took me 6 months to get enough Credits for an Anaconda back in 2016, and I wouldn't change a thing.
"Grind" is a state of mind.