Almost five years later, necromancy time!
A question came up elsewhere and I thought the answer to it would be worth posting here too. As you might expect, it was:
how many credits would the classic Elite in exploration equal today? After all, Odyssey had a mapping payout buff, and added the Elite I-V ranks too.
Quick answer for those who are too lazy to read: around
7,300,000,000 Cr, which would be
Elite XXIII (plus a third) if the game counted that high. If you have that many credits in exploration data sales, then congratulations, you have made Elite the classic way!
Let me elaborate then. As per
this earlier post, the "Elite Plus" would be the equivalent of finding
1,734 undiscovered ELWs / WWTCs. Currently, one of those at a medium size will pay out 4.2 million Credits, so the total would be
7,282,800,000 Cr. With one Elite in exploration now requiring ~312,000,000 Cr of data sold, this would be Elite XXIII and a third. Of course, there are rounding errors, and Odyssey might have upped the original requirement of ~156 million EXP to 160 million in order make the "extra" Elites easier to read for the developers.
An interesting question: so how many players might have this? I don't have an answer to that, but there is actually a decent estimate for how many players who share their statistics have Elite V at least. Both EDSM and Inara have statistics on this: as of now, Inara lists 1.03% of all Commanders having achieved Elite V in exploration, and if I'm reading it right, the site has 244,575 Commanders registered. Meanwhile, EDSM lists 1.6%, and 72,270 "flight logs", which I think might be the number of Commanders, or might just be the ones who share theirs publicly. The site has long since stopped making the videos that included the number of Commanders, so it's hard to tell. In any case, it's better to go with Inara then: there are at least 2,519 players who have reached Elite V in exploration.
Of course, the total number is only known to Frontier, as not everybody uploads their data to EDDN. Still, the trend has always been that most veteran explorers do, so I wouldn't expect the total number (of Explorer Elite V-s) to be much higher than that. How many of them would have made it to Elite X? No idea, as people just chasing ranks would stop at Elite V.
That was all that came to my mind then. Good luck out there![/i]