Credits per hour, Then and Now

[Cheese Helmet]

The image is from 2015. It's a rare trade goods route you could start doing effectively with a cobra, for a couple million an hour and it was considered good/decent credits. During this time, you had to progress ship to ship and with the increased capability came modest increases in credit earning potential. Those who did the imperial slaves smuggling runs remember that being a "gold rush" back then.

I'm not saying that the credits/hr at that time was the correct balancing. But it does seem we are now very far in the other direction, where an independent pilot wanting to progress on their own can go from sidey to an anaconda with one maybe two ships in between, in less than a week without really exploiting much of anything.

One of the things I really liked about my experience as a new player back then was the ship progression. I'm not against someone skipping the progression if they want to through a squadron boosting someone, but the current balance of the game isn't aligned with the way ship progression is laid out in really any way.

So I'd just like to ask, is ship progression still important? It was for me, but with the current iteration, maybe it's not anymore? Space legs is a whole new experience path for new players, Fleet carriers change the game too. Engineering is its own progression tree as well, that's more of a hard lock on exploring and combat though than trade. Just something I noticed and wanted to see what opinions are.

 

[Rat Catcher]

So is just like to ask, is ship progression still important? It was for me, but with the current iteration, maybe it's not anymore?

I'd be very tempted to say, that for a new player, ship progression is not important, only as they can spend Arx and buy a ready-built ship to play, or jump out and scan salad for a goodly amount. Looking back to 2017 when I started, and the first ship purchased after the freewinder (which is still in my FC!) took months of play (it was a T-6) to pay for... Happy days!

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I think the tricky thing to remember with any earnings balance question is that the vast majority of players don't play anywhere near optimally (and the people who post on the forums are extremely unrepresentative in both how long they play for and how much they optimise)

So you could get 2 million an hour back then. I took a week when I started out - with the advantage of knowing the genre conventions from the previous games in the series - just to earn enough to upgrade my Sidewinder's FSD to D-rated and get clear of the starting cluster.

Similarly you can substantially exceed 100 million an hour now by a variety of routes, but most players probably aren't earning anywhere near that routinely / at all. If you're "only" earning 5-10 million an hour and "only" playing for an hour a day, it's still going to take you three months of play to afford that Anaconda if you focus on that as your goal.

An actual "average" player is going at maybe 1% of the speed of a "top" player. And it's the average player the game needs to be balanced around, not making it so that someone who knows exactly what they're doing can't speed-run an Anaconda in an hour.

 

[mtfatboy3006]

Ship progression is an essential element of gameplay. But it is a finite element, and the game is infinite. The strength of Elite is that it is more about what you can finally do with those ships once you get them. Like make lots and lots of money, so that among other things you can transition to the fleet expansion element of gameplay...

 

[vSTAMPv]

I dunno.

Getting a ship is one thing, fitting it out and then engineering it is a whole different story.

Sure a new player could rush their way to an Anaconda, but it will be a piece of that they won't know what to do with and will probably have to rebuy more than a few times.

Sensible players will still work there way up the ship food chain.

 

[Shadowsnog]

The early game is still pretty much the same as it was. There are options how to progress faster if you wish to do so, but ship progression is still very much a thing. Its only after you reach a certain 'level' that credits start to become less and less meaningful.
For an mmo of this age its not only natural, but id say that elite is keeping it up pretty well.

 

[Jack Winter]

FWIW, I started a new alt, went to high cz in the sidewinder and followed syssec ships around. A few hours later i was in a Cobra mkV, the next day it was A rated and the alt started engineering and doing PP. Felt pretty good to me like that. I think a noob can have many hours of fun before they've exhausted all these game loops.

 

[Bigmaec]

What Ian and Ratty say.

Also Elite has a strong FOMO applied, due to being partially MMO, and it can be very frustrating never to be able to even barely compete with Oldtimers like us, who just casually throw a Billion at another reactive Corvette to optimize mining and also casually engineer it to G5 max in the span of half a day with the mats we gathered the last (checks inara) 7 years?

 

[Jack Winter]

FWIW, the new alt also did the CG, didn't mine much, but got 2 mining lasers and IIRC 70mil or so (plus the welcome credits for the IIRC 32 tons mined).

 

[Bigmaec]

FWIW, the new alt also did the CG, didn't mine much, but got 2 mining lasers and IIRC 70mil or so (plus the welcome credits for the IIRC 32 tons mined).

Your Alt isn't a noob though, they know everything your Main knows. Sliiiiiiight difference.

 

[Jack Winter]

Yes I know. But my point kind of was that as a more experienced I've gone fast but not too fast, I've had fun, and I've done one of the FOMO events. I think a noob probably has many hours of fun in front of them, especially if they take their time and don't start the min max grind. To me personally it's different nowadays, but it's still pretty well balanced.

 

[CMDR Voron]

what you’re seeing is a paradigm shift, the primary mode of progression probably used to be earning money and buying ships, it seems to now be getting materials and doing engineering.

I can’t say thats a bad trade off. With the newer paradigm, you can get any ship and DO anything really quickly - you just can’t be the best at it.

You have to consider that the game is 15 years old and the core audience, like you, had probably been playing it a long time. It does make sense to inflate over time so that newer players can catch up to the old heads. I assume that was the intent. I think it’s just so that people can play with others who have been in the game longer, which is pretty smart

 

[gorankar]

Credits are pretty easy, but earning enough for a FC stills takes time. So does reputation gain for Imp and Fed ships. PP still takes a while to get you those PP modules, you have to get the mats, perform the unlock tasks, and grab the commodities to unlock engineers, and the guardian modules/weapons/fighters still require putting in the work that entails.
I don't really feel like it is unfair to me that new players have a bit easier of a time earning those credits than I did. Months to my first Python, a year to my first Anaconda. They don't have access to the 18 month period where we could make 250-750M and hour mining VO/LTD either.

I am not a fan of pulling up the ladder after I climb it. Leave the ladder, and maybe hang an extra ladder for the ones coming up behind us.

 

[Stressfest]

The old days were much simpler, hauling fish to Eranin.. for a few measly credits, barely enough in the account to get a rebuy.

Good times.

 

[CMDR Voron]

In Cyberpunk, everyone’s always talking about making it rich and getting out of Night City - and signs of extreme poverty are ubiquitous.

Yet, in the game you never have to pay rent or cover an unexpected medical bill, so this poverty isn’t really felt or experienced.

Everything you make is pure profit. Healing items and even grenades magically regenerate with time.

To boot, the game has to keep throwing more and more money at you for completing missions, like… as if that was the incentive, and if you’d suddenly stop playing the game I’d the money wasn’t good. The money should be a tool that reinforces a narrative, instead it’s kind of an afterthought, so they throw more and more at you. Well, now you need to have something to do with it, right? Well that hammer with really good stats is 5 bajillion dollars, so you can save up for that.

Elite kind of has the same problem, but it is made worse by a shared multiplayer world. Games like Tarkov fix this by creating s time loop and wiping the server every so often (could you imagine if Elite even considered that?)

I paid 1.5 million to upgrade my rifle to lvl 3… I think that’s more than I paid for my whole ship?

It’s the same design mistake. Grinding for months to get a good ship does sound better to me.

the inflation probably isn’t as much of an issue as the fact that the game does not have (significant) maintenance, overhaul, repair or costs. So those with all their money can just sit, bored, atop a pile of imaginary currency making life difficult for others.

It would be pretty cool if there were some downsides to space industry. Make us do a repair mini game at station or put the ship into dry dock.

Did that fancy engineered class A drive get shot out last battle? Well, guess you’re looking for a new one.

Your ship blew up? Ok, well that space insurance (you don’t pay now), it’s going to double every time that happens in the same few hours of play and it only replaces a portion of the ships total value each time, so worse parts.

 

[kofeyh]

I'm not saying that the credits/hr back then was the correct balancing. But it does seem we are now very far in the other direction, where an independent pilot wanting to progress on their own can go from sidey to an anaconda with one maybe two ships in between, in less than a week without really exploiting much of anything.

What are you saying, then? Because this reads like "there has never been a good balance" and, soldier, I have some news for you - there is no good balance that is one size fits all. Everyone has a different version of 'good'. My good -- as someone who thinks in numbers with multiple zeros -- is different to someone starting out, or someone doing zero-to-hero and so on.

All of which is somewhat redundant when one can head to the Arx store an be able to make a cracking start in Elite with a useful ship and modules.

It's easy to have nostalgia for the old days. I remember running biowaste out of Robigo. Good times. What ship I had, however, wasn't what mattered. It was the experience that mattered, and I think Frontier focusing more on that (improvement of experience) is way better than getting into the weeds around what constitutes 'balance' for ship progression. They have been more accommodating of late, and that has translated to an uptick in player counts. Turns out for all the talk of suffering, people generally don't actually like suffering in practice.

CGs have started seeing much higher participation, colonisation is going flat out, there are carriers to earn and really heaps going on and I, personally, am pleased Frontier is spending most of their time looking forward, rather than being focused on the past.

Nostalgia is a powerful drug.

 

[kofeyh]

It’s the same design mistake. Grinding for months to get a good ship does sound better to me.

Several ships require time being spent to earn. Both in a credit and reputation sense. Carriers are a solid commitment for funding. Colonisation is very time and resource consuming.

Frontier has moved the time sink away from ships, to other aspects of the game. Which I think is sensible as that has the potential to have a broader appeal than forcing players to spend months to earn a single ship, when there are over 40 ships in the game, and counting.

Frontier has tried to strangle ship and material progression in the past. It didn't really work in a way that was constructive.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

the inflation probably isn’t as much of an issue as the fact that the game does not have (significant) maintenance, overhaul, repair or costs.

This again runs into the problem with the difference between an actual average player and the average forum poster.

• There need to be at least some activities where a beginner can both succeed and make a profit, or no-one gets out of the Freewinder.
• It seems common sense (players go on about "risk reward balance" all the time) that more difficult activities should result in a greater profit, if you succeed.
• So a skilled and experienced player (which includes everyone here) is going to be succeeding at the higher-end activities and regularly getting a substantial profit.
• (It's a multiplayer game, so they can also donate some of that surplus profit to their friend in the Freewinder anyway.)

The specific problem with introducing noticeable maintenance costs (beyond the current completely trivial ones) is that it leads to obligations to optimise.

If I do a bit of flying around, I'm probably earning 5-10% of the maximum possible credit rate for my ship. So if maintenance costs are high enough to matter at that level, they're not high enough to be noticeable to someone who's actually trying to maximise credit earnings. On the other hand, they're unrecoverable to someone who's earning much less than I am.

Elite Dangerous isn't really a game about trying to optimise things (there are plenty of things you can optimise, but you're not required to) so anything which requires that ... you need to do activities F, G or H - you can't do I or J because you'll fail too often to get a profit, and you can't do D or E because they won't cover your costs at this stage ... is going to be very unpopular

 

[Bob McBobblehead]

Scan a few stratum techtonicas in the bubble and you're ready to go.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

The image is from 2015. It's a rare trade goods route you could start doing effectively with a cobra, for a couple million an hour and it was considered good/decent credits. During this time, you had to progress ship to ship and with the increased capability came modest increases in credit earning potential. Those of who did the imperial slaves smuggling runs back then remember that being a "gold rush" back then.

I'm not saying that the credits/hr back then was the correct balancing. But it does seem we are now very far in the other direction, where an independent pilot wanting to progress on their own can go from sidey to an anaconda with one maybe two ships in between, in less than a week without really exploiting much of anything.

One of the things I really liked about my experience as a new player back then was the ship progression. I'm not against someone skipping the progression if they want to through a squadron boosting someone, but the current balance of the game isn't aligned with the way ship progression is laid out in really any way.

So is just like to ask, is ship progression still important? It was for me, but with the current iteration, maybe it's not anymore? Space legs is a whole new experience path for new players, Fleet carriers change the game too. Engineering is its own progression tree as well, that's more of a hard lock on exploring and combat though than trade. Just something I noticed and wanted to see what opinions are.

imo the launch progression rate was almost perfect.......... up until and probably including the Asp.

however due to how the prices of stuff increased vs how your earnings increased with larger ships, anything beyond an Asp became pretty grindy unless you used exploits.

Thankfully for me i was there for that early game and i genuinely would not changed any of my experience of those 1st 300 - 500 hrs or so getting to an Asp. That was my golden era of elite, where the future was exciting and everything in the DDF seemed possible. That was, and likely will always be by a country mile the most enjoyment i have had in any game.... admittedly some of that was because of the optimism of what was coming vs what was actually there then but even so......................