I've said in the past the game has been made easier , the credits are just an easy way to gauge. I took a trip back in 2017 to Beagle it took me 6 months and I made 400 million . That was in a Dolphin 44 lyr jump . Jump forward a few years and I was making 20 mil a night and beagle took a month and a bit. Fdev wanted folk to do exo and so the gave ridiculous rewards. The problem is they can't take it away now. Now we have fast travel in system . But these are just my own personal thoughts I have 21 billion thanks to boom states (50mil missions) and a good squadron who shared those missions . Whilst working on political bobble heads .
Credits per hour, Then and Now
- Thread starter Cheese Helmet
- Start date
Cash gains had to increase if Frontier wanted people to be able to afford a fleet of blinged out ships, a carrier to haul them around in, ships for the Thargoid war, and the resources to colonize systems.
Keeping the cash flow at the release date crawl wouldn’t have done them any favors for keeping players around when there’s all this stuff to do in game.
Needing to play daily for a year just to get a good large ship wouldn’t be fun to most people. Myself included.
Keeping the cash flow at the release date crawl wouldn’t have done them any favors for keeping players around when there’s all this stuff to do in game.
Needing to play daily for a year just to get a good large ship wouldn’t be fun to most people. Myself included.
Comparing earn rates of a "profession" (i.e combat vs trade vs exploration) as represented by the highest of all available activities, yes, it's balanced.
Peer into any one of those "professions", the internal balance is a complete and utter shambles. No logic or sense whatsoever.
Do people actually enjoy obsessing over money this much? We live in a world of political turmoil, economic depressions/recessions. Inflation and trade wars. Millions of people are in fear about their future, their economic situation, the stability of their currency and stock markets. Massive layoffs, rising unemployment etc etc etc. A lot of ELITE players are probably in a technical field, where we live under the threat of the looming AI boom replacing us with LLM's and chatbots etc etc.
And some of you want to log into a video game, and have us re-live all that. Can we not have a break from freaking economics and just have a virtual escape?? It's ridiculous!
And some of you want to log into a video game, and have us re-live all that. Can we not have a break from freaking economics and just have a virtual escape?? It's ridiculous!
Yes, I'd love a virtual escape.
Nonsense game design does not provide that.
I hear you, however, in video games some people like myself enjoy engaging in interesting and complex systems.
I don't even know what this means or what I'm supposed to do with this. You tend to just declare anything you don't like a "nonsense game design". If you can explain how struggling to earn a living in Elite is better "game design" or increases my enjoyment of the game, I would welcome the discussion.
I mean hey, it doesn't impact me. I now have "F U money" when it comes to credits in Elite. But by all means, totally ruin the new player experience even more by having them chase digital currency for months to upgrade a single ship. That is just great 'game design' there.
Uhhh I do too. Again how is this making those systems more interesting or complex? Like...come on with the slogans. Nobody seems to be actually explaining why the depreciation of credits to add struggle or scarcity does this.
How is what making things more interesting or complex?
Less credits per hour. You know, the topic of the thread?
The topic of the thread was asking if credits/hr is even still a meaningful way to measure progression anymore like it was before, given the massive difference in credit earning avenues and the other progressions that we now have, and if it should be or not.
I didn't suggest anything, I asked a question and provided context to the question.
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Where did I say "struggling to earn" was better design?
OK, so here's a few for you.
Most games reward you more for beating tougher enemies. You know what doesn't? Elite Dangerous. A vanilla Elite Anaconda from a ubiquitously available assassination mission will net me ~6m credits
Seeking out a much less available Pirate Activity Threat 6 site and fighting an Elite-rank, fully engineered FDL which is a significantly harder enemy will reward... oh right... like... 500k.
Edit: And let's not go near earning 12m for a novice eagle kill from massacre stacking...
Nonsense.
You know how most games value hauling tasks? By the amount you deliver, and how far you take it, because that's what dictates the difficulty of the task. Depending on the game, other factors may play in... all of which are irrelevant to Elite... e.g because a pirate will attack you just as readily for 1t biowaste as they will for 1t void opals.
But getting away from the point. How does Elite value hauling? By the value of the cargo, almost exclusively.
Nonsense.
The price of an item is normally decided by it's scarcity, effort to obtain, and demand.
Methane clathrates are equal scarcity as gold, just as difficult to mine as gold, and have orders of magnitude more market demand. But what pays more? Gold, by a whole order of magnitude.
Nonsense.
This is trash design without a single thought into how the game's economy should work. There should be rewarding things, and that should follow a logic. I shouldn't get rewarded because I pet my cat on a Wednesday and wore a red t-shirt to the shops, which means the Federation gives me a billion credits.
If i fight a harder enemy, i should earn more than fighting an easier enemy.
If I haul something further than I haul something else, I should get paid more.
If I mine something that's harder to find and mine than something else, I should get paid more.
If i seek favourable conditions, i should be rewarded more than less favourable conditions.
Elite does none of these things consistently.
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![[VR] Mad Mike](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/27/27910.jpg?1553527108){kind=avatar}
no it isn't. some people just like different types of games than you, no need to be a plonker about it .
I like a sense of progression in my games, and I want the game world to feel as plausible as possible. I play euro truck simulator in a similar way . am hoping farming simulator has something similar too - it's in my soon to play pile.
Microsoft flightsim 2020 however I struggled with. despite being a beautiful and detailed simulator there was no sense of progression in there ... until I got a mod for it.
apparently 2024 has a career so I may have to pick that up
It's pretty good (FS 25 at least is the one I've played). They get the crop prices mostly right in terms of what's valuable and what's less valuable (canola being an easy point out for selling for less than corn or beets for instance). And the in game settings give you a lot of freedom in terms of grow times and other stuff.
But, anyway, I won't derail the thread
I want all of that. With spaceships. In fact I want it worse- more misery, more inequality, I want WH40K levels of damnation.
Through scarcity comes invention and opportunity. Having a fluffy, hold my hand lets all dance around game is a total no-no.
ED had a dystopian setting- a post AI, decaying society stuck in a technological plateau. Lets keep to that.
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Making credits harder to achieve won't give you that sense. You'll still end up at the same place, it will just take a bit longer. I like a sense of progression too, I just don't feel chasing imaginary space-bucks is the only or best way to give us that sense.
Everyone is agreeing that 2024-2025 has been the best Elite has ever been. I'm not understanding where there's some great need to revert things back to the not-good era of Elite. Besides player nostalgia of course....
Cool then what you need from Elite is a perma-death mode. That's a totally reasonable request. That way you can leave me out of it.
No, I want (what we had at one point) was scarcity. FD should have kept at least some of that and developed crime and illegal actions. That way you could have had slow and legal, dangerous / fast and illegal money making tracks.
Elite: Dangerous is a rather glaring outlier in how little of an economy there is for a game that features trade so prominently. Stations produce items from nothing and the various BGS states are a poor excuse for a simulated supply chains. Prices vary with supply and demand, but they don't take money supply into account at all. NPC assets just spawn from nothing and can be farmed ad-infinitum.
I'm not adverse to compromise, but this level of compromise is a farce, and a serious downgrade from what existed in the early betas of this game. It's not even close to what I've had with other games.
I don't particularly have an issue with periodic resets to keep the setting from collapsing into absurdity. It could improve with each iteration, until they finally get it more or less self-balancing.
I'd be content in simply seeing modern first-world-problems levels of dystopia, rather than a setting that says 'dystopia' on the sticker, but then turns out to be a post-scarcity utopia akin to 24th century Earth in Roddenberry's Star Trek.
Conceptually I would agree with all these statements.