No they weren't and you're not still flying around in your starter sidewinder
Credits per hour, Then and Now
- Thread starter Cheese Helmet
- Start date
I refute that on the basis that I'm somebody and I disagree,
I remember when you would make 7 credits for computer parts original elite on spectrum.
My take on elite dangerous early years was it was a long term game . You had progression but it took a while and therefore the sense of achievement was what drove me . It took me 2-3 years to get triple elite just by playing the game . Your ship progression was slow and steady. Months and years of playing the game nowadays it's months perhaps weeks. Can you imagine the cries now if profits for exo were dropped to 100's rather than 100's of thousands?? I don't want a game which I can make billions iand buy every ship in a month ....
Me personally want to work towards the ship slowly and feel woohoo I've done it and then find out I hate it like I did with many ships and work towards the next one .
My take on elite dangerous early years was it was a long term game . You had progression but it took a while and therefore the sense of achievement was what drove me . It took me 2-3 years to get triple elite just by playing the game . Your ship progression was slow and steady. Months and years of playing the game nowadays it's months perhaps weeks. Can you imagine the cries now if profits for exo were dropped to 100's rather than 100's of thousands?? I don't want a game which I can make billions iand buy every ship in a month ....
Me personally want to work towards the ship slowly and feel woohoo I've done it and then find out I hate it like I did with many ships and work towards the next one .
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Was about to say the same.
I'd say the game incl its community peaked in 2020, and it went downhill from then. I don't actually consider 2024 to 2025 particularly positive - Arx store inflation, deteriorating tech state with the glitchiest visuals yet, half cooked and buggy content additions, early access ships behind a pay wall.
Sure, it's better than nothing, but it doesn't fill me with the same excitement and hope for the future of the game as just before Odyssey released, and the game generally felt more coherent back then (if nowhere near perfect but I was properly hooked then). Others are welcome to disagree of course.
This.
Maybe I'm just rationalising, or wearing the rose-tinted glasses, but it seemed like FDev made a conscious decision that progression should be slow.
Recently, there's been some discussion about ship-scale in ED and how ship cockpits can make ED's ships look deceptively small.
I'd suggest ease of acquisition also plays a part in diminishing the perception of ships in ED.
When you spent a month earning the credits to buy something like an AspX it "feels" significant when you see it on a landing pad.
I don't think people will get the same feeling when they can spend Cr6m to buy an AspX just so they don't have to wait for a ship to be transfered or use an Apex taxi.
Back in the day, one of ED's most often-heard proverbs was "don't fly without rebuy".
People were so desperate to start earning the "big bucks" that they'd spend most of their credits on something like a Python, Clipper or even a T7 and a load of cargo and leave themselves without enough credits to cover the rebuy if they got exploded.
I bet it's been years since anybody lost a ship in ED and couldn't afford the rebuy.
And, honestly, that's a shame.
People talk about how ED isn't risky enough but spending most of your credits on a ship and a load of cargo - knowing that if you can just get it safely to it's destination you'll double your bank balance - is quite the adrenaline rush.
I wonder what possible consequences a player would have to risk to get the same feeling today?
Loss of an FC?
Permanent loss of ships and/or engineered modules?
Money doesn't mean anything anymore except on larger scales. Unfortunately the game just does not support scaled progression and growth, requiring hilariously obscene grinds for things that should not. Because as it turns out, actually designing a game around that is hard. Why does the individual commander need to do so much for system colonization, for a carrier? At some point it should just be a lump sum that lets the cmdr grow their credits and so on.
Of course, upper management in their brilliance decided that instead of a good singleplayer game they wanted a mediocre MMO instead, and now have to contend with shoehorning everything into an insanely schematic'd networked nightmare to develop in, while implementing extremely difficult technical aspirations like Space Legs (and see how much that has failed to integrate with most anything in a reasonable manner.)
Once credit metas hit with 1.4 (was anyone even here in 2015? ten years ago!) it was all downhill from there. I had argued multiple times how eventually, one day, FDev would balance subsequent gameplay around that - it's not about the money you make now, it's how it affects what game design comes later.
Carriers launch and lol no one can afford it because only a tiny fraction of the community would stockpile 5 billion credits, those who farm those awful metas. Engineering launched, the entire combat game was rebalanced around having engineering and was impossible for anything that doesn't either have a large hardpoint or reasonable shields.
At least most credit making things seem to have scaled well to being much more accessible - I've been making a few tens of millions of credits every day I care to play doing combat or passengers or whatever so I can eventually actually maybe afford to one day blow it on a carrier. But before that, there wasn't a chance in hell I was ever going to enjoy playing elite to 5 billion credits + multiple millions of upkeep.
The point is - credits per hour will always be scaled relative to the progression of the Current Content. And inflated Metas are the most damaging because people like me who actually care about the game outside of biggest $$$$ per second because we didn't abuse some BGS anomaly to get unlimited money. At least after 10 years combat income is much nicer lol.
Of course, upper management in their brilliance decided that instead of a good singleplayer game they wanted a mediocre MMO instead, and now have to contend with shoehorning everything into an insanely schematic'd networked nightmare to develop in, while implementing extremely difficult technical aspirations like Space Legs (and see how much that has failed to integrate with most anything in a reasonable manner.)
Once credit metas hit with 1.4 (was anyone even here in 2015? ten years ago!) it was all downhill from there. I had argued multiple times how eventually, one day, FDev would balance subsequent gameplay around that - it's not about the money you make now, it's how it affects what game design comes later.
Carriers launch and lol no one can afford it because only a tiny fraction of the community would stockpile 5 billion credits, those who farm those awful metas. Engineering launched, the entire combat game was rebalanced around having engineering and was impossible for anything that doesn't either have a large hardpoint or reasonable shields.
At least most credit making things seem to have scaled well to being much more accessible - I've been making a few tens of millions of credits every day I care to play doing combat or passengers or whatever so I can eventually actually maybe afford to one day blow it on a carrier. But before that, there wasn't a chance in hell I was ever going to enjoy playing elite to 5 billion credits + multiple millions of upkeep.
The point is - credits per hour will always be scaled relative to the progression of the Current Content. And inflated Metas are the most damaging because people like me who actually care about the game outside of biggest $$$$ per second because we didn't abuse some BGS anomaly to get unlimited money. At least after 10 years combat income is much nicer lol.
Oh man. I made 7+ billion during the last Community Goal and it was for one of the easiest things in the game: Laser mining platinum. You missed it? That sucks
It was like a credit bonanza! Hang in there man you'll get that FC and it will be so worth it I assure you.
Why, yes. They do.
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I will say the thargoid war was excellent new content.... but that was largely completely outside of the main game ...,.. the thargoid content has very little to do with standard credit earnings in this game.
also the new ships. am not sure how they are related to the broken economy in elite.
there is a meme about this about causation Vs correlation which springs to mind.
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You might not, but you are a sample size of one, just as I am a sample size of one, we also have the ability to wipe our accounts at any time. So unless you might do that pretty often, arguing that should be a global thing is pretty hollow (do you, by the way?).
Also this is very circular reasoning, the sort of reasoning that leads to a snake eating itself.
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Game is 10+ years old and people continue to carry the "it should have been single player" dead albatross around their neck like it's some sort of totem.
Elite Dangerous is what it is; love it or hate it, Frontier have to work within their means and achieve what they can. They aren't going to do everything everyone wants. Credits have never been a metric that controls progression. Time is. Always will be.
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Rubbernuke grossed me out earlier. I hate that image...
This is a common occurrence; I just see it as a sort of rugged (at times slightly disconcerting) charm.
You aren't remotely the first person I've seen suggest that resetting my CMDR would somehow be a solution to any of the issues I have, nor that not doing so somehow negates my argument, but these assertion never gets any less obtuse.
Resetting my character isn't like clicking 'new game' in a single player title. It's like being stuck in your most recent save game with an empty inventory...same game, but now you have to waste time finding some pants before you carry on. There is no going back.
This is not a single player game. Unilaterally resetting my CMDR would do nothing to reset the setting he exists within. It wouldn't be starting from scratch, it would be dropping into exactly the same mess that's been building up for over a decade, only slightly more annoying. Hell, it wouldn't even reset my CMDR's past contributions. His name would still be plastered across the galaxy. His BGS victories and screwups would still be there every time I opened the galaxy map.
I want a clean slate. A fresh start for the whole galaxy. An opportunity for FDev to not repeat the same mistakes. The only way for that to occur is for there to be a global wipe, or for me to get my hands on the server software and run my own.
character resetting completely puts me off games. it's why I won't start star citizen despite wanting to and it killed the promising game once human after putting a few hrs into it. I often go months, years even between sessions, I have no interest in continual restarts.
I don't have a problem with tightly controlled game rules however. for elite dangerous that ship has long sailed. there was I time I naively thought the credit "exploits" were mistakes and I avoided doing them but it's clear now with 45million credit+ 5 minute trade runs I was wrong. maybe elite dangerous 2 could fix it?
and premium paid ships which survive wipes along with free "insurance" for life time rebuys is obnoxious P2W stuff and totally unfair imo
I don't have a problem with tightly controlled game rules however. for elite dangerous that ship has long sailed. there was I time I naively thought the credit "exploits" were mistakes and I avoided doing them but it's clear now with 45million credit+ 5 minute trade runs I was wrong. maybe elite dangerous 2 could fix it?
and premium paid ships which survive wipes along with free "insurance" for life time rebuys is obnoxious P2W stuff and totally unfair imo
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Another aspect for me is continuity, or the journey being shaped by events (and not just a monotone more / more more). Early on I'd go broke a lot, and I'd have to sell that C grade module or cool weapon to fund another cargo run. From that I'd think more and more about 'free' things, and it was this occilation between legality and necessity that drove interest. But the important thing was I kept going and not wipe / start again for a better run- the 'continutiy' of it all.
If ED had had todays missions and mechanics with yesteryears money I think the game (for me) would be amazing.
OT a little, though tying back to by "nonsense game design" comments... Jmanis is supposed to be a (non-uniformed) imperial loyalist, striking down the Federation at every possible turn in the most effective ways possible.
There's no small irony lost the most effective means at my disposal to do this rests in profitable activities which never draw the ire of the Federation.
The game even protects players by having virtually no negative consequence (and arguably, positive consequence) of having Hostile rep with a superpower, because the idea of balancing a career path that actively pushes you towards KOS with an entire superpower just seems way out out of scope of any planning around credit earn rates, sadly.
As a contrast, Jmanis in the days of FE2 was constantly a wanted fugitive, foregoing stakeouts and killing federation targets in deep space where the law couldn't see, with more expedient moving between targets and never paying my bounties for higher overall earnings... but I was always wanted in federal space and unable to dock.
in olden times one way around this was cosmetics. you would be able to buy an in game cosmetic item with in game credits for a huge amount or alternatively do a series of time consuming tasks which your primary goal was not about credits at all but about earning a cool rare skin .
this is no longer really a thing with modern games and I do understand why.... but this is precisely the reason why when people say so long as it's only cosmetics locked behind a paywall and not actual progression then it does not take anything away from the game, I would disagree with them.
less game unbalancing? sure but it still takes a way a huge amount of the reasons why people would put silly amounts of time into games.
And yet somehow if this was to happen at a global level, it's okay? Frontier just changes a little bit, then resets the universe, and we keep at it until some mythical point where it's "correct" and they stop?
I am not sure which universe this works in, but it's not this one, friend.