Remember when people were saying Bounty Hunting needed a nerf?

And now people are routinely making over a million per hour trading with little/no risk whatsoever?

Not saying bounty hunting is really ALL that risky (in an hour or two of hunting I only had my shields popped once, and only took about 3,000 Cr in hull damage), but it certainly takes a lot more effort that running a trade route. Even if you've gotten to the point where I'm at, where anything smaller than an ASP never gets a shot off and anything less than a Python doesn't even warrant a pip to systems, it still takes more effort to buzz around a nav beacon/asteroid belt and KWS every NPC that shows up. In fact, once any real danger is sucked out of it it might actually be worse: I find that I can barely bounty hunt for more than 30 minutes at a time without getting frustrated at having made barely 200k, and then tabbing out to check forums and seeing people talking about how they're making that much on a 10 minute round trip via trading.

Should bounty hunting, in fact, actually be buffed? Perhaps not at all levels because then it would be very easy to make starting cash. However, perhaps there should be some kind of way to find more large ships? If I could go to a nav point that had 80% ASPs or larger (like the high intensity combat zones, but for bounty hunting) instead of having 30% of ships have no bounty, and 50% of the ones that do have a bounty are Novice or less sidewinders with no shields and a whopping 900 credits on their head.

And to those of you who say "I play the game to have fun not to get the biggest ship," that's all well and good. However, It's taken me 9 days to scrape together ~7,000,000, which means I was making about 1,000,000 per day since I figured out what I was doing. If I want to kit out an ASP reasonably? That'll probably take me at LEAST 20,000,000 credits. Don't get me started on a Clipper or Dropship, which cost twice that to even buy, and then I'd have to have at least 10,000,000 spare to give the ship enough modules to be worthwhile. I really don't think my enjoyment is going to last long enough for me to play for 20 more days in my Cobra with little to no upgrades, then probably another 20-30 days in an ASP before I get into a ship that I actually want to fly. And then from there, probably EVEN LONGER before I can kit that out with all A's.

This is getting kinda ranty at this point so I'm gonna bring it back. Do you think bounty hunting deserves a buff in the wake of trading being more or less the only viable way to earn the credits required for any large ship?
 
People often said that bounty hunting gives too much credits. 90k for dumb ai anaconda... While you can buy cobra for 340k, consider that to fully upgrade it to A/B modules it will cost you 3-6 millions? And theres more expensive ships.
Anyways... seems like bounty hunting was nerfed. I was getting 6-15 k for cobra viper week ago. Now am getting much less credits from bounty hunting..
 
Same as above. Earlier THIS week I was making 100K in credits hanging around Alpha Centauri and Barnard's Star quite easily in about an hour. Now I'm lucky to even see 50K in the same time frame.
Not only are the bounties much less than they were a few days ago, but the NPCs also didn't try to run away at the slightest hint of laser fire. So I'm getting much less from kills of the same ships and also from NPCs jumping away.

It's disappointing to say the least.
 
It is not bounty hunting, it is blasting ships out of the sky for loansharks,
enforcing debts.

A bounty for the ingame activities considered to get the ships the npcs are flying,
should be way higher.
Yet NPCs need to get tougher in the higher bounty "tiers",
i think it would be best if they at least flew in escort,
like the traders you see in some Nav points or extraction sites.
 
It is not bounty hunting, it is blasting ships out of the sky for loansharks,
enforcing debts.

A bounty for the ingame activities considered to get the ships the npcs are flying,
should be way higher.
Yet NPCs need to get tougher in the higher bounty "tiers",
i think it would be best if they at least flew in escort,
like the traders you see in some Nav points or extraction sites.


I agree with this 100 percent. I will go so far to say that BASIC bounty hunting is just fine. We really need to see another 2 tiers of AI skill and bounty level for bounty hunting to really run well for a while. I also agree that 100k bounty large ships should have an escort or two.

I really do not think that bounty hunting should be as profitable as trading. Trading is very tedious, repedetive, low risk way to make money ( or play a game for that matter). While I will concede that an Asp or Python are really cool ships to go chase bounties in, as it stands right now ANY of the fighter class/subclass ships can do it well for a modest sum.
 
I like the idea of flying in escort when you have the super high level bounties. A shieldless anaconda with two reasonably high ranked Sidewinder escorts would arguably be more difficult than the Elite Anacondas that you can take down with nothing but chaff and shield cells.

And yes, I do use shield cells, because if I'm going bounty hunting I'll have to contend with Eagles and Cobras that I'd like Gimballed weapons for in a turning battle. That means I won't have the loadout necessary to kite and snipe a shielded anaconda with a skilled pilot without taking substantial hull damage, since Chaff appears to do next to nothing to the turrets at ranges closer than 1 km (which is where I need to be for my multicannons to be hitting powerplant).
There is only one case I have ever used a shield cell outside of big game, and that's when I was swarmed randomly by three sidewinders. Nasty little buggers, they are.
 
Since ED is new, FD hasn't had the chance to balance finances out yet. Over time, they'll analyse the data and determine if that's the pace they want players to progress at or if they feel the need to bump things up in order to attract more players. There's a lot of factors to take into consideration as well.

1. How fast are you able to destroy other ships
2. What's the average kills per hour ratio of players bounty hunting
3. How many wingmen are used to assist

These are some of the issues that will affect how bounty payouts are rewarded. And unfortunately, it's one of those things where if this game has more hardcore players than casual, the game will ultimately become more grindy for the casual player base since its quite common that MMO games do not want the hardcore player base to make it to the top to quickly. Looking at various traffic reports in several systems, there's approx 0.01% with Anacondas and Pythons. Roughly 5% have ASPs and 70% or more have Cobras or Vipers. Leftovers are shared with sideys, eagles, and trade ships. Only FD knows what they want, but I would guess they do not want more than 10% ASPs and less than 1% with Pythons or Anacondas.

Personally, I think camping at a resource extraction site or nav beacon hoping to find a good bounty is kind of lame. It's not as engaging and relies heavily on the RNG system for wanted ships to just appear out of thin air. IMO the root of the problem is the gameplay mechanics. There needs to be escort missions that offer good payouts and bonus income for ships destroyed. Or missions that involve raiding a pirate base with again, good payouts and bonus income from kills. I'd also like to have war zones or conflict zones that payout based on the skill and ship type. It's unfortunate they capped every ship at 3K. If it were reflective of bounty hunting payouts, then you would have an engaging battle with a steady payout stream so long as you can stay in the conflict and most importantly, do not die.
 
The current problem with bounty hunting is that you can pretty much do the same amount of credits per hour on a viper, a cobra, an Asp, a fed dropship, a python... Yet the cost varies wildly between them; given the insurance, repair, fitting and especially wear and tear costs, there simply is no incentive to fight in anything bigger than a cobra or Asp.

The earning progression simply plateaus for combat once you get to a viper or cobra, sure the bigger ships kill faster but big ships with big bounties are rather rare when what should happen is that their spawning rate should increase with the size of the ship you're flying.

In contrast, the earning potential of trading (which I like) increases the higher you go, once in a t9 you'll be making a heck of a lot more credits than in an Anaconda and that's a problem that needs to be addressed and NOT by nerfing trading.
 
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