Balancing of the credit income

[Aewarin Jameson]

The galaxy would be real boring if everyone was a trucker. I doubt there will ever be total parity but the disparity right now is immense.

True.

However an alternative to balancing the roles in terms of wealth what about including your reputation and rating into the argument ? (something I proposed to FD sometime ago but could have been missed)

• All ships are prices as they are.
• Components are categorised according to function (Combat / exploration / trade)
• As your rating rises you receive a discount from the vendors.
• As your faction rises you gain a further discount from the right systems

You could end up with a fully kitted out Asp that started at 500m (for example) being sold to a veteran, well liked Federation pilot for 75m.

Then you don't need to balance the roles simply adjust the discounts.

/2cs.

 

[Bearded Rooster]

im also in the boat of i dont care if trading makes more than (insert job title). but as it stands it makes way to much. tbh i believe there just needs to be a better incentive to pirate. a increase in pirate activity both player and npc will have a huge impact on the market. there will be more pirates so trading will slow down reducing the amount of credits players make and increasing the risk of trading(making it less dull) pirates will be gaining bounties which means there are more wanted players and npcs so bounty hunters will have more to shoot at and mining and exploring are in their own boat.

the best part of what i propose is all you are doing is changing one aspect of the game to "balance" the scales so that trading is still going to be on top but slows down. and raises the value of BH and piracy.

 

[Wulfpewpew]

Bountyhunting is for me atm 300-400k per hour, depending on the spawn. Just for your numbers in the startpost.

Beside that you are right, the scaling is wrong. The problem here is probably, that its easy to take out the most expensive ship, already with a 300k Cobra. If those ships would be far more dangerous, so that you could start doing pythons with an ASP for example, and Anacondas far later, those ships then easily could have bounties of 300k and more.

But tbh I have no real solution for this. THe onlything would be: Increase Pyhton and ANaconda spawns with high bounty.

 

[NeilSenn]

Permanent ship destruction should have been implemented to begin with.

Right now, fighting is a repetitive way to make low wages. Not a heart racing battle with dire consequences.
If they make ship destruction permanent, they could implement higher bounties and salvaging for modules, making all forms of combat a viable (but risky) profession.
It adds a sense of role playing. The ship feels real. When you lose one, you buy a NEW one, give it a paint job, try a new loadout... Not just respawn for a small fee.
engaging a pilot becomes exciting, winning is awesome, losing is devastating, getting a new ship is a reason to accumulate wealth etc etc etc....
Making money more vital to accumulate would be a good thing all around. You would be mining and trading for a purpose. Stack and equip some ships for combat.
As it stands, who would choose mining and trading over combat if combat paid more? Immersion is the word of the day...

 

[DaveB]

100% disagree with OP. This entire thread is based on the false premise that making profit is the only way to "progress"

If you're good enough, you can become Elite in a sidey.

 

[QziQza]

Nope. DB has said that he doesn't want any one style of gameplay to be more profitable than another. Expect balancing.

Piracy, unless very organised, shouldnt return the same amount of wealth as someone who is trading in a large freighter, i'm guessing earning potential is set by the ship you fly. Pirates in Type 9's and bounty hunters in condas doesnt really fit the role or playstyle. Not unless it is maybe a shared type 9 as part of a pirate clan, or an upscaled bounty hunter organisation that hires itself out as a small navy. cost to run/cr earning potential seems to fit with the rolls as is, well at least for the ships we currently have in game, maybe that will change when they bring in some more models amd introduce coop modes.

 

[JeffersonFlight]

The galaxy would be real boring if everyone was a trucker. I doubt there will ever be total parity but the disparity right now is immense.



Trading isn't going the extra mile. Trading is like falling off your seat and landing into money. It takes a lot more effort to be a pirate or a bounty hunter and those are probably the least rewarding and most high risk jobs atm. Granted they're a lot less dull.

How do you figure? Tons of people don't use or rely on trade tools. So it isn't "falling off your seat into money".

 

[changtau2005]

100% disagree with OP. This entire thread is based on the false premise that making profit is the only way to "progress"

If you're good enough, you can become Elite in a sidey.

I think the OP is addressing the scaling of different professions, rather than whether it's possible to reach Elite or not in the default ship. Say you want to go to Tokyo, you'd probably want to walk to the bus terminal/underground, then take the train, then take the bullet train/airplane, rather than taking a month to walk hundreds (or thousands) of miles. You could walk/swim all the way, but it's a stupid thing to do.

Multipliers should be introduced for bounties so it encourages teamwork to take down contract targets rather than jockeying for last-hit like MOBAs, which should present significantly more challenge than what they are now. Wings would let any ship become a viable target for pirates - right now, why would you attack an Anaconda when you could only scoop ~20 cargo? With wings, you could attack one and 4 of you could each scoop 20.

IMO trading should always be the highest earner, by a significant margin - how else are traders going to afford escorts, if and when Wings becomes reality and pirate attacks become coordinated? In the current situation, trading incomecannot let even the most high-earning trader pay even just one player as much as he could earn from simply bounty hunting without eating say, 25% of profits - there is no incentive to fly escort duty. For the average trader, that's probably 50% of profits - no sane trader would sacrifice that much.

Escort duty is space trucking without hauling goods, unless you're flying a high-risk route. How many players would want to do that? Also, hiring for escort duty means exposing your trade route - what's stopping the escort from selling route data for say, 10 million credits? I'd buy a 3kCr/t route for that in a heartbeat. What's stopping him from backstabbing you by telling pirates that you're hauling some high-value goods in some freighter?

I'll be brutally honest - unless you are looking for player interaction, there is zero incentive for a trader to be playing in open. Not may people are willing to lose hours (and I do mean hours) of work for more 'fun and excitement', but pirates need traders and bounty hunters need pirates. Once all this multiplayer stuff gets introduced, unless some mechanism is in place for traders to defend themselves effectively, you'll see more and more of us joining PvE groups or solo mode, because even armed freighters stand a ghost of a chance against more than one attacker at a time in the current meta. There needs to be some sort of mechanism to defend against wolf-pack tactics and dumbfire spam (think flak cannons).

So, as it stands, trading income is fine and other sources need to scale more. But hopefully the changes to come would make every role more interesting to play.

 

[Toscaner]

True.

However an alternative to balancing the roles in terms of wealth what about including your reputation and rating into the argument ? (something I proposed to FD sometime ago but could have been missed)

• All ships are prices as they are.
• Components are categorised according to function (Combat / exploration / trade)
• As your rating rises you receive a discount from the vendors.
• As your faction rises you gain a further discount from the right systems

You could end up with a fully kitted out Asp that started at 500m (for example) being sold to a veteran, well liked Federation pilot for 75m.

Then you don't need to balance the roles simply adjust the discounts.

/2cs.

i like that.

(but it's actually just another way of balancing the income, more subtle though)

generally i worry less about the disparity now, but i still think it's too big with a factor 5 or more.

 

[thesonandheir]

+1

Combat Bonds deffo need buffing - 3k Eagles and 3k Condas do not make sense.

Bounty Hunting is reasonable after the tweaks in Gamma - by far the most fun to be had.


Mining is boring, they should realise this and make improvements here.

Not tried Pirating, sounds ok apart from scooping up cargo, again FD should try to improve the experience for the pirate (possibly by allowing the pirate to demand a CR transfer instead of dropped cargo), this would also make trading more dangerous simultaneously balancing it more.


Still a great game though, much more to come here.

 

[crushdepth]

Nope. DB has said that he doesn't want any one style of gameplay to be more profitable than another. Expect balancing.

If bounty hunting paid as much as trading, noone would trade.

 

[Bearded Rooster]

i like the idea of having pirates being paid off in credits and not just cargo. such as you start blasting away at a npc/player they send the pirate a voucher saying "if you let me live you may have X credits" and if they kill the individual then the voucher is lost.

 

[Darkfyre99]

Hello guys,

I've played E since a month now and have to say I really enjoy this game

But there's one point where I see a problem - the credit income is very imbalanced...

Since the start I've done almost everything in Elite - I transported goods from starport to starport with my Sidewinder, I mined with my Hauler, I hunted pirates, beated Elite Anacondas and fought together with a capital ship over Panem with my Viper, I was a pirate in my Cobra, I traded rare goods in my Type 6, explored the way to VY Canis Majoris with my ASP and atm I'm transporting large amounts of Palladiam with my Lakon Type 7.

All of you know that trading makes the biggest profit - over 2 million per hour with a type 7. And you get similar rewards with trading rare goods.

But everything else is just doesn't worth to start with if you want to get bigger ships. You are more or less forced to do trading.

I'd say there's your problem right there. "If you want to get bigger ships." There is a difference between what you want and what you need. Unless you're a bulk trader, bigger isn't always better in this game, and some careers are simply better for smaller ships. Elite: Dangerous is as much a sim as this is a game, and there is such a thing known as over capitalization. If you want to maximize your income, then don't over capitalize. Fly what makes you the most money, and what you can afford to lose, as opposed to dishing out millions for a status symbol. If you're doing something you hate to so you can afford doing something you love, then maybe you should look at your own choices, including the ship you fly.

I really don't want this game to change, where getting a bigger ship and class "A" equipment always yields better results. I want there to be real choices with real consequences, not all of which are positive ones. I want to be able to fail catastrophically thanks to poorly thought out decisions out of combat, as well as in combat. I know not everyone will agree with me, but that's the kind of game I enjoy playing.

 

[Don_Von_Hulio]

If bounty hunting paid as much as trading, noone would trade.

The people who dont care for combat would.

 

[Darkfyre99]

The people who dont care for combat would.

And then they would be the ones on the forums complaining that they have do all this fighting in order to earn enough money to start, and keep, trading. And how unfair it is. And that all careers should have be equal, and that the game is penalizing them for having larger ships.

 

[Madbeard]

Problem if you do trading the bigger the ship the more cargo you have the more profits you make. If you do combat the bigger the ship the more expensive it is to maintain and you don't make profit. Some people say that is not all about credits. Then stop making threads about never leave dock without enough money. Everything in this game revolves around credits. You need credits constantly if you want to do combat. I mean trading has no maintenance costs other than fuel where combat has a lot and jobs don't pay enough.

 

[Don_Von_Hulio]

Right now, to have a whole lot of money and huge ship is counterproductive at every single task except trading. Mess up fighting and you either lose an unnecessarily expensive ship or obtain a hefty repair bill which will chew into your profit margin, maybe even go negative. We dont even have have all the ships and we desperatley need more.... but we also need more things to do as well, on top of what little we have.

Multi roles and non-trade ships need more reasons to exist and to use. Some may argue, but this game is extremely linear right now, probably the most linear game ive ever played that wasnt on rails.

For logistics sake on average if one was to trade from the time they got a Type 6 and upped to a 7 then 9 so they can get an Anaconda it would take around 80~ hours of straight trading. Then when you get the Conda... well all you can do to stay afloat is keep trading.

 

[Madbeard]

One last thing is that real life mercenaries are paid a lot more than people do in trading so stop making real life comparisons.

 

[Aewarin Jameson]

One last thing is that real life mercenaries are paid a lot more than people do in trading so stop making real life comparisons.

Depends on what you trade.

 

[SE-Apocalypse]

Problem if you do trading the bigger the ship the more cargo you have the more profits you make. If you do combat the bigger the ship the more expensive it is to maintain and you don't make profit. Some people say that is not all about credits. Then stop making threads about never leave dock without enough money. Everything in this game revolves around credits. You need credits constantly if you want to do combat. I mean trading has no maintenance costs other than fuel where combat has a lot and jobs don't pay enough.

Getting killed by pirates IS part of the maintenance costs.