Frontier literally have no idea how to balance roles (not hyperbole, evidence inside)

[CMDR Malkov]

I have a lot of faith in the Frontier development team BUT it is getting hard to see where they are going with things lately. I'm enjoying PP and the increased interaction between players that it has brought BUT it almost seems like FD want to stifle this rather than encourage it. The balancing atm just seems to push players towards trading, farming and solo as it's almost impossible to succeed or compete in any other way.

If we want our chosen power to flourish or even survive do we really have to spend the majority of every cycle:
- Sitting docked waiting for another assignment to truck in a desperate attempt to fortify impossibly high triggers
- Trading or smuggling so we can afford to fast track and avoid the above
- Watching helplessly as traders/farmers/5th columns push useless preparation targets out of mischief or ignorance
- Attempting to expand so we don't die, knowing that each expansion just makes our situation worse

Ok, PP was inevitably going to involve some grind and to some extent be a numbers game but the balancing seems to be pushing it further in this direction.
FD are clearly not idiots so I have to assume that this direction is intentional, I just don't understand why.
My fear is that more and more players will see PP as a set of tasks that get ever more impossible and just stop bothering to engage with it.

 

[CYB34]

It's what happens when you try to transition from a single player game to MMO

 

[DJ]

Most games have difficulty settings, how is ED roleplay any different?

Attaining perfect balance without yawn-inducing identikit characters and loadouts is a myth.

However, the PP merit system needs refining I agree.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

Do you think they intended for there to such a big disparity in Powerplay between trading and combat expansion? Given Frontier's apparent Patreus love, I really doubt it

That's PP and that certainly will get re-balanced quite a bit during these two months till next update.

- - - Updated - - -

Why? I'd love to see where they said they weren't intended to be remotely close but that aside, why does it hurt the games chances to be extended beyond basic features?

Because for each feature they add it has to be re-balanced to keep close balance between roles - if FD would have tried to do it. Thankfully, they don't.

 

[Derath]

Because for each feature they add it has to be re-balanced to keep close balance between roles - if FD would have tried to do it. Thankfully, they don't.

You make a good point, though I can't resist saying... They added features for roles?

 

[Parmo]

Speculation is fine, but saying they don't care or they dont know their game is really a hyperbole in my book. Lot of actually good data can get overlooked because such titles or claims attract toxic crowd.

Toxic crowd? Hyperbole?

 

[Whiterose]

The game isn't fun when you're making 200,000 cr/hr trying to play the game your way when the space trucker overlords are buying 100 anacondas and eating prime space rib in their space trucks made of solid space gold

yup this game is real fun wow so cool

I spent an hour last night hunting down a particular deserter. I made 43K from the bounty, and 78K from the mission. I enjoyed myself. I didnt think "Oh my God, the traders are making more money than me", I just did what I wanted to do. I dont give a rats rear end what other commanders are doing. As for balance, why? why should everything be balanced? I am happy exploring knowing it wont make me a packet, I dont expect the same returns as hauling 500T of imperial slaves.
Also your sarcasm doesnt really work on this forum as people may take you literally.

 

[Sonoskay]

Lets really truely think about this for a seccond. okay?

Now. Lets start With say.. "Balancing" Mining,
Part of the problem with mining is the Inequality of money making ability just ship to ship. more expensive ships can carry more, Progress more, and get what they need faster.

ok. So We have a variety of minerals Each with varying prices. the more expensive ores being harder to find. The ways to do this would be too... Raise the price of all Minerals, making profits higher. But then you would End up ruining the trade market. If you riase the price of ore, then the metals made from those ores would need to go up as well. And then you would end up making Metals go up in price. I suppose you Could reduce the profit margines for traders in this case. But then you would have a bunch of of traders.
You could make Painite, gold, and Osmosium, ect much more common. And that might work. But then i kinda feel it would cheapen the experience of mining. And would Actually get ridiculously profitable for ships with big cargo holds. and not helping small ship miners much at all..
You could possibly white wash all the prices . supply and demand. all ores are a uniform price. This has the benifate of ruining the econamy, AND making mining pointless.

You could Make it so ore needs less refining. So when you Get a cash of a mineral instead of needing like 10 ore to make a single refined ore, you could make it like. 5 or 6. This is probably the best option. But unless you went nuts with the balancing. the effects would overall be limited. (to be honest this should probably be done. this would help i think) it would NEVER be on par with trading or Bounty hunting

Or. You could start cutting on the money making ability of other professions making dreaded "Grind" So much worse. and having the added benifate of ing everyone off... we saw how well this went with the Bounty hunting bug when power play was released.


My point being. Unless You took away something special from each job, There is no way to make them perfectly Balanced.


Side note : The piracy nerf is one to protect players. I think, Specifically newbies. A Pirate with very few scruples could completely ruin weeks of a players work. Becuase lets be frank. unless you come into the game knowing how to play. it takes a long time to get going.

 

[Parmo]

You forgot the gold leaf toilet paper and ruby encrusted bidet.

I've tried them! Not a pleasant experience!

 

[HeimdallofHavn]

I think Frontier would be the first to admit that roles/careers, powerplay balance are all a work in progress.

Expect adjustments to be made. Braben himself commented on this directly at E3.

Personally I like these continual adjustments and the best darn MP game I played did them weekly - Sometimes putting something a bit out of whack just to test.

Anyhow, NPC pirating needs love.

Frontier talked about an action of "declaring piracy"...

Hopefully more is coming here including NPC's with more valuable cargo.

On edit:

How in the world is it possible to earn 10 million an hour bounty hunting. With RES's having been nerfed I am happy with 1 million an hour. Missions probably pay better for me atm. Which is good, because I also enjoy them more

Cheers.

 

[raok]

I spent an hour last night hunting down a particular deserter. I made 43K from the bounty, and 78K from the mission. I enjoyed myself.

Nice example we have here.


Lets take another player who would like to buy combat rigged Anaconda, and also reach the Elite rank in trading. He needs 1 billion credits, yes the game is GRINDY.


If we take your 43k + 78k = 121k / h
1 billion / 121k = ~8265 hours


Lets say that you play every day 3 hours? For some of us that is a lot.
8265 / 3 = 2755 days.


Lets say that you play 275 days per year, because you have all the rest of your life to live as well.
2755 / 275 = ~10 years.


We both probably agree that the other guy simply has to trade. We both probably agree that, it is not cool.

...

To that mining idea...
Increasing commodity prices is one option, and might be even mandatory at some point. They do not have to increase trade profits, they can still control min and max prices for goods. Well, PP benefits might break this now.

The imporant thing is that by increasing all commodity prices, you improve mining and also piracy income.


Maybe it would be easier to nerf PP benefits in this case?

 

[Soopyyy]

I spent an hour last night hunting down a particular deserter. I made 43K from the bounty, and 78K from the mission. I enjoyed myself. I didnt think "Oh my God, the traders are making more money than me", I just did what I wanted to do. I dont give a rats rear end what other commanders are doing. As for balance, why? why should everything be balanced? I am happy exploring knowing it wont make me a packet, I dont expect the same returns as hauling 500T of imperial slaves.
Also your sarcasm doesnt really work on this forum as people may take you literally.

The major problem is, while those missions and incomes are OK when you only need a couple million to fit out a ship, late game you need to do repeat those same missions 2000 times to make enough money to do ANYTHING. That gets tedious.

 

[who?]

I'm not sure that the aim has ever been to create uniform generation of credits per hour played regardless of activity, rather then a fun game to play.

I would find it rather strange if being an explorer, pirate, smuggler or trader all yielded the same profit per hour.That would be a very strange and very coincidental world. To me it'd also make your choice a bit pointless - "whatever path you take, you'll end up with exactly the same money, so who cares?"

I'd much prefer it if the roles were "balanced" in other ways. Being good at each role yields benefits specific to that role - be an excellent explorer and receive explorer-specific perks, missions, permits, equipment. Trading is (IMO!) the dullest profession, so I don't mind if they get paid more to do it.

 

[Bragor]

I have a lot of faith in the Frontier development team BUT it is getting hard to see where they are going with things lately. I'm enjoying PP and the increased interaction between players that it has brought BUT it almost seems like FD want to stifle this rather than encourage it. The balancing atm just seems to push players towards trading, farming and solo as it's almost impossible to succeed or compete in any other way.

If we want our chosen power to flourish or even survive do we really have to spend the majority of every cycle:
- Sitting docked waiting for another assignment to truck in a desperate attempt to fortify impossibly high triggers
- Trading or smuggling so we can afford to fast track and avoid the above
- Watching helplessly as traders/farmers/5th columns push useless preparation targets out of mischief or ignorance
- Attempting to expand so we don't die, knowing that each expansion just makes our situation worse

Ok, PP was inevitably going to involve some grind and to some extent be a numbers game but the balancing seems to be pushing it further in this direction.
FD are clearly not idiots so I have to assume that this direction is intentional, I just don't understand why.
My fear is that more and more players will see PP as a set of tasks that get ever more impossible and just stop bothering to engage with it.

You're on the spot IMO.

I can only talk for myself, but it gets harder and harder to even log in and do something meaningfull for the power I pledged to, as with the latest increase to fortifiation needs this feels more and more like a chore rather than a game to play for fun, Being pledged to a rather small power which gets beaten by like everyone (I'm pledged to Winters .. and beating the feds seems to be FOTM). That wouldn't be that bad if I'd get rewarded with something usefull. But the bonuses Winters get, compared to what they get with the empire factions, feels kinda unfair. So the way I'm thinking at the moment is, to defect to one of the empire powers (Aisling) once I got my lasers and start a collection of "special items" .. and while I'm in empire, I can work on my elite trading rating as the profits there are unmatched.

So is that the way they intended us to play the game by making certain things being no fun ? If everybody would think along my lines, we'd have 4 powers left all buddies to each other. Boring environment.

But there were alot of threads like this one and yet, FD makes things even worse instead of fixing unbalanced stuff.


What I draw from all of this is, FD must run out of cash .. seems to be the only reason I can think of why they release something as unfinished and unbalanced as PP rather than fixing and balancing PP or careers .. as a marketing point.

 

[Soopyyy]

You're on the spot IMO.

I can only talk for myself, but it gets harder and harder to even log in and do something meaningfull for the power I pledged to, as with the latest increase to fortifiation needs this feels more and more like a chore rather than a game to play for fun, Being pledged to a rather small power which gets beaten by like everyone (I'm pledged to Winters .. and beating the feds seems to be FOTM). That wouldn't be that bad if I'd get rewarded with something usefull. But the bonuses Winters get, compared to what they get with the empire factions, feels kinda unfair. So the way I'm thinking at the moment is, to defect to one of the empire powers (Aisling) once I got my lasers and start a collection of "special items" .. and while I'm in empire, I can work on my elite trading rating as the profits there are unmatched.

So is that the way they intended us to play the game by making certain things being no fun ? If everybody would think along my lines, we'd have 4 powers left all buddies to each other. Boring environment.

But there were alot of threads like this one and yet, FD makes things even worse instead of fixing unbalanced stuff.


What I draw from all of this is, FD must run out of cash .. seems to be the only reason I can think of why they release something as unfinished and unbalanced as PP rather than fixing and balancing PP or careers .. as a marketing point.

Their financials were made public last week. They're actually doing really well.

 

[smokingrabit]

yeah elite make publishers seem like they know what people want

 

[Sendraks]

This cycle the combat powers are already finding it harder and harder to meet their expansion targets as players realise it's simply an incredibly suboptimal way of earning merits. Moreover, the empire's massive success can be directly linked to their inability to effectively undermine or oppose one another. Arrissa and Aisling should be at each others throats but undermining or opposing via piracy is simply so difficult and unrewarding almost no one is doing it!

This!
FD need to look at the meta of powerplay and make some changes to how the Empire factions interact with each other. Currently it is 4 Empire factions pretty much vs 2 Fed factions and with the two fed factions being larger, defeat is inevitable as expansions cannot be sustained past a certain point.

It would make sense, once one Empire faction starts to come out ahead as larger and more potent than the others, that the daggers start to come out from the other Empire leaders.

 

[Glenn Ross]

I spent an hour last night hunting down a particular deserter. I made 43K from the bounty, and 78K from the mission. I enjoyed myself. I didnt think "Oh my God, the traders are making more money than me", I just did what I wanted to do. I dont give a rats rear end what other commanders are doing. As for balance, why? why should everything be balanced? I am happy exploring knowing it wont make me a packet, I dont expect the same returns as hauling 500T of imperial slaves.

THIS! +Rep for CMDR Whiterose.
Take a leaf out of the poem "Desiderata" the rest of you.

If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Nice example we have here.


Lets take another player who would like to buy combat rigged Anaconda, and also reach the Elite rank in trading. He needs 1 billion credits, yes the game is GRINDY.


If we take your 43k + 78k = 121k / h
1 billion / 121k = ~8265 hours


Lets say that you play every day 3 hours? For some of us that is a lot.
8265 / 3 = 2755 days.


Lets say that you play 275 days per year, because you have all the rest of your life to live as well.
2755 / 275 = ~10 years.


We both probably agree that the other guy simply has to trade. We both probably agree that, it is not cool.

...

To that mining idea...
Increasing commodity prices is one option, and might be even mandatory at some point. They do not have to increase trade profits, they can still control min and max prices for goods. Well, PP benefits might break this now.

The imporant thing is that by increasing all commodity prices, you improve mining and also piracy income.


Maybe it would be easier to nerf PP benefits in this case?

And so once you start doing one profession, you are stuck with it and can't do anything else? And if someone is working towards getting Elite in Trading, they'd better be working on more than 121KCr/h. I was doing a lot better than that in an ASP! When I an seriously going for that Elite, I'll be doing it in a T9 or better and should be looking at something in the region of 5-6MCr/h with already having got to 30MCr or more on the journey.
.
You don't seem to get the idea of using the proper tools for the job, and just take Cr/h as the yardstick that traders are beating you about the head with. I don't suppose that many traders are actually trading becasue they love doing it, we're mostly saving up for stuff and it's the quickest way of doing so - especially if you [like me] have zero interest in combat (PVP or otherwise). I'm not skilled in it, I don't like it, and I don't want to do it. Therefore Pirating and Bounty Hunting are closed professions to me. What else do you want me to do? Mining?
.
I'm primarily an explorer. I don't give a rodent's rectum whether I am making the maximum possible number of credits per hour, I'm doing something I find relaxing and enjoyable [and indeed, wonderous!]. I find being the equivalent of a "Eddie Stobart" driver to be frustrating, boring, tedious, and dull. If it wasn't for the money and the desire to get to Elite in trading eventually, I wouldn't do it. Therefore I want to make as much as possible in as short a time as possible so I can get back to what I actually enjoy doing in the game.
.
If you add in enjoyment to your "Balance" equation, trading is nowhere near as unbalanced as you think.

 

[Aewarin Jameson]

So many talented developers on these forums who know exactly how to do a huge project like this.
I look forward to seeing all their personal projects getting finished in the near future.
I expect an influx of top notch AAA rated space sims next year.

Strawman - one does not need to know how to cook to know food tastes bad; likewise if the game is not balanced one does jot need to know how to code to offer an opinion.

I personally couldnt fix ED problems as I left my coding days back with the Z80 but that still means I can have an opinion, just like the others.

Now, maybe your beef is in the way on which the argument is being presented in which case I agree - some people (myself included) can be a little melodramatic and argumentative

 

[raok]

If you add in enjoyment to your "Balance" equation, trading is nowhere near as unbalanced as you think.

The fact that trading is awful, is no reason to make it most profitable. Basically it just means that it is very very VERY bad game design, and FD should rework it.

Balance is another subject.


edit.

One more thing. Elite trading could be always like it is today. But as we know it is the most boring thing to do in Elite. Still it is a mandatory thing to do. Why then not provide us something more fun to do?

A game that forces you to do something really boring most of the time VS a game that is enjoyable from beginning to the end.

Which one you think most would like to play?