Does Frontier intend players to get Elite exploration within a week?

Should players be able to rank up to Elite in exploration within a week using the new passenger miss

  • Yes

    Votes: 61 22.8%
  • No

    Votes: 207 77.2%

  • Total voters
    268
  • Poll closed .
I don t care how other people plays but this way of increasing rank - not being compatible with my vision of the game - should be fixed

This is how i summarize your post after a very fast reading of it

Anyway yes : it should be like this considering that i was at 50÷ pioneer after endless sequence of Scan scoop jump scansione scoop jump... got it

Fast-tracking or grinding to get a rank is just that. It's largely irrelevant how you actually go about doing it so long as it's the most effective and fastest way.

I'm perfectly fine with people doing exploration related passenger missions and gaining Elite exploration rank with it. The discrepancy pointed out in the OP is in the rate at which it can be accomplished, not that people might choose to take advantage of it. There's nothing wrong with people playing more effectively in general.

...

To those who don't care or don't have a preference one way or another, clearly there are others that do. Please stop pretending that their preferences don't matter just because you don't agree with them.

Thanks.
 
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No, I understand fully. You are placing excessive value in a meaningless cumulative statistic.

It matters little if it take 12 hours, 12 days or 12 years of elapsed time, if the metric is purely a cumulative total. Which it is.

If exploration or combat or trade rank actually aligned with proficiency, you'd have a valid point. But, it doesn't...

No. It seems that you do not understand, even though you think you do.
It doesn't have to be about requiring abnormal skill. Perseverance can also be measured and rewarded.

FD have done the same with exploration that they did with trading. Since missions were added to experience (which they were not in the first year of play), most peoples trading elite rank should rather be called delivery elite.

It is a bit like having a pilgrim route. Pilgrims are supposed to experience, and get the spiritual reward for, the mindless trudge over hundreds of kilometers.
When the leaders of the shrine start laying on a service to bus people there in a few hours, the whole concept is thrown in the dust.


But the primary problem that FD face, is that those players that have joined ED after release are not fans of the game itself, but merely people who expect (demand) it to be like all the other games they have played. With instant gratification.
 
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No. It seems that you do not understand, even though you think you do.
It doesn't have to be about requiring abnormal skill. Perseverance can also be measured and rewarded.

And here is the key problem.
Kofeyh is right, it is a cumulative statistic,
only factoring in revenue from the tasks tied to the job.
Do you understand the problem?
Neither time, nor amount of planets, nor stellar phenomena, nor distance are tracked.
Just cold hard cash.

FD have done the same with exploration that they did with trading. Since missions were added to experience (which they were not in the first year of play), most peoples trading elite rank should rather be called delivery elite.

It is a bit like having a pilgrim route. Pilgrims are supposed to experience, and get the spiritual reward for, the mindless trudge over hundreds of kilometers.
When the leaders of the shrine start laying on a service to bus people there in a few hours, the whole concept is thrown in the dust.


But the primary problem that FD face, is that those players that have joined ED after release are not fans of the game itself, but merely people who expect (demand) it to be like all the other games they have played. With instant gratification.

You put too much value in these rankings.
I do not argue against them resemble a pilgrimage or something,
but the tracking process is too simple and lazy for that.

There.
Now you have got a spot to apply leverage to FD evolving the mechanic.
Looking forward to sensible suggestions;)
 
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well, i can assure you that this subject was brought up multiple times - every time when in some thread anyone of FDEV posted "passenger missions should now award progress in the correct rank" etc. ---- so i can only think, it was intentional, maybe not to the extend it is, but generally speaking.

which means 2 of 3 ranks now have shortcuts. you can get elite in trading with skipping many aspects of the trade game by missions, and you can get elite in exploration with skipping many aspects of exploration by playing passenger missions in the bubble. now we only need a shortcut for elite in combat and cqc/arena.

for combat, i suggest that the payout for skimmer missions is converted into "experience points" - 1 mio in skimmer missions = 100 EP, so you would need 20-25 mio in skimmer missions to go from deadly to dangerous.

for CQC/arena i would suggest, that every 15 minutes you wait for a match you get 1 rank awarded.

that would open up for interesting games-in-the-game, like "from start to quadruple elite in 24 hours"-youtube videos. I'll put up a suggestion in the suggestion subforum.
 
ELITE? Within a WEEK??

I'm all for giving people realistic goals but a WEEK... for ELITE?!?!

I had no idea this was a thing. IMO Elite should take months. David Braben never even got to Elite in the old games (admittedly because he kept changing things and having to work on other things, but still... if you could have knocked it out in a week I think a lot of people would have been put off
 
It's just a prime example of how little consideration and attention is given to exploration design and mechanics. While the new exploration mission rewards are somewhat high imo, they are in a way a kind of monetary apology for the previous 2 years of excessively low rewards for exploration. However the monetary requirement for exploration rank was not raised to match the rate of progress, so here we are.

I think they monetary requirement for Elite rank in Exploration should be raised from 150 million to 600 million. And the scan data rewards should be like wise quadrupled. The Passenger Mission rewards should probably also be cut by 30-50%. At this point there will be a balance between the reward from normal exploration and running passenger missions.
 
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well, i can assure you that this subject was brought up multiple times - every time when in some thread anyone of FDEV posted "passenger missions should now award progress in the correct rank" etc. ---- so i can only think, it was intentional, maybe not to the extend it is, but generally speaking.

which means 2 of 3 ranks now have shortcuts. you can get elite in trading with skipping many aspects of the trade game by missions, and you can get elite in exploration with skipping many aspects of exploration by playing passenger missions in the bubble. now we only need a shortcut for elite in combat and cqc/arena.

for combat, i suggest that the payout for skimmer missions is converted into "experience points" - 1 mio in skimmer missions = 100 EP, so you would need 20-25 mio in skimmer missions to go from deadly to dangerous.

for CQC/arena i would suggest, that every 15 minutes you wait for a match you get 1 rank awarded.

that would open up for interesting games-in-the-game, like "from start to quadruple elite in 24 hours"-youtube videos. I'll put up a suggestion in the suggestion subforum.

25 mio to go from deadly to dangerous? Isnt that a bit harsh a punishment? :p
 
Took this a few minutes ago:

Account last reset on November 22nd, 2014 and includes some degree of idle time after passive rep decay was introduced, but doesn't include any of the significant time I've spent in the Betas since, so is a fairly accurate representation of the time I've played in the last 26 months.

I can sink six to eight hours a day into a game I like and still not have it be the majority of my free time...which is all of my time, baring those unfortunate biological imperatives.

Work was always something I saw as an annoyance and once I had enough money, I stopped. Likewise, I've never been particularly keen on the idea of children. My wife, though she's more amicable to the idea, isn't willing to sacrifice her own career for it and will likely be too old to be comfortable having them (for medical reasons) by the time she gains tenure and has the time. Maybe we'll adopt at some point.

So anyway, I manage my ~2000 hours of Elite: Dangerous per year because I have ~9.3 times as much free time as yourself.

Well done Sir!

Rep'ed, not for spending so much time on a game but for having engineered your life to be able to do so.

You should write a book! (EDIT : But that might take up too much of your time.)
 
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ELITE? Within a WEEK??

I'm all for giving people realistic goals but a WEEK... for ELITE?!?!

I had no idea this was a thing. IMO Elite should take months. David Braben never even got to Elite in the old games (admittedly because he kept changing things and having to work on other things, but still... if you could have knocked it out in a week I think a lot of people would have been put off

Even within a few days according to some, maybe over a weekend. I wouldn't know for sure since I don't care to test it out and have too high of a rank to effectively do so anyway.
 
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I think it's odd to present this as a poll, with such a leading question.

Should players be able to get to Elite Exploration with 170 hours of playtime dedicated to exploration? Same question, different words...

If you think there's a bug, report it as a bug.
 
It's just a prime example of how little consideration and attention is given to exploration design and mechanics. While the new exploration mission rewards are somewhat high imo, they are in a way a kind of monetary apology for the previous 2 years of excessively low rewards for exploration. However the monetary requirement for exploration rank was not raised to match the rate of progress, so here we are.

I think they monetary requirement for Elite rank in Exploration should be raised from 150 million to 600 million. And the scan data rewards should be like wise quadrupled. The Passenger Mission rewards should probably also be cut by 30-50%. At this point there will be a balance between the reward from normal exploration and running passenger missions.

At least you explorers have a rank,
don't get me started on smuggling and criminal ranks,
which are non-existant. Although they have been
asked for at least since gamma.
 
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well, i can assure you that this subject was brought up multiple times - every time when in some thread anyone of FDEV posted "passenger missions should now award progress in the correct rank" etc. ---- so i can only think, it was intentional, maybe not to the extend it is, but generally speaking.

...

Sorry for any confusion. This thread is about the extent of discrepancy and rate and whether or not people prefer it as it is now or not – a few days is within a week. I was perhaps being somewhat overly conservative in my estimates.
 
Sorry for any confusion. This thread is about the extent of discrepancy and rate and whether or not people prefer it as it is now or not – a few days is within a week. I was perhaps being somewhat overly conservative in my estimates.

If it helps I voted no on the basis of the mission part of the question (or the whole question), not the time part in particular.
 
Even within a few days according to some, maybe over a weekend. I wouldn't know for sure since I don't care to test it out and have too high of a rank to effectively do so anyway.

Well sightseeing mid to long range can have anywhere from 1 - 15 million payout per mission. 156.5 million is Exploration elite. So yeah, it's doable if you stack 'em right and do nothing else I suppose. And ofc I'm not counting the actual exploration money you get from honking between your sightseeing stops.
 
If it helps I voted no on the basis of the mission part of the question (or the whole question), not the time part in particular.

It's relevant, but not what I was specifically trying to address. Sorry. Passenger missions just happen to be the method of operation.
 
It's just a prime example of how little consideration and attention is given to exploration design and mechanics. While the new exploration mission rewards are somewhat high imo, they are in a way a kind of monetary apology for the previous 2 years of excessively low rewards for exploration. However the monetary requirement for exploration rank was not raised to match the rate of progress, so here we are.

I think they monetary requirement for Elite rank in Exploration should be raised from 150 million to 600 million. And the scan data rewards should be like wise quadrupled. The Passenger Mission rewards should probably also be cut by 30-50%. At this point there will be a balance between the reward from normal exploration and running passenger missions.

Not sure about the top bracket for exploration, though with payment increases that you suggest I could see that working. As for the sightseeing missions, they should lower the percentage it accounts to exploration rank. 1:1 is crazy, and even 50% is quite insane. Either that, or they should make them hire crew befitting the fare I took. If a CEO wants to go sightseeing, I should be required to at least have flight crew on board, because I highly doubt said VIP is happy just sitting in the cabin rattling left and right as I Buckyball the ship around an M dwarf for refueling.
 
Still on Pioneer? I'm on my first exploration trip ever, and still carrying my first long range passenger, and I've just been promoted to Ranger after selling normal data at some of the Colonia waystations. Lots of water worlds, 2 ELWs (one of which was a Neutron star ELW), 2 Ammonia worlds and maybe a dozen Neutron stars. I wasn't even planning on going to Colonia but I set out ill-equipped (no AFMU) and diverted after 10k to the nearest waystation and then Neutron highwayed up to Colonia to refit at Jacques. I've basically turned a 28kly trip into a 49kly trip.

10fqdjo.png


I'm now back on course, about 5k out from my passenger destination which is about 14k out from the bubble. I am sticking to F,G,K and non sequence stars, and if I can make it back to home station without being scanned it should pay about 14 million, I'll be interested to see how it affects my rank.
 
Why not? If someone has flown the required number of systems or distance or whatever is required within a week what's the problem? It's only a badge anyway if that's you're end goal then the game is going to be pretty thin up top for you.

Literally this game seems full of people who want other people to abide and or play the way "they" feel other people should.
 
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