Confession of a shameless Mode Switcher...
- Thread starter DukeIronHand
- Start date
Oh no worries there, FD will find a new time sink. Le sigh.
It still either violates or does not violate the EULA. Once FD says it does, it does. The point remains. In fact, the entire point of my comment is that it doesn't matter if you agree with it. No offense, just being clear.
No problem. It's pretty much a grind now. Always was to a degree? But now, there's no hiding, it's 100% grind. If you don't focus on it, forget really ever having the ability to gain cutter or corvette.
To be fair, this is mostly at the behest of people asking for it. It's this bad, because a portion of the player base feels it's morally obligated to speak for the rest. It hasn't been helping.
That may have been true, but it's pointless shutting the gate, long after many horses have bolted. There are so many, not necessarily because it's easy to gain rank, because it's not at all, but rather because a lot of people had the needed ranks, day one. This tends to be forgotten in the maelstrom of demands to make missions, essentially, irrelevant (shutting the gate).
Instead of making the naval progression mean something; it's essentially just a locked gate to one of two ships. There's zero other value in it. Which makes it a fairly hollow victory to achieve. And it's hollow primarily because when it's just a grind, for the sake of the grind, it's not enjoyable.
I suspect the intent was to make those ships be the end of one enjoyable journey, and the start of the next; only there is no real journey at this point; just incessant grind.
It's been some months, but if memory serves, the final rank to obtain the Cutter/Corvette requires approximately 600 missions, give or take. Consider how long it would take, given your play time - I would guess somewhere between 1-2 months, just for that rank. The one before it is ~475ish, I think.
At 3-4 hours a day, it took me about 5 weeks to do both grinds. Yes, I did them back-to-back, and it was far from the best time I've had in the game. I did some approximation and extrapolation while doing them, and I felt pretty confident that it would take approximately 50% longer at my play time if I just took the Missions as they came along. I am also confident that I could obtain one of these ships in 3-4 months (at approximately 15 hours per week) doing it the *right* way. If you consider ~2000 Missions, at 100 Missions per week, that's 20 weeks, give or take. This is no small amount of time, certainly, but it's a far cry from the years that others are claiming in this thread. I think that the entire issue here is a combination of misperception on the part of a lot of players, and a few errors on FD's part.
If we assume:
Frontier intended these ships to be rare.
Frontier intended for Commanders to have earned enough (just from the Missions) to at least buy the ship soon after achieving the rank, if not right then.
Frontier intended to keep them rare over time utilizing the risk of the large rebuys.
Frontier intended for these ships to be the backbone of wings, not the Solo Player's PvE Juggernaut.
Do I know these things for certain? Of course not, but they make a lot of sense, especially when you look at the whole situation. Unfortunately, the ease of obtaining credits in the current game (even without using the virtual ATM methods) has completely negated 3 of those 4 intentions, and Engineering negated the fourth. Now, these things are prolific, and since the cat is out of the bag at this point, perhaps it's time to take another look at how they are obtained.
Also - a Refresh button is a horrible idea. Can you imagine the load on the Mission server if a lot of people are pounding on this button repeatedly? You know it would happen, and so do I. We both should also know that there might be some groups of people that might try to utilize that load to grief. Pass.
A better solution is a Mission filter - you choose the type from a dropdown (which already exists, it just doesn't work the way I think it should), and the Mission system only gives you that type of Mission. The caveat, is that it doesn't give you as many. So, with the filter, you get 5-8 of your preferred type (no, it shouldn't be any higher than that), and you can then choose to wait until it refreshes (mode-switching would no longer work, ideally), you can start working the Missions you have, and pick up more at one of the destinations, or you can go to another location to try to get 5-8 more. Make your choices, or better said, choose the jobs you want to do, and filter out the chaff.
Riôt
At 3-4 hours a day, it took me about 5 weeks to do both grinds. Yes, I did them back-to-back, and it was far from the best time I've had in the game. I did some approximation and extrapolation while doing them, and I felt pretty confident that it would take approximately 50% longer at my play time if I just took the Missions as they came along. I am also confident that I could obtain one of these ships in 3-4 months (at approximately 15 hours per week) doing it the *right* way. If you consider ~2000 Missions, at 100 Missions per week, that's 20 weeks, give or take. This is no small amount of time, certainly, but it's a far cry from the years that others are claiming in this thread. I think that the entire issue here is a combination of misperception on the part of a lot of players, and a few errors on FD's part.
If we assume:
Frontier intended these ships to be rare.
Frontier intended for Commanders to have earned enough (just from the Missions) to at least buy the ship soon after achieving the rank, if not right then.
Frontier intended to keep them rare over time utilizing the risk of the large rebuys.
Frontier intended for these ships to be the backbone of wings, not the Solo Player's PvE Juggernaut.
Do I know these things for certain? Of course not, but they make a lot of sense, especially when you look at the whole situation. Unfortunately, the ease of obtaining credits in the current game (even without using the virtual ATM methods) has completely negated 3 of those 4 intentions, and Engineering negated the fourth. Now, these things are prolific, and since the cat is out of the bag at this point, perhaps it's time to take another look at how they are obtained.
Also - a Refresh button is a horrible idea. Can you imagine the load on the Mission server if a lot of people are pounding on this button repeatedly? You know it would happen, and so do I. We both should also know that there might be some groups of people that might try to utilize that load to grief. Pass.
A better solution is a Mission filter - you choose the type from a dropdown (which already exists, it just doesn't work the way I think it should), and the Mission system only gives you that type of Mission. The caveat, is that it doesn't give you as many. So, with the filter, you get 5-8 of your preferred type (no, it shouldn't be any higher than that), and you can then choose to wait until it refreshes (mode-switching would no longer work, ideally), you can start working the Missions you have, and pick up more at one of the destinations, or you can go to another location to try to get 5-8 more. Make your choices, or better said, choose the jobs you want to do, and filter out the chaff.
Riôt
It's approximately 600 missions for the final rank, assuming 'medium' influence. Low influence is nearly twice that.
This is assuming that in the above, you only operate from federal bases, and only ever except federal missions, for example. You ignored anything that wasn't, which you surely won't be doing if you're not really focusing on this. If you're doing more than a few missions per session, then you're focusing on missions, and the entire argument falls over.
So, if we assume say 5-6 sessions a week, which is possibly on the high side for a non-trivial portion of the player base, with realistically three or four missions over that entire week actually contributing, given you'll be in non-aligned systems at times, and non major powered aligned stations, and factions, and you're not particularly focusing on who you're doing missions for, never mind that for a large portion of time, you won't even be doing missions, then at 600 odd missions for the final rank alone, that's at least six months or so. Just for that final rank unlock.
In short, unless you place some sort of focus on rank progression, it's going to be much longer than you think. Arguably if you're pulling more than a dozen missions a week for a major faction, the focus is at least in part, doing that. It's not "casually" as part of normal play.
And anyone exploring can gain some influence handing in data; but the entire time they are out in the deep? Zero rank progression. Zip. Nada. Zilch. In short? I believe you are simply assuming based on "50% time spent dedicated on making missions a priority for chosen major power" is somehow identical to "normal play". Whatever that even means.
Frankly? Mission system needs an overhaul and frontier has to stop listening to edge-case complaints that are resulting in the outcome that commanders essentially have to focus on specific mission types, for specific factions, for considerable periods, to make inroads.
It should not take grind. Commitment? Sure. But the two are not the same, despite endless statements that they are. Indeed, it's these sort of assumptions that have lead us to this very outcome. Which is why I have very little patience for them.
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2 years to get the ranks for a Corvette playing casually? Sounds about right to me. They are not meant to be easy to get.
Sure... but I've been playing since beta and I'm still nowhere close and I do preference missions that count.
This may be true, but Frontier shot themselves (and us) in the foot by having those ranks accrue rapidly in earlier times. Quite a few had Cutter and Corvette early on, and had I focused on both much earlier, it would have taken far less time. The joy of hindsight, I guess.
But there is still considerably flawed assumption that it's just a few months of 'normal play' to gain a Cutter or Corvette. It certainly isn't. Not now. Hasn't been in a long time. Unless one essentially bases out of a port that has a high faction count for either chosen major power, and spends at least one-two sessions each week purely working on naval progression, it will be a very, very long time.
Assuming it's trivial to achieve this during 'normal play' is a common thing; it's not automatically a correct thing, though.
I can't find a relevant research, but that sounds like 12 times the time a usual gamer plays a usual game. Considering that FPSs nowadays have around 10 hours of gameplay... And Elite has even less of unique gameplay if you don't count getting there and searching for it.
BTW, I refuse to count looking at things (guardian ruins, Thargoid sites...) as gameplay, though Elite is making it the point of the game.
lol, good luck getting a PS4 player to spend 2 years in one game just to get one toy.
Thing is, that's two years without exploits if you focus. I've been playing longer and am still quite a ways away.
It is entirely possible to use a time-based seed with a keyed hash component, and use NTP to sync all the servers' clocks to real-time within a few microseconds, well under the ping time between servers. Amazon don't do it by default, but some other providers do and NTP servers are close enough to each datacentre to do it even better.
They are generative. Done correctly, they would not require explicit sync except for BGS and PowerPlay ticks.
Honestly by this point the mission system probably needs refactoring after 2.4. There's quite a few areas it's not so good. (Sorry, Dominic, but I've got a pretty good sense from the outside that it's grown into a Frankensteinian monster.)
Mode switching has been used since we've had a mission system in ED, including its previous iteration, largely as a re-roll because the mission system is honestly so bad it frequently does not even generate missions (admit it: you've seen at least one 0-board), or generates boards which are so poor we wouldn't want them.
IMO, the mission count should be substantially increased so we don't need to re-roll: 20, 30 missions should be available, at least half of which are available to the player and not rank-locked. Players should always feel they have some good option with the board they could pick up at any moment which could take them to another station, at which they also have a good option to take them on, so they don't spend ages in one place and the grind gets boring. The mission system is often not great at that, especially not long after a server reset, without a few re-rolls.
Failing that, a refresh option should be implemented (with a timer of say 10 seconds or so to prevent overload)?
Op is not talking about credits. He's talking about rank.
This guy (gal?) gets it. The entire artificial constraint of supply (presumably to try and stop people making profit at any point) has resulted in something of a frakenstein, that typically has few missions, unless in a specific state, with a long list of BGS exceptions going on to facilitate a single outcome.
The rest of the time, if the board isn't empty, it's full of linked missions that have no bearing on the prior mission, and cause the boards to 'stall' and not refresh at all. "Hey, thanks for getting that intel to us, can you go murder some punk two systems over now, since we know they're a bad egg? no? How about we never stop asking, does that work? I mean we won't offer you anything else, so it's that or nothing else I am afraid".
It's pretty clear the entire thing is now just endless cobbled together snippets of code and functionality that's just fundimentally busted. And yeah, just a ton of work, let people pick and choose the stuff they want to do (shock, imagine if people could do the stuff they like doing? I know, crazy idea, but it just might work).
1st of all keep in mind that becoming Admiral in real life is a thing that takes decades and is the end point of a marvelous career.
2ndly a cramped attempt to gain ranks is a way that is hard and full of frustration. I became Prince while trading rares across imperial space.
I had no home, tramped from station to station. Did a mission here, set a donation there. Ranks came in naturally and with no grind at all.
Maybe this way locks out frustration even if it takes some time to get the rank desired, but mabe also because having so many contacts
raising rank is easier while tramping around.
Regards,
Miklos
2ndly a cramped attempt to gain ranks is a way that is hard and full of frustration. I became Prince while trading rares across imperial space.
I had no home, tramped from station to station. Did a mission here, set a donation there. Ranks came in naturally and with no grind at all.
Maybe this way locks out frustration even if it takes some time to get the rank desired, but mabe also because having so many contacts
raising rank is easier while tramping around.
Regards,
Miklos
I'll also keep in mind that one does not obtain the rank of Admiral by working as a private contractor.
basically the current architecture how missions are created is limiting this type of solution. In the end the missioning is to be reworked from scratch and the day Froentier comes to the point willing to do that I will vote for those 65000 persistent stations, each one holding their mission queue that is visible and every time a mission is taken a new one will be created and mission board gets updated.
Means if a Commander is waiting to long to take a mission it might vanish an no longer is available. (Risk and reward). Then mission board updates and dependent on mission traffic it might look quite different.
That will also fully obsolete any mode swithing because the mission board is unique to this station regardless from where you are looking at it.
But this is a different aproach and huge amount of work (iventing the wheel a second time) and can only appear on a major release (Season 4,5,6,...?)
Currently, maybe you will get some cosmetic improvements but the missioning will nearly stay the same and the mode switching abuse will fill your stacked mission queue to gain advantage over other
commanders in profit and rank if they choose not to abuse the system.
Regards,
Miklos