Credit 'bugs' are really starting to annoy me
- Thread starter Mrat13
- Start date
So your complaint is that a ship with 64 open seats for passengers picks up 4 going to destination "A" and then looks for other passengers going to the same destination to fill the remaining seats and in doing so makes the same money as a trader who departs from the same station with a cargo bay full of goods that were in supply, that destination "A" is in demand for, mainly because the "challenge" level of taking off and landing with 64 passengers is less than the challenge of taking off and landing with 64 tons of materials?
Where are you being forced to participate in any one particular career because of credits? I don't trade, mine, or run passenger missions for income, but only when required to support other objectives and I'm not hard pressed for cash. If another CMDR has trading down to a science and can make more in an hour than I can in a week, I'm failing to see how that concerns me much less why I should go all communist and be outraged that anyone is making more than anyone else.
What about exploration then? I mean, anyone can go point and scan a few of the right planets and return with DATA that is much more valuable than most passenger missions and single trade profits, and since the explorer has no cargo or fussy passengers, there is little to no risk of interference from pirates and the like.
While we're at it, there is no reason that passenger missions, exploration, or trading should ever make as much as bounty hunting or handing in combat vouchers, so I'm sure when those whose income largely comes from combat petition FDEV to nerf everything else you will be good with that?
During the weekend after the latest release where passengers payouts where completely out whack, you could get around 450 mil per hour in the right system. I do understand why Frontier wanted to nerf them. I think quince could top out at around 75-80 mil per hour before the nerf, so it's not too far off either. I've been playing since beta, you also had the slave runs and skimmer missions back in the day but I don't remember how much they made when they were the goto money makers.
I couldn't care less as long as I have my trusted 2.5 million credit Viper and a HazRes or Comp Nav nearby, together with the occasional kill pirate lord, kill deserter or kill pirates mission.
That is the beauty of solo or private group and small ships
Oh, and 1.5 million profit are about 10 rebuys...
That is the beauty of solo or private group and small ships
Oh, and 1.5 million profit are about 10 rebuys...
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i should not even be update or 2..... imagine if i found a "semi" persistent group of asteroids with 80% panite..... if FD topped them up with say 150 tons, and i find them by doing a bunch of missions before a contact gives me the location as a "thankyou"
I *could* post that i found them on youtube in which case they would be exhausted within an hr, or i could keep quiet and get them myself..... and once they have given out their 100 tons, they are exhausted and that "gold rush" is wiped from their servers.
For me it's all about balance. There should not be credit fountains that last more than a day or two at most.
The problem is that people start to expect payouts like 70MCr/day. Once they do, all other activities in the game become pointless. There is only the cheesy activity to do, and so that is all they do. The game becomes a 'grind' because 'there is nothing else to do'.
Once they have got whatever they were earning the credits for, then it becomes 'nothing to do', and the whole exercise is re-interpreted as a pointless and boring 'grind'.
Then they tell everyone they know that Elite Dangerous is 'boring', has 'nothing to do' and is 'grindy'. Fewer people play the game.
Personally, I think that is a great shame, is doing E: D and Frontier a great disservice, and is in some small way shortening the life of a game that I think is great and would like to exist for as long as possible.
I wish that the BGS had some sort of automatic reaction to increased commander activity, and reduce mission payouts, increase commodity buy prices, and reduce commodity sell prices. The reverse, where there is little commander activity, would also help remote stations and create incentives to go to more distant places. Think how big the mission payouts would be at Hutton Orbital!
The problem is that people start to expect payouts like 70MCr/day. Once they do, all other activities in the game become pointless. There is only the cheesy activity to do, and so that is all they do. The game becomes a 'grind' because 'there is nothing else to do'.
Once they have got whatever they were earning the credits for, then it becomes 'nothing to do', and the whole exercise is re-interpreted as a pointless and boring 'grind'.
Then they tell everyone they know that Elite Dangerous is 'boring', has 'nothing to do' and is 'grindy'. Fewer people play the game.
Personally, I think that is a great shame, is doing E: D and Frontier a great disservice, and is in some small way shortening the life of a game that I think is great and would like to exist for as long as possible.
I wish that the BGS had some sort of automatic reaction to increased commander activity, and reduce mission payouts, increase commodity buy prices, and reduce commodity sell prices. The reverse, where there is little commander activity, would also help remote stations and create incentives to go to more distant places. Think how big the mission payouts would be at Hutton Orbital!
I have never engaged in any of the get-rich quick schemes. Never really had a need. I have made most of my credits by general trade, bounty hunting, and CGs. Got a bit from the Ram Tah mission, 30 or 40 mil I think, didn't complete it though (might go back to it to try for more). Got 90 mil from a recent exploration trip (had some good luck on terraformable worlds and first discovered bonuses).
I haven't really done too many regular missions. I have done some to get the Sol system permit, doing some now to get some empire rank, and will do more when I need to for other engineers, but my favorite type are the planetary scan missions due to the mats you get just by doing the mission.
It is also my understanding that way back when the game launched, making credits was a genuine struggle, so things could be a whole lot worse.
I haven't really done too many regular missions. I have done some to get the Sol system permit, doing some now to get some empire rank, and will do more when I need to for other engineers, but my favorite type are the planetary scan missions due to the mats you get just by doing the mission.
It is also my understanding that way back when the game launched, making credits was a genuine struggle, so things could be a whole lot worse.
I think you should stop feeling cheated - going to be easier and faster than waiting until all 'differently-legit' methods of obtaining credits are eradicated...
I, on the other hand, feel cheated because traders are able to earn so much more per hour than any other profession. I would like inconsistencies to be fixed too.
Can I counter that argument with this:
This is one of the risk vs reward arenas I will jump into, because not all professions are created equal, and thus should not all pay out equally.
Miners and Traders are exposed to some hazards, but not to the same degree as Bounty Hunters or Mercenaries.
Smugglers run some higher risks that "legitimate" traders, but it is because they choose to do so.
Explorers only real risks are pilot error, or perhaps an alien encounter, but only if they're exploring that part of the galaxy.
That doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement though - consistency being the key factor - If my average mission is paying X, it shouldn't suddenly drop to Y or skyrocket to Z - not without some logical reason behind it. But these kinds of payout variants happen already, and this could certainly use some work. +/-5% or +/- 10% sure, I can buy that. But 100k missions suddenly plummeting to 1000 Cr missions, or shooting up to 1m cr missions.. that's another story.
Regarding your counter argument quotation, how would you go about making that happen?
Regarding the mission payouts, its hard to comment on or assess the reward ranges since I've no idea why mission A pays higher/lower than mission B, only that missions are higher/lower based on rep level, system status, and mission rank.
Generally speaking, outside of governments with a lot of central control over their economies, salaries or costs of services are primarily driven by the available pool of people willing and capable of doing the job. Risk and other variables can factor into the equation, but only if thoses risks/variables are impacting the supply of people available and capable of doing the job. Importance of the job also is mostly a non-factor.
Fire fghters, police officers, and military personnel will never make as much as neuro surgeons or american football players for these reasons.
As for football players making tens of millions per year while active duty combat soldiers make $50 or less, while this seems like an injustice, one could easily make the case that the football players are in fact, under paid.
How many high school football players go on to make it to the NFL? We don't need to look at data to know that it must be a very small percentage, so small in fact that hardly anyone will know someone from their school that made it in the pros.
We can take nearly 100% of high school football players who do not go pro and train them to be effective soldiers, and even provide skills and training to be sucessful and productive citizens. If some of those individuals don't want the job because of the low pay, its not exactly hard to find three or four others that will do it.
In 2015, the Dallas Cowboys pulled in $25 million USD per game, from stadium revenue alone. What is generating $400 million per season? What are people paying for? To watch a relative small group of people play football. The loss of one or two key players can dramaticly swing the fortunes of the team, as will as attendence.
My interpretation of this is that the "gold rush" would be some sort of heavy resource node (asteroid, planetary location, etc), that you could discover through the new suite of exploration tools that they talked about at the expo. You could then share with your friends, or with the world, or keep to yourself. But the key difference between this and current/past exploits...er, um...gold-rushes is that the resource would eventually be depleted through use.
Well, at least this is how i'd like it to pan out...
That's all there is to it, really; simple market forces.
If a thing can generate a heap of cash, the people who help make that thing happen can demand a big chunk of the cash.
In ED there's really not much that players make happen.
Only just started with PowerPlay so I dunno if there's many credits in that.
powerplay is a moneypit
if you want rank 5 you're gonna throw in 100M of your own money and then only make 50M back, which are needed to keep the rank 5. OR you could do it without paying for new commodity allocation and you're a complete, utter nutter.
Utterly pointless. Shooting yourself in the mouth is a more fun activty.
[edit] well, the powerplay locked modules are nice. Some of them. pack hounds, imp hammers, APAs have my approval
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I paid 100,000,000 for my 1st week of rank 5, and since I only required 5334 merits/week to maintain it, or 178 kills/week, it was easy to maintain, so I broke even @ week 2's payout (week 3), up by 50,000,000 forever after, until I wanted to do something else with my limited time.
For me, the turn off was that I was an enemy in all other sectors of the bubble.
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On the flip side, let's pool all those high school football players who actually WANT to go pro..
Right off the bat, the chances of any high school football player making it into the NFL is actually 0%.
Why? The NFL has Draft rules, and the first of these is anyone considered has to have graduated no sooner than 3 years ago. https://www.sbnation.com/nfl-mock-draft/2017/4/27/15391690/nfl-draft-eligibility-players-college
So they might as well go to college, and play there. Now that cuts down the number of potential candidates a good bit, but still leaves a rather large pool of eligible players to choose from - as compared to many other "real" jobs, though there are still draft rules that apply here as well. But once all the requirements are met, the NFL finds it still has an extremely large pool of talent to call upon, and out of those tens of thousands of qualify candidates, less than 1% will actually be chosen.
As for training high school grads as soldiers.... no, not nearly 100%, maybe 75% can qualify - meeting the physical fitness requirements, passing the physicals and drug tests, getting qualifying ASVAB scores to do anything more than be a latrine digger... and as for their overall effectiveness... I suppose someone could be a very effective latrine digger. Of course, there is also a fair wash-out rate, even in Basic Training.
As for actually making it happen - the current generation of NFL players are doing a pretty good job of destroying attendance, which has reached all-time lows with their National Anthem antics, which has prompted some team owners to start taking a stance, as this drop in revenue is starting to affect the entire league. I fully support the players doing this though, as in the long run they'll see their contracts diminish, as the league can no longer afford to pay someone $14 million to kick a ball 19 times in the course of a year.
And I encourage those who are not purchasing tickets in response to these antics to continue to not purchase tickets as well - as they are going to have to most impact on these grossly inflated contracts. It's actually pretty simple. Once the game attendance hits that critical threshold it will impact advertising revenue, and once the commercial sponsors feel the burn in their bottom lines, it's pretty much all but over at that point.
I didn't bother going Rank 5. I made rank 3 and kept it there for a month, bought my modules and opted out.
It was interesting for the first two days, routine by the end of day 5, and by week two I was just ready for it to be over.
Just gonna say, you can gain merits by handing in AI combat bonds from a CZ. It's only one per AI, but I don't think 800 kills a week in a CZ is too hard is it? 5,500 probably but tier 4 isn't too shabby, especially adding in bounty profits (which can also be doubled for certain PP groups)
Side note: the maths.
Merits divided by 2 each week-
800/2 = 400 merits.
400 + 800 = 1,200 merits/2 = 600 merits.
600 + 800 = 1,400 merits/2 = 700 merits.
700 + 800 = 1,500 merits/2 = 750 merits.
This equals 4 weeks or when you are allowed the special weapon is starting from scratch. You then only need 750 kills to maintain rank.
If looking just for weapon, you only need 400 kills a week. I can show the maths for that too. Oh and the maths for rank 5 too.
Sorry for this splurge but I like number crunching.
Much less if you kill from PP zones, etc.
From the wiki:
You earn get 30 Powerplay bonds for destroying enemy Power NPC ships in their control systems or systems they are trying to expand to.
Within Powerplay conflict zones such as Military Strikes you will earn 10 Powerplay bonds for each enemy ship killed. This includes both NPCs and players.
Hmmm, I may be going too off topic.
From the wiki:
You earn get 30 Powerplay bonds for destroying enemy Power NPC ships in their control systems or systems they are trying to expand to.
Within Powerplay conflict zones such as Military Strikes you will earn 10 Powerplay bonds for each enemy ship killed. This includes both NPCs and players.
Hmmm, I may be going too off topic.
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It's my thread so I don't mind. Curious how a vent thread became so popular tbh.
But anyway, is it really 10 merits for the CZ, and not one? That seems way to easy as the numbers I've stated would then be divided by 10, in which case you'd need 550 kills a week to achieve rank 5, which doesn't sound too hard.
I feel like I'm missing something though.
I'm not going to get into the whole thing about the other methods but what I will say is trading is unbelievably broken in this game.
Most trading involves a handful of goods. All goods should be able to offer a similar return on investment given the right trade routes but, sadly, the bulk of tradable items just aren't worthwhile.
Its fun to try and be good at something and achieve due to performance. If top performance is attained through zero-skill and near effortless exploiting it becomes a bit pointless. Imagine if the highest mountains by far clukd only be climed by escalator, and mountaineers only had hills to conquer. It would be daft.
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