[Obsidian Ant] Elite Dangerous - The Credits Problem: A Case of Feeling Unrewarded?

[sollisb]

Same old fallacy. It only appears this way.
FDev sees odd spikes on income almost instantly - because they have global database/server monitoring and if someone starts getting too much money unusually fast, they pick it up, check logs how its done and assign development priority to it. Development, testing is slow process and may take many weeks - so usually "nerf"/mechanics rework gets released after word already got out.

If FDev relied on public word to find issues with economy, it would be much slower to react.

That's incorrect!

Take Quince for example; Initially it was players stacking 20 missions, and scanning one comm point to complete all missions. It was going on for weeks. No-one said a thing. Then Mr. I wanna show you all how great I am, posted it to YouTube. And Quince became the landing site for the 2nd coming of the messiah.

Enter Fdev! Oh! No, that's not how it was intended. We'll fix it!

Enter fix.. Only allow 3 missions, but give extra credits, and still all completed by 1 scan.

Enter the jealous types! Wait that's still not a great fix! Fix it Moars!

Enter new fix which we have now. Result? Absolutely. Quince is empty.

Example 2: Engineer exploit

Known about from beta testing, allowed to enter production

Those who know about it abuse to hell and back

Enter Mr. Look at me, let me show you this exploit!

Enter general outcry, rattles thrown out of prams

Enter FDev. Oh! Wow, we better fix it. And we'll remove all modules too.

-

Unless the general populace knows about and cries about, something, FDev have better things to be doing... Like Planet Coaster or some other game..

 

[[VR] optimal_909]

one of the issues are in many ways that it is incredibly easy to earn vast amounts of money EARLY in the game while (compared to the big three) late in the game.

Risk vs Reward when looking at insurance cost makes small to medium ships the preferred ones.

Once you have 100s of millions on your pocket, who cares about the rebuy? You don't lose ships very often, especially not the big ones.

 

[Ian Skippy]

In 2 years of playing or so, I have never seen FDev nerf 'an earner' without someone crying about it first.

That is because this community cries about everything. You try nerfing or buffing something people didn't ask for.

 

[NeilF]

I'd rather simply have more rewarding gameplay, than bigger rewards.

ie: I'd prefer to see gameplay made more involved and interesting, and for it to just pay a fair amount. Ultimately I'd rather be enjoying some gameplay with true depth, than shuttling back and forth as part the latest mindlessly dull exploit.

 

[RidingTheFlow]

That's incorrect!

<snip>

Unless the general populace knows about and cries about, something, FDev have better things to be doing... Like Planet Coaster or some other game..

No, the fix gets put in production - then tested "live" for a while on what actual effect (since you don't want to nerf things too much). Often its not enough - then another fix figured out, tested by QA, put in production, tested live - rinse and repeat. It all takes lot of time

No one cares about forum moans. Save maybe forum team, who may decide to put conciliatory PR statement like "yeah, we hear you, fix is on the way" when things get too much out of hand.

 

[sollisb]

I don't get the 'earn the credits so that I do what I want' point, as OA's explanation is also hazy.
Sure most players want to fly the big 3, but there is a natural progress to get those ships - as in every game, and it is just fine as it is. Also, fighting thargoids is just like a late game status, again many ways similar to other games.

As for forcing activities on players they don't like, that may hold for mining, and perhaps pirating (plus griefing, of course), but otherwise credits keep flowing in.

Edit: you can earn millions easily with passenger hauling, you only need an Adder and two cabins.

But.. You earn a lot more in a bigger ship. It comes down to 'how fast' you want to earn credits. Not how many credits can you earn..

There is nothing in E.D. that can be balanced.

Look at it another way.. How does a typical MMO stretch out the player level curve?

By limiting them to certain area restricted by mob-level. You can kill hundreds of the mob, but you'll only ever be gettign teeny bits of level experience. Only when you have enough can you advance.. And that advancement allows you to take on more difficult mobs.

In this way, the players is on a curve. At some stage, the player reaches max level. So they enter end-game, where they must join together, to beat bigger mobs.

E.D. Has none of that. FDev appear to be ignorant of that concept. You enter the res site in a Sidewinder, kill an enemy Anaconda and get 200k credits. Enter Mr-Has-it-all, who kills an enemy anaconda and get 200k credits..

The bottom line is; FDev know nothing about MMO building. All they know is 'random'..

I've been designing and building online MUDs since the 80s. I've been playing games since the '70s. The only thing common between E.D. and MMO is the multiple player.

 

[verminstar]

Ask any long time commander and they'll tell you. These things don't just appear. If you go looking, you can find your own cash cow.

You don't hear anyone complaining about the cash-cows they don't know about.

Oh but we do...its a well known, worst kept secret sorta thing now with this community that some would advise not telling anyone about any potential cash exploit because it would come with howls of anguish from those wanting a return to 'the good old days' where it took 6 weeks to get a cobra 3. To play another way means yer having fun the wrong way apparently...they certainly quick enough to shove that into yer face that theres a right way and a wrong way to play this game.

Point now being that when a cash cow is found, my advice would be to not tell anyone, not even yer own mother and especially not anyone on this forum or reddit. Keep it to yerself and farm the living daylights out of it before word gets out and the hardcore brigade start brandishing torches and pitchforks demanding frontier 'fix' it.

Thats actually not a healthy attitude fer a game...its quite literally the same as saying if ye can cheat and get away with it, then fill yer boots cos personally speaking, I couldnt care less what ye do so long as it doesnt affect me...and it doesnt so I dont.

How can this be rectified? Easy...FD can fix their game. Thats to say the answer is easy, but in practice, much less so otherwise this thread wouldnt exist...or the multitude of threads discussing the same thing fer years would not exist.

The cash exploits do keep the faithful on their toes and frothing at the mouth...a somewhat amusing side effect played out like a drama on these pages on an almost daily basis ^

 

[Conch]

Indeed? Why the game is a job for you and why you accept it?

nice troll..

 

[Darkfyre99]

one of the issues are in many ways that it is incredibly easy to earn vast amounts of money EARLY in the game while (compared to the big three) late in the game.

Risk vs Reward when looking at insurance cost makes small to medium ships the preferred ones.

Once you have 100s of millions on your pocket, who cares about the rebuy? You don't lose ships very often, especially not the big ones.

There are certain activities players enjoy in this game where you can lose ships quite often.

Some players who engage in this activity use what I consider to be a quite reasonable strategy, and bring ships that they can afford to lose repeatedly, with rebuys low enough that an hour spent making money legitimately can earn them dozens of rebuys. Other players who engage in this activity bring the most expensive ship they have instead, and then complain that it takes too long to earn their rebuys back, and keep asking for yet another credit buff.

Personally, I'd rather that Frontier add an outlet for these players that would allow them to earn credits through those activities... assuming their skills were up to snuff, of course.

 

[[VR] optimal_909]

But.. You earn a lot more in a bigger ship. It comes down to 'how fast' you want to earn credits. Not how many credits can you earn..

There is nothing in E.D. that can be balanced.

Look at it another way.. How does a typical MMO stretch out the player level curve?

By limiting them to certain area restricted by mob-level. You can kill hundreds of the mob, but you'll only ever be gettign teeny bits of level experience. Only when you have enough can you advance.. And that advancement allows you to take on more difficult mobs.

In this way, the players is on a curve. At some stage, the player reaches max level. So they enter end-game, where they must join together, to beat bigger mobs.

E.D. Has none of that. FDev appear to be ignorant of that concept. You enter the res site in a Sidewinder, kill an enemy Anaconda and get 200k credits. Enter Mr-Has-it-all, who kills an enemy anaconda and get 200k credits..

The bottom line is; FDev know nothing about MMO building. All they know is 'random'..

I've been designing and building online MUDs since the 80s. I've been playing games since the '70s. The only thing common between E.D. and MMO is the multiple player.

I don't think Elite has to mimic the standard MMO layout, and anyway what are the chances of that scenario? Perhaps the issue with me is that I don't play any other MMO, but I think Elite has way more into it with factions and other aspects than PvP - and for the better.
Sure, mission payouts are erratic at best, with getting a million for hauling a passenger to a neighboring system, yet you get peanuts for other mission that carry greater risk.

 

[Marc_Hicks]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgnLqOSTrek


The topic OA tackles at the end might be a bit of a taboo in these forums, but I think he's convincing enough.

All I want is for the payout of a mission to be reflected by the difficulty of the mission. A courier mission fhat pays 6,000 Cr should be easier than one that pays 60,000 Cr. If a courier mission pays a lot, then I expect to be either hounded by hostiles or be required to get the data to its destination, unscanned.

Likewise, I want to see mission pay-outs move even more beyond just a credits focus. Particularly bigger variations in Reputation "payouts, & a favour system within which we can exchange reputation for in-game benefits.

 

[[VR] optimal_909]

There are certain activities players enjoy in this game where you can lose ships quite often.

Some players who engage in this activity use what I consider to be a quite reasonable strategy, and bring ships that they can afford to lose repeatedly, with rebuys low enough that an hour spent making money legitimately can earn them dozens of rebuys. Other players who engage in this activity bring the most expensive ship they have instead, and then complain that it takes too long to earn their rebuys back, and keep asking for yet another credit buff.

Personally, I'd rather that Frontier add an outlet for these players that would allow them to earn credits through those activities... assuming their skills were up to snuff, of course.

PvP and solo a Thargoid, those are the only high risk activities in-game if you have a decent ship.

 

[shadragon]

In order to solve basically all but the "I must earn 1bn credits a second, because reasons" complaints, FD need to balance all activities in the game, to earn roughly the same.

Wrong. You cannot balance all activities in the game, at all ranks, at all sub-factions to pay an equal amount for each activity, unless you pay the exact same amount for all regardless of complexity, duration or task.

Explore a system - 50,000 credits
Kill a pirate lord - 50,000 credits
Mine a lump of rock - 50,000 credits
Smuggle goods to an orbital - 50,000 credits
Kill 45 ships - 50,000 credits

Think that will work? You cannot balance each activity to make the same value per hour because everyone is different, plays differently and has varying amounts of time to play. I love the 'I can only play an hour a week and can't make the same amount as those who do 3-4 hours a night, it's not fair' threads.

If you watch OA's video you see he shows his PS4 account with multiple-millions in the bank and only a couple of dozen hours of game time. I've got 200+ million in credits on all my accounts and I've never exploited anything. Credits are so easy to make today that it's silly. When I began in v1.0 the mission board looked like this:

(Image screenshot from a v1.0 Isinona video)

People who can't make money in Elite today are either unwilling to actually go earn it (The "I don't want to do that" crowd) or flit from place to place not building up relationships with sub-factions getting crappy payed missions as a result (Then moaning about it endlessly).

Elite is a game that takes time and actual effort. You need time to develop your skills. You need time to form relationships with sub-factions. You need time to bring up your ranks and standing. In time, you will be surrounded by allied sub-factions and can generate as much cash as you want. People who expect a Corvette and six billion in the bank on day one, bought the wrong game for their personality. They're the ones who end up posting the "I'm bored" and "grind" threads.

The other comments I see are from people with Anaconda's / Cutters / Corvettes who will say their rebuy is xx million, but they can only make 2 million a mission and it's not worth them risking their ship. So now you expect Frontier to cover your entire rebuy cost in each mission payout, so you can feel comfortable leaving the landing pad? O M G...

Back in v1.0 if you saw a player in an Anaconda, they typically had at least a Dangerous rating and you gave them a wide berth out of respect. I never heard any of them complain about rebuy.

I said it yesterday in another thread. The gap between your expectations and reality is not realities fault. Others call it grind, I call it advancement, but I'm not in a hurry to get anywhere and that's the difference. Play the game, don't game the play.

 

[Marc_Hicks]

To reiterate, whether or not a play session has been "rewarding" for me has nothing to do with how much money I made (heck, some nights I end up with less than I started with, as I pump money into donations to trigger potential follow ons), but has everything to do with whether the activities I engaged in were a decent challenge, & required my active participation. Hope that makes sense.

 

[Red Anders]

If the answers were easy, then this forum wouldn't be having this same discussion over and over and over again.

I mean, look at this random mission I took a screenshot of, in system I'd never visited before:

Spoiler

[url]http://i.imgur.com/p4vPJVQh.jpg[/URL]

227k to deliver four economy VIPs 12 light years. How you view this mission's payout really depends upon a host of circumstances that changes from player to player:

• If I were a beginning player in a Hauler, this would be a huge amount of money, because I can take this mission in a ship that costs less than a third of what the mission is paying out.
• If I were doing BGS work, especially when starting a new theatre of operations, this is the kind of mission I'd take because I'm going to that system anyway, and my first-class cabin just happened to be empty. The reward is the influence and reputation gain, the credits merely a bonus.
• If I was playing for fun and profit (aka my sightseeing tour company), this mission wouldn't even rate a look, because I'd be operating out of a region of space I've spent three years, off and on, building up the contacts I need to make a lot of money in a short amount of time.

Mostly, though, this mission trips my "You can buy your own ship for that!" detector, which I find so annoying that I have to resort to headcanon just to preserve the game's verisimilitude.

Even within a relatively narrow focus such as non-sightseeing passenger missions, there are endless quirks and instances of missions which when viewed alongside each other make zero sense. I'll give this example from last night (sorry I didn't screenshot them and I'm at work now anyway) but they are far from atypical. these were offered to me by the same faction, at the same station.

• 16 business class passengers to a system about 13 LY away, with a flight of 120k ls to the drop-off station (so basically about 10 minutes) - 7.5m credits
• 8 business class passengers to Ratraii, over 22,000 LY away with a flight of 26 ls to the drop off point - 965k credits plus 1 exquisite focus crystal

I know that the difference in travel time to the drop-off point once in-system is a key issue for determining the reward but is it really impossible for the game's mission generator to take account of both the fact that the first mission involves a ten minute supercruise flight but that the second one involves a trip that takes a minimum of 10 hours without using neutron boosts even in a ship with a 30-40LY jump range and actually scale rewards in a way that makes some kind of sense?

What makes it even more crazy is that at the same station again, there were tourist (sightseeing) missions to Colonia that paid 25m. So if I just need to fly there and drop someone off, less than a million and an EFC is fine, but if I have to make a return trip within 4 weeks, 25m or more?

Really there shouldn't be any passenger missions to Colonia from the bubble that pay less than passenger missions within the bubble because no matter how long a fight it may be to Hutton or the other distant stations, it's not really an undertaking on the same scale as a 44,000 light year round trip.

 

[shadragon]

assuming their skills were up to snuff, of course.

That's another issue. People who do the exploit runs and jump into Condas with no combat experience then get killed and complain they were greifed.

 

[Marc_Hicks]

Wrong. You cannot balance all activities in the game, at all ranks, at all sub-factions to pay an equal amount for each activity, unless you pay the exact same amount for all regardless of complexity, duration or task.

Explore a system - 50,000 credits
Kill a pirate lord - 50,000 credits
Mine a lump of rock - 50,000 credits
Smuggle goods to an orbital - 50,000 credits
Kill 45 ships - 50,000 credits

Think that will work? You cannot balance each activity to make the same value per hour because everyone is different, plays differently and has varying amounts of time to play. I love the 'I can only play an hour a week and can't make the same amount as those who do 3-4 hours a night, it's not fair' threads.

If you watch OA's video you see he shows his PS4 account with multiple-millions in the bank and only a couple of dozen hours of game time. I've got 200+ million in credits on all my accounts and I've never exploited anything. Credits are so easy to make today that it's silly. When I began in v1.0 the mission board looked like this:

https://i.imgur.com/Hpfn24v.jpg
(Image screenshot from a v1.0 Isinona video)

People who can't make money in Elite today are either unwilling to actually go earn it (The "I don't want to do that" crowd) or flit from place to place not building up relationships with sub-factions getting crappy payed missions as a result (Then moaning about it endlessly).

Elite is a game that takes time and actual effort. You need time to develop your skills. You need time to form relationships with sub-factions. You need time to bring up your ranks and standing. In time, you will be surrounded by allied sub-factions and can generate as much cash as you want. People who expect a Corvette and six billion in the bank on day one, bought the wrong game for their personality. They're the ones who end up posting the "I'm bored" and "grind" threads.

The other comments I see are from people with Anaconda's / Cutters / Corvettes who will say their rebuy is xx million, but they can only make 2 million a mission and it's not worth them risking their ship. So now you expect Frontier to cover your entire rebuy cost in each mission payout, so you can feel comfortable leaving the landing pad? O M G...

Back in v1.0 if you saw a player in an Anaconda, they typically had at least a Dangerous rating and you gave them a wide berth out of respect. I never heard any of them complain about rebuy.

I said it yesterday in another thread. The gap between your expectations and reality is not realities fault. Others call it grind, I call it advancement, but I'm not in a hurry to get anywhere and that's the difference. Play the game, don't game the play.

LOL, that brings back memories. Regardless of payouts, I do so love the newer mission board layouts.

 

[Shinji Ikari]

He has 100k subscribers, the vast majority of those are probably active ED players. If he discusses some topic FD does take notice, and he is able to articulate his criticism in a polite non-offensive manner, so my hope is that his message actually reaches the devs. Sure, a rant would be easier. For that, go and watch Yamiks.

I could see Yamiks as the most popular ED YouTube in the forseable future.

 

[Stealthie]

Hate to say it but, for the most part, that video seemed like "a lot of fuss over nothing".

What's more, I think Ant' makes some flawed assumptions about people's motivations and methods when it comes to earning credits.

The fundamental fallacy seems to be that people are forced into "grinding" well-paid, menial, tasks to earn credits when it might be better to provide sources of more substantial income instead.
Trouble is, that's not going to work because - big shocker - if you create a way to earn more credits people are just going to grind the living poop out of that too.
All you're doing, then, is increasing the "pay gap" between those who do what they enjoy and those who do what earns credits.

And then there's the issue of what people are willing to actually DO to earn credits.
How many people do you suppose are willing to spend 10 hours doing the Ancient Ruins mission to earn Cr110m compared with how many people spend 10 hours "grinding" surface scans or passenger missions for a similar reward?
People are lazy.
We prefer simple stuff to complex stuff.
If we are trying to achieve something, we'll look for the most straightforward way of doing it rather than a more complex method.

Offer people a more immersive experience - such as the Ancient Ruins mission - as a means to earn big credits as a reward for a significant effort and they'll say "Ain't nobody got time for that" and they'll go right back to repeating the same simple task over and over again.

I get the distinct impression that the people who want higher payouts in ED don't actually want to put in a lot of effort to get them.
They want a one-stop mission which earns them Cr100m or more.
And then they'll do it again and again and again, just like they're currently doing with surface scans, thargoid tech or passenger missions.


As for the idea that people get upset because they feel like the big credit-earners are "gated" in some way, that's cobblers too.
It's cobblers primarily because it's not true.
Beyond that, however, it'd still be cobblers even if it was true.
Anybody who is able to take advantage of a "gated" opportunity to do something has gained that opportunity as a result of PLAYING the game sufficiently.
If you can't manage to do that, you don't get the same opportunities.
That's not an "issue" unique to ED. It's a simple fact of life. People who put in more effort are rewarded for it.
Accept this and move on.

 

[h347h]

What is wrong with having to work for things in video games? The rate at which credits are available now is still too high. Credits haven't been relevant for well over 2 years now.