Just as a thought to consider, maybe you are not the ideal reference. And maybe not everyone who has logged 300h and has more than 5M worth in total is a minmaxing, metagaming overachiever who doesn't properly RP and doesn't understand how the game is supposed to be played. I also highly doubt that your progression is what FD intended by design. This is not personal, but you do tend to tell people how the game is truly designed and how FD truly intended it to be played.
[Obsidian Ant] Elite Dangerous - The Credits Problem: A Case of Feeling Unrewarded?
- Thread starter SaliVader
- Start date
Just as a thought to consider, maybe you are not the ideal reference. And maybe not everyone who has logged 300h and has more than 5M worth in total is a minmaxing, metagaming overachiever who doesn't properly RP and doesn't understand how the game is supposed to be played. I also highly doubt that your progression is what FD intended by design. This is not personal, but you do tend to tell people how the game is truly designed and how FD truly intended it to be played.
I don't beleive FD really have a cohesive idea of how game truly intended to be played. That's one of the problems at the root.
Agreed. Obsidian Ant is one of the most balanced advocates we have for this game, and is to be respected.
While I am happy that you have found a niche in the game where pursuing credits has little value I feel that you are trying to impose this view on others and I don't agree with that. Clearly, for many people (myself included) Elite Dangerous is a game where obtaining (and improving) spaceships is core to the entire experience. FD clearly intended things to be this way, otherwise they would make each ship roughly the same in capability and cost. But they didn't because there is a progression in the game from less capable ships to ships that are much more powerful.
People in the game identify with their ships the same way that car enthusiasts identify with their hot rods in their garage. FD's income even depends largely on this 'hot rod' approach as they sell cosmetic items for all of these ships. FD have also done an amazing job creating an awesome variety of ships that can fill all kinds of cool niches. Lots of us want to try them all! This all requires credits. Obsidian Ant is not arguing that this should all be free. What he (and a lot of other folks) are talking about is that the process to advance in the game should be more fun, more variable, and more rewarding.
Imposing a very narrow view of the game on others I feel does not help move this debate forward, even though your approach to the game is totally valid. But my approach to the game is also valid.
PvP is essentially sport. If you want to make a career out of any sport you need to be really, really good at it. You need money and skill to make money. For the vast majority of us it's just a bit of fun to spice things up.
If you want to be a pirate the game allows you to do so, but there is no well trodden career path, no Elite rank. You start off doing it because you are desperate & maybe if you are really, really good at it you can make enough profit to become a career criminal. But again, for most of us we do it because it's fun. It is already balanced against trading because trading is dull but predictable, piracy is exciting & risky. Choose your path, and the consequences that go with it.
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Jenner
I wish I was English like my hero Tj.
Actually it's worse than that.
No one starts off doing piracy because they are desperate. People only pirate when they already have a fat bank account with which to outfit their ship, because piracy in and of itself earns you zilch. If you are an ace pirate you still earn zilch. Seriously - there's no money to be made in getting people to drop cargo. It won't even cover your combat expendables.
Yes, to me this is the core of ObsidianAnt's message. Well put!
*raises hand*
Approaching 500 hours in the game since last Gamma reset (I have a life and family outside of ED), and approaching 500 million in assets. Don't metagame, don't exploit, and I do a lot of Roleplaying. I do, however, enjoy the strategic elements of this game, and I'm getting tired of those elements slowly being trivialized into non-existence because of how easy it has gotten to make money in the game lately.
BGS work used to be a fun but unprofitable enterprise, where I had to think about the size of my war chest, and examine each credit I spent with an eye towards how it progresses me towards my goal of driving the local governor of Evil Galactic Federation out of power. It was fun, it was challenging, and if I needed to make money, I return home and do some easy flying until I had refilled my coffers.
Now, I can earn seven or eight million an hour just through BGS alone, and casual flying earns me even more. How the heck am I supposed to feel like a spymaster when I now have an effectively unlimited budget, and all I face are the Keystone Cops?
Nope. Try again. Most people just want reasonable time for progress.
For you maybe
We all play our own way, and need to accept the consequences of that, including the self actualisation that you might not actually be good enough at your dream job to make a living from it, or that your dream job simply doesn't pay very well.If it helps, you could include 'bored' or 'frustrated' within the definition of 'desperate'
There are a number of posts on the subject of killing T-9s to get some engineer resource or other for example.
The core of this problem is that Elite has a very low skill ceiling when it comes to variable outcomes. Whatever activity you choose to participate in basically has a set rate at which you can expect to earn credits. Most variation in outcome is down to RNG rather than how you play.
It doesn't matter how carefully you plan, how precisely you optimize your ship, or how attentive and skillful you are in executing your chosen activity. High-level play and thoughtful planning will not significantly elevate the rewards you are able to bring in. Most activities can be accomplished with a fairly low level of attention, foresight, and knowledge; and nothing you do beyond that mediocre level of commitment will substantially increase your rewards.
It's not that mining needs to give X amount of credits per hour in order to be a valid activity. It's that there's not sufficient depth of play to allow for depth of outcome. It's fine to have an activity which only gives out modest rewards to the uninitiated and inexperienced; it's another thing entirely for that activity to remain more or less static no matter how much you learn or how skillfully you play.
And just about everything is like this. Without greater mechanical and technical depth in the various activities in the game, there cannot ever be a form of balance other than "set all activities to generate same amount of cr/hr no matter what," which will still be imbalanced and upsetting to people because that means you are now "forced" to engage in whichever activity carries the lowest risk of setbacks, has the lowest barrier to entry with respect to outfitting, and is the most widely available. And then you just end up with people ranting about how the mission board doesn't give out enough of those mission types and doesn't refresh fast enough.
When the Thargoids came, we suddenly had a kind of "boss" enemy which required specialized outfitting, strategic play, and some combination of either higher numbers of ships or incredible skill and optimized outfitting. Thing is, we should have had something which fulfills this role for a long time. There's no reason we couldn't have had high-value assassination targets, with specialized engineering builds and unusual AI patterns, which we could learn to take down using a combination of skill, planning, and coordinating with others. Likewise the surface base assaults were never really developed or integrated into the game very well and could have served a similar purpose.
That's combat, but there ought to be equivalent high challenge opportunities in every area of activity. You give people the opportunity to "git gud" at their chosen activity, and allow for appropriate rewards to follow, and suddenly relative payouts between professions don't matter as much, because there will also be tremendous variation *within* professions, and chances are no matter what you are doing, you could be doing it better for a better reward.
It doesn't matter how carefully you plan, how precisely you optimize your ship, or how attentive and skillful you are in executing your chosen activity. High-level play and thoughtful planning will not significantly elevate the rewards you are able to bring in. Most activities can be accomplished with a fairly low level of attention, foresight, and knowledge; and nothing you do beyond that mediocre level of commitment will substantially increase your rewards.
It's not that mining needs to give X amount of credits per hour in order to be a valid activity. It's that there's not sufficient depth of play to allow for depth of outcome. It's fine to have an activity which only gives out modest rewards to the uninitiated and inexperienced; it's another thing entirely for that activity to remain more or less static no matter how much you learn or how skillfully you play.
And just about everything is like this. Without greater mechanical and technical depth in the various activities in the game, there cannot ever be a form of balance other than "set all activities to generate same amount of cr/hr no matter what," which will still be imbalanced and upsetting to people because that means you are now "forced" to engage in whichever activity carries the lowest risk of setbacks, has the lowest barrier to entry with respect to outfitting, and is the most widely available. And then you just end up with people ranting about how the mission board doesn't give out enough of those mission types and doesn't refresh fast enough.
When the Thargoids came, we suddenly had a kind of "boss" enemy which required specialized outfitting, strategic play, and some combination of either higher numbers of ships or incredible skill and optimized outfitting. Thing is, we should have had something which fulfills this role for a long time. There's no reason we couldn't have had high-value assassination targets, with specialized engineering builds and unusual AI patterns, which we could learn to take down using a combination of skill, planning, and coordinating with others. Likewise the surface base assaults were never really developed or integrated into the game very well and could have served a similar purpose.
That's combat, but there ought to be equivalent high challenge opportunities in every area of activity. You give people the opportunity to "git gud" at their chosen activity, and allow for appropriate rewards to follow, and suddenly relative payouts between professions don't matter as much, because there will also be tremendous variation *within* professions, and chances are no matter what you are doing, you could be doing it better for a better reward.
What? I am staying away from alien hype, but is this number accurate? I earn more for killing these "pirate lords" in 'Vettes which can be swatted in ~1 minute, and from what I heard, Thargoids bit harder to go down.
2 millions for killing a thargoid with limited number of these ax weapons is a joke.
Best days were massacre stacking with my wing. Enough fun because (unfortunately shallow) pew pew and lot of credits
Off course it is sad for a game if exploiting is the best part of the game.
Don't worry - once we unlock the AX Kill Warrant Scanner, we'll be able to collect the additional bounties that were put on the Thargoids' heads while they were in the Andromeda Galaxy and in witchspace.
Stealthie
Banned
Maybe that's FDev's way of telling you that PvP isn't intended to be a "career"?
Bottom line; it's not so much a problem with the credits as it is to do with leaving the player feeling rewarded. It's difficult to talk about credits without also talking about game mechanics. Mechanics are being overhauled next year so I didn't want to focus on that subject. Instead, I was raising the point that maybe the reward system should also be revisited, and either start valuing credits in a different manner, or perhaps start offering other rewards to people (cosmetics, modules, ships etc).