What is the value of a credit?

[NW3]

That's nice and fluffy. And if 500 Credits was worth that NPC's time who are we to judge him?
But speaking of "beta testing", if I remember Passenger Mission beta testing you could easily make a couple of millions per hour already. And players didn't even have a chance to whine about it, because well, it was beta. Frontier implemented it, just in case you are still looking for the "guilty". Thank them, not the players.

Of course it's only human to look for the biggest watering hole but then again you can't fault the players for taking the advantages the game offers.

There's been a misunderstanding. The quote was spoken by the player, who thought a 500 cr bounty was great. Other bounties, which he ignored, were for amounts like 110 credits.

I fault all the crybabies who cannot stop complaining about how low the credits are, no matter how much they have been raised in the last few years.

 

[IndigoWyrd]

This has been done so many times already...

Aside from 1 Cr is worth 1 Cr, there is no hard and fast answer.

People always like to use Beer, I prefer something with a more measurable real-world value - Gold.

Gold - 1 ton, 9401 Cr, or ~ .29 Cr/ounce
Gold - 1 ton, $1282.60 per ounce * 32,000 ounces per ton = $41,043,200 per ton of gold.

That's about all the math I want to do at this hour.

 

[Hossi]

Okay, listen... there is no way to calculate the worth of a credit based on in-game commodities. Yes, you can convert credits to units of beer or gold, but we dont know the (relative) worth of the these items.
Take gold for example, gold works good because we can make it ourself. Gold is pretty much worthless! When I go mining I just ignore gold. Waste of time, I only go for the three-Ps. I could go to a ring and come back with 100 units of gold an hour later, that would be ~3billion€ today. Since gold is abundant in planetary rings and can be easily gathered we can safely assume that gold is much cheaper (relativly) then today. How much cheaper? We don't know, therefore we can't use it to convert credits to pound/dollars/euros.
The same goes for beer. How is this made in the 35th century? How much work goes in it? We dont know.

As for the income in relation to the price of our ships, that on is easy: Its a game, therefore the return-on-investment (ROI) is greatly exaggerated. Today a good investment will pay for itself in a few decades(!).
I work in powerplant engineering. If we build a plant, lets say for 1 billion €, it will take about ten years to build this thing, and 20 to 30 years until it has paid the initial investment. Only after this you will start to earn money.
And now ask yourself, would you be willing to play this game for decades, just to earn the investment costs of one ship? If the ROI would be realistic, earning a anaconda would take centuries, you might as well cut the ship from the games, since noone ever would earn the money to buy it in his lifetime.

 

[IndigoWyrd]

Okay, listen... there is no way to calculate the worth of a credit based on in-game commodities. Yes, you can convert credits to units of beer or gold, but we dont know the (relative) worth of the these items.
Take gold for example, gold works good because we can make it ourself. Gold is pretty much worthless! When I go mining I just ignore gold. Waste of time, I only go for the three-Ps. I could go to a ring and come back with 100 units of gold an hour later, that would be ~3billion€ today. Since gold is abundant in planetary rings and can be easily gathered we can safely assume that gold is much cheaper (relativly) then today. How much cheaper? We don't know, therefore we can't use it to convert credits to pound/dollars/euros.
The same goes for beer. How is this made in the 35th century? How much work goes in it? We dont know.

As for the income in relation to the price of our ships, that on is easy: Its a game, therefore the return-on-investment (ROI) is greatly exaggerated. Today a good investment will pay for itself in a few decades(!).
I work in powerplant engineering. If we build a plant, lets say for 1 billion €, it will take about ten years to build this thing, and 20 to 30 years until it has paid the initial investment. Only after this you will start to earn money.
And now ask yourself, would you be willing to play this game for decades, just to earn the investment costs of one ship? If the ROI would be realistic, earning a anaconda would take centuries, you might as well cut the ship from the games, since noone ever would earn the money to buy it in his lifetime.

Gold is, however, not worthless - it has a fairly fixed value - 9401 Cr/ton
Palladium, Plantium, Painite also have fairly fixed values as well in terms of credits per ton. They happen to be larger values, which is why you ignore the lesser valued gold, but let's try this..

Would you rather have 10 tons of Painite or 100 tons of gold? (440k cr or 940k credits)?

 

[Wulfram Carbide]

We Commanders, as members of the Pilots Federation, are an elite of exceptionally skilled, highly trained and well qualified professionals, embarking on a dangerous career. This is why we are able to see such huge returns on investments.

Admittedly this logic looks less convincing if you actually see me fly.

 

[Chris Simon]

We Commanders, as members of the Pilots Federation, are an elite of exceptionally skilled, highly trained and well qualified professionals...

[video=youtube;tQ4MsR251as]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQ4MsR251as[/video]

[video=youtube;4iHn5gJTJ38]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iHn5gJTJ38[/video]

 

[DeathStroke]

 

[Red Anders]

Got to agree with Chris.
Anyone who thinks otherwise is from the 'now now now' stomps feet camp

Really? Chris said 100k credits per hour. That is possibly the most ridiculous thing I have ever read on here, unless he (and you) also think that players should never participate in PVP because the amount of time it would take to earn the credits for a single rebuy of any mid-range ship would effectively prohibit it completely.

More to the point, it would also remove anybody who wanted to play in open and didn't fly a full combat build ship all the time since a few gankings would be wiping them out completely even six months into the game.

If that's really the level of income that you think delineates the instant gratification crowd from your somehow nobler way of playing a computer game you are barking mad.

Note, this is coming from someone who has 2,500 hours in the game, not some noob who bought an Anaconda in three days.

 

[House0fDerp]

Got to agree with Chris.
Anyone who thinks otherwise is from the 'now now now' stomps feet camp

Why do I keep finding myself in contact with this strange universe in which no sense of time exists between the immediate and the glacial pace? It obviously has to be some sort of other universe in which time behaves differently as no rational person could otherwise come up with this argument.

Because numbers are fun:

100k/hour = 1470hours for a conda = 61.25 straight days of play with no breaks at this allegedly optimal rate. No one sits in front of a game for 2 months straight concentrating fully on the game and lives to tells the tale though. So for the do nothing else, wholly obsessed player that could play, say, half a day and was still playing optimally, 4 months, or 122.5 days.

When you start paring down towards reasonable or even restricted play numbers getting into such a ship becomes a somewhat daunting affair.

5 hours/day = 294 Days
3 hours/day = 490 Days
2 hours/day = 735 Days

And mind you these are minimum timeframes assuming every hours is at that top out pay and no days are missed or have further reduced play time. It also makes the assumption that those peaks are attainable from the first hour in your stock sidewinder. more realistic estimates that account for upgrading and doing less optimal activities would probably inflate those number several times over.

Obviously some would claim such a stretch as intent, and already have, but it begs the question: Why? What is the grand purpose served by such a mechanism? Is the intent to be horrendously unappealing to anyone who is not wholly into this game to the exclusion of all others? Is it intended as a carrot of sorts to be chased (but not actually chased) as a long term goal for lack of other such goals? As a long term reward exclusive to multi-month/year players?

I'm genuinely trying to work out the benefit of such a limit to income. Help me out here?

 

[Chris Simon]

Really? Chris said 100k credits per hour. That is possibly the most ridiculous thing I have ever read on here, unless he (and you) also think that players should never participate in PVP because the amount of time it would take to earn the credits for a single rebuy of any mid-range ship would effectively prohibit it completely.

You know what, the more I think back the more I realize how much better would everything be.
Yes, I said 100k/hour. Four months to earn enough to buy an Anaconda. And it was fabulous.

Remember (probably not, as I see) the time when the Elite universe was meant to be place where commanders would coexist and cooperate? Where PvP was certainly possible but rare and extremely dangerous for both parties and therefore meaningful and fun? Where PvP was done in Eagles and Vipers, because, like you rightly said, nobody would risk losing and Anaconda?
Those were the days, I tell you.

 

[LeoBartlet]

You can thank players for that.
In early betas, the economy was right. You were making 100k/hour tops, whatever you did. Earning money for Anaconda was a REAL work and to own one was a priviledge.
Then players start complaining. They wanted to have the best of everything in two days of playing, and Frontier collapsed under the pressure. Nowadays you can make tens of millions per hour and people STILL whine it's not enough.

This is actually one of the pet peeves of mine and something I will never forgive this community.

Perhaps you should worry about your own game and less about what others are making in an hour.

Just a suggestion

But hey, the casuals are the majority and win - as always.

Christ get a grip will ya.

 

[House0fDerp]

If total hours in the game have some meaning to you then here's some comment from a commander who has >5000 hours spend and owns a Vette without ever grinded. 100k per hour maybe a bit too low but it's much more to what I would vote for than what we have now. We would still have a game now what meanwhile has turned into a joke. These days I would wipe my commander for a reasonable price range and a game that makes sense. But hey, the casuals are the majority and win - as always. That's why I consider these threads as futile...

Sometimes I feel very close to go Isinona's route, starting from scratch and going full ironman mode. Cause the beginning still feels very ok to me.

Question: What's forcing you to earn more than you'd like and how is that actually impacting your experience?

 

[WR3ND]

"What is the value of a credit?"

A grain of salt in the hourglass of life... apparently.

...

Anyway, people can make upwards of around 30 million in one hour doing missions, so making the same amount over a couple days exploring seems a lot more reasonable in that context.

Back in 3301 (2015) I took a couple months going to Sgr A and back and made around... maybe 60 million credits or so.

I don't really go exploring nor play the game for credits anyway; it's just a nice side bonus to help see me on my way to more important things. Piloting pointy space cows like the Anaconda isn't anywhere on my priorities list. My Python is enough of one of those for my tastes, when I can stand to use it.

Spoiler

 

[Chris Simon]

Perhaps you should worry about your own game and less about what others are making in an hour.

Just a suggestion

Perhaps. And perhaps other people should realize that what's good for long-term gameplay.

 

[LeoBartlet]

Perhaps. And perhaps other people should realize that what's good for long-term gameplay.

100k an hour would credits would probably do more to diminish the player base than earning a couple of million an hour would.

 

[House0fDerp]

Earning money could be part of the game, it's called gameplay, you know?

I'm going to ignore this part as it can only be willful ignorance of the fact that all income in the game is a result of playing the game regardless of the rate aside from pointing out how completely this evidences a failure to support your own point.

Money would actually have a meaning while right now it's just a tool, a lever.But maybe you've never played a decent singleplayer RPG since you ask such a question.

Until it didn't because the requisite time had passed and people got fat wallets with all the things in the actual year 3033 as opposed to now. Rate of income and cost are not gameplay. The actual activities one does which may or may not result in credits and the means by which you perform those activities are gameplay.

Also I'd be glad for you to mention an RPG where currency actually functioned in the manner you think it should. I mostly play single player games or games with strong single player focus and they all use credits for gating and incentive with the goal of being balanced to move the player forward typically in pace with the surrounding tailored content. That said that is a wholly different approach to what this game attempts thus making that comparison highly suspect if not completely irrelevant.

Perhaps. And perhaps other people should realize that what's good for long-term gameplay.

If you feel slowed pacing is the preferable means to adding longevity to a game over things like mechanical depth, dynamic outcomes and strong player emotional investment I'm not sure what to say. I'm not aware of any other longstanding games that took the former route over the latter ones that held sizable playerbases long term. Care to share a few?

 

[Sentience]

You can thank players for that.
In early betas, the economy was right. You were making 100k/hour tops, whatever you did. Earning money for Anaconda was a REAL work and to own one was a priviledge.
Then players start complaining. They wanted to have the best of everything in two days of playing, and Frontier collapsed under the pressure. Nowadays you can make tens of millions per hour and people STILL whine it's not enough.

This is actually one of the pet peeves of mine and something I will never forgive this community.

So I have to grind away my free hours at home, doing what's essentially a second job to get a virtual spaceship in a time frame that you deem appropriate?

Yeah. No. The game should be fun for everyone, not just hardcore masochists that enjoy getting extremely little for all the grind time they put into a game.

Perhaps. And perhaps other people should realize that what's good for long-term gameplay.

Who decides what "good long-term gameplay" is for the entire player base? You? I don't remember voting you in as my ED opinions advocate.

 

[Zeeman]

That's nice and fluffy. And if 500 Credits was worth that NPC's time who are we to judge him?
But speaking of "beta testing", if I remember Passenger Mission beta testing you could easily make a couple of millions per hour already. And players didn't even have a chance to whine about it, because well, it was beta. Frontier implemented it, just in case you are still looking for the "guilty". Thank them, not the players.

Of course it's only human to look for the biggest watering hole but then again you can't fault the players for taking the advantages the game offers.

By Beta, I suspect they mean the Beta before actual game launch. I dropped in at about 2.3, and it took ages to get from Eagle to Cobra. I think I was in my eagle in Beta for a few months. It is way too easy to make cash now, but that ship really has sailed.

Z...

 

[Chris Simon]

So I have to grind away my free hours at home, doing what's essentially a second job to get a virtual spaceship in a time frame that you deem appropriate?

Yeah. No. The game should be fun for everyone, not just hardcore masochists that enjoy getting extremely little for all the grind time they put into a game.



Who decides what "good long-term gameplay" is for the entire player base? You? I don't remember voting you in as my ED opinions advocate.

Play the game as you want. Grind away, pile money, but when you're buying that third Cutter and feeling a bit disinterested in everything, remember me, having a great time in Couriers, Cobras and Keelbacks, for three straight years without ever running out of things to do and places to be.
Two thirds of the ships in Elite are irrelevant for people like you. Isn't it a shame that you spend first ten minutes in a Sidewinder, half an hour in a Cobra and then buy an Asp and start grinding ranks for a Corvette. I refuse believe that it's entertaining. Because IT'S NOT. Just read the forums.

 

[Zeeman]

So I have to grind away my free hours at home, doing what's essentially a second job to get a virtual spaceship in a time frame that you deem appropriate?
...

On the flip side - everyone should be able to have an Anaconda - a virtual space ship - within a few hours because you deem it appropriate?

I think there is a balance between grind and easy. Not everyone should have a "big 3 ship", but it should be achievable by everyone in a reasonable time frame. What that reasonable time frame is...?

We don't all own Lambo's, AMG Merc's, Ducati 1299 R's and Leerjets. that's what FDL's, Anacondas, cutter's etc are - the very high end. It should take time and effort to get there. They are not really any more "fun", per se. The problem, I think, is more so that getting there is not as much fun as it should be.

Z...