Earning/Rewards in the game - Does it need a solid rework, or is it just too late now?

[NeilF]

I've had this thought numerous times, and I'm of course not alone as many threads on this and related topics come up over and over - How should the game be rewarding activites, and is it currently doing so in a logical/productive way at the moment?


This hit me again last night during the livestream where it covered the new Megaship gameplay assets. The notion is Wings of you will go to these and undertake a heist to - for example - extract the cargo from its hold. So a group of you do this. Get bounties. Get damaged. Risk increasing your Notoriety? Risk destruction? All for a dozen tons of some cargo?

And in another thread we have of course have discussions where super safe trade or passenger gameplay can give 100-200mCRs per hour.

An in another thread we have traders, making millions an hour, complaining about PvP Pirates stealing a few tens of thousands of CR of this cargo from them, not in thruth even covering their costs, let alone the game offering a method to make a real profit.


It hits me we have a growing issue (as more gameplay elements come online) that the risk/reward and time/effort reward is getting more and more skewed on a CR reward basis. Of course it's not all down to CRs, as many people do what they do for enjoyment. But, it's rather frustrating surely if you undertake a more complex or risky path, that you then get a laughable payout at the end of it? eg: Four of you raid a Megaship, and the 10t of cargo you then divide up between you doesn't even pay for your repairs, let alone your bountys.

Would it be nice to see FD sit down and try and address some of this? Or is it simply too late or not important enough (now)?

 

[Agony_Aunt]

Kind of both i would say.

It is too late, but even so, it could do with a good rework. And there are always new players coming in.

When you see doing an assassination that will take about 30 mins (due to waiting time) and you have to watch the clock and plan other activities, and still only get paid 500k while on the passenger mission board you see a non-wanted basic one way delivery for the same or even more, if you are thinking about quick credits its a no brainer. Salvage missions where you have to extract from other ships, meaning its not just simple kill but piracy required, which takes more skill, pay less than basic pew-pew missions.

Its basically all out of whack in terms of risk vs reward.

And then, if we bring the BGS into it, we have low risk stackable one way missions that give +++ INF, while the longer sightseeing missions where you have to spend up to an hour getting around give you just ++ INF (or is it just +?).

 

[andrak]

Megaships need to be full to the brim with high temp diamonds / drop mats like imperial shielding, improvised components, pharmaceutical isolators, cracked industrial firmware, modified embedded firmware to even remotely interest me in pirating them with the new consequences of crime coming.

 

[NeilF]

Megaships need to be full to the brim with high temp diamonds / drop mats like imperial shielding, improvised components, pharmaceutical isolators, cracked industrial firmware, modified embedded firmware to even remotely interest me in pirating them with the new consequences of crime coming.

Well, my stand out question on this is of course if you do have a big fire fight as part of a heist, and destroy X security ships, does this increase the Notoriety? If so that seems a bad outcome surely?

And if the entire mechanic can be side stepped by CMDR A opens cargo hatch and flies away, and CMDR B stays and collects cargo (ignored by security), that will be a laugh riot.

 

[SpaceGoblin]

Perhaps it will be tied in with the new wing missions and mission reward re-balancing that is also coming with the Q1 update.

Perhaps it *will* be more worthwhile if you have a mission to do it, rather than just turning up and looting on an ad-hoc basis.

Perhaps the live-streams are just a teaser/taster to pique community interest, not a full disclosure of all the things.

That's a whole lot of maybe, but the open beta for Q1 is next week, so answers are not far away.

 

[NeilF]

Perhaps it will be tied in with the new wing missions and mission reward re-balancing that is also coming with the Q1 update.

Perhaps it *will* be more worthwhile if you have a mission to do it, rather than just turning up and looting on an ad-hoc basis.

Perhaps the live-streams are just a teaser/taster to pique community interest, not a full disclosure of all the things.

That's a whole lot of maybe, but the open beta for Q1 is next week, so answers are not far away.

Maybe... But clearly a game wide reward evaluation rework would IMHO be a big job. I'd be surprised if they "sneaked" it in

 

[Xanador]

The reward balancing will get even more complicated. Just take the new wing missions: You will be able to do them as a single player, which is nice, but all the work going into the new trade system...when I can simply take a trading wing mission with better payment.

 

[RandomGun]

And if the entire mechanic can be side stepped by CMDR A opens cargo hatch and flies away, and CMDR B stays and collects cargo (ignored by security), that will be a laugh riot.

May work. Though, CMDR B will probably get scanned quickly like Ed in the live stream.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

When I started out the credits were kinda hard to come by. For a while that got better in general.

Literally the last thing I remember of playing ED was fighting some super tough AI pimponnent with its crappy extra ingredients, because that's what they want us to play now. I could beat after like 15 mins, earn a bounty of 16,437 cr and pay like 146,808 cr for repairs.

I mean I might have cut that repair bill for the FAS with some more effort, but in the end I rammed the AI to pieces just to get over with it.

And that was it. I just decided it was the last drop on my craplist. You know you don't really enjoy the experience when you ragehit alt-f4 in increasing frequencies.

 

[SpaceGoblin]

Maybe... But clearly a game wide reward evaluation rework would IMHO be a big job. I'd be surprised if they "sneaked" it in

Undoubtedly!

But 'mission reward' rebalance is on the feature list for Q1, and I get the impression that they *seem* to be encouraging players to take missions to indulge in gameplay activities, either to provide more ways to engage with the BGS (for better or worse, depending on how one feels about tha BGS), or to be a quick way to provide more rewards for player activity. Raiding a mega ship might be lousy payoff without a mission, but slap a mission with three payout options on top of that, and bobs your mothers brother, or something Or both (BGS tampering and increased reward).

And they did mention in the first stream that mission payouts have not been finalised yet, numbers are expected to go up.

Even more maybe layered on the perhaps

Soon (tm).

 

[Kaocraft]

Maybe... But clearly a game wide reward evaluation rework would IMHO be a big job. I'd be surprised if they "sneaked" it in

Mats are the new credits. If you saw the livestream you saw the tech broker. And a materials broker will be shown off next week. This tells me that Frontier are giving up on credit balancing. They're going to gate everything through Materials and that's how they'll deal with the credits problem.

Yes those Cargo canisters are worthless and no one will ever run a "heist" for a reward like that. (Likewise I'm glad to see the new trade tools in place but trade is dead - it's all hauling missions now) But, some of those hackable cargo bays might contain materials, in which case I suspect people *will* accept the risks & penalties to bust them open.

 

[NeilF]

The reward balancing will get even more complicated. Just take the new wing missions: You will be able to do them as a single player, which is nice, but all the work going into the new trade system...when I can simply take a trading wing mission with better payment.

Yes, but the Wing missions (eg: for trade) done in solo will require multiple runs? Instead of if four of you are doing it in one?

 

[Lily from anim.o.v.e]

Ed has a huge issues wit hreward/effort balance even on nonrisky tasks. Now tailoring risk in it makes stuff even more imabalanced. Yes it needs a rework, but don't know if FD can do that the last times the changed mission rewards don't really show they are able to ballnce this.

This entire "material" thingy without even having p2p trade is just placing walls in front of the "blaze your own trail" idea transforming it into a "blaze on our rail" feature because it forces people to that ONE or TWO specific things to achieve something. And that's kinda reducing the sand form the sandbox turning it into a concrete box where you can just follow existing pathes.

 

[Dagwit]

There are players out there with billion-credit Cutters who want to fight them. They don't want to spend long hours grinding out 50 million credit rebuys. If they're forced to they'll likely just get bored and quit the game entirely.

Then there are others who are committed to the slow progression through the game, for whom large payouts are the forbidden fruit hanging temptingly within reach. They find this incredibly annoying, but it doesn't stop them playing the game they want to so they probably won't quit.

FDev's sympathy is almost certainly with the second group. But FDev is a business, and both groups are FDev's customers, and businesses don't like losing customers; so it's in FDev's commercial interest to keep some source of easy credits in the game.

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

In short, yes.

Risk/time Vs reward is waaaaaaaay off.

It would require a complete rework of most of the economy.
And to make the most of it, the bubble needs "redesigning".

We need vast expanses of dangerous anarchy systems between the major factions, something you can't just jump straight over, you can take a long route round, or go through. Risk/reward.
And trade between the major factions should rake in massive profits.
But you need to navigate the dangerous waters in the middle.
Pirates can earn a living hijacking these traders, bounty hunters can earn a living killing pirates. All the high security systems would have been strip mined, so all the good ores would be in low/no security systems, or beyond the bubble.
Trade within the major factions mini bubbles would be safe, but low profit.
From there, you can then build a good logical economy.

FD could technically use the Thargoids to devastate the bubble and leave each major faction in its own bubble. But it won't happen. Lol

But right now, you just avoid the low security systems with a simple filter, that often means no extra time or jumps. Lol

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

There are players out there with billion-credit Cutters who want to fight them. They don't want to spend long hours grinding out 50 million credit rebuys. If they're forced to they'll likely just get bored and quit the game entirely.

So basically they don't want to play the game.

Then there are others who are committed to the slow progression through the game, for whom large payouts are the forbidden fruit hanging temptingly within reach. They find this incredibly annoying, but it doesn't stop them playing the game they want to so they probably won't quit.

I am similar to this, but in my eyes progressions finished at the Cobra, everything after that is a choice, so I just do stuff I enjoy and let the credits flow in naturally.

FDev's sympathy is almost certainly with the second group. But FDev is a business, and both groups are FDev's customers, and businesses don't like losing customers; so it's in FDev's commercial interest to keep some source of easy credits in the game.

Credits are easy to come buy if you have a cutter, corvette or anaconda. But they do need to play the game regardless to get those credits.

 

[jasonbirder]

If they're forced to they'll likely just get bored and quit the game entirely

There are Genuinely people who'd quite the Game completely, if they had to take a temporary step down to a middle-tier ship to play the game???

 

[griffrawk]

In short, yes.

Risk/time Vs reward is waaaaaaaay off.

It would require a complete rework of most of the economy.
And to make the most of it, the bubble needs "redesigning".

We need vast expanses of dangerous anarchy systems between the major factions, something you can't just jump straight over, you can take a long route round, or go through. Risk/reward.
CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

Then the major factions would exist just inside their own bubbles. There would be no way for them to expand / contract as there would be no occupied systems. It would hobble PP straight away.

Even minor factions would be affected as I suspect they do overlap major faction boundaries as well.

 

[Kaocraft]

The reward balancing will get even more complicated. Just take the new wing missions: You will be able to do them as a single player, which is nice, but all the work going into the new trade system...when I can simply take a trading wing mission with better payment.

It's even more basic than that. Trade is irrelevant NOW due to the high payments of delivery missions. The trade tools are great, but there's no reason to "buy low and sell high" when instead you can "pick up and drop off" for more money. Wing missions aren't going to make much of a difference because the problem is already there.

The only way for regular freeform activities to be worthwhile is if there's a massive across the board reduction in mission payouts.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

In answer to the main question: yes, it's far too late. But it was too late back in 1.0.


Frontier have I think two problems with balancing earnings:
1) Ship prices increase at a much faster rate than ship capabilities. A Cutter is about 70 times better at trading than a Sidewinder, but costs 10,000 times as much. A Cutter is about 10 times better at trading than a Cobra III, but costs over 100 times as much. Etc.

2) Professions have very different earning curves by ship type. For trade, capacity is king, and the profession scales pretty linearly with that. For exploration, so long as you can fit a scoop, ADS and DSS (which a Sidewinder can) you can earn at maximum potential and getting a bigger ship won't help earnings. So if you want to balance e.g. exploration vs trading, do you balance it assuming the pilot is in a Sidewinder, a Cobra III, a Python or a Cutter? You can't balance all four simultaneously. (Combat is inbetween - you get more as your DPS increases, but especially with engineering by the FAS stage or thereabouts your DPS can be high enough that "running out of targets" starts limiting earnings, and with system authority assistance even a Sidewinder can earn big money in a High RES)


I don't think it's fixable now. What would need to happen is:
A) Decrease the high-end ship prices considerably. Cutter should be about 50 million fully-fitted, with most ships above the Adder seeing price cuts on both their hulls and their modules.

B) Provide high-earning opportunities that require a big ship. This is difficult:
- trade is easy. Introduce multi-tonne barrels which are much more profitable. (Pirates also benefit because stealing one 64-tonne super-barrel is a lot quicker and more profitable than stealing 64 one-tonne barrels)
- exploration is easy but would be very unpopular - introduce some new scanning tools "The Really Detailed Surface Scanner" and "The Extremely Super Detailed Surface Scanner" which give even more information about planets than the DSS and pay out much better, but take size 5 and 7 internals respectively. (Or something more interesting than a scanner, preferably)
- combat is difficult - you'd need to substantially increase the firepower of the large/huge hardpoints, and substantially increase the defences of medium/large ships, so that ships more-or-less fight at their size class ... but massively reduce the agility of the bigger ships so that they can't just trivially swat a small ship and need to use turrets to keep them away. Something more like Freespace 2 where the fighters (small), transports (medium), cruisers (large) and battleships (NPC capital ships) all felt very different and had different roles in a fight.

Having developed a completely different game - let's call it Elite 5 - they could then balance the payouts across the professions and ships to allow both progression and reasons not to always just use the biggest ship.


With Elite Dangerous, however, I think they're largely right to make earning money relatively easy.

I personally like the feel of the smaller ships - I spend most of my time in a Cobra III, and while I have a Python and FDL for when something bigger is needed, I'm not flying anything which needs a large landing pad. I could afford to buy one ... but I've tried them a bit and they just don't interest me. So for me the rate of earnings is easily fast enough, probably even a bit too easy but never mind, it encourages a bit more risk-taking so that's fine.

For someone who actually likes the big ships, on the other hand, that exact same rate of earnings can be painfully slow and they have to be extremely risk-averse. Given that they can't do much in their Cutter than I can't do in my Cobra ... and they certainly can't do anything in it my Python or FDL can't do ... why should they be paying massively more and worrying about money more just because they prefer the look or feel of the big stuff?