Frontier's Nerf Valhalla

[Shadowed]

Disagree. Conflict zone pay pennies and you have to rely on RNG in Haz Rez zones. Only eagles and adders spawned for an hour. And if you have a decent ship and get blown to bits then you lose the time in the HazRez/ Your Rebuy and any potential bounties.

Becoming hostile to the local pirate faction greatly increases Anaconda spawn rate. The higher base combat rank you are, the larger the wanted ships as well.

So if you are Elite, hostile to the local pirates, and Level 2 on ALD/ZH you are able to easily make 15m cr an hour or more.

And I don't know anyone who has died to an NPC in a combat ship at a RES. How does that happen? Haz RES are only dangerous when a PvPer wants to attack me.

 

[Imgran]

You're acting like it's intended to stay this bad. FD is going to restore the distance multiplier. It might work differently than it does right now, but long distance cruises will be rewarded again. They just took down a broken system because its brokenness was warping the game. They'll put it back once they're sure they have something that will work at least a little better without breaking the game.

 

[Funny]

You're acting like it's intended to stay this bad. FD is going to restore the distance multiplier. It might work differently than it does right now, but long distance cruises will be rewarded again. They just took down a broken system because its brokenness was warping the game. They'll put it back once they're sure they have something that will work at least a little better without breaking the game.

It would be nicer if you could simply jump to a second/third/whatever star though, and then have the distance factor scale off distance to nearest star... just saying. An hour in supercruise isn’t exactly fun if all you’re seeing is darkness/the same starry void.

 

[operant]

You're acting like it's intended to stay this bad. FD is going to restore the distance multiplier. It might work differently than it does right now, but long distance cruises will be rewarded again. They just took down a broken system because its brokenness was warping the game. They'll put it back once they're sure they have something that will work at least a little better without breaking the game.

Sadly they have also broken normal passenger missions (over about 1k ls perhaps) for normal players. Usual ineptitude.
IIRC they messed up after the last patch, then 'fixed' it.
Obviously not as simple as fitting a (polynomial) function to a set of points (predetermined distance/reward) using a standard library.

 

[Cmdr Muerte Viene]

The alternative would have been UA bombing Allen Hub plus some of the planetary ports. The Smeaton run had to come to an end, one way or another. Your limitless profits had a devastating effect on BGS, and in that aspect, the mechanism was utterly broken. Glad FD heard and finally fixed it.

O7,
[noob]

How was the effect devastating. You could argue CG's have the same effect.

 

[kofeyh]

You're acting like it's intended to stay this bad. FD is going to restore the distance multiplier. It might work differently than it does right now, but long distance cruises will be rewarded again. They just took down a broken system because its brokenness was warping the game. They'll put it back once they're sure they have something that will work at least a little better without breaking the game.

Please. Frontier lurch from one extreme to the other, until sufficiently yelled at, apply an extreme fix to an extreme outcome and then ignore it until they are sufficiently yelled at.

It’s been happening for four years. They won’t put anything back. Just have another extreme thing happen on purpose, for purposeful reasons and ignore the warning that it’s extreme, it will then get shouted down. Suddenly that’s our fault and Frontier certainly didn’t intend the thing they absolutely extremely intended and appoligists will leap in to say “but this is just temporary and of course they will rebalance”.

Which is the one thing they should do, but refuse to. See you later on when the next extreme intended outcome is suddenly not intended, frontier swing the extreme axe and folks say the same thing all over again.

If folks are a bit dim and haven’t seen history repeating more than “ground hog day” then that’s more on the observer than observed, I dare say.

 

[Cygnus X-1]

It’s been happening for four years. They won’t put anything back. Just have another extreme thing happen on purpose, for purposeful reasons and ignore the warning that it’s extreme, it will then get shouted down. Suddenly that’s our fault and Frontier certainly didn’t intend the thing they absolutely extremely intended and appoligists will leap in to say “but this is just temporary and of course they will rebalance”.

Kinda like the shield booster changes that were rolled back after much beta testing, with the assurance that the balance issues would be fixed eventually. I wonder if there's been any follow up on that?

 

[FudePoof]

Please. Frontier lurch from one extreme to the other, until sufficiently yelled at, apply an extreme fix to an extreme outcome and then ignore it until they are sufficiently yelled at.

It’s been happening for four years. They won’t put anything back. Just have another extreme thing happen on purpose, for purposeful reasons and ignore the warning that it’s extreme, it will then get shouted down. Suddenly that’s our fault and Frontier certainly didn’t intend the thing they absolutely extremely intended and appoligists will leap in to say “but this is just temporary and of course they will rebalance”.

Which is the one thing they should do, but refuse to. See you later on when the next extreme intended outcome is suddenly not intended, frontier swing the extreme axe and folks say the same thing all over again.

If folks are a bit dim and haven’t seen history repeating more than “ground hog day” then that’s more on the observer than observed, I dare say.

This is my gripe. I can understand nerfing things that are broken. But many in this thread and others have totally forgot that frontier already swung the nerf hammer once, stated that the system was now working as intended, and have decided to swing the hammer again because they messed up again. It wouldn't be so bad if they revisited things and balanced them, but frontier just leaves it broken.

Does anyone remember about three years ago, before the cutter and such, when imperial slave smuggling net 9-16k profit/ton on the black market and frontier chose to nerf this?

Some how they thought that 320k profit per ton equivalents were acceptable after "balancing".
(as to how I got that number Anaconda max cargo/passenger ratio: 468 cargo/200passenger = (2.34).
150mil per 200 passenger= 750,000cr per seat

converted to cargo equivalent:

750,000/2.34= 320,512,821)

 

[Bob Lighthouse]

Ftr, I landed at Jones almost every trip for the higher Gs.
I also started killing every interdicter, often 3 at a time.
I never relogged.
I took data or other cargo when it was on the way/space allowed.

Let's not pretend everyone doing this was behaving a certain way.

 

[Dagwit]

I'm not sure that Frontier wanted this nerf. Why? Because long-supercruise economy passenger runs have been a thing for months. Frontier could have nerfed them long before now but didn't. So why act now rather than wait till Beyond drops to make any necessary scaling back of payments?

Because the mission servers are melting under the weight of all the board-hopping. I know this because I was board-hopping at Allen Hub on Sunday and it wasn't going well. I think Frontier would rather have waited and made some less radical reduction in payments when Beyond comes out of beta - they don't like easy money but I suspect their figures show that every nerf sees players leave the game - but it became clear that the mission servers simply wouldn't survive that long.

PS Why nerf payouts rather than block board-hopping? Because nerfing payouts only requires changing a variable, whereas blocking board-hopping would require reprogramming a bunch of stuff that's about to change anyway.

 

[JetsonRING]

We were totally earning our "excessive" pay on those missions to Smeaton Orbital. There were times i had a dozen Elite Anacondas and Fer De Lances taking turns interdicting me over a span of forty minutes. It was exciting, it was Dangerous. Thank you FDev for sucking even more life from the game. o7

 

[Imgran]

Sadly they have also broken normal passenger missions (over about 1k ls perhaps) for normal players. Usual ineptitude.
IIRC they messed up after the last patch, then 'fixed' it.
Obviously not as simple as fitting a (polynomial) function to a set of points (predetermined distance/reward) using a standard library.

Well they had to do something. The Medb/Smeaton runs were an active cancer to the gameplay elements FD wants to encourage. They had to go. An overcorrection is better than an undercorrection in that circumstance. As long as they time it to bounce back to normal in a reasonable time frame I'm OK with this.

Of course what I'd love to see them do is get in under the hood and really overhaul the passenger system, but that's probably a bridge too far with so many other irons on the fire.

 

[Imgran]

We were totally earning our "excessive" pay on those missions to Smeaton Orbital. There were times i had a dozen Elite Anacondas and Fer De Lances taking turns interdicting me over a span of forty minutes. It was exciting, it was Dangerous. Thank you FDev for sucking even more life from the game. o7

Oh stop. Long range missions are coming back in some form, probably sooner rather than later.

 

[Numenor1379]

The alternative would have been UA bombing Allen Hub plus some of the planetary ports. The Smeaton run had to come to an end, one way or another. Your limitless profits had a devastating effect on BGS, and in that aspect, the mechanism was utterly broken. Glad FD heard and finally fixed it.

O7,
[noob]

I'd like you to prove exactly how much of a "devastating" effect Smeaton (alone) had on the entire BGS. Go ahead...

 

[Genus]

I'd like you to prove exactly how much of a "devastating" effect Smeaton (alone) had on the entire BGS. Go ahead...

A more relevant question would be how, under any definition of normal, that doesn't point to the BGS itself being the actual problem. FD ain't so keen to address the elephant in the room, when a quick kneejerk instruction for the intern to turn a dial on one line of code will do.

 

[GraXXoR]

All I want to know is what on God's Green Earth took them so long?

They should have been gone the first week they were reported.

Yet after so long, why would they nerf it "effective immediately"

Long running times, allowing those who keep it secret to amass massive, gamebreakinig wealth, then announce it to the general player public and say that it is being nerfed immediately is the worst possible method.
Imagine how people who have worked their way to 1,000,000,000 credits fairly (like most did back in the day) only to find that others managed it in a single day.

Putting aside any arguments of grind vs gameplay, generally it's parity that people want and this announcement (which may come as news to some) with the message that it's now immediately nerfed is a pretty poor approach.

 

[Numenor1379]

All I want to know is what on God's Green Earth took them so long?

They should have been gone the first week they were reported.

Yet after so long, why would they nerf it "effective immediately"

Long running times, allowing those who keep it secret to amass massive, gamebreakinig wealth, then announce it to the general player public and say that it is being nerfed immediately is the worst possible method.
Imagine how people who have worked their way to 1,000,000,000 credits fairly (like most did back in the day) only to find that others managed it in a single day.

Putting aside any arguments of grind vs gameplay, generally it's parity that people want and this announcement (which may come as news to some) with the message that it's now immediately nerfed is a pretty poor approach.

Ummm, this money maker has been known for months. Frontier has known about it for months. People have been making millions for months. It is not something that just showed up yesterday, and it was as fair a way to make cash as anything else (it just was massively more efficient than any other method).

 

[GraXXoR]

How was the effect devastating. You could argue CG's have the same effect.

CG's what have the same effect?

CG's cash payments?
CG's grief magnet?
CG's taste?

 

[Genus]

Imagine how people who have worked their way to 1,000,000,000 credits fairly (like most did back in the day) only to find that others managed it in a single day.

I would be one of them. Have to say I'm not so far up my own donkey, to chuck my teddy out over it. In fact, I'm happy that the game was more sustainable "funwise" and easier for new players to progress than "back in the day". As I've been around for a while it was fun to try on all the ships, take a few more risks in combat to experiment, forget about exploring and all the other dull as duck "chores" I didn't have to do for a while.

But hey ho, that's life.

Was only a matter of time before some more "rational" decisions were taken.

 

[Maka Gucci]

I would be one of them. Have to say I'm not so far up my own donkey, to chuck my teddy out over it. In fact, I'm happy that the game was more sustainable "funwise" and easier for new players to progress than "back in the day". As I've been around for a while it was fun to try on all the ships, take a few more risks in combat to experiment, forget about exploring and all the other dull as duck "chores" I didn't have to do for a while.

But hey ho, that's life.

Was only a matter of time before some more "rational" decisions were taken.

Well *ing said, mate.