What is reasonable Cr/h - post your opinion!

[MadDogMurdock]

Credits/hr is entirely the wrong question because it has no inherent balance for different stages of the game.

Rebuys/hr is the correct question because then it somehow relates to progression through the game from the starter Sidie and some relationship with the opportunities available to you compared to your rankings.

It should certainly be less than 1.

 

[sollisb]

There should be no limit.

You can't answer this question in any meaningful way in relation to E

In something like WoW for example, mobs, crafting etc are all balanced to where a given level of player should be playing. The zone is geared to their level and is somewhat of a challenge. It is neither lethal nor crazy easy. This is all done by creating the mobs to match the requirement. Density of mobs contributes to the difficulty, but as they (the density grow) so does the reward, or there will be a 'named' mob to give a decent reward.

In E they add tougher ship to existing zones which is backwards. The missions in no way reflect the difficulty nor the reward reflect the time/effort invested.

The closest they came was with long distance Pax missions, which rewarded based on time invested. How-ever, it would be fair to say, they were a little too rewarding. But how do you measure that? You just cannot in E because it too much based on Random Occurance.

And I fear, that in FDev they don't have anyone with 'balancing' experience. The recent skimmer missions taken off line, will be fixed using some obfuscated convoluted system that will never work, because, the mission system is also a mess.

There are a multitude of ways to easily fix this, rather than simply remove them entirely. But I'll be honest, I think the whole mission system needs a rework. I was doing Data Delivery Mission last weekend for fed rank and was earning more on time bonuses than I was on the actual missions. a 42k missions should not pay me and extra 120k for being early!!

For giggles; I feel I'm doing ok if I earn 10m per hour in the HazRez. But then again, I don't need credits, it's more a sense of reward vs effort.

At the end of the day, only the individual can assess if they feel they are being rewarded enough for what ever effort they put in. And if they don't feel rewarded, there's always other games with other micro transaction shops to feed your money to.

 

[Barking_Mad]

Enough so those lame PvP'ers who can't fly for toffee can lose as many big ships as they want in Luke Sykwalker mode, whilst avoiding as much of the rest of the game as possible.

 

[Aashenfox]

Relative to difficulty, but the hardest stuff should be paying about 40-50m an hour imo.

 

[Agatosh]

I think the earning potential should be tied to your Pilots Federation ranks, much like it was back in 2.0 when the missions had rank requirements.
For Elites I think 50M - 100M would be fair.

 

[Roybe]

Credits/hr is entirely the wrong question because it has no inherent balance for different stages of the game.

Rebuys/hr is the correct question because then it somehow relates to progression through the game from the starter Sidie and some relationship with the opportunities available to you compared to your rankings.

It should certainly be less than 1.

I agree this is a better definition...but your math would require a multiple of hours to regain the loss of a single ship. This is much to harsh a punishment for the loss of a ship...

Add onto this that the number you give would completely remove the incentive for progression to whatever ship level a player desires.

No one needs to dedicate large pieces of their life to enjoy a game.

The longer I hang around this game, the more I see a necessity to rethink the rebuy mechanic vs. time to recover from that loss.

 

[Aashenfox]

I agree this is a better definition...but your math would require a multiple of hours to regain the loss of a single ship. This is much to harsh a punishment for the loss of a ship...

Add onto this that the number you give would completely remove the incentive for progression to whatever ship level a player desires.

No one needs to dedicate large pieces of their life to enjoy a game.

The longer I hang around this game, the more I see a necessity to rethink the rebuy mechanic vs. time to recover from that loss.

Until I started canyon running and doing a bit of pvp here and there, I had 6 rebuys since 2015. SIX. Four of those were in the first month. Yes, I'm very careful not to die if it's at all avoidable (and it is pretty hard to be killed in Elite if you are awake and don't want to be). I must have 20ish now, but some players have thousands, I don't see how any metric can be based on rebuys based on such wild variance.

 

[rootsrat]

Glad to see constructive discussion!

For the record - I made this thread with a little tongue-in-cheek feeling. I wanted to see the reaction to this (deliberately vague!) question and provoke the discussion about balance in the context of earning Credits in game.

Personally, I don't play the game for Credits, they are a byproduct of my activities in game. There are times when I decide it's time to make some buck and then money becomes a goal for a while, but I never take shortcuts like Robigo, Sothis, Rhea etc., so personally I don't care about Cr/h, but I understand that this balance is an important aspect of a game as a whole.

I agree with those of you that said that the early part of the game is well balanced, but the mid- and end-game could see increased rewards, so that we don't have to spend eternity working our butts off to get that new shiny new 7A Fuel Scoop or Mirrored Armour

I also like the idea of intentional temporary gold rushes in game, where the earning potential is massive, but so is the risk.

Keep the ideas and suggestions coming guys!

 

[shadow133]

My biggest gripe in regards to this wasnt the reweard only, but the lack of reward progression. For a beginner the mission rewards are great, enough to get you an fsd or new small ship in a fair amount of time. But then to get to a python it gets very grindy. From then on I feel it is extremely unbalanced, with costs growing significantly. I wish harder missions, lomg distance trips and ones that would get you wanted would pay more: 30 mn or more. For long distance trips (sag A), given the time and risks I think 200 mn or more easily. Life is already too tough and I can barely play once a week.

 

[sgurr]

I just don't get the whole focus of cr/h. I can't help think that anyone approaching the game that way won't be playing for very long.

What I would say is that for those who enjoy flying the big ships they need to be able to offset the costs in a reasonable time.

As a PB player I've long known I have the most fun in small ships. They can do anything the big ships can just a bit more slowly. These days that's usually a Cobra III, and it lets me do anything I want. Great to fly, looks , small rebuy, can land next to any guardian structure and gives a challenge by dropping into any Threat 4 USS or even solo'ing a Cyclops in it:

Spoiler

Anything extra is a bonus. I'm not Conda wielding a hero, I'm a mote of dust in a vast simulated galaxy where cr/h doesn't mean very much.

 

[Cmdr Eratosthenes]

Purely speaking for myself - as I don't think attempting to divine absolute answers for this particular issue has been the tiniest bit helpful in all the discussion that's gone on here over the past few months, on the contrary, absolutism/zealotry has been poisonous on all sides of this argument & has merely lead to stupid back n forth debates that have gone nowhere - based on where I sit in the game after almost 3.5 yrs with regard to assets, 'achievements' & so on, I don't see a problem with 100M/hr.

Everyone else's mileage will obviously vary depending on how long they've played, expectations, achievements etc.

 

[Strexxxxx]

I personally wish there was way to get 100Million an hours

 

[JudeSaint]

The biggest problem with credits in this game is that there is nothing to spend them on.

Ill use Eve as an example as its the best one i have. You lose a ship your insurance does not cover 95% of it (really it doesnt cover any of it because the insurance was silly in eve)
When you lost said ship you also lost ... everything (again except what you could go salvage from your now blown up ship) You had to rebuy every little thing you had on your ship down to ammo.

Some of the bigger ships cost quite a bit to replace. In the billions easy.

For instance my carrier. cost to rebuy it with parts was around 1.8-2.2 billion depending on what modules i had on it. I could then take said carrier and fit it out for "ratting" (lets say haz rez hunting for the sake making my point here) and get 20-50 million "credit" ticks every 15 minutes (Isk, or credits as we know it did not come instantly. they ticked into my account every 15 minutes so if i had a really good 15 minutes i could see a 50million credit tick, this was a bit on the rarer side)
Now take into consideration any rare drops i got which could range from like 20-30mil for a semi rare drop to up into the billions for extremely rare drops (that came from SUPER difficult rare spawns, like once a month type spawns) Anywho i digress ....

my point is that i really think there needs to be more of a REASON for credits. By no means to i have EVERY ship in the game but i have a fair amount and they are all kitted to the brim. But they could solve this whole credit per hour issue by simply adding in a few ACTUAL credit sinks instead of nerfing everything into the ground.

My personal opinion? ... Get rid of the crazy good insurance. Make it more like real life.

If you wreck your car ALL the time (AKA get blown up) then your insurance company is going to raise your rates (say now instead of 95% replacement it drops to like 85 or something) and it keeps going down if you keep dieing. If you go like ... a day or 2 or 3 or whatever without dieing then your rates start to get better. Just a thought. Ive always thought that a 95% replacement on ships was way way overkill and it really takes the risk out of bringing out any kind of a shiny ship. Hell right now ill bring out my corvette or my anaconda just for s and giggles and the replacement cost on them is 30-40 mil each ... and i could care less how many times i lose them as they are very very VERY easily replaced.

 

[crushdepth]

Whatever you can get. Regulating income is FDs job.

 

[Eduardson]

I dont think there should be a limit... To me the game just feels too static with values, like FD are afraid of extremes.
There are no total save spaces, but also no region only the best players can survive trespassing. Its the same with commodities: their should be places graving for some water, paying you thousands as long as the BGS tells them to, but right now it appears more like the whole galaxy has some aggreement over standardized prices.
And this same general modesty also seems to appear with rewards: If you are lucky, the game should give you a fortune for killing some skirmishers and if you are in bad luck almost nothing for dealing with elite-pirates.

For me it's not about the credits but about the feeling of a living System in the background.

 

[Shoklar]

If you're playing by a cr per hour rule, then you're playing Elite Dangerous wrong. Set goals and have a small to-do list while enjoying the look and feel of the game. I play in VR oculus and its an amazing experience and I find myself always in wonder at the environment and gameplay. Remember - its a game, not a job where you're enslaved to it and paid by the hour. If your time is precious, then do what you like best, but one should not be able to accurately predict their cr per hour, period.

 

[sollisb]

If you're playing by a cr per hour rule, then you're playing Elite Dangerous wrong. Set goals and have a small to-do list while enjoying the look and feel of the game. I play in VR oculus and its an amazing experience and I find myself always in wonder at the environment and gameplay. Remember - its a game, not a job where you're enslaved to it and paid by the hour. If your time is precious, then do what you like best, but one should not be able to accurately predict their cr per hour, period.

Oh.. an added 'period' for emphasis! lol.. yeh, right.. I don't tell you how to play, so yeh.. guess the rest..

 

[rootsrat]

If you're playing by a cr per hour rule, then you're playing Elite Dangerous wrong. Set goals and have a small to-do list while enjoying the look and feel of the game. I play in VR oculus and its an amazing experience and I find myself always in wonder at the environment and gameplay. Remember - its a game, not a job where you're enslaved to it and paid by the hour. If your time is precious, then do what you like best, but one should not be able to accurately predict their cr per hour, period.

I honestly think that there is no "wrong" way to play Elite (unless EULA/game rules are broken) and statements like this don't help any discussion on these boards.

 

[Eshackleton]

I would trade my CR/h for some Painite so I can unlock that engineer. I'm not mining until the update.

 

[Strexxxxx]

If you're playing by a cr per hour rule, then you're playing Elite Dangerous wrong. Set goals and have a small to-do list while enjoying the look and feel of the game. I play in VR oculus and its an amazing experience and I find myself always in wonder at the environment and gameplay. Remember - its a game, not a job where you're enslaved to it and paid by the hour. If your time is precious, then do what you like best, but one should not be able to accurately predict their cr per hour, period.

So, we should not look to buy better ship and better module, and go around the univers to discovers planet and event. Okey