Why is Combat still a Low Paying High-Risk activity?

I'm looking at all the professions and I'm really happy that most jobs in the game have gotten some meat on their bones in terms of payout but what about Combat? With the risks that combat it brings, surely the combat community should get some fat wallets as well.



I've played this game for the past 3 years and
Never in Elite Dangerous have I seen a "gold rush" on combat missions or anything combat oriented compared to the other professions.
Never in Elite Dangerous have I seen someone get rich purely off of combat without the help of other professions but have seen vice versa.
Never in Elite Dangerous have I seen a new player jump into combat as a means of getting credits unless a part of a wing.
(sadly enough, the only thing that kept combat players "well fed" were the stackable combat missions... but we all know what happened to that)



BUT! That's not to say that every patch hasn't involved Combat In the general sense, but what's the point of having the best and shiniest tools for a S*** Paying Job? Especially when the S*** Paying Job is high-risk and the tools are the most expensive and/or tedious to get than the ones of the other, lower-risk jobs?


Heck, most of the enginners in the game are Combat Focused and they require combat players to do non combat oriented activities in order to unlock them.


I've only seen combat players use "gold rush" trade, passenger, and now, mining methods to upgrade their Combat ships. This system "forces" combat players to take part in activies they wouldn't normally do in order to get a substantial amount of money to upgrade their ships. This, in turn, also deters them from doing these activites willingly in the future.
Then they explain their grievances and get told to "play another game" by those in other professions that are doing what they love and getting paid well to do it.

(edited for clarification) I'm hoping this is making sense. Combat players don't need new tools, they had enough tools 2 years ago. Combat Players need better pay to keep them occupied in their High-Risk activites and that means being on par in pay with the rest of the activites. This includes PVP as well but that's a different beast.


Also, why aren't there any combat missions/USSs to fight ships planetside? like wars and such next to a planetary base or canyon?
 
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I'm in a really bad mood today and couldn't be bothered to read your post, so I do apologise in advance for that. I did just want to say though (based on the title) that massacre missions now pay superbly well and have never been easier to complete.

9m for 16 ships is a common occurrence and quite reasonable I feel.
 
Just guessing, but probably because the AI would smash their ships into the ground before you could deploy your hardpoints.
Certainly not, since AI works reasonably well, when you do a base raid and a ship is around (at least the last time I did that, months ago).

Wing assassination missions used to pay about 5 mil, which was basically fine. But now, balance is rare these days.
 
I'm in a really bad mood today and couldn't be bothered to read your post, so I do apologise in advance for that. I did just want to say though (based on the title) that massacre missions now pay superbly well and have never been easier to complete.

9m for 16 ships is a common occurrence and quite reasonable I feel.

Sorry to hear that you're in a bad mood. You're usually happy and cheery. I won't discuss any of my points for this reason and will wait until you're having a better day.
 
There are systems that constantly give massacre and assassination missions to systems that has only one body - all mission signals are relatively close and jumping into one of them usually follows with another target(s) jumping into instance. (and massacre missions now spawn signal that has 5+ targets inside it)

Fight 3 Corvettes at the same time.
Especially when you get a bugged instance and police is shooting at you instead of them... "Challenging PvE experince"

You can literally stack missions and get easy G5 mats or money if you have a decent ship, I don't even bother with HGE anymore since usually one assassination gives me 5 biotech conductors which I can trade up later.
 
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Yeah, right, 3.3 had no impact on combat profits at all. /s

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sollisb

Banned
The difference can be summed it with;

New mining can yield a billion or more in 4 hrs
A delivery of 180 things to a station 1 jump away yields 9m+
Exploration is just 'I win' credits
An hour in a HazRez yields 2.5m now...

So yeh, the thing that risks your ship the most, pays the least. Absolute Geniuses at Fdev.
 
The difference can be summed it with;

New mining can yield a billion or more in 4 hrs
A delivery of 180 things to a station 1 jump away yields 9m+
Exploration is just 'I win' credits
An hour in a HazRez yields 2.5m now...

So yeh, the thing that risks your ship the most, pays the least. Absolute Geniuses at Fdev.

Did you not see my lovely chart?

That was 99.9% from a hazres.

Frontier balancing their economy:

giphy.gif
 
Get a good combat rank and a good rep witht the local factions and you get good missions. Some of them pay really well and are not very dangerous. :)
 
Never in Elite Dangerous have I seen someone get rich purely off of combat without the help of other professions but have seen vice versa.

My current balance is 500MCr in cash and rest in assets among them fully equipped Anaconda and Federal Corvette.
You have not met me because I'm playing solo.
I have no PC near to provide my stats screen, sorry.
But my story is:
From the start I did bounty hunting only (without missions, first were navbeacons, then lowres, res, hires - without missions often with KWS), later participating wars (missions) and hazres.
Opening engineers forced me to do things I've never done before, like mining, but generally I feel thankfull for new experience (and mined stones in battle python)...

Before recent update massacre missions payed from ally factions like 10MCr for mission (or 8MCr + g5 mats) + 1-2-3MCr combat bonds and this is about in an hour. This is basically the stuff I mostly do in the game.
When I get bored I'll change ship, weapons and will try to adapt them to conflict zones... And I should admit that after conflict zones hazres seems rather relaxing... I never did trade/exploration/mining stuff to make money.

I believe that there're a lot of people which play game not "like me". Because of this the game is wonderful.
o7
 
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