You're forgetting that the payouts for data transport missions and boom material transport missions was significantly reduced along the way.
When I finished Duke, I had 300 million, The estimated cost of my cutter, without discount, was ~690 million. Estimated rebuy was, also without discount, ~34 million.
I'm not complaining. I'm just pointing out to you that what ever was going on when you were earning the rank, wasn't going on when I was. Did I do it at lower ranks and so I made less money? Yep. But I definitely read about nerfs that had happened, so that had to figure into it as well.
You folks seem to think making money is just a matter of snapping your fingers... I'll agree to an extent, but only with experience in the game. Watching videos only goes so far and I'd rather learn by doing.
We learn more from our mistakes than our successes.
Your last line, I agree with completely.
As for what was going on whilst I was earning the ranks though, well all sorts of madness really. We've had quite a few nerfs of short-lived gold rushes in the past, all of which were things that FDev clearly never intended to represent the earning level available to players which is why they were nerfed to begin with.
None of those would give you the answer to what was different in my case though, because although I certainly sampled a couple of them, specifically Robigo smuggling (which involved a 800+LY round trip with cargo whilst being pursued by anything up to 10 or more separate npc pirates for the entire journey, so hardly noob territory) and long distance passenger missions (which involved doing passenger runs to stations almost as distant from the star as Hutton Orbital, i.e. takes about an hour to fly there) I never tore the Arxe out of any of them precisely
because I had no interest in trying to win the game in a fortnight. Disregarding exploits and unintended consequences, credits fall into your hold these days compared to at any point since I started playing. Really.
The reason I had the credits to not worry about the cost of a Cutter is that it was
over a year after I started playing that I earned the Empire rank for one, because I didn't immediately try to grind that rank from day one to the exclusion of anything else. I earned the rank and the credits by just playing the game, doing whatever activity took my fancy. I just didn't try to do it all in three weeks.
That's the point really I guess - when I play games I usually want to have the experience that the game designers intended and it's clear as day that they do not intend for people to be earning a billion credits over a weekend and jumping into top tier ships after a couple of weeks. Any personal value judgement I (or any other player) might make about the topic is ultimately irrelevant, because it's not me that gets to decide what's reasonable and what isn't - it's the game designers. The fact that they have stomped on every single high-credit exploit, unintended consequence or whatever other non-pejorative term you care to use indicates pretty clearly that these are not things that are in their design for the game and that's why I'm fine with it. David Braben himself has said that his vision for the game is one where players do a bit of everything and that he can't really engage with the mentality of people who just grind out the same thing over and over again.
If people want to play the game like a race, I can't stop them. FDev can though and they've been consistent in trying to do that since the day I started playing. It shouldn't be a surprise to anybody by now.
Fun fact: As I've already said I own a Cutter, Corvettte and three Anacondas. Out of those, one Anaconda is a dedicated miner that I've owned for ages but hardly use because I hate flying the lumbering beast around asteroid fields. One is a heavily engineered exploration ship with a 75LY jump range which I have spent a decent proportion of my game time in, mainly because when you're heading 40,000 LY or more outside the bubble, spending a lot of time in a ship kind of comes with the deal. I last flew the Cutter (total cost around 1.5 billion) over a year ago and the Corvette was about the same time. I've spent at least 75% of my time in the bubble flying a Python - cost 55m stock and about 350m fully A-rated - and still do now, with my assets of over 6.5 billion and 1.7 billion cash. Having that kind of money doesn't make the gameplay any different. There's no in-game activity that you can't do in a Cobra Mk3, or a Keelback if you want to fly a SLF.
I know people think fleet carriers will be a massive cash sink. I'd be amazed if the stock cost is more than about 750m credits but I'm hoping that equipping one will increase that significantly precisely
because it will give me a reason to actually care about making credits again. I still think a lot of people that have spent ages grinding out billions from mining are going to be in for a shock though because historically FDev don't gate content with credits to begin with. Carriers are almost certain to use novel materials for fuel and possibly for other aspects of their operation and the scarcity of
those will be how carriers are gated so that owning and using one is non-trivial.
Obviously there will be yet another outcry about that when they're released, followed by someone discovering an exploit to get around it because that's what always happens
![[VR] Mad Mike](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/27/27910.jpg?1553527108){kind=avatar}
