What is everyones ideal credits per hour rate?

Vedmo

Vedmo
I started a free account a couple of weeks ago. There was real ship progression from Sidewinder to Viper MKIV, then I flew to Maia to pick up a Meta-alloy and headed to Deciat, where turning in all that data got me a Felecity unlock. I kept unlocking engineers until I had invites from all of the Colonia engineers, then headed that way.

I turned in ~200 million in explo data and bought a Python. Up until now we've covered 90% of this Commander's play time.

Extraction delivery missions have since bought me a Type-9. I use the Python for small pad big payout missions while stacking large pad ones until I can fill the Type-9. This means regular 50 to 100 million an hour Python earnings with an occasional 150ish million one time Type-9 delivery to boost it well over 100 million/hour average.

I've done in two weeks what took me 6 months or so when I started playing, of course with the benefit of knowledge this go around.


So far as what's appropriate, I have no clue.
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
Craith said:
Actually, something equivalent to your rebuy value per hour sounds quite fine as a target value.

A bit more for more risky stuff. Anything above 2x rebuy is ridiculously high IMO. And I actually mean rebuy value for a standard ship to use this, you can try to do it in a weaker ship if you want, your payout wouldn't get reduced.
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Highest possible rebuy I think is this build - https://s.orbis.zone/auB2
If built at iSola Prospect for the 20% cost penalty, it would have a rebuy of 109 million credits.
And yes, it's definitely a ship which would get more effective at almost anything by swapping some of the modules for cheaper ones - actually earning money with it might be tricky :)

So 2x that an hour isn't far off what Frontier seem to currently be targeting as high-end pay.

(70 million rebuy wouldn't be impossible for a more sensible build, either, which isn't that different when it comes to the very low precision with which earnings can be balanced anyway)
 

theBreadSultan

T
XW_Ziggy said:
For me, the cost of endgame, fully-engineered ships like the Corvette or Cutter seem to be about a billion and the rank/rep grinds to reach them should be a long-term goal. I can make half a billion in an evening after work if I want, via deep core mining or passenger missions which makes the purchase cost of the endgame ships nonsensical.

Either the ship prices or the income needs to change, because there's no feeling of progression or accomplishment if you can jump straight to endgame ships on day one.

Assuming the ship prices don't change, my feeling is that you should probably be playing for at least 50 hours to buy an endgame A-rated ship which means that 20M/hour should be seen as the upper limit on any form of credit earning. An Anaconda is, from Li Yong-Rui space, just 125M credits, and even at 20M/hour - that's something that can be still attained on day one, so no, I don't think 20M/hour is unreasonable. Perhaps it should be considerably lower than that even.

The only thing that needs money is Carriers, and they've been designed as money-sinks on purpose. You only buy one if you have money to burn and nothing else to do with the money.
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I'd say it takes a lot more than 50 hours to get an end game ship - certainly if you want it A-rared

You are looking at it from an experienced player perspective. Your forgetting the whole learning to land on a pad, getting through the mail-slot smoothly.
Wrapping your head around modules, controls and the basic game and flight mechanics.

Then you have to remember that this person is not going to know the exact type of missions to do to get a specific ship / strap optimal mining equipment equipment on it and head straight to the hot-spot you know about to mine a good commodity which you then sell at an optimal station.

No careful analysis of the stats between the ships you can buy - no flying to Hutton orbital because wow 2 mill for 1 small delivery mission!

No getting your ship blown up because you decided to check out a conflict zone in your barely upgraded DBS - for which you didn't have the rebuy, because now is the moment you learn that lesson.

The credit/Grind is NOT the game. It's a part of it sure, but it's not THE game.

It made sense that the ship progressing was so slow in the start, because there was less content. But as more content comes to the game, the rate of progression should speed up.

It also makes the game more... Dare I say it.. Fun
 

aRJay

aRJay
Even when I was new I never thought about how quickly I was earning credits in terms of hours, I would sometimes have a target of so many credits before going back to the station to cash in bounties and repair the Sidewinder.
But I was never that obsessed with how many credits I was earning except when I had just raised enough to buy a new ship but needed to double or triple the amount to make the purchase secure but even then it was more an "are we there yet, no, well maybe next week then" kind of vibe.

Later when I got into doing CGs I would get interested in how fast I was earning towards the end of the CG to see if I would stay in the band or even move up.

I would like to see credits remain in the game, some people will still want them to keep score, but I think ship and module pricing needs to be looked at with little change for the cheapest but top end ships getting more of a price hike and module prices increasing more with size and grade than they do now.

But I couldn't say where those prices should be.
 

Kaocraft

Kaocraft
The relative balance and interplay between different activities and systems of progression is so much more important than the top level, the average level, and the bottom level of earnings per time unit.

If the benefits, drawbacks, opportunity costs, and risks of any given activity and its range of possible outcomes is something that players can grasp, and we can make what feels like interesting meaningful consequential decisions about our activities in the game, then across-the-board earnings potential can almost be set to anything.

A major problem with this game is that there isn't any utility in high skill or high knowledge play. The highest possible credits-per-hour methods that crop up have always been basically doable by anyone willing to follow a guide, and failure to execute on high credits-per-hour strategies carries no more risk than failure to execute on low credits-per-hour strategies.

What this ends up creating is a situation where Frontier has to treat top earnings potential as though it were the default average player's income, and balance the game around optimized strategies, while also making sure that optimized strategies aren't too difficult or inaccessible to any given player.

If the top earnings opportunities were difficult, risky, or both, then Frontier wouldn't have to balance everything against them.
 

willisit

willisit
It should be enough not to disuade new and casual players from being able to progress. Some people can manage 2 hours a week, some, 60+. That's tough to "balance". In some games, the game scales with you - say, you're "level 1" and you can earn x, and when level "100" you earn y. Well, within those levels are areas to play, kit to buy and adventures to be had. Elite is pancake flat, which hurts both sides. A sidey owner isn't going to earn 50m an hour as a newbie, but conversely, a Carrier owner needs to earn those figures to keep floating in the black, so that's a good-ish number. Way too simple for here, sorry. :)
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
aRJay said:
but I think ship and module pricing needs to be looked at with little change for the cheapest but top end ships getting more of a price hike and module prices increasing more with size and grade than they do now.
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I think this would end up making the problem worse, not better. I'd go as far to say that the existing exponential pricing curve for ships and modules is why credits are completely unbalancable and Frontier have just given up and gone for a "everyone can be post-credits, regardless of profession" approach.

At the moment a T-9 costs about 1000 times as much as a Hauler, but is only 30 times better at hauling stuff. So earnings balanced around making a T-9 affordable mean the Hauler can pay for itself in a single trip. Equally, earnings balanced around assuming everyone is a Hauler pilot looking to work their way up to the Cobra III would mean the T-9 was already unaffordable. And that's trade, which at least scales somewhat linearly as you upgrade your ship size - something like exploration, a Sidewinder and a Cutter earn basically the same amount ... for surface salvage missions a Sidewinder or Cobra can actually be quite a bit better than the Cutter because it's far easier to find a landing spot for it in rough terrain and they have much better supercruise agility too.

On the modules side, an 8A Fuel Scoop costs 289 million credits, while a 7C Fuel Scoop still gives over half its scoop rate for under 6 million credits ... and the 5C still scoops at a quarter of the rate of the 8A for about half a million credits. Now, sure, Fuel Scoops have a ridiculous pricing curve already, but I don't think it'd be an improvement to apply the same thing to other modules too.

If things were priced at what they were actually worth, a lot of the medium and large ships and modules would come significantly down in price - and then earnings could at least in theory be balanced across all ship classes at once.
 

PrincessMinMin

Banned
P
It should take a long time to get the biggest ships in the game (excluding FCs) as was originally intended. So hundreds of hours. So whatever CRs/hr that would enable that.
 

Morbad

Morbad
XW_Ziggy said:
For me, the cost of endgame, fully-engineered ships like the Corvette or Cutter seem to be about a billion and the rank/rep grinds to reach them should be a long-term goal. I can make half a billion in an evening after work if I want, via deep core mining or passenger missions which makes the purchase cost of the endgame ships nonsensical.
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My CMDR (last reset since the moment Gamma dropped) had the rank to buy a Corvette well before he had the money.

Craith said:
Actually, something equivalent to your rebuy value per hour sounds quite fine as a target value.

A bit more for more risky stuff. Anything above 2x rebuy is ridiculously high IMO. And I actually mean rebuy value for a standard ship to use this, you can try to do it in a weaker ship if you want, your payout wouldn't get reduced.
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Income being hundreds of times his expenses seems ridiculously high to me.

As it is, I see a rebuy screen every 200-300 hours, on average. If I had to be as cautious as I'd like to have to be for my CMDR to get by, you could stick a zero on the end of those figures.

willisit said:
It should be enough not to disuade new and casual players from being able to progress. Some people can manage 2 hours a week, some, 60+. That's tough to "balance".
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It shouldn't be tough to balance, or rather shouldn't be an issue to balance, because the entire experience should be enjoyable, and nothing should be artificially gated behind arbitrary progress.
 

Urbanski101

Urbanski101
I don't know about anyone else but I didn't start playing ED way back when and think about 'how am I gonna earn mega credits'. This is a mentality that has slowly crept up on me...because of FCs

I played ED in the beginning because I wanted to be in that world again, fly the ships and create my own adventures which to a greater or lesser degree I have done.

Now with the introduction of FCs, this is content I want to experience but it requires a huge income stream so I do appreciate FD trying to balance the game and allow me to acquire the funds in my own way.

The credit earning inflation in just 5/6 yrs is insane so I have no doubt my goal is achievable but without a true dynamic economy, the credit genie is out of the bottle and they have a real job on their hands trying to balance it.

I don't think they can ever truly balance it but perhaps get to a point where we say "does this feel fair, do I feel like I'm being fairly rewarded for my time?" If the answer to that is mainly positive then perhaps that's good enough...or as good as I think it will get.
 
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Sensei Jacksama

Sensei Jacksama
IMO 60-70 million should be the baseline. Some activities should be slightly lower and others higher depending on skill but generally I think that's a good baseline for someone who knows what they are doing.
 

Craith

Volunteer Moderator
Craith
Ian Doncaster said:
Highest possible rebuy I think is this build - https://s.orbis.zone/auB2
If built at iSola Prospect for the 20% cost penalty, it would have a rebuy of 109 million credits.
And yes, it's definitely a ship which would get more effective at almost anything by swapping some of the modules for cheaper ones - actually earning money with it might be tricky :)

So 2x that an hour isn't far off what Frontier seem to currently be targeting as high-end pay.

(70 million rebuy wouldn't be impossible for a more sensible build, either, which isn't that different when it comes to the very low precision with which earnings can be balanced anyway)
Click to expand...
ok, that rebuy is a bit higher than what I expect the average rebuy for a cutter is - I was not really thinking about the edge cases (a freewinder should also earn more than 0 credits). more as a rough guideline, ~10 hours to buy a ship as good as the most expensive current one sounds good for me.
 

Flossy

Volunteer Moderator
Flossy
I've never understood this obsession with credits per hour! I've never based my game time on how many credits I can make in an hour and never will! Apart from anything else, it sounds too much like work to me, something I've not done for over 6.5 years in RL since I retired. A lot of my game play pays absolutely nothing except to give me a good feeling about helping someone. :) Not saying I never do make credits - one of my alts is currently taking part in one of the trade CGs, but even then it's more about helping the CG to succeed and the rewards are just a nice addition. :ROFLMAO:
 
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