The Elite ranks and current Community Goal

[angusmadmac1]

There was a time when being an Elite was a thing you had to work at it , i was so chuffed when i got my first it was a major accomplishment (took me 30 years ??) , nowadays it has been degraded to a few hours work mining or with the current community goal not even leaving the Bubble , Why has Fdev so little regard for Elite rankings ?
The current CG is for Exploration Data and especially Ammonia Planets , thats fine its nice to see exploration get some love , but its a week long and to a specific station ? and you dont have to discover new ammonia planets/ systems you can scan already discovered ones ?
If your going to do an exploration CG get newly discovered systems and planets and use the Deep space initiative carriers and or asteroid bases to take in the data ? That way you are helping the Carriers with a bit of extra cash and get people have to go exploring .
Just the thoughts of an old gamer who is sad to see the Elite ranking being relegated to a plastic medal found in every cereal box .

 

[another iconoclast]

Having gone from Scout to Ranger during the CG I find it hard to argue...

 

[CMDR Nathan Atterlein]

Rank is all good. The issue, is that we've got tools that basically do the work for us. Road to riches elw/tww search breaks exploration rank completely. Making it slower would only screw with the people who already grind for it without external tools. This is true for the other ranks as well.

 

[Bob McBobblehead]

I went from triple elite to triple elite in this CG, so can't complain.

 

[another iconoclast]

The obvious solution for exploration is add first finder requirements. To do that FDev will need to add tracking of what a commander found; I've not seen any way to find out what you found/mapped first so far. I suspect that the commander ID is copied into the map object, but no reference is put into the commander object to what they found, making it hard to add that functionality without a slow exhaustive search of a >4E8 element structure...

 

[angusmadmac1]

The obvious solution for exploration is add first finder requirements. To do that FDev will need to add tracking of what a commander found; I've not seen any way to find out what you found/mapped first so far. I suspect that the commander ID is copied into the map object, but no reference is put into the commander object to what they found, making it hard to add that functionality without a slow exhaustive search of a >4E8 element structure...

We get a ping when handing in data of first discovered systems and bonus for newly mapped bodies ? Yes it may be hard , but is it do-able ? I may be a bitter grumpy old man ? Who knows ???

 

[Florenus]

Only combat remains time consuming to achieve.
That's because unlike other ranks it's not dependent on credits.

Exploration ranking shouldn't be based on amount of money you make, but something else - number of planets scanned maybe.

 

[Factabulous]

Exploration ranking shouldn't be based on amount of money you make, but something else - number of planets scanned maybe.

They could easily make it based on first discoveries - only something like 0.001% discovered so plenty to go around.

Same old story - some commanders want it easy and would call it a grind, some commanders want something actually challenging and would be ok

 

[[PS4] Filthymick420]

Rank is all good. The issue, is that we've got tools that basically do the work for us. Road to riches elw/tww search breaks exploration rank completely. Making it slower would only screw with the people who already grind for it without external tools. This is true for the other ranks as well.

That isn't the games fault. Blame the community and content creators you all laud so much.

 

[another iconoclast]

We get a ping when handing in data of first discovered systems and bonus for newly mapped bodies ? Yes it may be hard , but is it do-able ? I may be a bitter grumpy old man ? Who knows ???

That's presumably a different object. I'd guess that the commander object has a vector of discovery objects, which include a first discovered tag and the body ID at a guess. I'd also hazard a guess that when you sell up, you get credits added and the vector of discovery objects gets deleted. So, again, unless the commander is updated with more than credits when it's cashed in, you're into mining the galaxy object for tags.

But, yes, in software the answer to the question "can it be done" is almost always yes, but it will take this much effort. Without seeing the code I couldn't comment, and probably couldn't comment if I could see it!

 

[[PS4] Filthymick420]

Its super freaking easy. Look up ammonia worlds on spansh then go get data. A squadmate today went from zero to top 10 in a few hours. C'mon guys tighten up

 

[angusmadmac1]

Its super freaking easy. Look up ammonia worlds on spansh then go get data. A squadmate today went from zero to top 10 in a few hours. C'mon guys tighten up

Yes but isnt that the problem though? jump to this system scan planet 4 , jump to that system scan planet 2 . Complain that exploration is boring , Get Elite with 1/4 of the exploration .

 

[CMDR Nathan Atterlein]

That isn't the games fault. Blame the community and content creators you all laud so much.

Nono, no blame on anybody. The game is great as is, it took me two years of nonstop bgs-based combat to hit elite (yesterday ), and I'm still far from explorer elite, even though I abused these tools myself. Those are great to have as well, enormous help with chores.

When it comes to blaming anyone, one can only turn towards him/herself for spoiling their ranks value with external tool grinding.

 

[[PS4] Filthymick420]

Fair point

 

[Florenus]

They could easily make it based on first discoveries - only something like 0.001% discovered so plenty to go around.

Yes, but it would mean that new players would have it increasingly harder to achieve (they would need to go further and further away from the bubble), so I'm not sure it would be fair.

I think it just should not be dependant on money, because when Fdev increases payouts, this also changes how fast you gain the rank, which is weird.
This is why combat rank remains in the same place after all this time - it doesn't matter how much you get paid, it only matters how much XP per kill you get and in the end you still need to kill more or less the same amount of ships to reach Elite.

 

[[PS4] Filthymick420]

Yes, but it would mean that new players would have it increasingly harder to achieve (they would need to go further and further away from the bubble), so I'm not sure it would be fair.

I think it just should not be dependant on money, because when Fdev increases payouts, this also changes how fast you gain the rank, which is weird.
This is why combat rank remains in the same place after all this time - it doesn't matter how much you get paid, it only matters how much XP per kill you get and in the end you still need to kill more or less the same amount of ships to reach Elite.

No no, that's no excuse. We have new players with Anaconda so they could easily have jumpacondas like the rest of some of us.

Newcomer / Intro - I got the ship that can kill anything, now what?

Hello everyone, I got the game from epic and aaaaallly got into it, at first i did some trading and taxi because i loved the futurama vibe, long story short i was saved up for a ship i like and now i have it, but the problem is all combat missions are kinda... meh? I feel like a bully killing...

forums.frontier.co.uk

 

[Susanna]

Yes, but it would mean that new players would have it increasingly harder to achieve (they would need to go further and further away from the bubble), so I'm not sure it would be fair.

I think it just should not be dependant on money, because when Fdev increases payouts, this also changes how fast you gain the rank, which is weird.
This is why combat rank remains in the same place after all this time - it doesn't matter how much you get paid, it only matters how much XP per kill you get and in the end you still need to kill more or less the same amount of ships to reach Elite.

Then do we need XP points for Exploration Ranks too?

 

[Kenneth McGrew]

Only combat remains time consuming to achieve.
That's because unlike other ranks it's not dependent on credits.

Exploration ranking shouldn't be based on amount of money you make, but something else - number of planets scanned maybe.

yeah time consuming but hardly skill based rewards for combat rank gain.

 

[Danieros]

The issue is that exploration rank takes into account credit value, not just raw number of scans.

So, every time there is increased payout, it is effectively a rank multiplier aswell. This doesn't happen with combat (an experience value is assigned per kill, so the combat bond/bounty doesn't seem to matter), so it stayed the most consistent elite.

Meanwhile, in this CG you can pretty much go from mostly harmless to elite with like 100 AW scans.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

This isn't an entire solution but 1 obvious part solution would simply have been for the moment pay for exploration was updated by X% the earnings needed to get to elite is also increased by X%

Also missions like the ram tah ones (great btw) didn't pay too much imo for the work involved however I would suggest missions should have a 25% (ie 0.25) multiplier added to the progression to exploration elite.

So sure pay 100million credits for a completed mission as it did take some time and commitment BUT imo it should only have added 25 million onto your rank to elite.

You could argue that exploration would be better being about discoveries (not necessarily 1st only discoveries as it will get steadily harder) and I won't disagree.

But right now it's all about money and so the easy fix is just to link the elite ladder increased with pay increases.
It's too late for me I am already exploration elite.... But I wish I wasn't.

(But no I am NOT wiping my commander)