TLDR; I think Red House knows what's up. Vent.
People need to stop and really think about it before they commit to doing something that 'makes credits.' The general go-to vague money-making guide usually promises you that you'll get around 100-150Mcr per hour, but every one I've tried doesn't deliver on that promise without a serious catch. Carriers cost you 5Bcr for their initial investment, and then anywhere between 5Mcr to 25Mcr on a weekly basis thereafter, assuming you'd want to keep it.
The rough time investment for that is as follows, then—but only if you manage to do specifically something that nets you 100Mcr/h+:
• 15 minutes per week for upkeep at maximum;
• 50 hours to cover the initial cost.
How many average players are actually earning 100Mcr/h+? Because I'm not. I was, pre-nerf and carriers, but now I'm struggling to get anywhere near 20Mcr/h—partly because the incentive isn't there and partly because of how realistic it is. In order to do that, I have to completely drop anything that I might want to do otherwise, because it will always require going a significant distance in the bubble, and it will always require doing only what the activity means you have to do. For example, if the idea is that you mine to reach that number, then forget about doing anything but mining.
In my case, it takes 5-10 minutes for me to locate a core asteroid that's worth mining at the moment it seems, and that asteroid will give me in the ballpark of 10Mcr. So if I put my mind to it and assumed that this rate stays more or less the same, I'll be getting 60Mcr/h.
• I could probably easily meet the maximum weekly upkeep by core mining for 10-30 minutes;
• It'll take just over 83 hours at my current rate of dedicated core mining to cover the initial cost of a carrier, assuming I don't get unlucky or lucky.
Keep in mind that I'm excluding my flight time and my true credit rate. My best cr/h rate is based solely on how quickly I can confidently fill up my cargo hold. It'd be even lower than that just factoring in trying to find somewhere good enough to sell to get a "reasonable" profit-per-hour, and because of that feasibility point that I alluded to above, it's
far lower; what would I be doing with a fleet carrier? Well, aside from leaving my unused ships docked at it (currently they're all in Cubeo)... Nothing that I'm not doing now. So why spend all that time and money on doing almost exactly what I'm doing now? What I'm doing now isn't going to cost me 5Bcr. It doesn't cost me 25Mcr/w, unless I do something that gets ships destroyed. If I got ships destroyed—like my Anaconda—then obviously, I'd have to keep that credit coming in, thus I rarely use my Anaconda.
See what I'm saying? I won't even use all the things I have now because there's not much point. What would I use an Anaconda for? Me—probably fighting. But maybe I can do that in something else that is cheaper but with similar effect, say... Fer De Lance. It suits my 'needs,' anyway.
Let's assume that a player not doing that kind of thing is making a bit less—I think 20Mcr/h is a reasonable estimate. How long before they can get something nice? My mate is looking longingly at an Anaconda, outfitted with choice gear. How long will it take him? Because 20Mcr/h is a good estimate for him—and, yeah, with practice he'll get better. The kind of outfitting he wants for it means he's going to end up spending about 500Mcr on this one ship.
• This is 25 hours of doing something specifically to make credits at his best current performance to buy this ship.
He's going to drop the game before he gets this ship, for sure. I've not long taken him to unlock his Guardian booster, I'll introduce him to engineers next—but he knows about mining. Currently, he thinks core mining is "neat." It took him about an hour to net a profit of 20Mcr-ish on core mining. Yes, he's new to it, but he knows now what he's looking for in that activity, namely, how to spot viable asteroids. It won't be long before he wants to shrink the amount of dedicated time needed for that activity, because as cool as it initially is (as I'm sure we can all agree), the novelty wears off a few runs in. And he'll inevitably manage to shrink that time, but it still won't net him much more than 100Mcr/h. That's fine for getting an Anaconda I suppose, but what then? The novelty wears off on his mining after all that and then he's left wondering what else there is to the game.
This couldn't be truer:
It's almost not even a game but some sort of MMO social experiment on how much and how many changes, and negative ones, that a player can take before they just throw in the towel and move on.
Aye, you can say the same about any activity, but the important thing here is repetitive tasks. In Elite's case—like many other MMOs—there are very few of those tasks that pay out 'enough.' If you ask me, the maximum rate of credit-making in Elite was absolutely fine pre-nerf. Initially I thought Elite was much more than a credit-making simulator, but in retrospect I was wrong. The emphasis on making money in this game is the strongest. Nothing else matters. And on the note of repetitive tasks, that friend I mentioned has already complained that you can't do some sort of automatic hyperdrive between systems on a multi-hop route (a would-be Hyperdrive Assist.) Basically, just jumping more than once to get somewhere is already getting tedious for him, and you know what? I wholly concur. It
is tedious having to babysit your apparently clever and helpful ship to the particular system that you're interested in.
I give my mate maybe a few more days of playing ED before he wonders what he's doing. We're talking about someone who plays MMORPGs. He knows the shtick, here. There is no satisfaction in selling things in Elite. Everything else that feels initially satisfying is just... Meh. Which is unfortunate, given the incredible and impressive infrastructure that game is built on. The MMO grind FDev are sticking in here is undermining how good the game could really be. Why isn't there more emphasis on exploration? Why can't we be pushed to get out of our comfort zones, see what else is out there?
I once made a comment on the Steam forums that was in response to someone asking for safe spaces because of ganking in Open play. Aside from the obvious advice, I suggested that he speak to FDev and see if they'd make him a personal version—something called
My Little Miner, perhaps. Somewhere he'd be safe and all that. In retrospect, that's what the game feels like in the first place.
My Little Miner.
