Why were LTD prices nerfed, anyway?

[Kantaris]

Yeah, can do that but my idea of the game is to actually play the game not to have second badly paid job...

Yeah, I understand that. Honestly without multiple billions I probably wouldn't have kept playing. I was able to afford a good exploration ship which gave me access to farming engineer materials and now I have a TON of those and the freedom to play the game however I want now.
No need to do anything except pop back out for engineer materials when I want a other grade 5 engineered everything.

So I've finally started doing AX combat to help humanity and now joining a Squadron because.... Well.... What else am I going to do now that I'm ugly rich

 

[Achtung-Goomba]

Does size count? As in, do you get more for what you dig out?

Size doesn’t matter as long as it’s big.

 

[Achtung-Goomba]

I’m not knocking it because I can see the appeal of ‘spensive carriers and being able to pick and choose your ship and loadout at will, but I must be nearing 500 hours now or more and I’m just nearly about to join the billionaire club... but I’ve got five well fitted small and medium ships that I enjoy flying, that are equipped to do a little bit of the everything in the game that I enjoy doing so I’m pretty happy with a slow casual earning rate. I think I worked out my rough hourly income over my total playtime, including assets, at about a million or so an hour, so it’s horses for courses isn’t it?

Galactic economic crashes won’t stop me flying.

 

[Bottom Hat]

Hey, get that small seismic charge away from my nostril!

Blimey, that would knock the snot out your nose either way!

Size doesn’t matter as long as it’s big.

That's what she said....!
And renault used to say too (to distract from my rudeness...)

 

[LeoBartlet]

Because people on the forum can't stand people making profit in ED so spend months moaning to the point that Frontier nerfs payouts - especially 6 8 figure sum profits...

FTFY

 

[Tikanderoga]

Why nerf their prices after getting them had been nerfed so hard so recently?

because people were getting rich way too fast. 200-250m/h was the norm with LTDs, and the markets just got flooded with it. Carriers started sprouting like mushrooms after rain and making a couple of billions per day was just too much money. Credits became meaningless, and progress in terms of ships had its FSD engaged from Sidewinder to A rated cutter in a matter of hours.
The general consensus was: If you want money, you go and mine. So they #1, #2 and #3 ways of earning money had to be balanced, and because LTDs were in abundance, they got hit the hardest with the nerf hammer. Then Paininte stepped up again, and got hammered as well. Now it's platinum and Osmium. Watch this space.

But everything has a silver lining: Other activities received a boost, like AX combat and bounty hunting, to reward activities with higher risk with more reward. Whereas mining still nets you a nice coin, but it will take you a bit longer to earn that carrier.
Personally, I cashed in during the LTD rush last year, I'm set for life and my carrier is paid for 8 years.

 

[DemiserofD]

To be clear, I'm talking about the SECOND nerf. They started at 1.7m each, then their demand AND supply was nerfed(demand at stations was used up rapidly, and Icy rings had dramatically less available due to the hotspot rebalance).

THEN, a month or two later, they seemingly arbitrarily nerfed their maximum price too, despite the fact that nobody really even mined them anymore since they were so difficult to acquire.

 

[metatheurgist]

They should never had gotten to 1m+ in the first place. And certainly not so common that every Commander and his Asp Scout could get them. Such a bizarre situation, a common easily obtainable resource somehow being worth more than anything.

 

[Jmanis]

They should never had gotten to 1m+ in the first place. And certainly not so common that every Commander and his Asp Scout could get them. Such a bizarre situation, a common easily obtainable resource somehow being worth more than anything.

Meanwhile Methane Clathrates, which are meant to be a common hydrocarbon and are priced as such, are harder to obtain, with higher demand. That's crazy right there. But the pricing of most high-end minerals were like that anyway.

The fact that you could introduce a mechanic which, on arrival, instantly filled your cargohold with Water, would still not be able to compete with the older pricing of LTDs, was beyond ridiculous.

 

[BL1P]

Because FDev can't stand people making profit in ED - especially 6 8 figure sum profits...

10 figure profits and 13 figure bank accounts.
Giggles at 8

 

[Agony_Aunt]

FD have issues with balancing the game. I think in part this is how they react to the issues themselves but also due to the complexity of the system. An example i often point to is Robigo passenger missions. Passenger missions in general pay well, but because of the almost unique situation with Robigo/Ceos/Sothis it means you can make profits there way above what you can elsewhere. And this problem appears time and again across various methods of making money or gaining ranks or gathering materials. There are always those outlier situations which means you nerf in an area that is too profitable you end up making it much worse elsewhere.

FD could, for example, reduce the number of factions in Robigo, or reduce mission generation, or change mission generation there. But then you are going down the road of putting more clauses in the code for specific situations, and as time goes on, such things would become less and less managable.

So its a bit of a tricky situation to balance even with good intentions.

But they don't help the situation by overreacting, like they did with missiles and torps. Mines another good example. They used to be great for getting NPC pirates off your back. But then FD made all NPCs just evade them with ease making them a lot less worth fitting (they retain some small use in making the AI have to fly around them, but its not that effective.

What I think FD need to do is make more frequent updates, tweaking bit by bit until the right balance is found. Unfortunately its often more of a fire and forget approach, and perhaps return to the issue months or even years later, if ever.

On the other hand, you can still earn very good money mining. Its not like mining as a whole was nerfed, just what you mine has to change. Tens of millions per hours is quite doable, which to my mind is decent money for a low risk occupation. I'm not sure why some people seem to think hundreds of millions for mining was ever acceptable and shouldn't have been nerfed in the first place.

 

[Jmanis]

FD could, for example, reduce the number of factions in Robigo, or reduce mission generation, or change mission generation there. But then you are going down the road of putting more clauses in the code for specific situations, and as time goes on, such things would become less and less managable.

Although this wouldn't fix the passenger mission aspect of things[1]... the best thing FD could do is roll back slightly to how things were before; where missions could send you to otherwise unpopulated systems. That's the biggest issue with the way boards generate right now. There is no reason this couldn't be done right now.

Part of the problem of systems like Sothis/Ceos is simply that the mission board generation algorithm can't do anything else... which is really bad. Redundant cases kill the viability of procedural generation systems, and that's what Sothis/Ceos and it's cousins are; systems where a mission is meant to generate for RAND(SYSTEMS), except SYSTEMS is a list containing one item.

By allowing unpopulated systems to be target systems for missions, a host of missions in a huge variety of locations suddenly become possible. These include:

• Hijack
• Surface Scan
• Surface Salvage
• Surface Skimmer
• Assassination (all forms)
• Massacres (all forms)
• Salvage

Where these might normally have a faction target, pick from the originating system of the mission, instead of the usual foreign faction list (which is empty for an unpopulated system). This'd go a ways to fixing the issues of redundant cases in mission board generation by offering greater board diversity. I'd still break down the boards into separate Combat/Trade/Criminal/Specialist mission boards because the number of types of missions the standard board has to deal with is simply too many to create a consistent, enjoyable experience.

[1] The reasons Robigo work still elude me. Comparing to other systems and the missions they generate... there's no reason Robigo shouldn't generate multidestination tourist missions to locations other than Sothis. It's really bizzare, and smacks of a logic error somewhere.

 

[metatheurgist]

I agree many things are hard to balance (especially in the mission system), but, I'm staggered that they thought having 1m+/T CR commodities that you could easily get in vast quantities was something that was sensible. Everyone agreed mining was in a terrible place before the core mining explosion but how could anyone think what they produced was balanced in any way? And now everyone expects to be making billions/hour and they think and deviation from that is "unjust" and "unfun".

 

[Jmanis]

I agree many things are hard to balance (especially in the mission system), but, I'm staggered that they thought having 1m+/T CR commodities that you could easily get in vast quantities was something that was sensible. Everyone agreed mining was in a terrible place before the core mining explosion but how could anyone think what they produced was balanced in any way? And now everyone expects to be making billions/hour and they think and deviation from that is "unjust" and "unfun".

FD's biggest sin was simply taking too long to adjust prices. It should've been dealt with in days, or a week or two, not months edging years. That simply allowed that sort of income to establish itself as status-quo.... any earner coming close to less than half the income of mining was dealt with substantially faster, even though that was still comparatively slow.

 

[Pristine_Bump]

I think I worked out my rough hourly income over my total playtime, including assets, at about a million or so an hour, so it’s horses for courses isn’t it?

Galactic economic crashes won’t stop me flying.

Just had a look at that mine works out at 5m an hour (more like 7m if I counted what I gave to my Alt ) but I havnt bothered much with credits since July when the BGS got my interest

 

[skananote]

They should never had gotten to 1m+ in the first place. And certainly not so common that every Commander and his Asp Scout could get them. Such a bizarre situation, a common easily obtainable resource somehow being worth more than anything.

I still do not understand what is the issue with IN GAME PRICES. It is a game, why is that so painful for others to accept that ppl make money??

 

[Jmanis]

I still do not understand what is the issue with IN GAME PRICES. It is a game, why is that so painful for others to accept that ppl make money??

It's not an issue of people making money.

It's an issue of making money at a rate that trivialises and invalidates the rest of the game, it's structures and fundamental activities.

Like I've said before in another thread... let's play an RPG I've made up.... pick your character:
warrior: 18 strength, 8 intelligence, 12 dexterity
Mage: 7 strength, 20 int, 10 dex
Rogue: 9 strength, 14 int, 17 dex
God: 9999 of everything

There is no "Rest of the game" when any semblance of choice of is destroyed by unbalanced mechanics.

 

[Achtung-Goomba]

I still do not understand what is the issue with IN GAME PRICES. It is a game, why is that so painful for others to accept that ppl make money??

True, but then if it’s so meaningless where’s the appeal in easily amassing a Scrooge McDuckian pile of space-bucks? But of course different people play the game differently, and you’d get on well with one of my squadron comrades who loves amassing credits

It’s probably (definitely?) to the point now where credits are pretty meaningless for a competent Pilots’ Fed member beyond the very early game. Once I’d gotten my core ships built and engineered how I like them in fact, I’m less inclined to see progression in the game as linear, more like a web, or a hole that my free time (of which I have lots right now, thanks Covid...) disappears into when my partners says ‘are you still on that gamestation?!’. I’ve sold my two most expensive hulls after stripping them back down because I couldn’t decide what I wanted to do with them, and just built a relatively cheapo fightin’ Adder which is an absolute joy to fly, so I suppose I’m going backwards?

 

[skananote]

True, but then if it’s so meaningless where’s the appeal in easily amassing a Scrooge McDuckian pile of space-bucks? But of course different people play the game differently, and you’d get on well with one of my squadron comrades who loves amassing credits

It’s probably (definitely?) to the point now where credits are pretty meaningless for a competent Pilots’ Fed member beyond the very early game. Once I’d gotten my core ships built and engineered how I like them in fact, I’m less inclined to see progression in the game as linear, more like a web, or a hole that my free time (of which I have lots right now, thanks Covid...) disappears into when my partners says ‘are you still on that gamestation?!’. I’ve sold my two most expensive hulls after stripping them back down because I couldn’t decide what I wanted to do with them, and just built a relatively cheapo fightin’ Adder which is an absolute joy to fly, so I suppose I’m going backwards?

Credits are kind of meaningless early in the game - and by early I mean first few weeks - when you get the ships you want. After that money just sits there and does nothing. I use three ships and those do everything I need. HOWEVER for most players the only progression that is visible in the game is the amount of credits coming to players account hence my issue... Taking this away from players kind of forces grind, and grind is not good. People will grind instead of playing. And yes I heard that boring "grind is for those who want to grind" B/S. Grind is there, whatever you want to call that thing it is real. There is only few lucky ones here who managed to find place where credits are not an issue but this comes with time/experience/luck... So instead of nerfing the game making it more grindy just stop breaking things FDev and let people make money... Win-Win...

 

[skananote]

It's not an issue of people making money.

It's an issue of making money at a rate that trivialises and invalidates the rest of the game, it's structures and fundamental activities.

I disagree. Isn't ED the game you make for yourself?? All this personal narrative thing?? So if I have credits how is that trivialising my imagination??