Arx Balancing Suggestions

[GraphicEqualizer]

Exploration Arx reward is not balanced. FSS, DSS and time spent in SRV/scanning surface biological and geological features rewards with pitiful amount of ARX. While handing in discovery data back at a station (potentially many weeks later) pays out huge (I reached my cap on just a page or two of data). This is a big disadvantage. We are capped at 400 p/w, which means effectively a penalisation as we cannot earn as we go, and cannot hand in them all when we get back - or we risk flying around with unhanded in data until the next week's cap (at the risk of getting killed and losing it all - Arx and credits). That seems very silly. Increase the time spent reward at the expense of the handed in reward. A system scan complete (where it's more than just a honk) could be 1 Arx, a planet DSS probe complete could be 1 Arx, scanning a new codex entry could be 1 Arx, driving SRV and collecting say 100 materials (or per 10 minutes) could be 1 Arx. At the moment I can do these things for an hour or two and maybe earn 2 or 3 Arx (whereas no doubt my discovery data has already maxed out for the week)

Also,

• maybe increase across the board the rate of ARX reward for open vs private/solo play, say 10%. It would reward the risks of playing open a bit (and meeting gankers) while also encouraging more people to be seen in game.
• I've not done any combat so can't speak to that (other than hearing that getting Arx for dying, doesn't seem right).
• And reward the grindy effort put into engineering more than simply buying modules, that reported exploit was ridiculous.

 

[MK Regular]

I agree with this. I've been out exploring for the last 3 months. In the past week I spent around 10-15 hours playing and managed to do the following:

• Visited 185 systems
• FSS scanned over 2000 bodies
• Mapped 65 planets
• Made 11 new Codex entries

You might look at this and say "wow, that's a lot of stuff, you probably earned well over 100 Arx for that" to which the answer is a resounding NO. For all of that, I earned a grand total of 60 Arx. Admittedly, the way the math for Arx earnings seems to be done would have resulted in me earning more than 60 Arx if I had done all of that in a single session, but it would only be ~10% more, meaning I would not have earned 70 Arx.

If we assume the best case scenario (i.e. I spent exactly 10 hours and earned 70 Arx), I would need to spend 57 hours every week in order to consistently reach the weekly Arx cap. When you compare this to how easy it is to achieve the weekly Arx cap in the same 10 hour period in the bubble, it feels like a massive slap in the face to all of the deep space explorers who were hoping to earn a few free cosmetics in the weeks or months they were going to spend out in the black. Instead they will be lucky if they manage to earn a single paint job for spending 4 months in the black, and will either be forced to hold on to their exploration data upon their return for excessive amounts of time or log in solely to sell their data if they want to have a chance to earn a free paint job for their efforts.

Simply put, the current situation is absurd. It was said that players would not need change the way they played to earn Arx, but currently the only way for explorers to earn a meaningful amount of Arx in a reasonable amount of time is to do exactly that, change they way they play.

It is very discouraging when your style of play is treated as being 'worth less' than other styles of play, be it through the lack of updates powerplay has received since launch, the abysmal credit earnings for combat pilots, or more recently the abysmal Arx earnings for deep space exploration. I'm not asking for exploration as a whole to earn more Arx than other activities, nor am I asking for it to earn more Arx than it currently does. What I am asking is for Arx earnings for deep space exploration to be more considerate of players' relative time investments. Even if cashing in exploration data rewarded 1/10, 1/20, or even 1/50 of the Arx it currently does, I would consider that acceptable if the removed Arx earnings were moved upstream to the point the data was collected at.

/rant off



Back to OP. I don't think there should be a 'open play reward' with regards to Arx. FDev has said on multiple occasions (and continues to do so) that they consider all modes to be equal (no, I'm not going to talk about open-only powerplay, since they binned that whole idea). Adding a 'open play reward' of any kind would be in direct opposition to this. Personally I play in solo (even though I'm perfectly safe in open with the nearest inhabited system being 26 kly away) because I can only take 4k screenshots in solo.

From what I've heard combat seems to reward Arx decently, 1M in bounty vouchers or combat bonds will give you 5 Arx, not including the Arx you will get for actually destroying the ships.

The buying and selling modules for Arx was removed, but the Arx for individual engineering rolls was not. Taking a stock module to 100% grade 5 will probably earn you just under 20 Arx. I believe it may be possible to load up a ship with a single type of module (like filling an Anaconda with 1E HRPs or small pulse lasers), doing grade 1 rolls on all of them (each roll should reward 1 Arx), and then selling them for stock modules of the same type until you are out of materials. If you maxed out your material storage, it should be possible to earn 300 Arx before you need to visit the material trader (which also rewards Arx) or go collect more materials.

Also OP, you may be interested in the thread that Factabulous started last week. If you have some time and want to help out we could always use an extra pair of hands to test and collect data.