Collapse the credit system, it's broken beyond repair

Snowymonk

Snowymonk
Right request - wrong reasoning.

by making credit earning ‘harder’, I think it will increase the attach rate for the newer players.
When I started, it took a while to earn sufficient credits to buy any / all ships. I had to expend time and effort to achieve something. I had to choose vulture or type-7. What I chose (my narrative) mattered to me.

with credit earnings so easy now, a couple of hours of mining and I can buy anything I want.

if people can buy anything they want, they then get to the end game and question what’s next.
it should take longer to get to that point - credit earning should be harder - people will invest more to get there (and Frontier should squash gold rushes / credit exploits)
 

Deleted member 110222

D
Oh I agree with OP.

But it's never gonna' happen so I can't be bothered writing more.
 

another iconoclast

A
The question is why is price so supply inelastic. If 10000 tons of diamonds get dumped in one system I'd expect them to become a lot less valuable there quite quickly. With a better economics model the focus would rapidly switch to trading those cheap diamonds to more distant systems as the local demand would have plumetted.
 

Stelar 7

Stelar 7
So take a monetary system and turn it into a barter system because you think some people have too much money?

I'm all for a crafting system but outside of a libertarian pipe dream money is a thing that will always have more utility than cost.

So basically, "No."
 

Agony_Aunt

Agony_Aunt
I'd rather they just make earnings more balanced for missions and other activites and tone down some of the more insane earnings while bufffing those that lack.

Of course, the problem is, anyone who comes after such a balancing will have to listen to stories of people earning hundreds of millions per hour and be miffed and of course, the complaints of grind will escalate... but there again, people still complain about grind, after getting an Anaconda during their first week of play.
 

Darth Ender

D
Snowymonk said:
Right request - wrong reasoning.

by making credit earning ‘harder’, I think it will increase the attach rate for the newer players.
When I started, it took a while to earn sufficient credits to buy any / all ships. I had to expend time and effort to achieve something. I had to choose vulture or type-7. What I chose (my narrative) mattered to me.

with credit earnings so easy now, a couple of hours of mining and I can buy anything I want.

if people can buy anything they want, they then get to the end game and question what’s next.
it should take longer to get to that point - credit earning should be harder - people will invest more to get there (and Frontier should squash gold rushes / credit exploits)
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It's not making earning wealth harder. It's splitting what you call wealth from 1 thing, to dozens of things (all commodities and materials). It's then giving those things all a specific thing they can "buy" or be transformed into and what those things can be used to "buy" or transform into. This doesn't increase or decrease difficulty. It just forces you to do a variety of activities to acquire what you want and forces you to adapt to the ever changing landscape of the BGS to where you can convert what you've acquired to what you want. Finally, it eliminates your ability to ever have so much of stuff that the cost of doing things falls to 0. It will always cost you and the game can be balanced to make the cost of "high end stuff" much more expensive than low end stuff and to make acquiring those expensive items (and the only ways to acquire them) harder than the easy stuff.

this last part is where the current credit system fails the hardest. It's no harder to acquire credits to purchase the most expensive things in the game than it is to acquire credits to purchase the cheapest. There's no barrier to encourage players who need a lot of credits to doing things that are objectively harder than easy activities since they both will pay credits and often the cost of time is used to attempt to be that barrier and all that does is create a grind loop that otherwise wouldn't need to exist ...a grind loop which is balanced against the legitimate players who are too new or suck too hard and have to use that easy method to gain credits. it's a no-win scenario.

My method makes that problem go away directly.
 
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Stelar 7

Stelar 7
Darth Ender said:
It's not making earning wealth harder. It's splitting what you call wealth from 1 thing, to dozens of things (all commodities and materials). It's then giving those things all a specific thing they can "buy" or be transformed into and what those things can be used to "buy" or transform into. This doesn't increase or decrease difficulty. It just forces you to do a variety of activities to acquire what you want and forces you to adapt to the ever changing landscape of the BGS to where you can convert what you've acquired to what you want. Finally, it eliminates your ability to ever have so much of stuff that the cost of doing things falls to 0. It will always cost you and the game can be balanced to make the cost of "high end stuff" much more expensive than low end stuff and to make acquiring those expensive items (and the only ways to acquire them) harder than the easy stuff.
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Why?

I'm not seeing a problem this "solution" is ment to accommodate.

What kind of grinding do I need to do when I want more ammo in my guns? With no money I have to have some fixed amount of something I'm not allowed to stock up on.

Do you really think people will enjoy fighting in combat zones when they have to farm some special something for reloads?
 

Darth Ender

D
Agony_Aunt said:
I'd rather they just make earnings more balanced for missions and other activites and tone down some of the more insane earnings while bufffing those that lack.

Of course, the problem is, anyone who comes after such a balancing will have to listen to stories of people earning hundreds of millions per hour and be miffed and of course, the complaints of grind will escalate... but there again, people still complain about grind, after getting an Anaconda during their first week of play.
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again, that's why my method works where your suggestion wouldn't.

I eliminate credits, so all of the billions in wealth you've accumulated is gone. Sure, you may have a lot of ships ..but that's as rich as you can be. As new content is created and new things are introduced, you'll have to cannibalize your fleet.
 

Darth Ender

D
Stelar 7 said:
Why?

I'm not seeing a problem this "solution" is ment to accommodate.
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Welcome to the game newbie. See, the game has suffered from infinite wealth - no cost gameplay since basically year 1. This leads to most players simply not caring about any aspect of the game except the quickest way to make credits to the point where costs no longer matter. That's a major gameplay problem that hurts the game in general.

What kind of grinding do I need to do when I want more ammo in my guns? With no money I have to have some fixed amount of something I'm not allowed to stock up on.

Do you really think people will enjoy fighting in combat zones when they have to farm some special something for reloads?
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You collect what you destroy when you can collect it. The same way you have stuff to auto-repair and re-fuel and re-arm your srv when out in that. Additionally, if docking at a staiton, you can trade for items you have collected that maybe can't be synthesized directly for items that can.
 

Linnunrata

Linnunrata
Not to mention how unimmersive it would be.

"Oh, economies capable of manufacture? Yeah, actually here at Lakon, we just sell you the blueprints. We read this Airfix stuff was a big thing back in the 1990s..."
 

Darth Ender

D
Stelar 7 said:
Hard pass, your method would make it pointless to stock my carrier.

People having billions of credits is not a problem.
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you're not even reading the post ...or you dont understand english. Carriers would be incredibly valuable with my idea. Being able to hold numerous different commodities in one place makes them a skeleton key to the restrictions imposed by the BGS on what is available and where. They can be used to fill in gaps that would otherwise make certain things extremely tedious to craft or long to trade. Carriers would be incredibly useful and they would have to be re-balanced to make that somewhat fair to any players who are coming into the game without having the abilty to get one for free because fdev was giving out diamonds for nothing.

People having billions of credits is a problem. Because it means all of those people do not care what anything costs. A game that is based on economic simulation and micro-management like Elite is, has to have a cost to player activities or it's gameplay falls apart. This may not matter to single player games, but it certainly matters to multiplayer - of which elite is. It's only as poorly seen as one because of this issue, which causes players to not become invested in it. Not because of the majority of players want it to be single player.
 

Darth Ender

D
Linnunrata said:
Not to mention how unimmersive it would be.

"Oh, economies capable of manufacture? Yeah, actually here at Lakon, we just sell you the blueprints. We read this Airfix stuff was a big thing back in the 1990s..."
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A. the current game has no "Lakon" location. the current game sells basically the same stuff everywhere that they apparently 3d print out of magic because there are no shipyards in the game. That's hardly immersive.

B. My idea would not sell you blue prints. They would be places you go to create things. You need manufactured parts, you goto a manufacturing station and do so, you need refined parts, you goto the refinery, you need high tech, you goto the high tech. Further, certain brands of modules could be limited to certain kinds of factions. Fdev could associate lakon with only factions that are have x,y,z attributes and so on. This would further diversify and give meaning to the numerous factions in the game. Creating strategy where none existed before ...even impacting things like powerplay, where there is potential to corner the market on certain things within certain powers - something not possible before, as well as undermine what is available in other powers by flipping their systems in unwanted ways. This would also impact how effective certain offense and defensive abilities powers have by reducing or increasing how easy it is to gather the items needed to craft weapons or combat items used by ships. Since players will need them.
 

Stelar 7

Stelar 7
Darth Ender said:
Welcome to the game newbie.
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Ooohhhh edgy.

Darth Ender said:
See, the game has suffered from infinite wealth - no cost gameplay since basically year 1. This leads to most players simply not caring about any aspect of the game except the quickest way to make credits to the point where costs no longer matter. That's a major gameplay problem that hurts the game in general.
Click to expand...

I dispute your thesis. The game cleverly has an ecconomy simulation where no players wealth effects any other players enjoyment of the game. If all players wanted nothing but piles of credits then we would have more players able to afford fleet carriers than we do. However Frontier provided the data that people with 10bn credits are a tiny minority of the games total population. So clearly you are incorrect.

You say it's a problem that people can grind for money because they can then afford stuff. Your replacement is even grinder, requires people to stop doing what they want and play other game loops. That's forcing your desired play style on others because you think people not playing how you want them to is bad for some reason.


Darth Ender said:
You collect what you destroy when you can collect it. The same way you have stuff to auto-repair and re-fuel and re-arm your srv when out in that. Additionally, if docking at a staiton, you can trade for items you have collected that maybe can't be synthesized directly for items that can.
Click to expand...

So now I have to change my build to farm mats, while I fight and instead of a fun furball I'm stopping to grab mats so I can reload and if I run out I have to run back to base to grab a different ship that's still got bullets and hope I can farm enough bullet juice to keep going, all hail our new all lasers all the time laser meta.

Your idea is garbage. Like dumpster fire in a sinking boat on a toxic sea in a dead world arround a failing star.

It would be absurd from a lore perspective and its garbage game play. Adding hard limits and grind where we once had leisure and fun.

Hard Pass.
 
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