Controversial topic: Mission Payout Nerfs

[Chris K177]

I understand that this is a difficult topic to breach in a constructive fashion and that by bringing up the subject I'm immediately opening a can of worms, but this is becoming a real issue for many players and will need to be properly addressed sooner or later. I respect that everyone has their own opinion of how the game was intended to be and should be played. However, I'd like this discussion to remain constructive in the hopes that if the Development Team decide to read it they can take away some constructive feedback, from a range of players.

The motive for posting this topic has been on my mind for a few months but, most recently, with the arrival of 3.0 I felt that the community has been more conflicted than ever about how much time they are expected to put into the game, in relation to the amount of ultimate fulfilment gained. I use the term ultimate fulfilment, because we must acknowledge that grinding is a very important part of balancing any game; it's well known that instant gratification with little effort seldom leads to long term satisfaction and a sense of achievement.


I wanted to see if I had just been exposed to a number of unsatisfied individuals, making a loud noise about it, or whether it was a real issue in the eyes of the community majority. In a recent poll I asked players if they felt that current payouts for missions were too low.

Out of 333 players who responded to the question, a staggering 79.6% the payouts were too low, while only 20.4% felt that it was not an issue. I requested that players who didn't feel that payouts were an important also vote against the statement, as they did not feel it was a problem. I was incredibly surprised at just how overwhelming the majority was, so I want to get people's viewpoints here too.


Please feel free to simply agree or disagree, but for the sake of constructive discussion I'd like to encourage you all to share your viewpoints on:


A) Whether or not you feel that mission payouts are currently too low

B) Why you feel this way, including any specific experiences with the game which led you to that conclusion

C) How you would hope that Frontier handle the situation and move forward in the future? What solutions could you offer?


Please respect each other's opinions and try to be as objective as possible

 

[rp198419]

Well, payouts are certainly lower than they once were. However, unfortunately, the ED 'nerf bat' is a familiar occurrence.

There are also, imo, too many wing missions, thus preventing solo players from progressing.

I sometimes think that FD want ED to be a social media platform rather than a 'blaze your OWN trail' space game.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

A) Whether or not you feel that mission payouts are currently too low

B) Why you feel this way, including any specific experiences with the game which led you to that conclusion

C) How you would hope that Frontier handle the situation and move forward in the future? What solutions could you offer?

A) Really depends which missions are being talked about.
- Data courier missions? No, they're probably fine.
- Trade missions? Really depends what you're trading - some pay very high, others pay very low, with no real connection to how difficult or long the mission is
- Source cargo missions? Yes, far too low. They're basically identical to a trade mission, except they take twice as long and you have to buy the cargo upfront yourself ... and they're more likely to attract opposition pirates ... so of course they pay about a fifth of what a trade mission would. (The wing source cargo missions are better)
- Assassinations? Too low compared with the high end trade missions. Or the high-end trade missions are too high compared with assassinations.
- Passenger missions? Again, depends what sort. Some are really high pay for the effort required, while others are nothing special.
- Massacre missions? I'm not sure there's any amount of money that would be enough to get me to do a 75 kill mission. Just too much repetition. But the pay bonus is not unreasonable if you were going to do that anyway.
- Piracy/Legal piracy missions? Far too low pay for the amount of effort needed.

I think the average reward level is mostly fine, but some mission types need bringing up and others need bringing down to make them more comparable. As it is, certain VIP passenger missions and certain types of trade mission pay extremely well, and others pay very badly.

Further, a lot of the mission types have scaling issues. How much money you need depends on what sort of ships you want to fly. If you like the small fast ones, you can get by on 1/100th of the money of someone who likes the large slow ones. But a lot of the missions are equally doable in either sort of ship.

B) Being able to make back the rebuy on my A-rated Python - almost two rebuys, at the high end - with a single straightforward one-hop trade mission certainly suggests some of them aren't paying too little. Similarly, I could make well over 50 million credits an hour with some sorts of missions, at very little risk - which is a lot more than most non-mission options. That's plenty of money for my purposes, and a single hour of those missions would give a small-ship fan all the money they need for the rest of the game. But, at the same time, it would barely buy a single A-rated module for a big ship fan.

And the risk, time commitment, and equipment requirements for missions seem to bear no resemblance to the amount of pay available (same rank of mission, same faction rep - it's right that those have a significant effect, of course, but other than that more balancing is needed)

C) Very difficult to say.

I think some rebalancing between the mission types so that they all have relatively comparable Cr/Hour expectations would be good (with the exception of ones like Data Courier, of course, which are easy to do alongside other missions, can - and should - be stacked up to do in batches, and don't take any cargo space or other equipment requirements)

As always: reduce the prices of high-size ships to better reflect their capabilities with respect to the low-size ships. I'd expect a ship 1000 times more expensive to be ... well, okay, maybe not 1000 times as good. But better than 1-10 times as good, which is the current situation. And it's certainly not practical to make the high end ships ten times better than they currently are, so, prices down. That's needed to get any sort of payment balance that feels right all the way from Sidewinder to Anaconda. (This is not mission-specific, but it will make balancing mission rewards easier)

No-one's ever going to complain about wider (and more varied) mission selections on the boards. Of course, last time that was tried it had to be partially rolled back because it was too slow at generating the missions. More optimisation work on the mission generation isn't going to be interesting to players, but the effects would be popular.

 

[MadDogMurdock]

They are unbalanced which is where the problem lies.

Proposed starting point for rebalancing here
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...for-FD-to-Bite-the-Bullet-on-Mission-Stacking

 

[CMDR RubberStig]

A) Whether or not you feel that mission payouts are currently too low

B) Why you feel this way, including any specific experiences with the game which led you to that conclusion

C) How you would hope that Frontier handle the situation and move forward in the future? What solutions could you offer?

A) For the most part yes, I feel they are too low but as Ian said above - depends on the mission type. but for the most part it seems to me that most combat related mission pay much better than transport, passenger and exploration missions.

B) I realise that combat has costs such as ammunition and repair costs, but to me, a lot of time still goes into the transport missions, and it feels unrewarding to run to 10 different systems, fending off interdictions from both mission pirates and local pirates (the use of ammunition and damage possibility here too) for some randomly stacked transport missions from somewhere in the centre of the bubble - because it's hectic, and pays little even if you are Elite in trade and Exploration (my sig is out of date).

C) Rethink how mission rewards are scaled. There is a big difference between non-friendly to Allied, the the Pilot's Federation rank makes little or no difference particularly in transport missions as stated above. If you want to make it fairer, only one rank above your current rank should be offered by the mission board. Being mostly Harmless and being offered Elite rank combat missions is ludicrous (what organisation would do this?) but this happens now. Additionally, embrace the way players play instead of removing stuff (the mining missions is fair enough - that was just silly). The skimmer missions in particular are a good example of this - players seem to enjoy shooting skimmers from their ship, so why not create missions like "Eradicate all skimmers from Planet P [hehe],5 from settlement A, 5 from settlement B, 5 from settlement C etc. Allow them to be stacked, acknowledge that they will be stacked by paying accordingly.

 

[Jaylem]

A) really it should depend on rank associated, I believe a lot of opportunity has been handed to low rank new players and has been stolen from those who have progressed.

B) in continuation of what I mentioned, wing missions prove massive gain if used correctly by new players, get a friend in a cutter. literally contribute 1-2t and hey presto!! multiple millions in less than an hour! Big game players who own cutters, corvettes and any other End-game vessel with 30M+ repair costs now have to literally scavenge credits to get by. Palin missions-gone, massacre missions above master-gone, transport missions- like hell I am doing that! trade missions are alright, but are monstrously repetitive once you reach elite and you get paid maybe a few million to carry 500t of cargo.

C) ALL aspects could use adjustment in regards to rank, time associated and overall difficulty. personally I find these wing missions to be redundant for high end players (with 3M to kill 200 targets...Ha) even with 4 players in a wing, the time it would take is still not even worth 10x the reward offered. best just to stack normal missions and do them as a wing unofficially. you will make a hell of a lot more for it! For those who have put in the time and effort to become elite, they should be offered missions that reflect on this. I am not talking 1B credits per second insane payouts, but bigger, like 10M to source and return 50 units of gold, or (as before) 25M to kill 108 targets (was really upset when FDev decided to remove that one...wonder how many of my other favourite pastimes are going to be removed also?!!!!

 

[Tygra]

A) Whether or not you feel that mission payouts are currently too low

B) Why you feel this way, including any specific experiences with the game which led you to that conclusion

C) How you would hope that Frontier handle the situation and move forward in the future? What solutions could you offer?

This is a mesh of A, B, and C.

I think the core of it depends on the player goals and time.

As someone else said, and to clarify:

* A person only interested in small ships as apposed to someone interested in large ships
* The willingness to Grind as apposed to doing other 'content'
* Available time the player has.

An eagle is only 44,800, An Imperial Cutter is 208,969,450, according to coriolis, not counting modules which make the cost nearly 10 times as much depending.

I think the #1 problem is they are using 1 system, Credits, to span that range.

There is no balance point, the range is too wide, and the means way to subjective.

To much one way and too many ships are cheap as dirt and you break the fulfillment,
To much the other way and your grinding your eyes out until you can no longer stand it.
In the middle, you get both to only a lesser extent, and both sides call it out, that's how it is now.

They tried to gate it with "content" but that just adds a meaningless barrier to entry that is more grind to
overcome, but once you do, it's meaningless. --Content in this context being a single mission after a scale slider fills up.

Here's an example of another game I am playing, and perhaps a fresh point of view.

I am playing Final Fantasy XIV, when I started 4 years ago, there was only the base game, "A Realm Reborn", now, at the time, there was almost no content. (like Elite now), so, the leveling process WAS the content. It took a long time and was a lot of effort to get to even level 50.

Today, after 2 additional expansions, and dozens of patches, there's tons of story and content, some of it old, some of it only days old. Just today, I went from level 1 to 30 in only a few hours, and only stopped because I wanted to. (I am playing the story again on an alt just to see it again together again in context to the new stuff. I do this annually.) I sometimes get nearly 600% XP bonus to 60 using various means depending. (Items and fixed buffs) They don't care about leveling anymore because there's so much story and other stuff to do.

The point is, they've added so much content, who cares about leveling anymore, Square Enix even pushes you though the levels to get the content. What's needed for Elite is Content. Real, Substantial content, not just half baked versions of the same thing we already have.

Even No Mans Sky¹ is adding content. Like that or hate that game, doesn't matter, they've added content. That much can't be denied. Base Building, Story, Stargates, Freighters, Missions, Graphical Updates, etc, etc. All in the span of a year, and that's a small team where no one but their own community likes them, and they still do it.

The closest thing we got to that was the SRVs and Multi-Crew. (They were different then anything else at the time in the game.) The rest was well, take off, land, and occasionally have some form of cargo or shoot things.

I'd say, recently, the Attacked Star Ports was a good attempt, but the most you got was a glorified passenger mission.

In summary, (i.e. TL;DR), They need way more content; then the payouts, and getting ships quickly, wouldn't matter so very much.

The tragic thing is, there are puzzles, and places to see, and things to do, but unless you are wandering these boards or reddit, you might not ever encounter them. Audio Logs, INARA bases, reasons to pirate the capital ships or attack a thargoid, etc. All wasted because, again, unless you know to look, you could play this game and never even know they are there.

There needs to not only be more of that, but a means to tie it all together, and not abandon old content, but just like FFXIV, keep it around, even if it's old, so it fleshes out new stuff. But what there is now is no where near enough that they can walk away from the 'Grind of Leveling', i.e. grinding for credits is all there is.

My 0.00002 cents worth, who knows, maybe someone might read it someday.

:1I would love to merge No Man's Sky and Elite. Keep Elite's Ships and Visuals, and add No man's Sky's 'space legs', Base Building, Stargates, Freighters, etc, etc..... In some ways, No Man's Sky's newer stuff would really 'expand' this game. That game's updates reads like an Elite Players Wish List.