Cyclic nerf of credit cash cows is actually a BGS

[Chaparral]

It is nice to know I am not alone in thinking the boom bust credit rush is an intentional game feature. It is also disconcerting to think that I allowed my self to be annoyed when they nerf the latest "accidental" credit incentive. Clever FDEV.

I just have to sit back and wait for the next Smeaton with the confidence to know it's coming. After all, Chieftan and Squadron ships right?

 

[GG7]

i think they simply dont care, and after some time they reach schedule written somewhere in office and fix it.

something like every cycle they add new ship. Everything is planned months ahead.

I'm sure they monitor the outcry from the usual busybody contingent and when it reaches its usual fever pitch, they roll their eyes and go in and nerf it.

The rest of us don't care either way. But I do find it highly ironic that the latest nerf effects everyone who does passenger missions anywhere in the game. This includes all those clueless busybodies who are more than just a little obsessed with how much $$ everyone else has in the game compared to them, despite it not effecting them in any way.

I had to laugh when the extent of the latest nerf became evident. Of course these same gems of the community immediately blamed the Smeaton run crowd and board flippers for the changes.

Guess they forgot who launched the crusade to do away with this in the first place?

(Apparently there are no mirrors on the planet they come from.)

 

[Delilah]

If we examine the history of credit cash cows within Elite, there seems to be a predictable 6 week to 9 week life cycle before nerf and emergence of a new money-maker.

Robigo
Skimmers
Passenger Intro
Massacre missions
Quince surface scan
Quince beacon scan
Smeaton passenger

To name a few (I'm sure there are more - I just haven't been paying attention.)

I am beginning to believe it is not FDEV's intention to simply nerf credit gathering vehicles to create gameplay equilibrium.

It's almost like a market manipulation to inspire game play interest. I wouldn't be surprised at all if basic medicine outbreak runs or something with the next Beyond chapter will pop, generate gameplay interest through a sudden cash cow, and then be nerfed again.

Let me go a step further with this tin foil hattery. I bet you could layer new ship offerings pretty close to that sine curve...

I've thought about whether this might be intentional on Frontier's part as well. Were there not such obvious design and implementation flaws elsewhere, and a culture of excellence that sought to fix those flaws, then I might agree.

 

[DNA-Decay]

The BGS is a weird beast and frequently throws up "edge cases".

Some of us discovered an Alliance "money printer" out in the California Nebula.
It wasn't widely publicised and most of the folks I knew weren't hammering it because they "already had money".

Unfortunately when the mechanic was adjusted to reign in the ones being hammered by every man and their dog, we got nerfed too.

And when I say "edge case" it's often systems out on the edge that generate these things. The mechanisms of the BGS are designed to work when a system has a certain amount of neighbours. One of the "Fed ranking" systems works because it is set lonely deep in Alliance territory. When a faction expands too much its "surface area" can throw up some weird things.

We had one of the skimmer mission systems in our territory. Everyone got rich, which was fine, but our faction got smashed and the system became uncontrollable. We took it to a Q&A with Dav Stott and we were told "Deal with it - There's a downside to being big. We did deal with it (Remind me to make a video explaining "Operation Stink bomb"). But by the time our fix was working, Frontier had decided to nerf skimmer missions to reign in the payouts.

That played out over months, and I think demonstrates that Frontier do notice when one thing pays too much.

 

[Kaa Mchorror]

I have assumed since the beginning that there would be gold rushes/busts in the different areas of the game. They are intended.

 

[GunnerBill]

If we examine the history of credit cash cows within Elite, there seems to be a predictable 6 week to 9 week life cycle before nerf and emergence of a new money-maker.

Robigo
Skimmers
Passenger Intro
Massacre missions
Quince surface scan
Quince beacon scan
Smeaton passenger

To name a few (I'm sure there are more - I just haven't been paying attention.)

I am beginning to believe it is not FDEV's intention to simply nerf credit gathering vehicles to create gameplay equilibrium.

It's almost like a market manipulation to inspire game play interest. I wouldn't be surprised at all if basic medicine outbreak runs or something with the next Beyond chapter will pop, generate gameplay interest through a sudden cash cow, and then be nerfed again.

Let me go a step further with this tin foil hattery. I bet you could layer new ship offerings pretty close to that sine curve...

The problem with this idea is that you'd expect there would still be a reasonable return from these activities even after the gold rush had ended, except they killed all of them - stone dead.

There's no point in promoting something (like the smuggling from Robigo) with big rewards only to kill it off so no one does it anymore.

Nobody goes to Robigo now, all the bars have closed and all the hookers have gone back to Jamesons.

 

[RidingTheFlow]

I have assumed since the beginning that there would be gold rushes/busts in the different areas of the game. They are intended.

Braben once said he likes idea of temporary gold rushes.

So dev team realised they could kill two birds with one stone calling "gold rushes" results of mispredicted new features and/or bugs "Its not a bug, its a feature", never gets old.

 

[Deleted member 38366]

IMHO only Frontier's lack of fully automated verification processes and tools is to be blamed.

The way it looks like, almost the entire Galaxy was being created only with manual spot-checks.
Fully automated Test environments & Tools with Dev-set scan parameters don't seem to exist.

If they did, alot of similar issues would have been detected during the 1st test-run in the Automaton/Parametrized Sandbox during Alpha-testing new stuff already within Minutes after sampling the effects of new mechanics or parameters.
"Result out of bounds" would be the result - with all affected Systems popping up in the list, ready to identify where the otherwise good idea lead to unintended Parameters.

Thus, it all remains subject to hand-checks and oversights, allowing the occasional "gold rush" to happen.
Ironically, the Players already have a good idea where to look for - and often hit the Jackpot.

 

[RidingTheFlow]

They actually have automatic verification tools. Unless they lied about it which I doubt since its pretty easy to data-scrape stats of income and such, also server saves lot of logs for each player transaction - just for cases like these, so they can reverse these transactions if they deem them "a cheat".
So I am pretty sure FDev knew it was going on and who's been doing it ages ago.

FDev just being very indecisive about game design. Or maybe its just lack of proper leadership, so you get lot of people making random decisions according to each one likings and preferences (also hence unwillingness to quickly revert feature due to desire not to "offend" whoever spent work designing/implementing said feature).

 

[Schmack]

I think that, in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter one way or another. The reason they nerf it is because it creates a void of experience elsewhere. It's not a BGS, unless you think hundreds of thousands of people want to go to Smeaton and barely anyone wants to leave. There should be people hanging off the pylons by now. With as many ships that are making that run, the BGS would cause the prices to decline, but they don't because the prices are set by the passengers instead of the station.

 

[Adaire]

I wish people would stop assuming they know exactly how fdev works and what their intentions are. Everyone has their own opinion on how to make the game amazing/successful and how it would be so easy, and everyone thinks they're 100% right. If there's only 1 right answer, that means a whole lot of people are wrong and don't know it.

How many people actually expected Smeaton runs to stay the same forever?

In any case, from some initial testing hopping boards, bulk payouts to far away stations were buffed a bit, but still don't compare atm to stacking first class/luxury/business VIP's.

 

[Delilah]

I wish people would stop assuming they know exactly how fdev works and what their intentions are. Everyone has their own opinion on how to make the game amazing/successful and how it would be so easy, and everyone thinks they're 100% right. If there's only 1 right answer, that means a whole lot of people are wrong and don't know it.

How many people actually expected Smeaton runs to stay the same forever?

In any case, from some initial testing hopping boards, bulk payouts to far away stations were buffed a bit, but still don't compare atm to stacking first class/luxury/business VIP's.

I wish people would stop assuming that Frontier's design and implementation failures were nothing more than personal preferences, despite the manifest evidence to the contrary.

 

[Adaire]

I wish people would stop making posts talking about evidence and presenting none. there's literally two different posts on forum now, one talking about how 56% FSD will be awesome and the other saying fdev are for capping it at 56%.

 

[Chaparral]

Operation "Stink Bomb" - classic. If this was publicized at the level of Salome' I would have taken a day off work to see how that was executed

Do you suppose the BGS gurus at FDEV have mission payout threshold flags that let them know about outcomes of edge scenarios? Probably not. Just youtube and reddit.

 

[Bortas]

The nerf to the latest one - which was going on for months - came just a few days before 3.0 beta. Cooncidence? Or did they want to easen our decision to either do more Smeaton-runs or play around with the beta?