Dear FDEV, Can we re-balance how ARX are earned
- Thread starter Shaele
- Start date
ARX seem to try to reward people for simply playing the game. In my view the only measure of playing the game is time spent in-game. My proposition is to tie ARX count to being logged-in, reaching maximum after say 7-8 hours (roughly hour per day).
What you do in-game should not matter at all. If you don't even want to play, just harvest the ARX by parking your ship somewhere, so be it, who cares. I don't know why anyone who does not want to play the game would want ARX in the first place but hey, not my problem.
What you do in-game should not matter at all. If you don't even want to play, just harvest the ARX by parking your ship somewhere, so be it, who cares. I don't know why anyone who does not want to play the game would want ARX in the first place but hey, not my problem.
ARX doesn't reward me for 'playing the game'.
There's basically nothing that's of interest for me in ED at the moment, I'm currently enjoying Space Engineers. The delay of Fleet Carriers put me off playing & I went searching for something else to entertain me.
For the past few weeks I've only been logging on to sell my 'caps worth' of excess Exploration data, then logging off until the following Thursday. Iv got a decent amount to go still! - btw I don't care anymore about anyone 'knicking' my first discoveries, that Ship sailed years ago!
That's around a hour's play/week tops, if I want to spread the data for rep gain.
The Xmas giveaway added another 5 mins per day, loading the game to read the message to log out again.
I know I'll be back playing properly some day & having some ARX in the bank may come in useful SHOULD frontier come up with a decent bobblehead, but at the moment FD it's not working for me.
There's basically nothing that's of interest for me in ED at the moment, I'm currently enjoying Space Engineers. The delay of Fleet Carriers put me off playing & I went searching for something else to entertain me.
For the past few weeks I've only been logging on to sell my 'caps worth' of excess Exploration data, then logging off until the following Thursday. Iv got a decent amount to go still! - btw I don't care anymore about anyone 'knicking' my first discoveries, that Ship sailed years ago!
That's around a hour's play/week tops, if I want to spread the data for rep gain.
The Xmas giveaway added another 5 mins per day, loading the game to read the message to log out again.
I know I'll be back playing properly some day & having some ARX in the bank may come in useful SHOULD frontier come up with a decent bobblehead, but at the moment FD it's not working for me.
I'd very much like it if FD rebalanced the ARX formulas to make it less combat centric. But there are three reasons why I rather hope they don't ever touch it again:
1. They'd break half the game again in the process.
2. It would never be an entirely fair distribution per ingame activity.
3. 400 ARX ultimately are too little to even overly care.
I'd rather have the 400 ARX as login and play reward stretched over a certain amount of hours played per week and not tied to ingame activities at all. Something like 40 ARX per hour maybe, up to the 400 cap. 10 hours total playtime per week is not too little, but also not too much.
1. They'd break half the game again in the process.
2. It would never be an entirely fair distribution per ingame activity.
3. 400 ARX ultimately are too little to even overly care.
I'd rather have the 400 ARX as login and play reward stretched over a certain amount of hours played per week and not tied to ingame activities at all. Something like 40 ARX per hour maybe, up to the 400 cap. 10 hours total playtime per week is not too little, but also not too much.
The fact that some of you are so worried about whether you get all 400 free Arx, or are worried about selling too much data and blowing free Arx points, is something I find vastly amusing. Well done on falling for the one trap of free Arx, well, the trap of the easily manipulated. They are free points than can only be spent on inconsequential fluff. If I earn Arx, cool, if I get 400, also cool. But I'm not going to hoard data in case I 'waste' it. I play the same as I've always played. On a list of important game features, Arx just doesn't rate. Also, they are of so little real value, again, I'm not going to go out of my way to get them or feel cheated if I don't..
'Tis a game, you're supposed to play it, not the other way around.
'Tis a game, you're supposed to play it, not the other way around.
... which would quickly be followed by lots of threads with people asking why they have to leave their PC turned on overnight to earn their ARX. Because people ...
Thats the thing tho, I would have been perfectly happy without this type of F2P mechanic in this game, I want to just play but the psychology behind these "free" ARX is similar to whats behind lootboxes, another F2P mechanic I despise and will no longer play any game that has them. You want the reward of these items even tho they have little to no value really. That FDev felt the need to put this kind of mechanic in makes me very sad for the future of this game.
I've hit the cap every complete week, usually on Friday evening (the week resets with the Thursday morning Powerplay tick for those that don't know), sometimes by the end of Thursday, occasionally it takes much longer.
If I were to describe how I currently play in a single phrase it would be that I flip systems. So I run lots of missions, gather lots of bounties with a KWS, and map lots of systems with a DSS. And some A-B trading while I am doing all of that other stuff.
Most weeks I have an election or war going on somewhere, but sometimes I'm just shuffling the factions around, getting them into position (contingency planning).
In any war I kill ships, I get lots of ARX for that.
In an Election, if my side has a base I can usually sell exploration data. I get lots of ARX for that, but sometimes my side has no assets & I can only do missions. I work just as hard, for the same goal, but I don't get anything like the same ARX reward.
This is because it is the completion of an act that is rewarded rather than the act itself. I think a refocus onto the act (ie the player is rewarded for playing the game rather than achieving results) would make sense.
I am rewarded for killing, I am rewarded for being killed, but I am not currently rewarded for trying to kill that Pirate Lord, not being able to but still surviving. That doesn't really make as much sense to me as rewarding the attempt regardless of the outcome.
If I gather a load of exploration data I am rewarded for selling it. But if I spent ages getting it then got blown up I get rewarded a small amount for the act of travelling, and a small amount for dying. For an in-game currency that is probably fair enough, but it isn't being rewarded for just playing the game.
But I hit the cap anyway, it makes no difference to me
If I were to describe how I currently play in a single phrase it would be that I flip systems. So I run lots of missions, gather lots of bounties with a KWS, and map lots of systems with a DSS. And some A-B trading while I am doing all of that other stuff.
Most weeks I have an election or war going on somewhere, but sometimes I'm just shuffling the factions around, getting them into position (contingency planning).
In any war I kill ships, I get lots of ARX for that.
In an Election, if my side has a base I can usually sell exploration data. I get lots of ARX for that, but sometimes my side has no assets & I can only do missions. I work just as hard, for the same goal, but I don't get anything like the same ARX reward.
This is because it is the completion of an act that is rewarded rather than the act itself. I think a refocus onto the act (ie the player is rewarded for playing the game rather than achieving results) would make sense.
I am rewarded for killing, I am rewarded for being killed, but I am not currently rewarded for trying to kill that Pirate Lord, not being able to but still surviving. That doesn't really make as much sense to me as rewarding the attempt regardless of the outcome.
If I gather a load of exploration data I am rewarded for selling it. But if I spent ages getting it then got blown up I get rewarded a small amount for the act of travelling, and a small amount for dying. For an in-game currency that is probably fair enough, but it isn't being rewarded for just playing the game.
But I hit the cap anyway, it makes no difference to me
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Deleted member 38366
D
I find it a bit bonkers that
skyrockets the Counter easily. Things you do while docked even, not even moving the Ship.
All while many other Activities (playing the Game and doing stuff before docking) fall behind, waay behind.
If anything, that's creating the very Meta Stugbob mentioned instead of evenly distributing it better.
All that could use a balancing pass indeed.
- Mat Traders
- Ship Transfers
- selling (and only selling) Exploration Data
skyrockets the Counter easily. Things you do while docked even, not even moving the Ship.
All while many other Activities (playing the Game and doing stuff before docking) fall behind, waay behind.
If anything, that's creating the very Meta Stugbob mentioned instead of evenly distributing it better.
All that could use a balancing pass indeed.
It's how I'm currently playing the game at this time. I don't care what anyone else thinks.
I'v played since day 1, at lot. I'v almost 10k hours on my game clock, however apart from DWE2 this year is the least time I'v spent playing over a twelve month period.
To be honest, if it wasn't for the ARX cap, I wouldn't have logged in at all since DWE2 finished.
Even though Iv not purchased a cosmetic (apart from the 1 ARX Thargoid) in the past two years, you never know what FD may 'sell' in the future.
It's free, so I may as well get it. Nothing wrong in that!
From my own observations on my current trip to/from Beagle Point:
Just scanning every system (even with mapping) doesn't do very much for Arx - after around 100 jumps/system scans I think there was 60+ Arx earned.
A session (Christmas Eve) where I was passing through the Formorian Frontier (return trip) and located 4 systems with Geo (all Crystalline Shards) so visited each body / mapped / landed / mined spires so ended the session with only perhaps 40 systems visited gave 130+ Arx.
Conclusion so far is that 'mixing up' the exploration activities 'earn' Arx at a better rate than just travelling. Despite going from Colonia to Beagle and covering around 16KLY on the return trip I didn't hit the cap by around 100.
At least i ticked off the to-do list bit before the January update, just in case we had the 'guesstimate' part of POI's included
Just scanning every system (even with mapping) doesn't do very much for Arx - after around 100 jumps/system scans I think there was 60+ Arx earned.
A session (Christmas Eve) where I was passing through the Formorian Frontier (return trip) and located 4 systems with Geo (all Crystalline Shards) so visited each body / mapped / landed / mined spires so ended the session with only perhaps 40 systems visited gave 130+ Arx.
Conclusion so far is that 'mixing up' the exploration activities 'earn' Arx at a better rate than just travelling. Despite going from Colonia to Beagle and covering around 16KLY on the return trip I didn't hit the cap by around 100.
At least i ticked off the to-do list bit before the January update, just in case we had the 'guesstimate' part of POI's included
Game mechanics have not changed since long time so people is looking for new reasons to play the game. It could have been a new reason for me too but my favorite game activities are almost no rewarded in arx so this is not true for me
An egocentric here !
I don't even have the external view control set up.
Engineering a Type 9 one evening this week pretty much got me up to the weekly cap all in one (long) session of playing. I’m not sure how much came from engineering and how much from the mats trading but it was completely ridiculous relative to the amounts I would normally get from just doing missions, combat, mining, flying cargo, etc. Perhaps trading grade 5 mats gives huge amounts of ARX or something like that - the exact cause remains a mystery to me. And I think that’s exactly the problem: it feels random and arbitrary.
I’m not one of those who complain endlessly about ARX and I would be fine not even getting any free ARX from playing. But if free ARX from playing is a thing, then it feels like it should be a much simpler and easier to understand system than it’s now. E.g. simply 0.2 ARX per minute of active playing. That would result in 12 ARX per hour. With ~5 hours a day you’d hit the weekly cap of 400, which seems reasonable and in the same ballpark as now.
The definition of ”active” should be something that would be virtually invisible to the user but prevents easy cheating by e.g. just parking in a station and leaving the computer / console running overnight. This could, for example, work so that you stop earning ARX if you don’t perform an ”activity” for 15 minutes. An activity would be pretty much anything that requires a human (not a simple script) to actively be playing the game: killing a ship, refine ore, make an FSD jump, engineering a module, scanning a system, planet or moon, buying or selling commodities, etc.
The idea is simply that everyone earns the same for the same time, regardless of whether you’re an explorer, do PvP, run cargo, play the BG sim, or whatever.
I’m not one of those who complain endlessly about ARX and I would be fine not even getting any free ARX from playing. But if free ARX from playing is a thing, then it feels like it should be a much simpler and easier to understand system than it’s now. E.g. simply 0.2 ARX per minute of active playing. That would result in 12 ARX per hour. With ~5 hours a day you’d hit the weekly cap of 400, which seems reasonable and in the same ballpark as now.
The definition of ”active” should be something that would be virtually invisible to the user but prevents easy cheating by e.g. just parking in a station and leaving the computer / console running overnight. This could, for example, work so that you stop earning ARX if you don’t perform an ”activity” for 15 minutes. An activity would be pretty much anything that requires a human (not a simple script) to actively be playing the game: killing a ship, refine ore, make an FSD jump, engineering a module, scanning a system, planet or moon, buying or selling commodities, etc.
The idea is simply that everyone earns the same for the same time, regardless of whether you’re an explorer, do PvP, run cargo, play the BG sim, or whatever.
Exactly! 5000 ARX is $4 right now in the PS4 store. That means your weekly free ARX (if you max it out) is worth 30 cents! I wouldn’t play a single minute just for the sake of earning ARX. If you earn some free ARX while you do what you’d otherwise do anyway then that’s great. Over time maybe that gets you a free paint job. But those weekly ARX are just worth 30 cents! Minute for minute, you’ll easily earn 10x more searching for dropped coins on the street.
But as I said in my previous post: if free ARX is a thing, then it would be nice if the rules for earning it were simple to understand and not feel so arbitrary. It makes no sense that you get 300 ARX for 2 hours of engineering but 3 ARX for 2 hours of mining.
Maybe the committee that set the Arx earning levels are factoring in how much fun an activity is and boring things get more Arx in compensation.
Green lasers and a few paintjobs for me.