Didn't FD balanced payouts? Just logged in after some years and it still looks the same old broken mission payouts
- Thread starter fuub
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They broke that trying to fix a different balance in round 3 of late last year's balance pass. Don't worry, they said they would be back after the new year to pick up where they left off, so maybe in a year or two they'll get back to unintentionally breaking a bunch of stuff again.
Edit: for your reading pleasure.
You are wrong. There was no 'balance pass'.
They did some easy/simple juggling of figures for some things. 'low hanging fruit' kinda stuff.
Plenty needs looking at still.
oh I see, nothing changed then. But he says the rewards remain high, do they still consider 500k a high reward?
guess Ill check again in a year
Can I hold onto your stuff until you come back?
Damn you, you eager beaver!
Too slow chicken merengo!
It went like this for delivery missions: Given all other factors equal
Original delivery payouts:
- 180t Biowaste = 1-2m, 180t gold = 7-8m payout
First balance pass (which uptweaked metal prices):
- 180t Biowaste = 1-2m, 180t gold = 35-40m payout
Third balance pass (which purportedly made distance/volume matter more in the reward)
- 180t Biowaste = 1-2m, 180t gold = 3-4m payout
So strictly speaking, they did that. What FD failed to do was rebalance to ensure cargo value was not the primary determinant in delivery reward... and managed to just nerf the payouts compared to what they originally were.
What the final balance pass should look like is:
- 180t of Biowaste or 180t gold = 7-8m
Delivering 180t of anything is the same risk and effort, regardless of it's underlying value. It should pay equally.
Original delivery payouts:
- 180t Biowaste = 1-2m, 180t gold = 7-8m payout
First balance pass (which uptweaked metal prices):
- 180t Biowaste = 1-2m, 180t gold = 35-40m payout
Third balance pass (which purportedly made distance/volume matter more in the reward)
- 180t Biowaste = 1-2m, 180t gold = 3-4m payout
So strictly speaking, they did that. What FD failed to do was rebalance to ensure cargo value was not the primary determinant in delivery reward... and managed to just nerf the payouts compared to what they originally were.
What the final balance pass should look like is:
- 180t of Biowaste or 180t gold = 7-8m
Delivering 180t of anything is the same risk and effort, regardless of it's underlying value. It should pay equally.
I'd be fine with that. I'd still like better payout based on rank of mission, assuming the pirates sent after an "elite" deliver mission were elite regardless of the mission runners rank. I suppose so long as fine on failure is tied to cargo value, there is technically more risk due to that (you'd pretty much have to try to fail a delivery mission, I realize).
There is definitely more risk in smuggling, and it would be very nice to see smuggling missions pay more than your standard delivery mission, but for some reason Frontier seem pretty stuck on the idea of going into crime to make significantly less money than honest work pays.
Oh yeah, sorry, that was assuming all other things equal. Thing is, Rank of mission directly equates to tonnage of the mission; rank does affect what pirates come after you, but this means higher rank = higher tonnage = harder pirates.
As for smuggling.... what a biowaste-storm that is.... missions aside smuggling is still broken. If Bruce's post is anything to go on, FD want to make smuggling materially different, not just "better paid" hauling.... but that misses the point that a big tick for smuggling is it creates trade routes where there may not be any legal ones, and it's one of the very few (under-represented) ways to cause bust/famine and -ve influence.
But smuggling missions? The formula for their payout is incorrect anyway, and pays out way less than a corresponding legal delivery,which is all sorts of wrong.
Their definition of "balancing payouts" seems to be "at least one thing you can do in each profession pays out ridiculous money"
So:
- bulk trading: trade precious metals (especially out of Infrastructure Failure)
- trade missions: source/mine tradable precious metal missions
- combat: stacked massacre missions + ALD bonus
- AX combat: fast interceptor kills
- mining: mapped Osmium/Platinum mining in a Platinum hotspot
All of those can pay well over 100M/hour, some of them maybe 2-300M/hour if done absolutely right (and I suspect the right approach might go even higher for certain wing trade missions, though I don't need the money so I've not tested it)
But they don't seem to worry too much about balancing within a profession [1]. So for bulk trading:
- trading out of an Extraction economy gets you 5k/tonne easy, 20k/tonne with a little bit of luck or skill, 60k/tonne if you line up ideal BGS states
- trading out of an Industrial economy gets you 500 credits/tonne easy, and maybe 5k/tonne if you line up ideal BGS states
Why is Extraction so much better than Industrial? No particularly good reason, and certainly no in-universe explanation, it's just they only boosted the Extraction export prices.
And similarly for missions: massacre and source cargo missions pay out exceptionally well ... everything else pays out about a million credits per mission.
[1] Which for settling the complaints about being "unable" to make money is sufficient for them - so long as some sort of shooting at pirates makes billions a day, players won't complain in large numbers that shooting at other (tougher!) pirates doesn't. But especially on the trade side it gives some very weird secondary balance issues.
I'd suggest gold should pay more but only on the condition that fdev totally change how AI reacts to these missions to the point where no pirates ever hunt you for hauling waste but significantly ramp up the risk of being attacked if carrying gold (the probability of being attacked should scale based on unit value, as should the strength of the attack).
I'd then take that one step further and make wing hauling missions pay more for high value goods but make it extremely difficult to do it without some form of defense (ie you should be attacked by wings of npcs not just one, with the capability to disrupt fsd).
The problem is, way too much would need to change for that to be viable so...
What you said. But just maybe up the reward for high value stuff and up the pirate spawn rate to compensate. I think it's important the commodity of the mission make a difference otherwise it'd be really flat.
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That's one way to look at it, and not one i haven't heard.
Thing for me is I've never seen the mission tails as after the cargo; rather, they've been sent to disrupt faction operations by destroying the shipment which, regardless of it's value, needs to be delivered for whatever reason. So in that regard, to the tail, it doesn't matter whether it's biowaste or palladium; that shipment has to be stopped, and that's what informs the rank-based d
If the value is to have an impact, I'd argue it should impact no more than 10% of the reward, not up to 75% of the reward like it currently does. Reason being your counterpoint that it'd make things really flat is already the case; mineral deliveries are simply a more accessible Robigo; static, always available, minimal conisderations needed. Like Ian kinda alluded to; why would I want to run deliveries from anywhere else, when the king of rewards is always from Extraction, guaranteed 100% of the time with the sole exception being a lockdown state.
The reward scale isn't helped by the fact that delivery missions are, with the exception of those ones which spawn just after Thargsday, limited to 20Ly distances. Maybe what the reward scale is missing is proper variations in the delivery stats; being:
- Range; needs to go out to at least 100 Ly[1]
- Timeframes; needs to have much tighter timeframes, perhaps down to just 10 minutes so you can't hang around for some boardflips to stack others.
- An actual need to defend cargo; what about a mission to deliver to a USS? You get there and there's two pirate CM3's waiting as a trap. Clear them out and a T9 drops in "late" to the meet and receives the cargo (a-la old "Seeking Luxuries" transfer mechanisms, which magicked the cargo onto the other ship)
There's a lot more FD can and should be doing to vary the reward than cargo value, which should be only a marginal part of the reward
[1] Although I concede this may wreck the efficiency of board generation; not my problem to fix though.
It could be argued these somewhat exist - some of the rarer source & return cargos are often further away than that. But (IIRC) they don't pay any more than other missions, so I don't do them often.
More varied timeframes would add more decision making (good), but I bet they're all 24 hours / 7 days because people complained, I seem to vaguely recall them being shorter before.
Would be nice. Things like BB recovery could point you at a second USS for delivery. Or add an extra stage to the mission 'go to X to find where the delivery is at'.
It's a real dichotomy - interesting, unstackable missions for (presumably) more money, or large numbers of easy cookie-cutter missions for grinding. I think I'd prefer your vision of missions - not sure we would be in the majority
Are you mad? My shieldless T9 wouldn't be able to withstand such torture. Bad enough I have to do more than 1 trip solo...
As I said, for it to make sense for gold > waste, a lot would need to change, including the whole AI routine around how npc pirates behave (from their spawn to their behaviour in normal space).
I'm on board with the proposal that gold == waste from a current logic standpoint (you cannot argue against it, in my opinion, there's zero difference logically as the game is now) but I'm totally against it from a game play perspective. If we agree that waste must equal gold then there's no point even telling us what we're carrying, or bothering with that entire branch of the BGS. Just tell us we're hauling 180t of "cargo" and be done with it.
Which I think is dull.
I'd much rather they be different. I'd much rather the entire game loop be different depending on the commodity. But right now all fdev have is a mission template system that allows only for some basic constant value altering. So if I have a choice between the extreme of waste == gold and gold > waste, I'd rather the latter all day long, if fdev could just make the gold mission harder.
The fact that, excluding the edge scenarios (really badly fitted to t9 trader for example), there's almost no risk to the pirate ai attack event (it's just an annoyance, a time tax) is another issue. A related issue but not low hanging fruit.
I hope this is sarcasm...
I'm on board with the proposal that gold == waste from a current logic standpoint (you cannot argue against it, in my opinion, there's zero difference logically as the game is now) but I'm totally against it from a game play perspective. If we agree that waste must equal gold then there's no point even telling us what we're carrying, or bothering with that entire branch of the BGS. Just tell us we're hauling 180t of "cargo" and be done with it.
Which I think is dull.
I'd much rather they be different. I'd much rather the entire game loop be different depending on the commodity. But right now all fdev have is a mission template system that allows only for some basic constant value altering. So if I have a choice between the extreme of waste == gold and gold > waste, I'd rather the latter all day long, if fdev could just make the gold mission harder.
The fact that, excluding the edge scenarios (really badly fitted to t9 trader for example), there's almost no risk to the pirate ai attack event (it's just an annoyance, a time tax) is another issue. A related issue but not low hanging fruit.
I hope this is sarcasm...
You darn right it is, unfortunately it was a 'in b4'
You would think that fdev could make the missions such that the probability (and difficulty) of pirates spawning could be related to the value of goods - that way Gold would get better pirates than Biowaste, and in that case shipping Gold should pay more then Biowaste. Not sure why that isn't the case. (From my recent Palladium missions the chances of opposition are pretty rare unless you take a lot of time.)
In days of old Highway Robbers seldom demanded "Your or your life!", tended to be far more "Your money or your life!"
In days of old Highway Robbers seldom demanded "Your
or your life!", tended to be far more "Your money or your life!"