Donation Missions - Paying off your way through Federation Ranks

khaos526 · Mar 21, 2017

So since there was a change in how donation missions are, is it still possible to buy your way up to Rear Admiral still by just doing donation missions if you find a good stable system that allows it?

If so, and someone has done it, how much did it cost them?

At one point before 2.2 it seemed all donation missions carried the same weight (which I did some when ranking up in the Empire), but that seemed to have changed by my experience and a lot of the other posts I've read.

So just curious if you can still pay your way through the ranks if you were so inclined? I'm at Petty Officer now and was just curious if it's still viable to do it and how much it might cost...

Rob_the_Sparky · Mar 21, 2017

Why would when you can easily do huge numbers of data delivery missions and get paid to do so. From my experience the boards simply don't spawn enough donation missions to make this viable.

XW_Ziggy · Mar 21, 2017

I stopped bothering with donation missions. I'm not sure that the 1,000,000 credit donations provide any more rank than the 25,000 credit donations. Either way, for my Fed rank it would have cost me 300 million just to go from Post Captain (rank 11) to Rear Admiral (rank 12). I used base assaults and data deliveries mostly.

I'm in Quince ranking up my Empire rank at the moment and at Earl (rank 10) I'm getting about 10% rank for 20 missions, so it looks to be similarly expensive and slow.

khaos526 · Mar 21, 2017

Good input. And at one point it seemed the higher donation would result in the same % increase as the smaller ones, but now that has changed. I was hearing it would be about in the range of over 500 million or so, but just hadn't seen anyone attempt it recently from rank 1 all the way up. But 300 million to go up one rank would be painful.

I was just thinking of it. I leveled up to King in Empire, mainly by the data missions. After I got to Duke I stopped. Decided to do Quince as well, just to get more credits before 2.3 and in the process without planning it, got up to King very quickly using those missions instead. I just went looking all over the bubble (and out) trying to use different filters and such trying to find a decent Federation Scan missions like Quince, but no luck. And I dread having to go back and forth over and over delivering tiny payout data missions and take forever to rank up. So figured if I could just fork over the money instead it might be a lot less boring...

VR Lucian Arkright · Mar 21, 2017

Just think of it like the days of old, when people would buy their Commission!

khaos526 · Mar 21, 2017

Great information. I'll probably see what I can get then from doing that method if I get bored of doing just the data deliveries (or if I luck out and find some great surface scan missions locations for Federation ranks).

Main thing is since I can afford it, it would allow me to at least save all that time spent just doing menial tasks over and over again. Done that for far too long, and really want to get back to having more fun...

Anthemeia · Mar 21, 2017

I ranked from ensign to rear admiral a week or two ago doing only donation missions at 17 Draconis. It took about 450m credits and about 3 days/8-10 hours of board flipping. If you don't want to do boring, menial missions, this is not a good method. But, I am a multibillionaire, so I chose my grind and committed and watched a bunch of movies. Like everything else in Elite, you can do slightly enjoyable repetitive activities for years, or you can do minimally enjoyable repetitive activities for a concentrated time so you can do more slightly enjoyable repetitive activities in a bigger ship.

khaos526 · Mar 21, 2017

Anthemeia said:
I ranked from ensign to rear admiral a week or two ago doing only donation missions at 17 Draconis. It took about 450m credits and about 3 days/8-10 hours of board flipping. If you don't want to do boring, menial missions, this is not a good method. But, I am a multibillionaire, so I chose my grind and committed and watched a bunch of movies. Like everything else in Elite, you can do slightly enjoyable repetitive activities for years, or you can do minimally enjoyable repetitive activities for a concentrated time so you can do more slightly enjoyable repetitive activities in a bigger ship.

Yep it's what I was doing with Empire rep, watching stuff in the background. And like you, I am a multi billionaire as well with all the ships I want other than the Fed Corvette. So money isn't an issue. And yep 17 Draconis is the only spot so far I'm aware of that has enough donation missions that I've found and no luck finding any scan or skimmer missions at all for Fed (just Empire and Independent and others like at Fehu).

So that just leaves the two options for now, unless I want to spend more time scouting around endlessly for them...