As far as I know rare items can be given to another player, meaning many people can bring these items to one FC. Can the data from the links be transferred ?
Elite Dangerous | Powerplay 2.0 Update
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Even so, rares have a 10 minute cycle and even with 4 people working in unison, the idea 40+ ranks could be gained in 5 hours (this includes both the acquisition of, then sale of, which is constrained by ship capacity per delivery) is utter nonsense.
Frontier are arbitrarily trying to govern how fast people can progress through levels, it's like engineering all over again.
You don't need a carrier - it may actually be less efficient to use one (assuming your goal is just earning merits and you don't care about which system you are selling to). This Mandalay build can travel 200ly to sell at max profit and return to pick up another batch in almost exactly 10 minutes, just in time to pick up another batch: https://edsy.org/s/vVp9wzf
If you don't have the Mandalay yet (you should consider buying one, it's worth it) you should be able to achieve something similar in an Asp Explorer or Krait Phantom - something like these could work (untested): https://edsy.org/s/v27UTeb https://edsy.org/s/vvZMJCl
Didn't someone post earlier that selling to a carrier removes the ability to earn Merits from the item? (Edit: can you even sell rares to a carrier? I don't recall seeing any rares listed in the market management screen). So you would have to use the jettison and scoop method, which is going to waste time and probably make this less efficient than just hauling, and the player donating the extra items won't be able to earn merits, so what's in it for them?
Not as far as I know
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This seems mathematically unlikely.
1. Rank 30 is 215,000 merits. That's ~70,000/week, which easily puts Rank 30 in top 25% of playbase, likely top 10%
2. If a CMDR played 18h/week (arguably twice or more of a 'casual' game playing say 7h/week) and reached Rank 30, that's a rate close to 4,000 merits/h. Much closer to Rares trading, SLF farming etc. than casual play.
If that CMDR played > 18h, that's likely a lot more than most. If they instead farmed > 4k merits/h, that's again a rate much higher than average.
3. A Rank 30 CMDR at this time point is thus in the 'elite' (likely top 20%) of playbase, objectively.
4. It was argued that an 'average' player can get 1st module (rank 34), in 5 weeks.
That's 237,000 merits = 47,400/week. At current merit rates, average players would be doing well to get 1,500 merits/h.
This would require over 31 h/week for 5 weeks. (At 2,000 merits/h, over 23h/week.)
Will let readers judge whether that's realistically achievable by average players.
Nah, python's honestly pretty mediocre overall. It's slow and can't carry very much. The primary limiting factor for laser mining is cargo capacity; the primary factor for cores is movement speed. Cutter is the best laser miner by a wide margin, and for cores, Clipper reigns supreme. Being able to boost over 600 alone allows it to get cores ~30% faster than a python.
OK, since you were not doing taipan-farming, escape pods, rares (and obviously not the dataport exploit), may I ask what it was that you were doing to make ~9000 merits per hour?
(Rank 30 is 215000 merits, 1 hour on weekdays and a few (lets's say, 2x3) hours on weekends is 22 hours total in 2 weeks, 215000/22 = 9772 merits/hour.)
Even if it was twice as many hours, it would be still close to 5000 merits per hour.
An hour or two, like I said. Nights are getting longer these days.
As for what I've done...mining, donation missions, hologram hacking, donation missions, trading, donation missions, settlement raids...a little bit of everything, really. I just do it fairly consistently. I'd say I've probably averaged a bit over 5000 merits per hour, though I couldn't tell you precisely how much over.
Heck, by my math, just 1-ton trading with reasonable profits can easily net you ~10000 merits per hour at the moment, if that's all you care about.
The point being, while I'm definitely playing A BIT more than average, I'm by no means sitting here grinding all day long. If I can do it in 2 weeks semi-casually, then a completely casual player should easily be able to achieve the same in 4 - the same amount of time as before.
The dangers of people misreading or assuming a thing. You cannot trade rares to a carrier, correct. So the entire argument seems to be based on assumption.
Furthermore, it's highly inefficient to have 3 people collecting rares, one person scooping and delivering (only one person is going to get merits out of that). So what, that same group of 4 is going to do the same thing, thousands of times, for each person in the party? That's massively less efficient than 4 commanders delivering to 4 carriers (or the same 4 commanders directly looping in something like mandalay, krait phantom, or anything else with long legs which cuts out faffing about with a carrier).
The only issue (apart from the genuine bugs, that are exploited) is that Frontier has not based the new mechanics on time invested and ensured each merit source was contextually similar to each other merit source.
All possible merit sources should have the same approximate capability per hour (and anything horrendously slow, could actually be buffed to encourage commanders to do those things) rather than the current approach which is scold players for engaging, then remove the way they engaged from being a relevant way to engage.
That is a fantastic way for PP 2.0 to end up just like PP 1.0.
The truly hilarious part in all this, is that changing powers, wipes all progress.. heaven forbid circumstances change.
Sorry Deep Core mining doesn't require speed, just need proper timing. Cutter and Type-9 are best in class for Laser mining. Python offers more slots and the over all build is more efficient then the Clipper in every single way. The Clipper is to large and has widely placed weapon slots. While not being able to land on a medium pad the Python takes the win here.
The speed is to locate the cores. They can be a long ways apart, and the longer you spend traveling, the less time you spend mining and making money. And the Clipper moves a good 25% faster than the Python - IE, 25% more money.
As for the shape of the clipper, that can actually be an advantage too, if you know how to take advantage of it. The wings let you curve shots around asteroids and hit the deposits with less movement!
Here's my summary of how to improve the PP gameplay:
Even getting the power's module require a lot of time so people prefer to avoid or hardly grind and burn out, losing all the mood to keep playing.
People will say thank you for reducing the grind amount.
- keep the balance of the reviewed activities as is
- return merit reward level for nerfed activities (hello, explorers - they can't rank up without scanning things worth of quintillion credits)
- buff merit reward for less popular activities
- significantly increase the merit bonus for weekly assignments 1-2K instead of 100-200, so even casual player can get 1-2 ranks per week without issues
- do not be bothered if people are getting their ranks fast, they are unlimited after the 100th rank anyway
- reward PvP activities much higher
Even getting the power's module require a lot of time so people prefer to avoid or hardly grind and burn out, losing all the mood to keep playing.
People will say thank you for reducing the grind amount.
Lets use the Clipper and Python build over on https://cmdrs-toolbox.com/ship-builds/mining
Python: https://s.orbis.zone/qElI
Clipper: https://s.orbis.zone/qElK
Hate to say it but the Python wins, in almost every aspect. the Clipper has 140 more speed while at 500 the Python is still more then capable. And these builds are sort of out dated, I'm sure I could push things further on both but the Python will still win.
Can't say i'm surprised with how all this has unfolded, balance has always been fdev's achilles heel. Some general observations include suits costing more than ships, smuggling paying peanuts while delivering cargo with virtually no risk making much more, scanning a plant in a sidewinder on day one makes millions while transporting a passenger to colonia for example only gives you approximately 500k, the list goes on.
So much in general is completely out of whack so why would pp be any different. Makes me shudder to think how unbalanced something as big as colonisation may be.
So much in general is completely out of whack so why would pp be any different. Makes me shudder to think how unbalanced something as big as colonisation may be.
"Even if it was twice as many hours", like I said.
Anyway, it must have been the donation missions then (I did not try those), since I doubt you can hack 5000 merits' worth of holograms an hour.
For comparison, I ranked one account up to rank 34 for the cannons, and it took me 2 days (as in 2 play sessions) of whaling, which yielded about 13K per hour before rank 24 and 18K per hour afterwards (thanks to the SAR bonus). It was pretty tedious, especially with this annoying limpet bug.
I also did a little bit of stronghold carrier NPC farming but even that was considerably slower (I did not bother to conjure up a fully optimised AFK farming build), and while PvE combat is a bit less boring than trading and suchlike, still it would have taken more than 3500 Taipan kills to reach rank 34 even with the pre-nerf payout, so I was like 'nah, not gonna do that'
Maybe mining has a better payout if you are mining the right thing in the right place in a highly optimised build, but a very casual test (128 tons of random junk like gold, silver, osmium etc) resulted in less than 1000 merits, so that was very far from anything I would be willing to do ever again.
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Im gonna mine in a MandalaySorry:
Coriolis EDCD Edition
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Maybe this is actually the new PP … Players attempt to AQUIRE rewards and FDev UNDERMINE them …
But that’s the thing … one player spends all their time during a week off and gets to L118, meanwhile, folks who only get to play 5 hours a week are looking at MONTHS of doing nothing but PP every session just to get the first module …
There has to be a middle ground. Separating Modules from the Merit Grind seems the only way (see my suggestions earlier in this thread) this can be made reasonable: anyone can unlock Modules given a little time, folks with lots of time can grind out the galactic influence game.
You are massively overestimating where the "average" player is here.
Getting a module in 5 weeks would require 50,000 merits a week, which would put someone into the top 10% of their Power's leaderboard.
At 3k merits/hour, which is a decent rate for most non-rares activities if you're not doing very specific things or optimising a lot (which the average player, by definition, isn't), that would be about 17 hours committed to Powerplay each week, so 2-3 hours a day just playing Elite Dangerous.
Mining technically works, it just has really specific undocumented location requirements for where you do the mining.
Reinforcement/Undermining: you must mine the goods in the system you want to earn merits in
Acquisition: you must mine the goods in a Fortified/Stronghold system supporting the Acquisition
Enabled. 40% profit was always a requirement - take the price you bought it for, multiply by 1.4, you have to sell it for at least that. Once it meets that qualifying requirement, higher sale prices are better.
Again, there is an undocumented location requirement for Acquisition: you must buy the goods from the supporting Fortified/Stronghold system
(For Reinforcement, you can buy the goods anywhere; this method isn't for Undermining at all)
Yes (Acquisition or Reinforcement only, as documented)
Reports vary. Some people can't get the enemies to show up, other people have no problems with them.
Those two are re-enabled and work. The exchange rate isn't particularly high, so it's not a time-efficient way of getting merits, but they work.
Note that exploration pays out per-system, not for the total payout of the page, so you only get paid for reasonably high-value systems.
So, just another 4 months for your first PP Module: great going CMDR!I've done power cz's, bounty hunting, defend megaship scenarios, interdicting traders, stalking and killing enemies at stations, scanning ships, wakes, and data points, picking up escape pods and wreckage, trading, trading rares, exploration, exobiology, donation missions, selling surface power items, hauling power commodities, hacked holoads and even refueled a ship once.
I'm at rank 6
(edit: rank 6, not 7)
#workingasintended
(To be clear - throwing sarcasm as the system not you, CMDR! I am absolutely in the same
Even if they got rid of all of the placeholder "only care package" type ranks, that would already be a good step forward.
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