Exobiology is broken (payouts/rank)

[[VR] Mad Mike]

While the new payouts are nice, it's too much. It should at least be half of what it is now. This is silly money for doing essentially not much and risk free.
But what's broken are the Exobiology rankings. The progress to rank up is using the old values. So you can hand in scans from 2-3 bios and jump up 2 ranks straight away.
Possible to even rank up to Elite in one day if you were so inclined.
Frontier need to rebalance the rankings in accordance with the new payouts and those of us who have ranked up so quickly, need to be put back to where we would be with the new ranking balance in place. So basically taking into account every bio scanned since Update 14.
The ranking up now is just ridiculously out of whack.

agree on the rankings. in just 6 in game hrs and a noob who had never done it before I have gone from zero to one off elite.

the pay..... I get where you are coming from and would once have strongly agreed with you......... but it means I may one day get a fleet carrier now so.............

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

+10 and cue "It's a simulation, with 400 billion stars, and it's dangerous" retort from WK's defending ED the way it is, conveniently glossing over valid points like this.
Not to mention the magic space drive. So real. It's realerer than real. But you can't magically teleport, because that would be cheating. Except for when you suicideport, then it's "ok".

Actually the daily whine posts started after that, from the "OMG IT'S TOO EASY NOW IT'S CALLED ELITE DANGEROUS FOR A REASON YOU KNOW THESE KIDS NOW DAYS JUST DON'T HAVE IT IN THEM TO GRIND PROPERLY LAZY SODS WHEN I WERE A LAD WE HAD TO BLAH BLAH BLAH".

Coincidence?

over all I preferred the balance at launch tho admittedly the game needed to scale better. once you got to an asp sixed ship things went a bit slow. the credit inflation was not a good way to do it imo as it makes no sense and all but ruined most piracy and makes most of the ships in the game vestigial. the inflation is also why a basic space suit costs as much as a small space ship and a slightly upgraded gun costs more than a medium sized space ship.

had FD have kept a handle on the economy they would not have needed to introduce all the other different micro currencies (materials and data etc).... sure they could have existed but have been bought and sold for credits.
i would MUCH rather have a sensible economy and internal consistency (and having FTL in a sci fi game , whilst not having fast travel and consistent gravity is fine)

but we haven't got that and haven't for a while. as such I hope FD fix the elite ranking speed but the payouts...... this is just 1 hugely op money printer. use it or don't it's up to you. another one will be along soon enough anyway.

I do agree the suicidewinder is lame but I see it as an exploit and have never done it

 

[gooddoc]

Make hay while the sun shines!

I knew the payouts had gone up, but was surprised to earn 500mil off around 10 scans handed in, for quite little game time.
However, Something isn't adding up, my INARA account keeps telling me I'm losing many, many millions (like 100+mils) on a day's loading up of the game......& I'v only lost 1 Krait in 'goid combat.
Also I noticed that my balance didn't seem to be increasing as fast as the amounts I was getting from payouts, suspected that I wasn't always being paid somewhere.........but with 17.5+bil in currency, I wasn't that bothered.

My aim was to boost my Exobio Ranking.......yes, I too made Elite (from nowhere) within 24 hours, slightly ruined that goal I'd set.

I wouldn't be surprised if the next patch nerfed payments & Ranking back to a more reasonable level, though I very much doubt that Frontier will risk taking away rewards already attained by players............wouldn't bother me personally, but maybe a newer player with lesser assets than me may get upset

 

[TheTechnobear]

I knew the payouts had gone up, but was surprised to earn 500mil off around 10 scans handed in, for quite little game time.

I'm a little surprised by this...

I've been doing some exobiology exploration, and what Ive been handling in ... averages about 5 mill per scan.
given the time exobiology takes ( find planet, DSS, land, gather 3 specimens)
this actually averages at quite a bit less, than mining, even in a Python!

so the payouts are perfectly reasonable (though see below)
however, the ranking indeed is very quick, compared to anything else (eg. trade thru mining)

though, perhaps Im 'doing it wrong', though Im pretty systematic, but its easy for exobiology to become pretty time-consuming.
(fyi, I about 1200ly out... tried both scouting with the DBX, and SRV... so appear to have all thats need, but it still takes time!)


that brings me to the a comment the OP made ...

I used a 3rd party tool to show me 10 systems with good Exo payouts.

ok, so my experience has been with standard exploration, no 3rd party tools... just going exploring anywhere that seems to have enough bios on it.

but sure, if you use a 3rd party tool... indeed, you're going to find valuable scans really quickly.

however, I don't think its FDev's job, to balance the game based on what 3rd party tools are available.
as, conversely, this would imply, you'd need to use 3rd party tools to progress 'reasonably'.

put another way, if 3rd party tools... open up exploits or rapid progression (e.g road to riches),
thats yours, as a player, choice to decide to use or not... its not part of elite.


thats not to say, 3rd party tools don't have a role, they do... elite is woefully inadequate in many areas.
I use inarz all the time for locating things like outfitting stations....
but thats my choice, how 'vanilla' do I want to play elite !

and so it is with exobiology !

 

[CMDR DUANES]

While the new payouts are nice, it's too much. It should at least be half of what it is now. This is silly money for doing essentially not much and risk free.
But what's broken are the Exobiology rankings. The progress to rank up is using the old values. So you can hand in scans from 2-3 bios and jump up 2 ranks straight away.
Possible to even rank up to Elite in one day if you were so inclined.
Frontier need to rebalance the rankings in accordance with the new payouts and those of us who have ranked up so quickly, need to be put back to where we would be with the new ranking balance in place. So basically taking into account every bio scanned since Update 14.
The ranking up now is just ridiculously out oI

While the new payouts are nice, it's too much. It should at least be half of what it is now. This is silly money for doing essentially not much and risk free.
But what's broken are the Exobiology rankings. The progress to rank up is using the old values. So you can hand in scans from 2-3 bios and jump up 2 ranks straight away.
Possible to even rank up to Elite in one day if you were so inclined.
Frontier need to rebalance the rankings in accordance with the new payouts and those of us who have ranked up so quickly, need to be put back to where we would be with the new ranking balance in place. So basically taking into account every bio scanned since Update 14.
The ranking up now is just ridiculously out of whack.

IMO payouts themselves are ok, because the activity is a hell of time-consuming, so in a credit-per-hour comparison it is just a catch-up, as it was waaaay too low before.

What is NOT ok are the various bonuses, absurd (as they multiply your actual payoff), and the fact that the rankings have not been amended, which makes it possible to reach Elite V in a couple of days, from scratch. This is clearly not the way it was designed, and will be very frustrating for these legacy players who spent weeks or months (as progression was very, very slow) grinding Exobiology, a situation any game should try to avoid.

 

[MrHatMan]

However, Something isn't adding up, my INARA account keeps telling me I'm losing many, many millions (like 100+mils) on a day's loading up of the game......& I'v only lost 1 Krait in 'goid combat.

You are (probably) not "losing" money. INARA is recording a credit adjustment to ensure your balance on INARA matches what is reported by the Frontier servers which is sent as a log event on login.

Sometimes addons (and the log file) are not correct in their calculations. But the server is authoritive, so it states the true balance at log on and is recorded as a credit adjustment in web sites like INARA or EDSM (EDSM calls it "Frontier Regulation").

In particular the event log file that all the addons use to monitor status isn't always current, it uses "lazy" writing to disk, so it may not even write all even data, particularly during a crash or game shutdown.
See: https://issues.frontierstore.net/issue-detail/35645

Another is repair costs. The value recorded in the log is completely wrong compared to what the actual value was.

It could also be regular carrier expenses, they don't show as "entries", it's taken by the server, and then an adjustment has to be made when you log in to the website balances.

Also I noticed that my balance didn't seem to be increasing as fast as the amounts I was getting from payouts, suspected that I wasn't always being paid somewhere.

There is a known bug where the amount reported doesn't match the actual payout, by 60% or so. Which is also probably why those credit adjustments are being made you mentioned earlier.

 

[Helvellyn]

I'm a little surprised by this...

I've been doing some exobiology exploration, and what Ive been handling in ... averages about 5 mill per scan.
given the time exobiology takes ( find planet, DSS, land, gather 3 specimens)
this actually averages at quite a bit less, than mining, even in a Python!

I was wondering about how it pays versus mining. It feels like a lot more when you pop in with a big payoff, but the trips are longer and there's more uncertainty to it. There's a little more variation than in mining so it's possible that the time isn't as noticeable, although both are grindy enough.

 

[gooddoc]

....


There is a known bug where the amount reported doesn't match the actual payout, by 60% or so. Which is also probably why those credit adjustments are being made you mentioned earlier.

That's what I was saying, I cashed in only around 7 complete scans, when in a previous unexplored System in the Outer Spur Region, to my Carrier's Vista guy & the message came up as over 330+mil credits on the bonus screen....verified on the INARA credits for that day & two days later another 330+mil. Though I didn't think that I'd recieved what would have been nearly 1 bil in credits for a few days Exo stuff......and I'd not really scanned more than 15-20 Exo's in that time.
But each day after the two big bonus's the account loss recorded 190mil loses at the start of the days play, as the account balanced with FD's numbers.

Didn't seem to get as good a payment as I got closer to the bubble & into previously explored Systems, maybe it's been adjusted.

 

[gooddoc]

I'm a little surprised by this...

I've been doing some exobiology exploration, and what Ive been handling in ... averages about 5 mill per scan.
given the time exobiology takes ( find planet, DSS, land, gather 3 specimens)
this actually averages at quite a bit less, than mining, even in a Python!

so the payouts are perfectly reasonable (though see below)
however, the ranking indeed is very quick, compared to anything else (eg. trade thru mining)

though, perhaps Im 'doing it wrong', though Im pretty systematic, but its easy for exobiology to become pretty time-consuming.
(fyi, I about 1200ly out... tried both scouting with the DBX, and SRV... so appear to have all thats need, but it still takes time!)


that brings me to the a comment the OP made ...

Only explaining what showed up on the bonus screen on my Carrier's Vista module........which was verified on the days gains on INARA for the two days it happened....330mil each of the days, for not that many scans.

 

[Hellrider]

If so, they should bring back painite selling at 780k/ton

I think, that for people which see nothing bad in exploiting blatant bugs, or in sick x150 boosts frontier should add new option, their own button "get 20 billions"
Avaliable only in 3.8

"but, but but time!".
-Cool. Profits shouldnt be only about time. They should be about required gear, skill, knowledge and risk.
Exobiology has nearly 0 risk (and I'm saing it after scanning planets on hundreds planets), require no gear (pff, artemis for 100k, and ANY ship with DSS. With first logs in bubble you can do it even in sidewinder), and very little knowledge.

Time? Cool, with time as the most important factor average explorer after 1 month trip should earn enough money for carrier
Also, I absolutely hate fact, that payouts between different things are more and more stupid.
First log of stratum tectonicas (and usually bacteria cerbrus, they love each other)- 900k*30=27m
first log bonus- 27*5=more than 100 millions. MORE THAN 20 DISCOVERED AND MAPPED EARTHLIKES.

 

[CMDR Rusty Dog]

Please. Have you tried to find logical consistency in Elite? Don't even bother trying. Next you'll start to wonder why ships have max speeds, or why you can't just take a fully loaded Type-10, accelerate to near light speeds and crash it into Earth to literally create a new extinction level event, or why you can die and be instantly teleported from Beagle point back to the bubble, but you need to take an Apex shuttle from one system to another, or why your Class 4 multicannon can't one-shot a human running on the surface of a planet.

Don't try to find logic in Elite, it doesn't exist.

Please? What do you mean please? I know very well that there are inconsistencies in Elite, many of them.
But does that fact nullify what I said? I think not.
You're basically agreeing with what I said and yet still choose to reply in such a troll-like manner.
I dunno what's wrong with you people. So sensitive to others opinions that you might not agree with.

 

[TheTechnobear]

price/profit is always a function of how much someone wants to do a thing... supply/demand.

so increasing the payout on exobiology is a natural step,
perhaps if everyone now races to exobiology then fdev will knock it back a bit.

but, Id say, outside of these threads, there is little evidence... that traders/miners/fighters all have switched to exobiology

I do suspect that things like ranks and perhaps bonus multipliers, were not fully considered...
and I'd not be surprised if these get a little tweak

but again...we have to put this in perspective, you can easily earn 100m / hour in mining even with a Python , which costs nothing.
its also virtually no risk, no gear, just time n' grind (unfortunately an ED staple ).
I'd not like to see drastically reduce the payouts, as I think the increase has made exobiology a more viable way to play the game, to have a way to progress JUST with exploration and the more options for players to play as they want is a good thing.
Elite has never been just about combat... it's about progress the way you want, being Elite in Exobilogy is not supposed to be comparable to Elite in Combat, different scales - let people play as they want, not as you think they should .

note: of course, Id prefer Fdev made exobiology more enticing by better gameplay loops... but thats for another day.

 

[SpaceGibbon]

personally I like doing whatever I think is the most fun in the game for me. exobiology as it stands is I think is pretty basic and gets very old quickly. "fixing" that by making it pay more is a bit of a cop out imo.
fixing it would be by expanding on it and making it more interesting and I hope fdev do that at some point. They could double the pay of what it is now and I'm still not going to do it.

 

[CMDR Rusty Dog]

ok, so my experience has been with standard exploration, no 3rd party tools... just going exploring anywhere that seems to have enough bios on it.

but sure, if you use a 3rd party tool... indeed, you're going to find valuable scans really quickly.

The tool I used was Spansh's Expressway to Exobiology plotter. I took a look at this because it had the new values already in it and I was curious.
On my main account I have been out in the void for months exploring. Not once did I use this tool for bios.
I have been taking it as it comes. Exploring as it should be done.
This was my first time even

 

[CMDR Rusty Dog]

ok, so my experience has been with standard exploration, no 3rd party tools... just going exploring anywhere that seems to have enough bios on it.

but sure, if you use a 3rd party tool... indeed, you're going to find valuable scans really quickly.

The tool I used was Spansh's Expressway to Exobiology plotter. I took a look at this because it had the new values already in it and I was curious.
On my main account I have been out in the void for months exploring. Not once did I use this tool for bios.
I have been taking it as it comes. Exploring as it should be done.
This was my first time even looking at Spansh's exobiology router, so I don't want it misconstrued that this is something I use on a regular basis because it isn't.

 

[TheTechnobear]

sure, don't get me wrong... as I said, nothing wrong with using 3rd party tools...
play as you want to play... set your own goals.

my point was much simpler... "Spansh's Expressway" is pointing you to particularly valuable resources, so it's giving you a slightly skewed view of the rewards.
because its targeting you to valuable payouts. (in this playthru!)

when you wandered around in the black, you'll know you got many less 'big hitters' (even at reduced rates)... and I dont see an issue with earning (e.g) 1 B credits, if you have wandered around for months in the void.... spend that time mining, and you'd have earned it too!


also lets remember, the game gets easier, and credits become irrelevant after a while. eg. an exploration trip to Colonia is a big thing early on the game.. you have very limited jump ranges... whereas for those later with FC, its a day out .. so exploration like everything else changes ...

its tough for Fdev to balance things, to be accessible to newer players, and yet also to those how have infinite credits, every ship etc....
we are also seeing this increasingly in the Thargoid War, and Fdev having to make AX weapons more available, some players that have 'done the grind' are not going to like it, but... you cannot expect new players to do years of effort to catch these veterans up, before they can play new content.
its a balance...

anyway at the end of the day, Elite is not about rankings or credits ... its a game, its about the journey, the fun you had getting there.
no one can take that away from you.

 

[metatheurgist]

What is NOT ok are the various bonuses, absurd (as they multiply your actual payoff), and the fact that the rankings have not been amended, which makes it possible to reach Elite V in a couple of days, from scratch. This is clearly not the way it was designed, and will be very frustrating for these legacy players who spent weeks or months (as progression was very, very slow) grinding Exobiology, a situation any game should try to avoid.

The ship left that dock ages ago. CR inflation. The exploration payout increase. The change of points given for kills. The CR payout inflation for trade and mining even though Trade rank has always been 1B (ish). To cherry the top they ignored progress already made when they introduced prestige ranks. So, yeah. It's a total joke now so welcome to the club exobio, we were expecting you.

 

[Bigmaec]

I wonder if FD will nerf correct this mistake feature and all those sweet ranks are being reduced next week.

Or if they just shrug it off and just correct the x5 multiplier.

 

[Mrc_NorthEast]

I wonder if FD will nerf correct this mistake feature and all those sweet ranks are being reduced next week.

I wonder if it is an Odyssey sale's pitch. Buy Odyssey, go exploring and be a billionaire in a week... Sounds like that is what is happening. Enjoy it while it last for those with Odyssey

 

[gooddoc]

personally I like doing whatever I think is the most fun in the game for me. exobiology as it stands is I think is pretty basic and gets very old quickly. "fixing" that by making it pay more is a bit of a cop out imo.
fixing it would be by expanding on it and making it more interesting and I hope fdev do that at some point. They could double the pay of what it is now and I'm still not going to do it.

That's true cmdr, I'd gone out to the Outer Core Region, really to fill in my codex on Planets & Stars I'd not yet logged, plus doing a bit of Exobio scanning to up my poor Rank in that field.
I was only 3.5kLYs from the bubble when U14 hit.....decided to return early, that goal can be continued when Iv got fed up with the non combat 'goid stuff.
But yeah! it's not improving Exobio stuff by just upping payments.......least of all to me with my 17.5+bil credits.