Exploration/Trading Ranks . . . sad!

60mm

60mm
I'm really surprised at how easy it is to Rank in these Careers. I am purely into combat and haven't gone out of my way to do anything else save for Engineer requirements.

I've made Trailblazer solely by visiting the Guardian sites and the Jellyfish Nebula and selling the Honk data from those. Two Exploration Data transactions total, and I didn't scan a single Body made me a Trailblazer . . . [where is it] I would have been happy with Scout.

On Trading, I somehow made it to Merchant despite never once doing a Trading Mission or anything related. Had a Market Network of . . . 4!
I would say I should have been Ranked Penniless. Peddler would have been very generous. Then recently, I wanted to unlock Bill Turner so went out to gather his precious Bromelite. The ring I went to had a Void Opal hotspot and figured I'd see what the rage was about and pad my account a little so I can focus on turning my Assassination Contracts in for Rep/Mats for a while. 3 runs later, one session, and I'm halfway from Tycoon to Elite . . . [where is it]. I am well aware Void Opals is a Gold Rush, but the tiers for Trader are still abysmally small. I can't imagine it would take a dedicated Trader very long at all to hit Elite w/o touching Mining.

These Careers' Ranking progression rate is just downright terrible. After ~3600 Bounties and a couple hundred Assassinations I'm at ~25% Dangerous in Combat (SLF since early Master). I'm sure I will at least double those numbers for ranking Elite in Combat and I like it. If I run into someone with Elite Combat Ranking, I know that person has seen a hefty amount of combat. Perhaps they played on Snooze with a Big 3 farming at a RES, but atleast I know they've done quite a bit of it.

Explorers/Traders however . . . I can't say I will ever see an Elite Ranking and think anything of it. Maybe they jumped on ED last week. Which I find sad. :(

Trade Ranks should incorporate other metrics such as Tons Traded, Market Network, Number of Transactions, etc.
Exploration should include metrics such as Bodies/Systems both Scanned/Discovered as well as LY from Starting Point. Elite in Exploration should certainly include at least one first time Discovery.

I don't see FD ever changing this as the Rivers of Salt would be Biblical, but I would love to see it happen.
 

Chris Simon

Chris Simon
Yeah. Unfortunately the constant buffing of trading and recently mining and exploration means you can literally become trading and explo Elite in a day. Sad.
 

Urbanski101

Urbanski101
Yeah....it's not good.

A friend of mine overtook me on exploration rank simply by doing passenger missions. He's never discovered anything, never been out of the bubble or traveled more than a couple hundred LY from his starting position, not criticising him, he just played the game and tried to make some credits but that makes no sense to me.

I on the other hand actually explored, and went over 24k LY from the bubble. But that was back in the day when exploration paid next to nothing so it didn't get me that far.

It's a fairly sorry state of affairs IMO
 

60mm

60mm
Urbanski101 said:
Yeah....it's not good.

A friend of mine overtook me on exploration rank simply by doing passenger missions. He's never discovered anything, never been out of the bubble or traveled more than a couple hundred LY from his starting position, not criticising him, he just played the game and tried to make some credits but that makes no sense to me.

I on the other hand actually explored, and went over 24k LY from the bubble. But that was back in the day when exploration paid next to nothing so it didn't get me that far.

It's a fairly sorry state of affairs IMO
Click to expand...

Yeah. That is absolute Trash.

I would think 500 LY from the Bubble would be a Requirement to get ya Mostly Aimless. How you can be an "Explorer" whilst living in the Bubble is beyond me.
 

CMDR Beltane

CMDR Beltane
Yea... those two are not much worth nowadays. Trade Elite is long worthless ever since the first gold rushes started without FD doing anything serious about it other than plugging holes. The only comfort i take for myself is that i did all of Trade Elite before those were a thing and arround 80% of Exploration before that went sour.

But well, at least i can still remember me after release going Sidewinder, Hauler, Cobra, T6, T7, Clipper, Python and finally Conda back then. And sheesh... the time between T6 and T7 felt like a lifetime XD.
 

Steven J Kirk

S
Most of my exploration rank (currently 77% Pioneer) is from passenger missions...and frankly I feel like a bit of a fraud.

That being the case, I've taken my Cutter outside of the bubble for the first time, gone beyond the 5kLY mark (to help with Professor Palin) and am going to carry on along the Highway to Colonia, maybe taking in a trip to SagA* while I'm out here.

I'm honking everything, FSS'ing and DSS'ing wherever appropriate and I finally feel like I vaguely deserve an Exploration rank.

On a side note my ship is called Enterprise, so I like the concept that when I get a 'First Discovered By' tag, it means I literally have boldly gone where no-one has gone before. It's the little things that keep me amused!
 

Chris Simon

Chris Simon
CMDR. Kirk said:
Most of my exploration rank (currently 77% Pioneer) is from passenger missions...and frankly I feel like a bit of a fraud.

That being the case, I've taken my Cutter outside of the bubble for the first time, gone beyond the 5kLY mark (to help with Professor Palin) and am going to carry on along the Highway to Colonia, maybe taking in a trip to SagA* while I'm out here.

I'm honking everything, FSS'ing and DSS'ing wherever appropriate and I finally feel like I vaguely deserve an Exploration rank.

On a side note my ship is called Enterprise, so I like the concept that when I get a 'First Discovered By' tag, it means I literally have boldly gone where no-one has gone before. It's the little things that keep me amused!
Click to expand...

It's the little things that matter the most. ;)
 

Dirtbird

D
I accidentally got explorer elite from the BGS work I did. I’ve done the Palin 5kLy trip but that’s about it. I’m tycoon as well, just from missions. The only one I’m actually putting in any effort towards is combat.

For trade and exploration, there’s penniless/aimless and elite. Anything else is a rounding error.
 

13A

13A
Exploration ranking is a lot easier now.

My original account only reached Elite after going to Beagle and back on DWE.

My new account has reached Ranger already and hasn't been more than 1000ly from the bubble.
 

Nadreck

N
Well, raising the requirements will only hurt those doing it the "proper" way, so I hope they won't do that.

For Exploration, I got some help from Road to Riches (around 200 million), but the rest was actual exploration, i was pleased to make Elite at Far Sight Base after coming in from the Formidine Rift. Since then I've earned a fortune doing passenger sightseeing missions, and I've heard that they affect Exporation rank, but being Elite already I couldn't see that. I haven't done many long-range passenger sightseeing missions, and I think those should count if they're taking you way outside the Bubble, some sort of minimum distance would be appropriate.

For Trade, I only got there this weekend (after playing for a year), mostly doing basic commodities trading: I actually refused to try out the new mining because I didn't want to reach Elite that way. So it might be a good idea to cap the effect of mining profits on Trade rank, if that's excessive.
 

Shiro Akai

Shiro Akai
Either I'm playing different game or I'm doing something totally wrong.

Trade: 11% Enterpreneur
Exploration: 64% Pioneer
Combat: let's mercifully skip on that ^^

Anyway - Trade - this is my primary profession. I haven't participated in any exploit (I did once tried skimmers, done 2 or 3 runs, got bored), occasional passenger missions (dropped due to <censored> demands). Usually I get into station, pick few "good" paying missions - 300-600k, sometimes I get those cherries 800k ones. Over 1M I earn with basic medicines and outbreak hauling. Been doing that and Enterpreneur...

Exploration - been to SagA* and back, earned bit over 100M from that. Made one circle around R2R. Made 10k LYs loop in unknown regions. Made several shorter exploration trips. Sitting at Pioneer.

Not that I care about these ranks - they give nothing (except bragging rights and maybe access to one station I will probably never visit anyway), but reading above I should be elite in at least one field. Oh well, maybe in next two years.
 

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead
Yeah, I just hit trade Elite from mostly mining.

Lol I suppose it's sort of trade. And I did earn 1.1bn from it.

Not far off Exploration Elite, which I hope to finish off this month. But that was mostly from exploration, with passengers thrown in. That seems ok to me.

Combat is slow going. 88% Deadly.
Gonna need to kill me some scouts to push that over the line in a reasonable time.
 

xondk

X
60mm said:
I'm really surprised at how easy it is to Rank in these Careers. I am purely into combat and haven't gone out of my way to do anything else save for Engineer requirements.

I've made Trailblazer solely by visiting the Guardian sites and the Jellyfish Nebula and selling the Honk data from those. Two Exploration Data transactions total, and I didn't scan a single Body made me a Trailblazer . . . [where is it] I would have been happy with Scout.

On Trading, I somehow made it to Merchant despite never once doing a Trading Mission or anything related. Had a Market Network of . . . 4!
I would say I should have been Ranked Penniless. Peddler would have been very generous. Then recently, I wanted to unlock Bill Turner so went out to gather his precious Bromelite. The ring I went to had a Void Opal hotspot and figured I'd see what the rage was about and pad my account a little so I can focus on turning my Assassination Contracts in for Rep/Mats for a while. 3 runs later, one session, and I'm halfway from Tycoon to Elite . . . [where is it]. I am well aware Void Opals is a Gold Rush, but the tiers for Trader are still abysmally small. I can't imagine it would take a dedicated Trader very long at all to hit Elite w/o touching Mining.

These Careers' Ranking progression rate is just downright terrible. After ~3600 Bounties and a couple hundred Assassinations I'm at ~25% Dangerous in Combat (SLF since early Master). I'm sure I will at least double those numbers for ranking Elite in Combat and I like it. If I run into someone with Elite Combat Ranking, I know that person has seen a hefty amount of combat. Perhaps they played on Snooze with a Big 3 farming at a RES, but atleast I know they've done quite a bit of it.

Explorers/Traders however . . . I can't say I will ever see an Elite Ranking and think anything of it. Maybe they jumped on ED last week. Which I find sad. :(

Trade Ranks should incorporate other metrics such as Tons Traded, Market Network, Number of Transactions, etc.
Exploration should include metrics such as Bodies/Systems both Scanned/Discovered as well as LY from Starting Point. Elite in Exploration should certainly include at least one first time Discovery.

I don't see FD ever changing this as the Rivers of Salt would be Biblical, but I would love to see it happen.
Click to expand...

Just fyi, missions profit count towards trade as well, or at least used to.
As for the scaling of those ranks, should it be increased? difficult to say, at the end they only point to "you've earned x amount of credits doing this" where combat is "you've killed x amount of npc's" and combat reward in rank last I checked scales with npc level, so yeah.

It is quite easy for frontier to change, and if anything they can just change the scaling, but ultimately the ranks mean very little, so why is there a need to change them? what would that do? nothing from my view. Especially with the loopholes that people constantly find to abuse and get those ranks up, the ranks themselves are rather meaningless.

And given trade and exploration rank is only shown to others through decales, is it really that important to change it at all?

Unless all the ranks are changed into something significant, then I do not see why there is a need to change them.

Significant could for example be counting more then just cash, rewarding people for aiding others, anything, other then a strict by x credit setup, until then, meh.
 
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MDHansen

M
Started playing at game launch. Took me nearly 2 years to reach combat elite, 2 1/2'ish years for trading, and over 3 for exploration. I didn't do passenger missions, so never got the exploration boost from them. Trading was for the very most moving stuff from a to b. (by 3 years of playing I had roughly 2500 hrs actual gameplay (I don't grind))

In my opinion, ranks should never increase by doing missions, but obviously indirectly still should by e.g the value of your delivery on the trading rank. Exploration should be good ol' fashioned exploration only, pure and simple.
Sadly I guess it's too late to change the mechanics. I can allreaady see the general forums light up with hundreds of threads.


P.S looking at Steam and my played hours... How the hoo do I have time for all that play!
 
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