FDev: Credit rebalancing incoming, "more reward for higher risk" activities

I've had this debate too many times now. Short version, mining prices break suspension of disbelief, and require too much cognitive dissonance to accept.

I was looking at the mining board tonight and saw a mission; "45t of Osmium, 5m credit reward!". Pfft. What a joke, when I can mine 45t of Painite more easily and get paid 40 million. That's what it does, for Every. Single. Activity. Many, many activities require substantially more effort than mining, and the only outcome of those activities is credits.

Knowing how ridiculously high mining pays out, it's impossible to not interpret the pathetic payouts everything else receives by comparison as nothing more than a kick in the proverbial from the person requesting the work.

If you really think that I shouldn't be concerned about the excessive payouts of mining, then these folks:

... should have absolutely no problem with a nerf. They're doing it for the love of it, right, just like I should be?

Unless, y'know, payouts matter. Which they do, and knowing how much mining pays out means every time I do another activity, the mediocre payout is just a limp and uninspiring ending to the days activity. That's how it ruins my enjoyment of the game.

Mining pays too much, and other activities cannot be appropriately balanced without completely throwing the progression of the game out of whack. Nerfing it is inevitable.

Take CGs for example; 7 days of concentrated effort for a weak 80m payout at the end. To even remotely be competitive with mining, you're looking at something like a 1b payout per person for say, the top 50%? Might as well just remove credits at that point.

EDIT: It's not just mining that's on the nerf table, rememeber. Let's also talk about massacre stacking. That can net you 150m/h if you stack right, averaging 5m per basic ship kill. So where's that leave Threat 5-6 Pirate Activity? I rate those ships at 4-5 times the effort, so 25m per kill sounds like a good place to start, to base it around what massacres currently offer.

I rekon with some effort, I could spin about 1b an hour under those circumstances. That'd be a broken mess. So you can't realistically balance Threat 5-6 Pirate Activity sites until you nerf massacre stacking. The same needs to get done to mining and all the other outliers.

"Masscre stacking" on the table. My rear. Do you know what they put on the table? Massacre missions. That gets a nerf. The intended gameplay. Stacking wont be addressed.
How long is that mining crazyness going on now? 2 years? If they bothered about balance they would long have adressed it. They either dont have the manpower or brains to balance anything in ED. Engineered power creep is still OP as heck.
"It'll be mild upgrades" my turdside.
 

Quick summary:
  • Aware that balancing isn't right
  • Done in stages, continuous
  • Mining first, start next week
  • Combat next, start two weeks later
  • "How much earned per hour, different loops, what risk, what reward, skill required"
  • Core mining should be higher paying than laser mining, as more skilful
  • Mining heavily linked to economy via commodities
  • Galnet narrative driven
  • Combat needs to be buffed, better rewards
  • Wing missions not a focus yet
  • Combat missions, bounties, bonds
  • Conflict zones last
  • Won't be a quick fix, will tweak and check data/feedback
  • It feeling right to the player is what matters
  • Been seeing all the existing feedback, videos etc
  • Balancing is super important, on the agenda and a priority
  • Incremental changes
  • Discussions have been ongoing since after Arthur & Bruce joined FDev
  • Skill and risk more rewarded
  • Bulk sale to change to be fairer, average not minimum
  • Rebalancing will be tied with the ongoing storylines
  • Forum post later this week, roadmapping the rebalancing
  • Implementation over the next weeks

I just seen this... and no i did not read 25 pages...

So i guess they will ruin mining even more, including even more destroyed hotspots in all ring types not only in ice rings
They they will ruin combat and everything else...

I realize that i'm not appearing very optimistic, but well.. glad that the mining rush pre carriers sorted me out - credits wise
So whatever if come... let it come.
I'm ready (25 bn cash on each of my 2 accounts)
 
just got a message in game saying servers going down to apply an update and to check forums for info.... can't see anything - does anyone know if it's the first of these nerf..... balancing acts and should i go sell my void opals quickly?
 
Before someone accuses me of selfish behaviour: such a nerf will most likely lead to a massive loss for me, and yet I strongly support it. I'm currently sitting on heaps of VOs and Painite on my carrier, the equivalent of about 2 billion in total, and I have no intention of going home to make any panic selling.

I do have an objection, however:
This ore heap contains 2/3 VOs and 1/3 Painite, with only a small part of the latter having been mined by laser. Since everybody knows that laser mining is way more skill free and way more efficient compared to core and SSD mining, it will be impossible to "balance" these two activities against each other. Unless you split Painite into two variants and treat them differently - or you drastically nerf the intrinsic deposits of Painite.

Not sure what you would lose? Only future income will be affected I believe.
 
If you read carefully, I won't be going home for a while. So if they adjust the prices now, it will naturally affect my income when I sell my collected VO and Painite (which I already have) in the future - then with the adjusted prices, compared to the actual prices. I don't know what's so difficult to understand here, isn't it self-explanatory?
Well, it's just one cargo load.
 
Unless you need to compete in some manner that's dependent on one's ability to afford outlays of credits. This is admittedly rare in the current game because most activities now provide more credits than are necessary for just about anything. However, there are still situations where someone may need a ship, the ability to sell large quantities of cargo at a steep loss, the ability to pay off large fines/bounties, or to afford large quantities of merits.

Fleet carriers are also priced as they are, due in some part to the raw credit supply, which is significantly related to mining profit.

Sounds like a great way to get parasites or a fungal infection.

Can scarcely get any worse!
Even then, high mining payouts don't affect you -- if you're not a miner, then you wouldn't have been using mining to achieve your goal anyway, you'll have used your preferred style of gameplay, in which case, it only strengthens the case that mining payouts are fine as they are and it's the other career paths that need to be buffed.
 
Even then, high mining payouts don't affect you -- if you're not a miner, then you wouldn't have been using mining to achieve your goal anyway, you'll have used your preferred style of gameplay, in which case, it only strengthens the case that mining payouts are fine as they are and it's the other career paths that need to be buffed.

If someone isn't a miner, then they are disproportionately affected by high mining payouts by virtue of them only being able to take advantage of them by engaging in an activity they dislike, which would, if credits mattered, give a small subset of play-styles greatly inflated agency.

It's true that inflating other gameplay paths could bring parity in this regard, but only by further eroding the relevance of credits themselves.

If credits are to matter, then most credit rewards need to be reduced, and mining 'profit' would need to be reduced a lot.
 
Even then, high mining payouts don't affect you -- if you're not a miner, then you wouldn't have been using mining to achieve your goal anyway, you'll have used your preferred style of gameplay, in which case, it only strengthens the case that mining payouts are fine as they are and it's the other career paths that need to be buffed.
Most players aren’t doing one particular thing to the exclusion of everything else. There aren’t a lot of “miners,” just people who do some mining some of the time.
 
Even then, high mining payouts don't affect you -- if you're not a miner, then you wouldn't have been using mining to achieve your goal anyway, you'll have used your preferred style of gameplay, in which case, it only strengthens the case that mining payouts are fine as they are and it's the other career paths that need to be buffed.
Then rebalance this for me... let's not even look outside mining for a moment.

45t of Painite pays out roughly 40m credits
A mission for 45t of Methane Clathrates pays out roughly 2-3m

Of these two activities, Methane Clathrates requires more effort to collect, owing to the fact no hotspots exist to increase their rarity, and twenty times more effort is required before methane clathrates will become close to the payout of Painite.

My guess would be =~ 50m.

This is why it's inevitable for a mining as it currently stands to get a nerf. Minerals such as Painite are simply too common to maintain their price.
 
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Hnn... just had an "upgade" from the launcher. Has the rebalancing kicked in?

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!!
 
If someone isn't a miner, then they are disproportionately affected by high mining payouts by virtue of them only being able to take advantage of them by engaging in an activity they dislike, which would, if credits mattered, give a small subset of play-styles greatly inflated agency.

It's true that inflating other gameplay paths could bring parity in this regard, but only by further eroding the relevance of credits themselves.

If credits are to matter, then most credit rewards need to be reduced, and mining 'profit' would need to be reduced a lot.
Completely incorrect; everyone has the choice of career they choose. Just as in the real world, some careers pay better than others. It's a choice. Anyone CAN make lots of money if they go out and mine a bit. I agree that combat and exploration need to be buffed - 10,000cr for a thargoid kill is ridiculous, but the argument you're making is little more than a whine that your PREFERRED game style doesn't pay as well as another and so the solution you seek is not to correct the payouts for your preferred style but to reduce the payouts for those who enjoy an activity you happen not to prefer.

The last thing ED needs is MORE grind added -- that's why people have left this game for other games like NMS and SC (even in its current form).
 
Then rebalance this for me... let's not even look outside mining for a moment.

45t of Painite pays out roughly 40m credits
A mission for 45t of Methane Clathrates pays out roughly 2-3m

Of these two activities, Methane Clathrates requires more effort to collect, owing to the fact no hotspots exist to increase their rarity, and twenty times more effort is required before methane clathrates will become close to the payout of Painite.

My guess would be =~ 50m.

This is why it's inevitable for a mining as it currently stands to get a nerf. Minerals such as Painite are simply too common to maintain their price.

You've got a real thing for the methane clathrates, haven't you? I have no issue with the payout for painite being downgraded - it is unusually priced because it's in the same tier of payouts as core-mined commodities, but core-mining is virtually dead at the moment thanks to nerf, nerf, nerf, more nerf, one more nerf and let's throw in a broken PWA for good measure and not fix it for 3+ months. Core mining NotSpots need to be buffed. I made my first few billion exclusively on VOs, making roughly 330M every 2 hours. Now, I can spend 4 hours in a VO NotSpot and come away with barely half a hold on a good day. I agree that MC should pay more than it does, but you fix that by increasing the price of MC, not by nerfing the ever living hell out of everything else. Or maybe you don't... just because something is rare doesn't mean it's valuable. If it's something that has no real demand, then it will never be worth anything.

The price of minerals is already artificially controlled by FDEV - one of their many, many failed patches introduced a broken (surprise!) supply and demand system and, along the way, they also artificially suppressed the price of LTDs - I know that from first-hand experience as I had mined 2000T of them with a value of around 3.3B cr only to find, the next day that they were now worth only 40% of that without any warning, and the price has never recovered. You don't keep a player base happy by having them invest significant time performing an activity only to, at the drop of a hat and without warning, suddenly cut the value of that work more than in half, which is what it seems very likely is going to happen again on Monday. I'll be back in the bubble to sell another 7000T of cargo worth well over 5B cr, but there are a lot of players way out in the black who have absolutely no way to get back in time and they're about to get royally screwed by FDEV. That's the kind of thing that causes people to find other games to play.
 
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