FDev: Credit rebalancing incoming, "more reward for higher risk" activities
- Thread starter StuartGT
- Start date
Gold still pretty much sucks, Jmanis. Osmium and Platinum are great right now (200-250K per ton). Even Painite is still not bad. At 95-150K per ton, it's still easily worth going for. All this complaining by some is little more than a tempest in a teapot.
Wing mining missions can push the price of Gold and Silver to about 200k/tonne as well.
(which would be more like 800k/tonne if you do them as a full wing, of course, when the payout gets copied)
It's part of the economic madness that you can be paid more for transporting something than the thing is actually worth. It's always been that way though. If they got it right, we'd all just cut out the middleman by doing hauling instead of missions.
I have done a lot of delivery missions over the years - but that number sounds excessive. How? I haven’t seen anything mentioned about upping payouts just yet. But the prices of several metals have been increased lately.
Sure, but where before it was an opportunity cost where you'd be able to shift through at least 90[1] asteroids before it was wasted effort looking for painite instead of just harvesting gold/ palladium that you find (10-20k vs 900k) that opportunity cost is now more like 4-6 asteroids (50k vs 200k-300k). And as Ian points out, if you "sell" to missions you're closer to 200k/t then you're in the clear. Even then you can consider that you can pretty much get ~ 50k for gold/pal/silver anywhere... while os/pl etc are only stateful.... there's now a lot more nuance to choosing what to mine.
Overall, it's now a considered risk/ gamble worth considering...
Missions to deliver 180 tons of gold are paying about 35M today (was previously about 10M). I guess it's experimental and might be gone tomorrow.
Increased galactic average of minerals means increased rewards for delivering them, since delivery missions reward primarily on the value of the goods shipped, instead of the tonnage.
Okay, thank you. That makes sense.
But considering what the profit from mining has been then perhaps they are not going to nerf it. This could be the next intended gold rush. FD said they would introduce new gold rushes over time.
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A slower game? The game is glacial as-is. I think you're playing the wrong type of games.
Really? If destruction meant something, would you play differently? If hazards like damage, fuel expenses etc tied into ship choice and outfitting fed into banal things like missions it would alter how you approach things and make choices matter.
Right now fuel, credits, ships and ship types, B C and E modules, engineering as well as a whole host of other things are made pointless because you can go from stock to A grade instantly. Ship design and skills to mitigate shortcomings are meaningless.
I know your pain. It's really a very sh**ty way to treat players - you have them invest significant time in gathering a particular reward only to, out of the blue, cut the reward for that time significantly and with insufficient notice for them to do anything about it. Any change of that magnitude should be communicated well ahead of time so players can at least do something about it.
I mined 2100 tons of LTDs just prior to the big nerf a few months back. I was so tired that evening that I jumped my carrier into the system to sell and thought I'd sell them in the morning after the patch. They went from being worth 1.7M/ton to less than 800K/ton. I lost half the value overnight. It could have been worse. I read about a carrier owner who had a buy order for LTDs at something like 1.2M/ton who had purchased around 8000 tons; he lost a huge amount of money thanks to FDEV.
I would actually love it, with my self-imposed glacial pace of earning space bucks, if rearm/refuel/repair were more than just a formality whenever I docked. Sometimes when I get an old ship out the hangar I’m surprised to see B-class modules on optional slots, and realise it’s because that’s the best I could afford at the time. Even with my paltry income though, buying a ship and A-rating it seems fairly trivial when I don’t think it should.
The game you're arguing for is not one that would hold people's interest, and it most certainly isn't ELITE. ELITE is a game of progression, where you invest time to build your ship, to upgrade it, to take on better missions, or to simply head out and explore if you want. Nobody is going to invest any serious amount of time into a game with the kind of hard losses you're advocating because that's not how most people choose to play the game. This is a GAME that most people play for a few hours per week (some even less).
I mean for example (off the top of my head)
If people could not afford A grade modules, you could use engineering to make other grades better as a stop gap.
High end ships like the Cutter need expensive and specialist repairs, while ordinary ships like the T series are easy to repair
Fuel and repairs were expensive making AMFU and scoops a money saving tradeoff
Pirates maximising cost v capability
Ship loss would be a setback
Features like Powerplay offer service for a 'way out' of certain hardships
WRONG. He lost money. Had it been an in-game event that changed the value of his cargo, then that would have been a normal and acceptable risk of trading or mining. However, what actually happened is that FDEV had in-place a game mechanic that allowed a time investment of X to result in a reward of Y and then, without warning, FDEV came along and said, "Thanks for investing time playing our game, but we're going to cut the reward by some significant amount" -- that's acceptable if you communicate it to players well beforehand so they have time to cash out their current time investment, but they didn't do that, they just basically wasted that player's time.
The game should not be about the ships, it should be you surviving on what you are dealt- as it was to begin with.
Early ED had progression because ships, modules, fuel, repairs meant something. I had to save a few days for armour for my Cobra and every transaction could lead to me going bankrupt- in short I had to use skill in everything to get by- even the smallest mission done wrong could lead to financial disaster, and me having to do desperate things to claw it back. Thats a game.
Did he see a minus figure? If not he still made money.