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

[Jmanis]

So I'm going to be watching very closely how and if FD deal with.

1. Smuggling... specifically fixing it by removing the -25% debuff on illegal items.
2. Incorrect payouts on wing vs non-wing CZ Massasacre missions.
3. Normalising and fixing massacre missions in general. Outbreak massacres are broken, Deserter Massacres are harder than Wing Assassinations, CZ massacres can't stack but pay equally to pirate massacres, and the general imbalance of stacking rewards.
4. Whether we see a fix to the 50m credit limit on missions.
5. How they intend to fix Mining Missions.
6. If they intend to make common mining ores common, and rare, high-value ones rare.
7. If they fix the problem of delivery missions being rewarded primarily on cargo type, not volume, where the latter is the primary determinant of difficulty, not the former.
8. How they intend to address USS, Scenarios and surface exploration, and the pittance in loot they offer.
9. How they intend to buff Pirate Activity Threat 5/6 POI.
10. If we'll get a fix to Thargoid tissue sampling, and a boost to payouts for alien biopsies in general[1]
11. If we get a boost to codex discoveries.
12. If we'll finally get a boost to one-way colonia passenger missions which pay less than 1m credits. Courier missions, this is fine, but passenger missions this is not.
13. If we'll get easier to find and more rewarding Luxury-class passenger missions
14. If we'll get a fix to megaship looting.
15. If we'll see a raising of the 50m mission reward technical limitation.
16. A boost to payouts for Thargoid/Corrosive/Otherwise Dangerous/hard to get items.
17. A boost to Military Courier cargo.
18. Normalisation of mission board generation to deal with redundant-case systems generating boards of easily-stacked missions, skewing income substantially.

All these issues impact FDs ability to rebalance effectively, if at all. I don't envy their task, but if these things don't get addressed, you might as well not even bother with a rebalance.

[1] I'd rather see research biopsies be used for secondary outcomes rather than credits, but right now their only purpose is credits, and it's pointless

 

[Sublime]

The way they said on the stream that they want to work the rebalancing of the economy into the storyline of the game really makes me feel like something big is coming. Maybe a war, or a Thargoid invasion of the bubble. Things like that tend to disrupt economies in a major way.

 

[Jmanis]

The way they said on the stream that they want to work the rebalancing of the economy into the storyline of the game really makes me feel like something big is coming. Maybe a war, or a Thargoid invasion of the bubble. Things like that tend to disrupt economies in a major way.

Spoiler alert. Due to a shortage of bauxite miners, all our ships are now made of painite.

 

[CMDR DragonHorn]

I get that rewards are important and all (although we all know credits at this point lost pretty much any possible value), but how about fixing actual game balance first, which is nowhere to be found currently? Sure, balancing rewards is easier, but is that really takes priority?...

 

[here_it_comes]

That applies to pure combat too.

In combat, player error is far and away the smallest risk involved. The real risk all revolves around skill and experience (which largely removes the player error risk). Saying that the risks of combat include player error is technically true, but practically false.

I think its interesting with trading missions specifically, because you're in a ship that's outfitted for trading but put into a combat scenario. The trading rewards are probably separate, but all these missions have wrinkles when you get interdicted.. the bonus rewards for killing mission targets should be buffed into the millions per ship. This would change the mildly high negative experience of the scripted interdictions into something you might look forward too...

You mean bonus' for killing ships you are interdicted by during trade missions? Why would the employer give a crap about who you killed while delivering 500 tons of mac and cheese?

I agree the rewards for bonus targets in combat missions is abysmal (I always ignore them), ideally they would be boosted along with combat mission pay. How much they are worth should be based off the ship/rank. I don't think dangerous Vultures are worth millions, let alone one million.

 

[znôrt]

Balancing is super important, on the agenda and a priority

 

[Jmanis]

\
I think its interesting with trading missions specifically, because you're in a ship that's outfitted for trading but put into a combat scenario. The trading rewards are probably separate, but all these missions have wrinkles when you get interdicted.. the bonus rewards for killing mission targets should be buffed into the millions per ship. This would change the mildly high negative experience of the scripted interdictions into something you might look forward too...

My issue with this is that it's only credits. 99% of wrinkles I don't bother with because they don't equate to more influence, for an activity which would otherwise have negative impact.

Take Massacres for example (noting; I don't see this necessarily as a problem with these missions)... ignoring stacking, massacres are awful to do if your goal is influence. This is because the influence is derived from the credit reward, to a maximum point. That is, a mission to kill 10 ships will reward X credits, with a Y influence option, whereas a mission to kill 40 ships will offer 4*X reward, but still only have a Y influence option, despite being four times the effort.

Contrast against an assassination mission worth 500-700k credits, or +++ Inf, versus a 1-2m mission with a +++++ inf option. The effort scales.

Another mission-based example, without going near wrinkles yet, is Urgent Terror Kill Orders (or whatever they're called); the assassination mission that requires you to scan a surface beacon before learning the location of the target. These pay out the same as normal assassinations, despite being two missions in one (an installation scan mission + an assassination mission)... but even if they considered that and made them pay 4-5m instead, it'd still only offer the same influence rewards... so they're usually off the table for me too.

I remember in the hey-day of wrinkles, you couldn't get a mission that wouldn't offer a wrinkle. There was a time when I simply stopped taking deliveries before you could opt out of the wrinkles, because I'd get a "Oh, we actually need you to deliver it to this other destination, sorry. Here's some credits" but no additional influence.

Sorry, I'm actually kinda rambling now. I guess my point is simply boosting the rewards for wrinkles doesn't suffice. Non-credit rewards such as influence (and rep) must also be a consideration.

 

[[DOOK] Droogie]

The big question is: What are they going to break in the process?

 

[Mr Dr Diego]

Jesus christ leave surface mining alone and bump everything else first. F fs.

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

In combat, player error is far and away the smallest risk involved. The real risk all revolves around skill and experience (which largely removes the player error risk). Saying that the risks of combat include player error is technically true, but practically false.

Well you only die in pve combat if you make a mistake. I don't think the intention of any of the missions is to force you into a unavoidable situation where you have to experience near death.. or real risk. It can happen, but that's again players not choosing the right thing, or maybe rng?

You mean bonus' for killing ships you are interdicted by during trade missions? Why would the employer give a crap about who you killed while delivering 500 tons of mac and cheese?

I agree the rewards for bonus targets in combat missions is abysmal (I always ignore them), ideally they would be boosted along with combat mission pay. How much they are worth should be based off the ship/rank. I don't think dangerous Vultures are worth millions, let alone one million.

Same reason that combat activity is going to pay more for doing the same thing after a balance pass.

I still think its a point though, the only scenario that's closer to the being a real example of "risk" is when you're in a ship that's not outfitted primarily for combat being in a combat situation. Yeah i know in practice it doesn't matter, a player who even bothers with this is going to have full multipurpose outfitting, but maybe in theory it matches in my head.

Also just saying again, buffing combat rewards is brilliant because it would be great to have a choice more than one gold rush and 2 or 3 lesser ones. But pve isn't really risky, you're supposed to win every time.

 

[Jmanis]

Jesus christ leave surface mining alone and bump everything else first. F fs.

The problem with that is that mining in general pays ridiculously too much. For other activities to be competitive and, as FD put, skill and risk based, the payouts for other activities become equally ridiculous... you're staring down the barrel of 50-100m for a wing assassination, for starters... let alone an hour of hunting at a Pirate Activity site churning close to a billion.

While mining stays the way it is, other activities can't fit in to a properly balanced economy if their payouts are balanced around mining income. It has to be nerfed.

 

[TheChaosGrinder]

mining is just way out there. As someone who's currently doing quite a lot of transport missions because they fit my work from home schedule all too well, I have to say I do make bank (Not really, took me weeks to get to over 100mil with a type 6 with 112t cargo) but it still feels like i make no money at all.

 

[JohannStrauss]

Good thing: I already became so incredibly rich that I don't actually care what FD will do next.

AS LONG AS IT ISN'T GALACTIC WIDE COMMUNISM AND expropriation OF THE RICH!
I feel a bit bad for the new players though. They will never make a trillion.

 

[JohannStrauss]

mining is just way out there. As someone who's currently doing quite a lot of transport missions because they fit my work from home schedule all too well, I have to say I do make bank (Not really, took me weeks to get to over 100mil with a type 6 with 112t cargo) but it still feels like i make no money at all.

Try selling combat weapons to war systems. But don't tell anybody. They have supply missions.

 

[Kaocraft]

I have no faith whatsoever that Frontier are capable of getting this right, never mind maintaining it once it's done, but I support the attempt.

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

Just watched obsidian ants video, and it could be something to look forward to.

I think the social media message is a bit one sided.. all the people who complain about this are combat players, and in an attempt to get combat out of the hole, they used a justification of risk vs reward.. which becomes a really weak basis when you think it through. Go to an engineer and risk is zero.

If the goal is to get rewards for all pillars to about the same happy level.. maybe mining down a few notches and everything else buffed to meet it.. that would be genuinely great. The fun would return back to before you knew anything about the game and just did stuff randomly without thinking about some credit meta. That would be quite good to enable experienced players to do that again without reservation.

Yeah coddling the combat requests might be a bit dumb because lol risk, but at the same time, im also greatful to the youtubers who socially engineered frontier to taking action. Thanks and well done.

....

And maybe the current community team for the first time in history taking note?

 

[Spacewhacked]

There are players who love mining that still won’t do the combat thing. I’m just saying they shouldn’t completely make mining useless like they did with core mining.

 

[FlyingBrickyard]

The big question is: What are they going to break in the process?

(Apologies in advance)

 

[Cageman]

No, it means actually scaling NPCs to the job. X4 G5 Sidewinders with phasing and Groms would be nasty and much more of a problem than one G1 NPC Corvette.

Yes... if you are in a small ship.

If you fly a Corvette fully G5 engineered with enough shield cell banks to last for hours, then the pay should be A LOT LESS, compared to you engaging the same enemies in a G5 fully engineered Eagle.

 

[Jmanis]

Try selling combat weapons to war systems. But don't tell anybody. They have supply missions.

You wouldn't realise with how washed out the mission boards get with massacre missions during war. Wish they'd undo that change already...