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

[Nadreck]

While I appreciate that most forms of combat are badly-paid, there still needs to be some sort of relatively simple way of earning a steady and adequate income. Something a casual player can drop into, play for an hour or so, and get a worthwhile payout.

It could be "gated" with a setup process to qualify. Like gaining Allied status with factions to obtain the best missions. I hope they don't nerf those.

 

[Jim Chapman]

There's currently no skill involved in mining,

That's a controversial statement right there! I reckon it took me a few hours of practising before I could reliably and quickly spot asteroids that had cores, and were likely to have Void Opals/Low Temperature Diamonds in those cores. Compare PVE combat where you can basically grind-to-win (I mean that once you've bought your shield tank, and engineered its thrusters, power distributor, efficient lasers and so forth, you'll never need to lose a battle again, even if your only approach to dogfighting is jousting, with a bit of circle-strafing). Of course, there is some skill involved in combat, I just don't think that Elite combat skills are any more sophisticated that Elite mining skills.

 

[Rubbernuke]

That's a controversial statement right there! I reckon it took me a few hours of practising before I could reliably and quickly spot asteroids that had cores, and were likely to have Void Opals/Low Temperature Diamonds in those cores. Compare PVE combat where you can basically grind-to-win (I mean that once you've bought your shield tank, and engineered its thrusters, power distributor, efficient lasers and so forth, you'll never need to lose a battle again, even if your only approach to dogfighting is jousting, with a bit of circle-strafing). Of course, there is some skill involved in combat, I just don't think that Elite combat skills are any more sophisticated that Elite mining skills.

You are kidding, right? Mining is low skill requiring hardly any reflexes at all.

Plus, you have to have the skills to get the engineering too- which is the entire game.

 

[Jmanis]

Surely though the problem with mining is that you have a supposedly rare minerals that fetches huge amounts seemingly competing with hydrogen for abundance? There is too much of VOs / LTDs in the wild to justify the price they fetch, surely? If it was more scarce then seeing it in transports would drive piracy, make hitting a big score actually an event and mining an actual profession than a ticket to everything. So then the price can go up drastically but its not going to destabilise the rest of the game.

100% this. Three things determine the relative value of an item.

• Scarcity of the commodity [1]
• Difficulty to procure
• Overall demand

Demand is already a done argument. All items have demand displayed in the game, and it affects the price of an item, with states affecting the overall demand.
As for scarcity... LTDs, Void Opals, Painite, they're all more common than the so-called "low tier" commodities such as Methane Clathrates, thanks to hotspot mechanics.
Meanwhile, difficulty to procure is equal, regardless of whether it's low or high tier.

So let's look at this arbitrary station.

Demand of 1,431t of of Methane Clathrates, vs 2t of Monazite, prices as listed.

Comparing the two.

• Methane Clathrates are rarer than Monazite
• They are equally difficult to procure
• Demand for Methane Clathrates is three orders of magnitude higher.

So logically, Methane Clathrates should have a far higher price. But instead, Monazite is three orders of magnitude more expensive. This makes no sense.

Now, if you could gather Methane Clathrates 1,000 times faster than Monazite, then this pricing would make sense, which is why I keep plugging bulk harvesting as a solution. Even just 50 times faster gathering would alleviate most of the issues around this balance.

But it still leaves other activites well out of the water, and as I said before, if you try to balance other activities with this, you get ridiculous payouts on otherwise mundane activities just to achieve parity with mining's income rates, so it must be nerfed to a degree... whether that's the overall scarcity of high end minerals or a simple cut of about 75% of the current market value, either fits.

[1] The first person to mention De Beers and Diamonds gets a quick trip to artificial scarcity and market manipulation, which is definitively absent from Elite's universe given the relative freedom for commanders to collect any mining materials they like.

 

[Jim Chapman]

You are kidding, right? Mining is low skill requiring hardly any reflexes at all.

Plus, you have to have the skills to get the engineering too- which is the entire game.

Why do you think 'reflexes' are 'skill'? And what skills are involved in getting engineering? AFAIR it's just a long drawn-out treasure-hunt, fetching stuff (all of which is easy to get hold of, though sometimes rather time-consuming)

 

[zimms]

I assume this is the December surprise that has kept them busy.

Great to hear, a balance pass has been long overdue and areas other than credits could use one too. Looking forward to see how this goes.

 

[Morbad]

Your analogy doesn't fit E because in E, every miner IS a mining company - none of us work for anyone but ourselves.

Same analogy could be applied to combat pilots, who are privateers in command of their own (lightly crewed) vessels.

As for demand exceeding any and all rational need, if we were talking about 7B people on a single planet, yes, you'd be right, but we're talking about trillions of people spread across tens of thousands of worlds. The demand is astronomical and, while supply is, essentially, unlimited (due to the entire galaxy being a source), it still needs to be mined before it can be used.

Supply for many commodities far outstrips any reasonable estimate of demand. The human population of the Elite setting is about a thousand times that of today's Earth.

I'll use LDT's for comparison, whose closest equivalent would seem to be natural diamonds on Earth. Most of the demand for diamonds has been decorative, as appears to be the case with LTD's on Earth. There are certainly industrial/scientific uses, but they've never been predominant, even before synthetic diamond could fill that role.

How many tons of LTD's do you think have ever been mined in Elite? It must be well into the billions by now. And every tourist, high-tech, refinery, or industrial system seems to have a constant five or six-figure demand.

In the history of the planet Earth about 1200 tons of diamonds have been extracted, and the planet has maybe 300 tons of accessible reserves left. Currently, about 30 tons are produced per year, on a planet of almost 8 billion people. If per capita demand for LDTs in Elite were similar to natural diamond on Earth, a single dedicated miner CMDR could fill that entire demand, for the whole bubble.

Same can be said about most other commodities with modern analogs. Thousands of CMDRs and countless NPC miners (I know they don't actually sell the stuff they mine, but they are supposed to present the illusion that not all work in the galaxy is done by the PF alone), should produce such a glut of supply of 'high value' commodities that they should rightly be almost worthless. The demand is blatantly artificial, as can be seen in the game's runaway credit supply.

 

[Deleted member 182079]

That's the problem. People get into the game and go "now what?"
You need something to work for. Call it what you want but in game development this is referred to as 'end game,' as defined by the industry itself.

So tell me, what's the 'end game' in games like MS Flight Simulator or Assetto Corsa then? Everything is unlocked, there's nothing to 'work towards'. All there is is to enjoy the activity, and learn the mechanics within those titles. Nothing more. I place Elite in the same bucket, despite it having a basic progression path in the form of ships to unlock/purchase/improve and a bunch of ultimately meaningless ranks to go through.

 

[Rubbernuke]

Why do you think 'reflexes' are 'skill'? And what skills are involved in getting engineering? AFAIR it's just a long drawn-out treasure-hunt, fetching stuff (all of which is easy to get hold of, though sometimes rather time-consuming)

Engineering requires you to have done all the activities required to unlock them- thats why I said the entire game. You need to know combat, how ships work, know how to fly, know how to use the map and so on. Some is fetch and carry certainly, but not all of it, and certainly not knowing what effects and blueprints are best.

Do rocks fire back? Laser mining is just you sitting there firing away and collecting lumps. Sub is just knowing when to click a button once, core is highlighting, firing charges and....not much else. Its all show. Compare that to fighting Thargoids, or wing assassin missions, or undertaking stacked assassin / trade missions, or fighting ATR....no comparison at all. To make matters worse you get paid x1000 more for doing very little, whereas risking your neck gets you peanuts.

 

[Deleted member 38366]

[cloak - engaged]
[sneaks into the room]

Hey guys, one thing I wonder about when it comes to general prices/rewards and the Economy getting another balance pass :
- has anyone ever considered that all Ship and Equipment prices still follow V1.0 era metrics? A Sidey still costs as much as 6 years ago and so does an Anaconda.or a Class 4 Weapon or a Shield Generator; these prices never moved an inch

[runs like crazy]

 

[Morbad]

To make matters worse you get paid x1000 more for doing very little, whereas risking your neck gets you peanuts.

That's because every man, woman, child, slave, and fetus needs fifty-thousand carats of painite and LTD jewelry!

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

I have a week end and then some of NMS time to make a short comparison: Overall NMS is more plausible in terms of where to get stuff and how to rank up stuff. If you look you can track progress easily. If you need something mats you can find it by looking at places they are found at. The game tells you when you scan planets. (Clarify: With the visor. They are RIGHT there, not just a chance to drop. You can visually see them. Plant has carbon? It drops carbon. You scanned planet has gold deposit? You find it mine it, you get gold.) Credits come in many ways, probably more than I know or have explored. I get steady progress just casually playing. That doesn't earn millions in minutes, but I have a couple ideas how I could farm them faster.
But first of all, though it's pretty grindy at times, it doesn't feel punishing. I do something, I get something. My time doesn't really go to waste like in ED with its all-or-nothing philosophy.Yes, NMS has annoying parts, but there is nowhere near any progress deletion to see like in ED. I feel I can just pick it up at a later date. In ED I get punished with rank decay and progress loss if I take only small breaks already.
My weapons do decent damage and I don't have to grind gear to do basic game activities like combat e.g.

 

[Maymo]

It's far to late for that now - given the number of multiply billionaire CMDRs - and also the price of a Carrier.

I refuse to believe that. I firmly believe balance should be geared by what it’s like to progress in the game from 0 credits as a new cmdr makes their way up through the various ships.

FC’s shouldn’t be used as a metric for this as they vastly exceed the cost of the most expensive ship.

Many billionaires have achieved their fortune from what I view as a broken game. Likewise new players have become totally spoiled by this, a player complained here recently because they were reduced to making (and I quote) “a measly 100m credits” an hour due to the PWA bug. Or T6&7 are , just go buy a Python...

Frontier shouldn’t have allowed this to go on as long as it has, I’ll never understand why...

...but using past mistakes as a factor in rebalancing the game really isn’t a good way forward.

 

[BL1P]

Some things I think need fixing along with the re-balancing for mining.
Infinite supply of Ore from a single roid. A roid once mined should stay depleted and a wing should not get 100% of a roid for each wing member.
The wing should get the same as the single player. The advantage for a wing is, its collected faster and you find prospects faster. We dont need 100% each magic mechanics to make using a wing attractive anymore, which was the idea behind wings getting massive extra payouts when wings was introduced.
No we wont run out of stuff to mine, we wouldn't run out of stuff to mine even if we only mined the 0.048% we have discovered so far.
The 5% wing trade reward needs to come from the leader of the wing not some magical credit god. That is another relic from when wings was introduced.

Overlapping hot spots should not increase the % of cores or roids of that type per overlap, they are just a larger area. They should keep the single hotspot %, the advantage is its a bigger area.

 

[Rat Catcher]

Out of the loop what are we all mad about?

It's Wednesday?

 

[Morbad]

Out of the loop what are we all mad about?

RX 6800XT stock.

 

[Rubbernuke]

Out of the loop what are we all mad about?

Rather than being a dystopian dog eat dog universe we can all get a mining laser and bypass everything to become bored billionaires. That and the serial injustice of Cornflakes.

 

[WhoCares]

... Laser mining is just you sitting there firing away and collecting lumps. Sub is just knowing when to click a button once, core is highlighting, firing charges and....not much else. Its all show....

Core mining is a bit more than that, as you are running on a timer planting multiple charges on a more or less rotating target in different fissures of different strength, where the strength of all placed charges need to hit a certain range for optimum yield.

 

[BL1P]

Out of the loop what are we all mad about?

Not mad !
We are happy they are fixing the balance !

 

[Factabulous]

Out of the loop what are we all mad about?