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If this was true then we would not have had a mining nerf in the post-fleet carrier patch.
FDev, Have You Lost Control of Your Game?
- Thread starter CMDR Tony
- Start date
Well that would mean FD only care about money , and not about the game itself , which may be really bad. (for the game itself)
And we know how good they are at balancing things .....Stakeholders vs shareholders! Who knows, maybe FD is trying to balance that?
S
Tuning the rate people make cash while wanting everyone to get a carrier so you can make money are not opposing concepts. There's nothing else to do til 1/4 2021 so they're stretching it out a bit.
Would you prefer a subscription fee?
yeah. Great game with sub or bad game without sub, i go for sub.
And to be honest , I do think elite is not a bad money maker atm , maybe i'm wrong tho it's just guess.
You have to look at the time-line here. At the introduction of the patch, the respawn exploit was not yet widely known and certainly those who used it were relogging and dealing with pirates in different ways rather than just resetting the instance using an SLF. Hence, the tuning was not intended to nerf this exploit in particular, but to cap the income rates of the methods that were being used. This does suggest that they would consider current rates with the exploit to be too high.
I bought my FC with credits largely made from trading and exploration...very little mining. I have 67 weeks ingame...not a newb for sure. There is a problem, whether you admit it or not, when new players can access Anacondas in a day or FC in a week. At this moment there is no progression in the game......just a trough for people to feed at....I imagine most of those new players won't stick around for long when there is nothing to spend those credits piling up. I'm sorry, many have been playing for years now and have worked hard in the game to make credits, gather materials, to get those nice ships. It's kind of a slap in the face to all of the players with a lot of time in game to see new players just come in and reap easy rewards. What's next? Multiply material gathering by a hundred fold to make that easier too? How about we just cut the rank limits by 2/3 so Elite is even easier to make? How about they just highlight all the secrets of the game on the galaxy map so no one has to search the galaxy. I tell you what.....how about when they buy the game.....they just get an in game message that says......you win! Welcome to Raxalla!!!!
if this game was subscription based, we'd be playing a much better game. Subscription means the developers dont get paid without players playing the game. That incentivizes consistent new content, and a game that encourages actually wanting to play it so much you're willing to pay forever.
What we have now is what happens when it's not and the game isn't a labor of love.. at least not anymore. I give a month or so before credits are purchasable via arx. Might as well, they only matter if you want them to matter. It's in their best interest to allow purchasing credits. .
What we have now is what happens when it's not and the game isn't a labor of love.. at least not anymore. I give a month or so before credits are purchasable via arx. Might as well, they only matter if you want them to matter. It's in their best interest to allow purchasing credits. .
That's my greatest fear for this game.
I doubt they do that , but hey , thye may fix money exploit alot faster in this case
Balanced to what, though?
An average player?
A skilled veteran?
The best player in the game?
A Cobra III?
A Krait?
A Cutter?
Credit earnings?
Material earnings? (in several different types)
Take credit earnings of exploration and trade - exploration it barely matters what ship you do it in, and the necessary equipment is generally pretty cheap (sure, A-rated fuel scoops are expensive, but C-rated will do if it's just credits you're after). Trade on the other hand the bigger the better - a T-9 can earn about 50x as much as a Sidewinder hauling exactly the same thing - more, when trade missions are considered.
So if exploration and trade are set to have the same theoretically maximum profit when done in a T-9, exploration pays out incredibly well for a Sidewinder. But if exploration and trade are set to have the same profit for a Sidewinder, then exploration pays terribly for any bigger ships.
This could be "fixed" by making it so that you couldn't make maximum exploration profits in a Sidewinder - you needed a fully-fitted large ship with a wide range of sensors which couldn't fit in a Sidewinder - 6A gravity analysers, 5A thermal imagers, 5A Very Extremely Super Detailed Surface Scanners, and so on.
That "fix" would be incredibly unpopular with explorers who generally don't care exactly how well their profession pays but do want to be able to take a ship they enjoy flying on their three-month voyages.
The majority of the trade economy does work like that.
If people want to get involved in that sort of thing, they can grab a cargo ship and get hauling things like Coltan and Indium and Crop Harvesters. Lots of interesting supply and demand, price fluctuations dependent on player trade and local political factors (weapon prices rise a bit under pirate attack, for example).
There's - realistically - fairly thin margins for hauling most of this stuff. A typical trip in my Krait II (128t capacity) will make me about 150,000 credits profit. [1] And it'd make quite a bit less than that if lots of other people were doing it and meaning that supplies and demands were getting tighter.
There was once a time this process actually affected a significant number of players [2]. There were major complaints as a result. Frontier now understand very well that the majority of their players aren't interested in this sort of thing and so made Tritium immune to supply and demand.
[1] If I'm lucky it'll attract a pirate to kill, which is where the 'real money' is.
[2] Palladium has a very slow regeneration of NPC supply, so most Palladium-selling stations don't have much stock. For a while the game generated lots of "source Palladium" missions with very high payouts (500t for 40 million credits, or similar) - still does, from time to time, though not as large - and people took them. The combined effect of people taking them was that the Palladium supply ran low bubble-wide, making the missions difficult to complete (you could mine the Palladium, of course, but mining several hundred tonnes of Palladium isn't a quick process). So to make the money from the missions you needed either a secret Palladium source other people didn't know about - hard, with EDDB and the like, but not impossible - or to mine for the Palladium instead - or to spend hours hopping round a whole bunch of markets picking up 10t a time.
The player response to this was not "wow! this is an amazing supply and demand economy with dynamic gold rushes in response to player activity!" it was "Frontier are clearly incredibly incompetent to add missions to the game which require independent thinking and might sometimes not be possible, stop it now!" (only with more expletives)
The lesson was clearly learned.
I don't feel that way and I hauled poo from Sothis for my Cutter and I'm proud of it
The problem isn't the skip from sidewinder to anaconda tbh, it's that the smaller ships and bigger ships do not differ. There aren't ROLES for the ships (for example something only a fast cobra can do etc.), because the ships are basically copy and paste vessels with a bit tweaked stats to make them look different. If there were tasks only specialised class of ships could do, the skip from Sidey to a Conda wouldn't matter because you'd still need those ships to do their respective jobs.
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Fair enough if you think the economy in ED is robust and makes sense so be it
Fair enough if you just don't care and want money as fast as possible and to hell with balanced economy..
But your logic makes no sense to good game balance imo. Taking your logic to the extreme
FD could allow us to engineer god roll all our ships and fill our holds with LTDs just by pressing F1.... After all you can choose not to press it. Whilst this may be true it would definitely make me feel a mug for NOT pressing the button.
Years ago as a player who refused to do anything in game I felt was obviously out of balance I voiced the concern that sooner or later there would be so many who exploited or cheesed their way to billions that FD would start to balance costs around them. I was told I was spreading FUD, and making slippery slope falacies.
It has taken a while but the other shoe has finally fallen with FCs imo.
I am not even raging anymore.... Just dissapointed.
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I'm both
I used to be..... Until recently I was proper cheesed off. Now I am mildly fed up and dissapointed...... Not quitting just yet tho (albeit I suspect some on this forum wish myself and others like me would!)
The idea that what other people do in the game doesn't impact you can only be true if you believe that the BGS is meaningless and pointless and inconsequential. Which may certainly be true, but it is not the intention of Fdev that it is so.
the BGS is supposed to be the core of the game. Connecting everything and everyone together and creating a means to tell stories and have mysteries and be a vector for player control.
If you dont think that infinite wealth and being able to fast-track that completely destroys any kind of hope a player who isn't exploiting the acquiring of credits has at playing on level playing field (or is even in the stadium) then you aren't paying attention. You're using that "pretend the game is This" nonsense to imagine a game that doesn't exist.
If i have eleventy billion credits, then no amount of cost barriers or fear of loss matters to me. I can do things that dont make sense. I can manipulate the BGS regardless of if it's even remotely favorable to my credit account and I can do it at scales that are impossibly high compared to a player who is not making credits the way I'm making them where I put in no effort and get a billion credits in a couple hours.
If you dont think that kind of thing is game breaking, then you dont understand games. Or maybe you work at Fdev.
the BGS is supposed to be the core of the game. Connecting everything and everyone together and creating a means to tell stories and have mysteries and be a vector for player control.
If you dont think that infinite wealth and being able to fast-track that completely destroys any kind of hope a player who isn't exploiting the acquiring of credits has at playing on level playing field (or is even in the stadium) then you aren't paying attention. You're using that "pretend the game is This" nonsense to imagine a game that doesn't exist.
If i have eleventy billion credits, then no amount of cost barriers or fear of loss matters to me. I can do things that dont make sense. I can manipulate the BGS regardless of if it's even remotely favorable to my credit account and I can do it at scales that are impossibly high compared to a player who is not making credits the way I'm making them where I put in no effort and get a billion credits in a couple hours.
If you dont think that kind of thing is game breaking, then you dont understand games. Or maybe you work at Fdev.
The fact they nearly never communicate , and not giving us what they aim for, does not help.
If they add why they do something on a patchnote , that would be cool. But that may require work.
Some exemple you can have are how WOW or LOL patchnote are handled ,alot of game do this now. The post the change , and explain why they do it. That's help to understand their aim, and tho understand the direction of the game.
Right now they choose not to talk ,probably because they may lose some players doing that .
Or maybe because the game worked so well in term of players and reviews recently , they are thinking this was good. Maybe it was and we'r wrong.
If they add why they do something on a patchnote , that would be cool. But that may require work.
Some exemple you can have are how WOW or LOL patchnote are handled ,alot of game do this now. The post the change , and explain why they do it. That's help to understand their aim, and tho understand the direction of the game.
Right now they choose not to talk ,probably because they may lose some players doing that .
Or maybe because the game worked so well in term of players and reviews recently , they are thinking this was good. Maybe it was and we'r wrong.
Having a non-linear price/performance progression is not a problem for the game - quite the opposite, it gives players the best of both worlds.
Casual players can get that rapid taste of progression as the low-level content. In a single evening they can upgrade modules and get a real increase in performance. For more dedicated players that are just starting out, it can also help hook them into the game initially, as they see things changing quickly rather than having a largely static game. Even with just 20 hours of play-time, they can experience a wide variety of different things in the game.
More dedicated long-term players benefit from this non-linear progression as it ensures that they don't just experience all the content immediately after the first weekend of playing. It gives them goals to work towards and heights to aspire to. It produces aspirational content that only a fraction of the players will ever directly enjoy, but others will hear about it and want it. It's the long-term top-end stuff that keeps the long term players playing the game even after several hundred hours.
The problem occurs when casual players don't just want the aspirational content, but when they expect to get access to it and then rage when they can't get it.
This is also mirrored in real-life, as the top-end products tend to have price tags way beyond their actual performance as you are paying for the combination of specialisation and prestige. With computer components, you can pick up a cheap GPU for a basic monitor output very easily, spend a bit to get a 2070, or spend a hefty sum to get a bit more performance out of a 2080, spend even more for less of an increase for a 2080Ti or literally throw your money away by buying a Titan RTX for that marginal performance increase.
Remember that A-rated stuff is literally the best money can buy, you are paying a lot for it and any organisation that cares about cost efficiency would do better by going bigger or wider rather than going for A-rated stuff. Even the military stuff is "only" B-grade, and that's pretty pricey compared to lower grade stuff. Comparing A-rated stuff to C-rated stuff is like comparing a Bugatti Veyron/Chiron to a top of the line BMW 5 series. You wanna car? Stick with a BMW or even something cheaper. You wanna show of and truly make the most of the roads in your area no matter the cost? Well, hope you have plenty of money to hand...
Filthy casuals aside, if you follow the money, then it benefits fdev greatly to allow infinite easy money. They dont care about making a cohesive internally consistent game lore ...or basically any lore at all anymore that makes sense. They make a lot of money selling new cosmetics and it's all about reducing costs (lore, narrative, completing existing features) and increasing income.
If they patch these obvious exploits, they'll be sure to leave a more "legitimate" path to free easy credits. Credits mean nothing and it's in fdev's best interest to keep that the case since cosmetic sales are directly related to ownership of many ships and cosmetics sales seems to be the primary source of income for ED rather than just a tiny extra fund.
If this game was subscription based, cosmetics could be treated as a bonus fund instead of the only fund and credits could be properly balanced. Since it's not, there is 0 hope of a balanced economy. Fdev would be effectively killing their source of income if they did balance it without a subscription.
If they patch these obvious exploits, they'll be sure to leave a more "legitimate" path to free easy credits. Credits mean nothing and it's in fdev's best interest to keep that the case since cosmetic sales are directly related to ownership of many ships and cosmetics sales seems to be the primary source of income for ED rather than just a tiny extra fund.
If this game was subscription based, cosmetics could be treated as a bonus fund instead of the only fund and credits could be properly balanced. Since it's not, there is 0 hope of a balanced economy. Fdev would be effectively killing their source of income if they did balance it without a subscription.