FDev, Have You Lost Control of Your Game?

[Deleted member 110222]

@OP - not bashing in any way, but ever heard expression 'the horse is already out of the barn'?

Your screenshot shows ~3/4 billion credits. From number of LTDs mined, you have a big ship and clearly not new at this, so safely assume not the first billion you've earned via 'out of control' mining.

Far as credit inflation being rampant, I 100% agree. But horse is already out of the barn on that. If FDEV shut the taps down now, severely reduce mining and/or other future 'next goldrush' opportunities, the game would explode from the rightful complaints of newer players who have not yet earned the billions you have clearly already gotten while complaining how overpowered it is.

As badly distorted as you may believe it to be now, the bottom line is all commanders have equal opportunity to take or pass on these gold rushes. But if FDEV completely shuts the taps down instead of minor nerf here and there, you will create a permanent class of haves vs have nots.

Don't you see the irony of the let them eat cake implication where you've clearly benefited from the mining but seem to be calling for even bigger nerf so others can't obtain what you already did?

I agree.

That's why the best solution is the one nobody wants to discuss.

Full reset.

Everyone put back in their Sidewinder, economy actually sorted out and the credit farms closed. Yes, take away all those carriers, all those engineered ships, which will deal with the joke that is legacy engineering too, and you'd have Frontier back in control in an instant.

Unfortunately people will scream so it won't happen, and that is why this game will never, ever be balanced.

 

[and_ft]

I agree.

That's why the best solution is the one nobody wants to discuss.

Full reset.

Everyone put back in their Sidewinder, economy actually sorted out and the credit farms closed. Yes, take away all those carriers, all those engineered ships, which will deal with the joke that is legacy engineering too, and you'd have Frontier back in control in an instant.

Unfortunately people will scream so it won't happen, and that is why this game will never, ever be balanced.

It would be an interesting social experiment though

Imagine watching the meltdowns on these forums and Reddit

 

[Deleted member 110222]

It would be an interesting social experiment though

Imagine watching the meltdowns on these forums and Reddit

No need for any social experiment.

Frontier really just needs to send this rather unruly community a message: They are no longer in charge, and they play by the GM's rules or not at all.

The GM is not your friend.

 

[Darth Ender]

the game can't survive slow balanced progression. There's no engaging game narrative/content/role playing and there's no organic player created content. The majority of players would be hard pressed to justify spending the time to play thru to expensive ships when they know what awaits them at the end is nothing more than what they experienced at the very beginning in their sidewinder.

Unfortunately, the 15 or so players who would stick with it out of some kind of obsessive loyalty to the dream of elite wouldn't be able to fund the game.

You'd only be able to reset the game if you refactored a lot of the gameplay and essentially created an entirely new game (Elite Deadly or so). At which point, you could keep the current game as-is and just spin up the next iteration, done right from the start.

 

[VirtueXOI]

Couple years ago mining was desolate. Now its booming. Seems fine. That profit of 200m/hr isnt exclusive to mining though

and the 1B/Hr ?

 

[RamirezKurita]

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.

You pretty much stated the solution yourself, and even your "problem" won't be a problem as you have already stated that many explorers don't really care about the income.

Player skill, credit investment, reputation investment and material investment are all different axes that must be accounted for in balance.

More skilled player means more money and/or more materials. More credit investment means more money and/or materials. More reputation and material investment? More goodies.

Obviously, some of these things might cancel out. A skilled player in a cheaper ship might be able to match a less skilled one in a more expensive ship.

But ultimately, if you give two players of equal skill a fixed amount of credits and materials then send them off into the black to make as much money as possible within the next 12 hours, they should make equal amounts of money. You also have to account for relative specialisations of ships too, as a ship should be a bit more cost efficient at its specialty than a pure multirole (although I do feel that FD have gone too far with cost efficiency on specialist ships, as they are starting to render multiroles pointless in some applications).

They also need to figure out a rough relative value of the materials compared to credits. I know the G5's are currently valued at about 5 million each, but we all know that isn't really what their value is as credits are almost useless. A station could probably sell a G5 material for several times that and players would still roll up and stock up on them without second thought.

Interestingly, in terms of scaling, it looks like FD have selected approximately credits^0.42 to be the indicator of overall performance in trading, with dedicated trade ships having roughly double the performance their cost would dictate (or about 5.2x the cost efficiency of a multirole once the nonlinearity of it is accounted for) and combat ships having notably less trading potential. This means that a doubling of credit investment for an equal level of specialisation should yield approximately a 34% increase in money making performance. This very basic relationship could then be used to further balance other activities for multirole ships as you would immediately have a ballpark estimate of what their earnings should be like in other activities by applying whatever specialism multipliers that are necessary, which would then give projected earnings that the various hardpoints and modules for the ships can be balanced around. Sure, it would involve a lot of work and dozens of betas, but it's a worthy goal in the end.

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.

Which is a shame, because as far as I can see, that's exactly how a source mission should work. If the commodities can be easily obtained simply through normal markets, then why would they need to advertise and pay several times the normal market prices? As it currently stands, those kind of missions both remove important though processes (as you don't need to consider selling prices any more) as well as paying more than equivalent normal trading; it doesn't make sense for something to be both simpler and better paying.

I'd much rather if source and return missions weren't just a routine "go to nearest applicable market, buy, return, depot", but instead required extensive knowledge of the local area and the supply stockpiles of relevant goods. Too much of trading is already offloaded to EDDB or simply based on states rather than actual supply/demand, which in turn removes most of the required skills for trading.

It makes me wonder if this is part of the mission generator not explaining the situation to players though. If the mission generator stated the available supply of the relevant commodity in all stations within 50 ly and pointed out in big, clear letters that these goods are hard to source, this probably wouldn't be an issue. The solution to a dumb player base is to educate them via appropriate means, not to appease them with goodies and by removing depth from the game.

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 .

I think this is also part of the problem, they make very few changes and they very rarely explain the logic behind the changes when they do. Maybe there is some kind of hidden purpose behind things breaking down wholesale that we aren't aware of, but in the absence of information all we can see is that players are being funnelled into particular activities if they want credits and the entire credit economy is basically dead as a result.

It's also a general PR thing, devs (both individuals and teams) that communicate with the community are generally well liked, even if players don't necessarily agree with their decisions as at least they know why such a decision was made and the logic behind it, unlike a communication blackout where players generally assume incompetence when they don't understand a decision.

At the moment we have no idea whether they are actually deliberately grinding the economy into dust, if the game is instead moving into a full capital ship and fleet management game and credits are required for enterprise-level activities, whether it is a symptom of internal conflict in FD as each dev group wants their pet feature to be the best paying and the neutered balance team are powerless to stop it (ever notice how the latest feature tends to be overpowered and each one is more broken than the last?), or whether they are just plain incapable of balancing the content. It's really pushing the limits of Hanlon's Razor here.

Full reset.

Everyone put back in their Sidewinder, economy actually sorted out and the credit farms closed. Yes, take away all those carriers, all those engineered ships, which will deal with the joke that is legacy engineering too, and you'd have Frontier back in control in an instant.

Unfortunately people will scream so it won't happen, and that is why this game will never, ever be balanced.

Or you go for the happy middle ground and inflate costs in line with economy. It's not a full reset, but those billions that players have stashed away are no longer effectively infinite money. If 200 million credits of revenue is the new 10 million credits of revenue, then 200 million credits should be the new 10 million credits of expenses. Players don't "lose" anything so they can't complain, yet credits return to relevance for all but the most regressive luddites that vow never to buy anything again (which are largely unaffected by income inflation anyway). It's a soft reset that gives the best of both worlds in terms of fixing the economy, negating previous balance issues and without taking anything away from players.

No need for any social experiment.

Frontier really just needs to send this rather unruly community a message: They are no longer in charge, and they play by the GM's rules or not at all.

The GM is not your friend.

"We can and will take anything or everything from you without notice, regardless of how you obtained it, whether it is due to you outright cheating, exploiting or because we simply screwed up and were too lazy to fix things quickly enough. If you have something in your account's assets that we dislike, even if it was obtained legitimately, we reserve the right to remove it without warning or explanation."

Yeah... That'll go down well. They might be legally entitled to do it, but it is not a healthy precedent to set. Remember that the economy is in this state because of FD's actions, not because of the players.

Any GM for any groups that I play with would quite swiftly be left quite alone if they were to randomly kill entire parties off for no reason and with no escape. Tweak things here and there and retcon the odd thing to reduce the effects of their own mistakes? Yeah, they do that for the sake of a good game. But not TPKing without warning to cover up or cancel out their own mistake.

"Well guys, turns out I accidentally rolled on the greater magical items table when it should have been the lesser one a few sessions back. Rocks fall, everyone dies, no saves allowed, no resurrections allowed, your bodies and their items are never discovered and everyone is to generate new characters starting from level 1 again. No exceptions, no complaints, get genning."

 

[Ralph Vargr]

You pretty much stated the solution yourself, and even your "problem" won't be a problem as you have already stated that many explorers don't really care about the income.

Player skill, credit investment, reputation investment and material investment are all different axes that must be accounted for in balance.

More skilled player means more money and/or more materials. More credit investment means more money and/or materials. More reputation and material investment? More goodies.

Obviously, some of these things might cancel out. A skilled player in a cheaper ship might be able to match a less skilled one in a more expensive ship.

But ultimately, if you give two players of equal skill a fixed amount of credits and materials then send them off into the black to make as much money as possible within the next 12 hours, they should make equal amounts of money. You also have to account for relative specialisations of ships too, as a ship should be a bit more cost efficient at its specialty than a pure multirole (although I do feel that FD have gone too far with cost efficiency on specialist ships, as they are starting to render multiroles pointless in some applications).

They also need to figure out a rough relative value of the materials compared to credits. I know the G5's are currently valued at about 5 million each, but we all know that isn't really what their value is as credits are almost useless. A station could probably sell a G5 material for several times that and players would still roll up and stock up on them without second thought.

Interestingly, in terms of scaling, it looks like FD have selected approximately credits^0.42 to be the indicator of overall performance in trading, with dedicated trade ships having roughly double the performance their cost would dictate (or about 5.2x the cost efficiency of a multirole once the nonlinearity of it is accounted for) and combat ships having notably less trading potential. This means that a doubling of credit investment for an equal level of specialisation should yield approximately a 34% increase in money making performance. This very basic relationship could then be used to further balance other activities for multirole ships as you would immediately have a ballpark estimate of what their earnings should be like in other activities by applying whatever specialism multipliers that are necessary, which would then give projected earnings that the various hardpoints and modules for the ships can be balanced around. Sure, it would involve a lot of work and dozens of betas, but it's a worthy goal in the end.



Which is a shame, because as far as I can see, that's exactly how a source mission should work. If the commodities can be easily obtained simply through normal markets, then why would they need to advertise and pay several times the normal market prices? As it currently stands, those kind of missions both remove important though processes (as you don't need to consider selling prices any more) as well as paying more than equivalent normal trading; it doesn't make sense for something to be both simpler and better paying.

I'd much rather if source and return missions weren't just a routine "go to nearest applicable market, buy, return, depot", but instead required extensive knowledge of the local area and the supply stockpiles of relevant goods. Too much of trading is already offloaded to EDDB or simply based on states rather than actual supply/demand, which in turn removes most of the required skills for trading.

It makes me wonder if this is part of the mission generator not explaining the situation to players though. If the mission generator stated the available supply of the relevant commodity in all stations within 50 ly and pointed out in big, clear letters that these goods are hard to source, this probably wouldn't be an issue. The solution to a dumb player base is to educate them via appropriate means, not to appease them with goodies and by removing depth from the game.



I think this is also part of the problem, they make very few changes and they very rarely explain the logic behind the changes when they do. Maybe there is some kind of hidden purpose behind things breaking down wholesale that we aren't aware of, but in the absence of information all we can see is that players are being funnelled into particular activities if they want credits and the entire credit economy is basically dead as a result.

It's also a general PR thing, devs (both individuals and teams) that communicate with the community are generally well liked, even if players don't necessarily agree with their decisions as at least they know why such a decision was made and the logic behind it, unlike a communication blackout where players generally assume incompetence when they don't understand a decision.

At the moment we have no idea whether they are actually deliberately grinding the economy into dust, if the game is instead moving into a full capital ship and fleet management game and credits are required for enterprise-level activities, whether it is a symptom of internal conflict in FD as each dev group wants their pet feature to be the best paying and the neutered balance team are powerless to stop it (ever notice how the latest feature tends to be overpowered and each one is more broken than the last?), or whether they are just plain incapable of balancing the content. It's really pushing the limits of Hanlon's Razor here.



Or you go for the happy middle ground and inflate costs in line with economy. It's not a full reset, but those billions that players have stashed away are no longer effectively infinite money. If 200 million credits of revenue is the new 10 million credits of revenue, then 200 million credits should be the new 10 million credits of expenses. Players don't "lose" anything so they can't complain, yet credits return to relevance for all but the most regressive luddites that vow never to buy anything again (which are largely unaffected by income inflation anyway). It's a soft reset that gives the best of both worlds in terms of fixing the economy, negating previous balance issues and without taking anything away from players.



"We can and will take anything or everything from you without notice, regardless of how you obtained it, whether it is due to you outright cheating, exploiting or because we simply screwed up and were too lazy to fix things quickly enough. If you have something in your account's assets that we dislike, even if it was obtained legitimately, we reserve the right to remove it without warning or explanation."

Yeah... That'll go down well. They might be legally entitled to do it, but it is not a healthy precedent to set. Remember that the economy is in this state because of FD's actions, not because of the players.

Any GM for any groups that I play with would quite swiftly be left quite alone if they were to randomly kill entire parties off for no reason and with no escape. Tweak things here and there and retcon the odd thing to reduce the effects of their own mistakes? Yeah, they do that for the sake of a good game. But not TPKing without warning to cover up or cancel out their own mistake.

"Well guys, turns out I accidentally rolled on the greater magical items table when it should have been the lesser one a few sessions back. Rocks fall, everyone dies, no saves allowed, no resurrections allowed, your bodies and their items are never discovered and everyone is to generate new characters starting from level 1 again. No exceptions, no complaints, get genning."

Sounds like Frontier The Killer DM to me.

 

[Eymerich]

Couple years ago mining was desolate. Now its booming. Seems fine. That profit of 200m/hr isnt exclusive to mining though

I have nothing against mining paying so much.

The problem is that it has hidden every profession out there being the only way to get a Fc.

And no: I have over 3000 hours putted in ED, never mined, and I have barely 3,8 Billion.

Mining is the only reasonable way to get a FC.

Payout of Bounty hunting is 2 milion; how many missions need to be completed just to get 5 bilion? that's right: 2500 mission, which usually last 10 minutes each one, which is 416 hours, approx 18 days of game.

Tell me how many (tri)-bilion can you do with mining in the same amount of time and then will see if this game is balanced...

This game has serious problem.

 

[jacozilla]

I have nothing against mining paying so much.

The problem is that it has hidden every profession out there being the only way to get a Fc.

And no: I have over 3000 hours putted in ED, never mined, and I have barely 3,8 Billion.

Mining is the only reasonable way to get a FC.

Payout of Bounty hunting is 2 milion; how many missions need to be completed just to get 5 bilion? that's right: 2500 mission, which usually last 10 minutes each one, which is 416 hours, approx 18 days of game.

Tell me how many (tri)-bilion can you do with mining in the same amount of time and then will see if this game is balanced...

This game has serious problem.

Haul tritium cargo as a pure trader - you can have that FC in ~4 weeks even with casual play of 15 hrs/week.

90M per hour x 15 hours/week x 4 weeks = 5.4B

Getting a FC without mining in ~4 casual weeks of play doesn't seem bad.

 

[jacozilla]

I agree.

That's why the best solution is the one nobody wants to discuss.

Full reset.

Everyone put back in their Sidewinder, economy actually sorted out and the credit farms closed. Yes, take away all those carriers, all those engineered ships, which will deal with the joke that is legacy engineering too, and you'd have Frontier back in control in an instant.

Unfortunately people will scream so it won't happen, and that is why this game will never, ever be balanced.

Not that I would absolutely be against a grand reset per se, but you are making rather critical assumption in reset idea - that Fdev will somehow have learned the lesson and not muck it all up again.

I have no faith that a grand reset would be a one time thing, Fdev would simply over time screw up the balance again, and now with a precedent set, like some games with "seasons" ala Diablo 3 or Path of Exile, we'd just have a reset whenever FD felt like as cheap way to balance.

So why should I agree to a grand 1st reset and wipe out years of my time in game, especially when compared to lot of others my grand total bank balance of 2B (and no FC) is rather modest? I'm fine without a FC btw, I'm at point in game where I can do what I want for fun, any activity I want without worry about is it most CR per hour or rebuys, etc.

Again, not saying the idea of reset is bad per se, but just have no faith that after the reset Fdev wouldn't screw it all up again so might as well keep all the hours invested.

 

[Darth Ender]

Haul tritium cargo as a pure trader - you can have that FC in ~4 weeks even with casual play of 15 hrs/week.

90M per hour x 15 hours/week x 4 weeks = 5.4B

Getting a FC without mining in ~4 casual weeks of play doesn't seem bad.

if you think access to everything in less than 1 month is not bad.... then what is the point of credits? 1 month to get billions means you'd be better off just getting rid of credits altogether. It would at least focus balancing on things that do matter since credits obviously do not.

 

[Defacto]

A lot of text

Good to see a bit of effort-posting on this topic!
Maybe instead of these constant forum skirmishes, those who are reasonably like-minded should band together and start to work on some kind of deep suggestion/discussion post? Maybe that would get some things moving, that insult hurling on the forum can not? I think there's a lot to cover, and several layers of suggestions, from complete reimagining of critical game concepts to ''What can we do by fixing the things that are already in game?''

 

[jacozilla]

if you think access to everything in less than 1 month is not bad.... then what is the point of credits? 1 month to get billions means you'd be better off just getting rid of credits altogether. It would at least focus balancing on things that do matter since credits obviously do not.

i think you have confused me with someone else - e.g. people complaining that it will take too long or not possible to get FC without mining. I was replying to a guy that claimed basically all other professions were hidden due to mining.

i was showing with my 1 month estimate from just hauling cargo that it is indeed possible to earn a FC without mining or taking so long it is impossible (as some other ppl have suggested in other posts/threads)

I have nothing against mining paying so much.

The problem is that it has hidden every profession out there being the only way to get a Fc.

And no: I have over 3000 hours putted in ED, never mined, and I have barely 3,8 Billion.

Mining is the only reasonable way to get a FC.

Payout of Bounty hunting is 2 milion; how many missions need to be completed just to get 5 bilion? that's right: 2500 mission, which usually last 10 minutes each one, which is 416 hours, approx 18 days of game.

Tell me how many (tri)-bilion can you do with mining in the same amount of time and then will see if this game is balanced...

This game has serious problem.

 

[Maolagin]

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.

Exploration is actually a great example of not everything being a "progression". In terms of raw profitability, exploration effectiveness probably peaks somewhere around the AspX - large enough to pack all the toys and a fuel scoop large enough not to slow you down, but small enough that supercruise agility isn't slowing you down either. But if a new player wants to start exploring early, it only takes about 1M credits to throw a 3A FSD and surface scanner into say an Adder and head out.

 

[Bigmaec]

Exploration is actually a great example of not everything being a "progression". In terms of raw profitability, exploration effectiveness probably peaks somewhere around the AspX - large enough to pack all the toys and a fuel scoop large enough not to slow you down, but small enough that supercruise agility isn't slowing you down either. But if a new player wants to start exploring early, it only takes about 1M credits to throw a 3A FSD and surface scanner into say an Adder and head out.

Exploration has another different value component because you paint your name on stars, planets and moons for everyone else to see.

 

[Schmack]

I have nothing against mining paying so much.

The problem is that it has hidden every profession out there being the only way to get a Fc.

And no: I have over 3000 hours putted in ED, never mined, and I have barely 3,8 Billion.

Mining is the only reasonable way to get a FC.

Payout of Bounty hunting is 2 milion; how many missions need to be completed just to get 5 bilion? that's right: 2500 mission, which usually last 10 minutes each one, which is 416 hours, approx 18 days of game.

Tell me how many (tri)-bilion can you do with mining in the same amount of time and then will see if this game is balanced...

This game has serious problem.

Well I have stolen almost 3 billion dollars worth of merchandise, the majority of that being low temperature diamonds from NPCs.

I would be more than happy to have someone crew with me and take a portion of my earnings. I can make two or three billion in an afternoon.

Prior to mining I made maybe 12 billion doing combat and haulage. I understand that a lot of people are doing exploration or perhaps looking for Raxxla or whatever tinfoil hat thing is happening over that way but I've always been focused on the money. Sometimes it's beneficial sometimes it's not.

My carrier is under the same name as my user here. Let me know if you want to hook up and go make some money.

 

[Vasious]

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...

But it has also created the situation were all the small ships and modules are prices so low there is no progress in the earlier levels and all earnings are scaled to the massive prices of the upper end ships.



According to the first result on Google, which probably uses local shops
A Titan RTX is $2,499.99
A 2080Ti is $1799.00
A 2080 is $1299.000

If it was Elite Pricing it would be

A Titan RTX is $54,558.00
A 2080Ti is $7794.00
A 2080 is $1299.000

Originally there was a progression but it would become an irrational increase for the next tier so over time earnings increased
And now everyone would earn $50,000.00 an hour so so ignore the initial tiers all together


Rather than cars look at Container ships
A 2500TEU geared Container ship averaged at $15,00,000.00 in 2010 second hand
A 3500TEU geared Container ship averaged at $18,00,000.00 in 2010 second hand

Where as in Elite
The Type 7 is 310 tonnes at 17 Million
The Type 9 is 790 tonnes at 76 million.

The opposite of the real world, as no one would be buying a ship costing them MORE per ton as an upgrade.

the problem all stems back to the price of ships and modules relative to each other.

For modules each upgrade in Rating and size gave ever smaller and smaller increase in performance compared to cost.

Compare the 1E Fuel Scoop performance and cost to the 1A
Compare the 1E Fuel Scoop performance and cost to the 2E 3E etc

Similarly the Power Plant and so forth.

Then consider the Costs of the Starting ships, their modules and capabilities to that of the mid range and high end ships.

Every Credit gives you less and less for what you get an increases exponentially, yet the increase in capability to earn credits was relatively a

So for example a Trading Hauler costs ~400,000 CR and carrying 22 tons
A Trading Type 6 costs ~2,900,000 CR and carries 106 tons

So ~7.25 times the cost for ~4.8 times the Cargo units with a small increase in performance and suitability etc that is hard to justify that extra cost.

The issue is compounded by A rating, or in the larger ships,, where the cost ratio increases far more than the utility.

It is not a question of how much can I make on any given cargo run, nor that both ships can eventually move a million tons given unlimited time, but how many cargo runs and how long does it take to pay off the investment in the ship.

If a ship makes 100CR a ton profit trading
The Hauler from the example takes 181 trips to pay for the ship ignoring fuel
The Type 6 takes from the example takes 273 trips to pay for the ship ignoring fuel

So the upgrade in ship is less efficient and there is at no point does the Type 6 gain an advantage from its scale which it should if it was to actually be a trade-ship for sale in a universe with any verisimilitude.

Any exponentially relationship makes anything but the high end meaningless.

If the Anaconda was 1/100th its price and modules didn't increase in cost exponentially then earnings could have been balanced so that the Anaconda was reasonably attainable yet at the same time not make the first dozen ships skippable in an hour

A Compression in price also would have made trading more diverse in commodities
How much trade is there by players in regular commodities due to their relatively low profit margins to the few high value commodities.
But if the current hundreds of thousands of credits different between the average prices of commodities and it compressed down to where rational profits, when against rational compress prices, could be made on the vast variety of goods, ideally based on supply, demand, location and BGS (and Community goals?)

Again if you didnt need a million credits for a module upgrade but only 10,000 then to earn it in the same time, the profits from trading, or any activity for that matter, need not be as extreme and can be rationalized to all fit together.

Lets say as an example an Anaconda was supposed to be a 10 hour ship, and I repeat, just for the same of example to make the maths easier.

Currently that is 146,968,450 for the base model and so one would need to earn 1,470,000 Credits an hour.

That is more than the 13 smallest ships an hour and if one was to make a 50% profit on say trading on the galactic average
Crop Harvesters -> Coffee back and forth
That is 1739 CR a ton both ways based on average prices and a 50% return with no supply or damage issues for the example.

So 845 tons an hour and 8453 tons total

But if the Anaconda was 1,469,684 the earnings required is a smaller 14,700 Credits a hour

Noting that the aim to to compress the extreme prices not cut everything by a factor of one hundred so the small ships are sill priced similar as they are now, the larger ships are just relatively much cheaper than they are now

Using the Commodities prices above it is just 10 tons an hour so they might need to be adjusted and compressed to get the right place

The 14,700 Credits a hour then becomes a figure that makes it a reasonable option to progress thought the small ships &/or upgrade their existing ship to whilst still progressing towards the goal ship in the time frame planned

Basally make each CR worth MORE not LESS by simply adding 0s to the rewards to be able to pay for exponentially priced ships and modules and make the ships and modules be actually worth the credits and not just the next point in a mathematical formula

If you only need to make 30-70 CR per unit profit on a trade good for it to be a worthwhile trade, then more goods can be worth while trades, from Bio-waste and Algae to Clothing and Consumer goods, where as if you need to make 10,000 - 50,000 CR per unit profit then all those commodities worth less than that may as well not even be in the game.

The same for Mining, if the common ores paid a rational profit, the precious stones need neither to be so extremely priced nor the only way to profit.

Incidentally this also makes missions make far more sense.

Currently we have:
Factions Seeking to pay for x tonnes of goods and offering to pay for those goods the multiple times CR it would cost to buy a Hauler outfit it, fly it to a market that sells buy those goods and bring them back.
Economy Class passengers paying the price of a Hauler with enough economy cabins to carry them to move one jump away
Factions paying Millions of credits for you to salvage 4 tons "Commercial Samples worth 1/100th of that
Factions offering data delivery that pay more than it costs to buy a wing of Sidewinders to delivery the Boom Data.

If you didnt need missions to have so many 000s of CR to be reasonable progress then they once again add to the verisimilitude.
It would make sense a faction would pay a premium for some good that they cannot source locally, and don't want to wait for the next Bulk Trading Mega ship so commission a tramp trader but not so much that it would be worth more than the ship they are hiring.

 

[Darth Ender]

the imbalance of cost and justification for higher cost but lower return can easily be handled and justified if the activities such better equipment could handle apart from simple volume of cargo was substantially different from the kind of activities that cheaper hardware was more practical for.

Having the things you do being the same whether you're in a sidewinder vs a conda or a class E/D ship vs a class A and B is why the economy is impossible to scale. Not simply a matter of price of ships and modules.

As long as there aren't activities designated to be biased to the more expensive equipment or certain ships vs cheaper ones or other ships then any changes you make to cost and reward will suffer from the same devaluation of one or the other that we currently experience.

 

[Tikanderoga]

Couple years ago mining was desolate. Now its booming. Seems fine. That profit of 200m/hr isnt exclusive to mining though

Yes it is.
I can't think of anything that pays that much in so little time.
Maybe Robigo might come close, but mining is the undefeated #1 activity if you want to make lots of money in this game with low to no risk.

 

[Sylveria]

Ask the past rep exploits if FDEV has truly lost "control" of their own game.