FDev, you need to deal with the on-foot merit *exploit/cheat* quickly.

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rootsrat

Volunteer Moderator
rootsrat
Cmdr. Numa said:
Forced grind has always been at the core of the game. You need to get through it to get to the fun.
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This is not correct unfortunately. This is however factually correct statement:

Optional (with few exceptions) grind to get to your goals faster was always part of the game. You can either get to your goal slower, or you can grind the min-max option to get there faster.

From me: just don't complain about the latter, if you choose the latter.
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
Ian Skippy said:
Counterpoint: You can easily set a threshold. Nobody got 25k merits per hour on foot legit. Nobody got 25k merits per hour by accident. And this was intentionally done to screw over the work of countless other people.
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Oh, Frontier certainly could throw the book at them, but merely revoking the merits earned that way (if done in the next few hours) would avoid the need to set a threshold in the first place and would be simpler. In some respects leaving it right to cycle end to ensure maximum time wasted by the exploiters is even better.

The more awkward thing happens in about 12 hours if all the merits gained this way actually change some system settings, give rank rewards, etc., it's too late to really roll it back, and therefore a lot more people start thinking of it as one of those "yeah, it's not supposed to do that, they'll fix it eventually, take advantage while you can" situations. At that point while Frontier's TOS are clear that prior inaction is no reason to expect leniency later ... the longer it goes with them clearly knowing it's there, letting it work, and doing nothing ...
 

Cmdr. Numa

Cmdr. Numa
rootsrat said:
This is not correct unfortunately. This is however factually correct statement:

Optional (with few exceptions) grind to get to your goals faster was always part of the game. You can either get to your goal slower, or you can grind the min-max option to get there faster.

From me: just don't complain about the latter, if you choose the latter.
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I have very much fun minmaxing ships, as such I have a full fleet. To get there I was forced to grind credits at the start, materials in the middle and now merits. This is because my playtime is too limited to get where I want to be without grinding when I can. One time I almost hit the uninstalling breaking point. That was when engineering 2.0 came. Not long before that my fleet was done. It didn't have many godrolls, but it was good. I didn't play for months, before I finally clenched my teeth together and went through updating my whole fleet to the new standard. Recently swapping out all FSD for SCO was a cakewalk in comparison. Now there are new ships I want to have fun minmaxing. I had my cache of powerplay modules, but some are used up. And there is a new one that I'm very much looking forward to. So grind it is, again. And it is as monotonous as credit grinding was to get that first Anaconda. There was at least some variety in material farming. Maybe powerplay 2.0 gets there after a few balancing passes.
 

rootsrat

Volunteer Moderator
rootsrat
Cmdr. Numa said:
I have very much fun minmaxing ships, as such I have a full fleet. To get there I was forced to grind credits at the start, materials in the middle and now merits. This is because my playtime is too limited to get where I want to be without grinding when I can. One time I almost hit the uninstalling breaking point. That was when engineering 2.0 came. Not long before that my fleet was done. It didn't have many godrolls, but it was good. I didn't play for months, before I finally clenched my teeth together and went through updating my whole fleet to the new standard. Recently swapping out all FSD for SCO was a cakewalk in comparison. Now there are new ships I want to have fun minmaxing. I had my cache of powerplay modules, but some are used up. And there is a new one that I'm very much looking forward to. So grind it is, again.
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You weren't forced. You chose to min-max and to grind - to get there faster. If you were forced, everyone else would have to be too. And I'm pretty sure I wasn't forced to grind. Every single time that I did it, it was my decision to choose the min-max path.
 

Hibiki54

Hibiki54
With Exploration Data and Exobiology, FDev quickly turned off that feature while they investigated how they would balance it. In fact, they did this on the fly with no update needed.

Why could they not do this with Power Data downloaded from Data Ports? Just turn announce a repeatable exploit was discovered, confirmed and they are turning off merit gains until fixed.
 

galahad2069

G
rootsrat said:
You weren't forced. You chose to min-max and to grind - to get there faster. If you were forced, everyone else would have to be too. And I'm pretty sure I wasn't forced to grind. Every single time that I did it, it was my decision to choose the min-max path.
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I wasn't forced to buy a house. I chose to grind for money in order to buy one, instead of just waiting for money to flow in "organically" and buying the house one or two decades or centuries later. But I totally had options. Could have just rented some hole in a block of flats. Could have just bought, idk, a tent or something. 🤷‍♂️
 
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Northpin

Northpin
galahad2069 said:
That one was hilarious.
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this 👇 was the really hilarious part :ROFLMAO:

galahad2069 said:
If you had a hired SLF pilot, the sum that fdev deducted was more than the amount of money you actually made (because the NPC crew sucked away a certain percent of the fertiliser profit from you, as from any other income). If you were not very rich before the fertiliser trade and you made a very large sum of money using the exploit, you could happen to find yourself sidewindered the next day. :)
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CMDR Vhi

CMDR Vhi
Rat Catcher said:
Now, with the recent changes, it is much simpler to get mats for engineering, which is good, IMO.
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And the reason this is good is also the reason some people feel compelled (since it appears there is some semantic issue with the word "forced" around here) to min-max. Not everyone wants a game to be a second job/life, there has to be some balance here, and it seems FDev often, if not always, misses the mark.

Look at how many PP2.0 ranks give "care packages". Those could all be stripped out; it's obvious they're only there to slow down progression, and then maybe people wouldn't feel as compelled to min-max their way through them.

I think part of the issue is that Elite Dangerous is an online game that, due to the addition of arx, naturally wants to keep players in-game for as long as possible like many modern multiplayer games, but it doesn't have the update cycle of modern multiplayer games, so instead they just make everything require a significant amount of time to achieve. See: the thargoid war lead up and execution.

It's like trading using the in-game tools, versus trading using inara. You can definitely eventually get whatever credit goal you're aiming for using only in-game tools, but you can do it in a small fraction of the time just by going to a website that gives you information that Fdev could easily provide you in-game if they wanted to. The game design compels players to use a third party tool, because the in-game tools are designed to slow down how quickly credits can be earned by trading.

The game loops get a little repetitive after you've done them a few hundred times already; I don't think it's fair to fault anyone for wanting to achieve their in-game goals with as few loops as possible.

I don't want to come off as someone that dislikes the game, though; I'm excited to see how the colonization stuff plays out. I'm sure it will be a truly breathtaking grind. (I kid, I kid!)
 

Disemboweled Ego

D
Ian Doncaster said:
In this case ... it's probably not necessary to do more than remove the merits gained through use from both system and personal accounts. Accidental users will lose a trivial number of merits and possibly not even notice. Deliberate users will lose a lot, and it's not worth pushing more than that and risking catching an accidental user who'd just lost track of which data ports they'd done yet. The deliberate users will still have wasted their time all week which could have been spent getting merits they'd keep, failed to do anything useful on a system level, and that's enough to get the point across.
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Assuming FDev internally still logs these new activities in a sensible way that lets them do this while deciding not to add the new stuff to the journal.

With how haphazard a lot of the stuff in the latest update seems this becomes a possibility to consider too.
 

Screemonster

Screemonster
Helmut Grokenberger said:
I hope they act hard and swift on this. Personally I think CMDRs that make guides based on exploits should be banned, flocked, tarred, feathered and forced to listen to Neil Diamond or Barry Manilow for extended periods of time.

And I hope they are able to roll back the supposed 30k merits per hour for those who used that exploit, and also do that.

I wish we wouldn't live in a world where gamers happily accept exploits to gain an andvantage because "reward!". I remember when I tried Hitman (the first one of the new ones, I think) I was baffled when it showed that leaderboard after completing a mission, and it was full of dorks who had cheated their way to finishing in one second or even fractions of that.

Gamers on a broad basis are just dumb. There, I said it.
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Yeah, this needs the Rockforth Fertiliser treatment at minimum. Ideally it should get the same treatment that the engineering mats exploit did back in the day.

Hell, neither of those were used for competitive advantage over other players. It's not something you can do accidentally.

Hilariously it strikes me as something that would be trivial for the devs to detect too. There's a very hard limit on how many of those things one can obtain legitimately without leaving the area and returning.
 

Rat Catcher

Rat Catcher
gjoe said:
Look at how many PP2.0 ranks give "care packages". Those could all be stripped out; it's obvious they're only there to slow down progression, and then maybe people wouldn't feel as compelled to min-max their way through them
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I had a quick look at PP 2.0 and decided it held nothing to interest me, which was no surprise as PP 1 didn't either!
But others are enjoying it, which is good.
gjoe said:
I'm sure it will be a truly breathtaking grind. (I kid, I kid!)
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Monumental, certainly! ;)
 

Ian Skippy

Ian Skippy
rootsrat said:
This is not correct unfortunately. This is however factually correct statement:

Optional (with few exceptions) grind to get to your goals faster was always part of the game. You can either get to your goal slower, or you can grind the min-max option to get there faster.

From me: just don't complain about the latter, if you choose the latter.
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But it does depend on how much slower it is. Without using the exploit or rare grinding I've got ~23k merits in roughly ~12 hours (give or take). The average adult with responsibilities and a demanding job might get an hour or three a week or so, and would need over two years of focussing all their time on it. Suppose they want to join a CG, or do something else that pays less or no merits, half their time, it will take them four and a half years.

Four and a half years. Assuming ED is the only game they'll play for the next half a decade.

So, sure, it is fine if you don't get to the end in a weekend. Slower is fine too. But maybe this is a bit too much. :)
 

rootsrat

Volunteer Moderator
rootsrat
galahad2069 said:
I wasn't forced to buy a house. I chose to grind for money in order to buy one, instead of just waiting for money to flow in "organically" and buying the house one or two decades or centuries later. But I totally had options. Could have just rented some hole in a block of flats. Could have just bought, idk, a tent or something. 🤷‍♂️
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That's such a massive hyperbole that it's vertex is burning in the Sun's corona.
 

Chaines

Chaines
Looks like we're in for another week fighting those exploited bugs the hard way.
Maybe we could give the technique to everyone to get the attention from Fdev.
 
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