FDevs does everything have to be a grind?

[[VR] Mad Mike]

in all honesty i "get" that it needed to be tweaked from gamma.....

but even so they threw the baby out with the bathwater. The fact that some players insist that money making is harder now than at launch when the "forum dads" played truly blows my mind.

imo the game was approximately scaled ok at the start untill you got to the beyond the T6 ships.... at that point things did hit a brick wall.. (but that said i feel the launch price of the vulture was far closer to what it shoudl have been, the vulture price cut to what it is now is another missstep with little logic behind it, as it is an apex combat ship!.

what i think is, FD should take a step back and relook at locking missions to rank, actually scratch that..... better yet, keep the same missions on the board, but have the mission board look at your rank and then balance them accordingly....

so if i log in to the same board as a dangerous player in an FGS compared to a competent player in a viper IV, we both see the same mission "kill pirate X" (simply because it is apparently too hard to generate 1000s of missions on the board) but for me pirate X will be a deadly pilot in super pimped out with some ENG mods FDL and pay for arguments sake 2 million (with a high bounty voucher) , but for the "competent" ranked player he may be an expert pilot in a fairly highly rated but not engineered Asp but only paying 1 million (plus smaller bounty)


from a mission board point of view it is still generating the same number of missions and the same number of missions are available regardless of your rank, but the actual pay and difficulty is being gated based on your own point in the game. This way players in low level ships are not earning illogical amounts of cash and the players in the high end ships are not still being forced to do what are then insanely trivial, and low paying missions

thinks would get more crunchy when taking missions in a wing with a mate (perhaps then generate BOTH enemy ships in a wing together and you have to kill both to both complete the mission)

 

[Trafalgar Law]

in all honesty i "get" that it needed to be tweaked from gamma.....

but even so they threw the baby out with the bathwater. The fact that some players insist that money making is harder now than at launch when the "forum dads" played truly blows my mind.

imo the game was approximately scaled ok at the start untill you got to the beyond the T6 ships.... at that point things did hit a brick wall.. (but that said i feel the launch price of the vulture was far closer to what it shoudl have been, the vulture price cut to what it is now is another missstep with little logic behind it, as it is an apex combat ship!.

what i think is, FD should take a step back and relook at locking missions to rank, actually scratch that..... better yet, keep the same missions on the board, but have the mission board look at your rank and then balance them accordingly....

so if i log in to the same board as a dangerous player in an FGS compared to a competent player in a viper IV, we both see the same mission "kill pirate X" (simply because it is apparently too hard to generate 1000s of missions on the board) but for me pirate X will be a deadly pilot in super pimped out with some ENG mods FDL and pay for arguments sake 2 million (with a high bounty voucher) , but for the "competent" ranked player he may be an expert pilot in a fairly highly rated but not engineered Asp but only paying 1 million (plus smaller bounty)


from a mission board point of view it is still generating the same number of missions and the same number of missions are available regardless of your rank, but the actual pay and difficulty is being gated based on your own point in the game. This way players in low level ships are not earning illogical amounts of cash and the players in the high end ships are not still being forced to do what are then insanely trivial, and low paying missions

thinks would get more crunchy when taking missions in a wing with a mate (perhaps then generate BOTH enemy ships in a wing together and you have to kill both to both complete the mission)

I mostly agree with this, with the exception of the Vulture pricing. Earnings are vastly higher now (I would say that the monetary grind has been removed completely at this stage)

At release earnings were fine until you hit the Asp Explorer level (I was really struggling to outfit the Asp from what I can remember). The problem was that the ships beyond that point basically seemed out of reach without being forced into grinding trade routes, other methods just paid very little in comparison, bounty hunting earned much less at the time (the post you posted before sums it up: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/68294-Bounty-Hunters-are-no-match-for-any-other-career) and missions were very poorly paid and not as varied as today, so when the Vulture was released with a 20million price tag people understandably revolted. Unfortunately frontier overreacted and reduced the Vultures price to a 1/4 of it's original and increased the payouts at the same time, which messed up the rest of the progression as well. I seem to remember something similar happening with repair costs too.

In short, I've always felt that the original earnings were closer to what things should have been, but that the ship prices were too high at the top end. Cheaper big ships could then have been balanced out by the originally higher running and repair costs.

 

[Jex =TE=]

Well, some people consider 'find more beans every ten minute' to be a grind, and 'click 20 times to roast meat into steak' a grind.

Thats kinda the thing: something isn't objectively a grind in most cases, its individual perception. If you think DayZ is grind-free, have fun. Honestly, I wont get mad, upset, frustrated, depressed or angry about it. I wont try to talk you out of it. I hold zero resentment for you not feeling a grind in DayZ. I wont consider it wrong, or right. It is just your opinion.

When it gets weird though is when people insist others should start perceiving grind and have no fun, and apparantly get very upset when they see others enjoying a different game. Then it becomes borderline pathological. IMHO.



The weird thing is that it seems missions can be improved during one dev's lunch.

"Hey John, what about that informant who tells you where the target is?"
"What about it Bill?"
"Where should we send the player to?"
"Always right back to the very system where he just came from."
"Always?"
"Always."
"Wont that be stupid?"
"Nah, they'll never notice."

Yes, like I said earlier, grind is an opinion and we all find different things grindy so everyone is right with their opinion of the game. As for DayZ, if you were looking for food every 20 minutes you were playing the game wrong. I don't know what to stay about that but food has never been an issue.

What can be agreed on objectively is game mechanics though. Take trading for example, passed everyone's feelings on it, I think we can all agree it's about as shallow and basic as you can get.

 

[Jex =TE=]

True, but playing the same levels over and over again until you get good... building your experiance and skill is seen by some as a grind and one which some players today actually pay to avoid with the advent of loot boxes with Buffs inside and paying to unlock all weapons and character classes from the get go.

Which is why we keep seeing pay 2 win mechanics becoming more common place. Play to some is grind to others and those that dont want to work towards their goals... complain.

All I can say is people are total idiots if they play games they find a grind. I'd go farther and say they aren't even gamers then. There must be some psychological issue going on with a person when they do something they don't like. We don't get unlimited life on earth so making your experiences enjoyable would be a good thing.

 

[Miklos Atreides]

Yes, like I said earlier, grind is an opinion and we all find different things grindy so everyone is right with their opinion of the game. As for DayZ, if you were looking for food every 20 minutes you were playing the game wrong. I don't know what to stay about that but food has never been an issue.

What can be agreed on objectively is game mechanics though. Take trading for example, passed everyone's feelings on it, I think we can all agree it's about as shallow and basic as you can get.

Yes, I agree. In the core trading is boring stuff, always was, nearly everywhre.
Frontier let us alone in the dark, that's why all the tools are around to enlighten us with data Frontier does not want to provide up to date.
And yes, dreaming of having some kind of Production-Lines you can hammer on to improve profits, only BGS is not that mature to provide this today.
But the day it comes there are unpredictable results.

Regards,
Miklos

 

[Jex =TE=]

good god

Does anyone here think the pricing model in FDev resembles anything but an absolute mess? Why do ships cost what they do? Why does fuel cost what it does? Modules? Payments?

I think they're completely out of whack myself. Randomly made up and don't make any sense.

You cannot have a market and buy/sell when nothing makes sense price wise. Does anybody even know what 1 credit is worth in ED universe? Maybe it's me being ignorant and someone can educate me.

 

[M00ka]

Does anyone here think the pricing model in FDev resembles anything but an absolute mess? Why do ships cost what they do? Why does fuel cost what it does? Modules? Payments?

I think they're completely out of whack myself. Randomly made up and don't make any sense.

You cannot have a market and buy/sell when nothing makes sense price wise. Does anybody even know what 1 credit is worth in ED universe? Maybe it's me being ignorant and someone can educate me.

So tell us, how would the economy work in the 34th Century? How much should a ship cost, or an FSD?

 

[Jex =TE=]

Because the way the economic sim works, if you bring in raw materials to a station, it will produce goods for sale at a faster rate.

Of course, 99% of the time, a station will resupply naturally, at a fast enough rate that a single Commander would find it hard to deplete on their own. It used to be that a single Commander in a Type-9 could deplete a station's supply of high-end commodities for days. But some people complained, and now you only see this level of depletion during CGs.

So something that barely worked anyway was then removed and nothing else was changed. That's incompetence right there and a developer that doesn't know their own game, like a lot of things in ED. There's really 2 issues here - making the gameplay more engaging but also being able to actually do that whilst remembering the game you made lol

 

[charognard]

Does anyone here think the pricing model in FDev resembles anything but an absolute mess? Why do ships cost what they do? Why does fuel cost what it does? Modules? Payments?

I think they're completely out of whack myself. Randomly made up and don't make any sense.

You cannot have a market and buy/sell when nothing makes sense price wise. Does anybody even know what 1 credit is worth in ED universe? Maybe it's me being ignorant and someone can educate me.

easy : 1ton of beer = 187cr
1liter = 0,0053 cr
1pinte(.5l) =0.0026cr
Irl pinte = 5€ = 0.0026cr.
1cr=1923€
Globaly, 1cr=2k€, by the way, any mission is godly payed lol

Medium pay irl : 1300€, counting 1,5% inflation by year, in 3300, midium income should be 78000000€ = 39000cr/mount

 

[Jex =TE=]

(looks in bank balance................. looks at what 2 million credits buys in elite dangerous..........)

2 million ia NOT literally nothing. it is a mid specced cobra III for goodness sake (which was THE jewel in the crown of multipurpose ships in the original elite.

Now THIS is what I call (almost) literally nothing

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/68294-Bounty-Hunters-are-no-match-for-any-other-career

KILLS: 100
TIME: 320 minutes (most time was spent searching for wanted ships)
Repair and Ammo: 77 000 credits
Bounties Earned: 437 696 credits
Profit: ~360 000 credits
Profit per hour: 67 500 Credits
A

AND the poster was upset because it reflected poorly compared to the HIGH paying professions.....!!!

Let's compare profit per hour in Cobra doing
Mining: ~500 000 credits
Trading: ~600 000 credits (60 t cargo)

Wow look at all the people from that thread that don't post here anymore. Guess they moved on...

 

[Jex =TE=]

So tell us, how would the economy work in the 34th Century? How much should a ship cost, or an FSD?

I see you didn't really get the point. It costs whatever it costs but if you can't even work out a base unti for what a credit it is non of your pricing will make sense. To answer you question, things will cost whatever their production cost is + profit margin %

How much would A ship cost? How long is a piece of string? What is "A ship" What is a credit worth? Since ships get 3D printed, there's no labour cost it's all automated and resources are so commonplace they should be cheap so with free labour and power and cheap as chips resources you tell me how much things should cost.

 

[SamSlade]

OP is correct; that's why this game has such a small, filled player base and no emergent, dynamic game play.

 

[Jex =TE=]

easy : 1ton of beer = 187cr
1liter = 0,0053 cr
1pinte(.5l) =0.0026cr
Irl pinte = 5€ = 0.0026cr.
1cr=1923€
Globaly, 1cr=2k€, by the way, any mission is godly payed lol

Medium pay irl : 1300€, counting 1,5% inflation by year, in 3300, midium income should be 78000000€ = 39000cr/mount

I found this on reddit

I don't know how many of you are actually wondering about how much your ships and ammo would cost in the real world, however I was and decided to find a perfect way of testing this.

For this example we are going to be using something super simple and easy to find information on when it comes to price: Gold.

At the time of writing the galactic average price for a ton of gold is 9,742 credits.

At the time of writing 1 ounce of gold is 1,184 USD.

Now, I'm going to take the price in USD of 1 ton of gold. I'm pretty sure we can already see this is going to be kind of ridiculous.

So, 16 ounces in a pound and 2000 pounds in a ton, or 2200 pounds in a tonne which was used before the metric system in England.

This brings the price from 1184 USD in one ounce to 18,944 USD in one pound further increased to:

37,888,000 USD in one ton. 41,676,800 USD in one tonne.

Now, once again I am going to run the calculations for both depending on what one ton is in Elite: Dangerous, whether that is 2000 pounds or 2200.

For one tonne of gold: 1 Galactic Credit (GCr) is equal to 4278.05 (truncated) USD. Similarly for one ton of gold 1 GCr is equal to 3889.13 USD (once again truncated)

So 1 GCr is roughly equal to 4000 USD in the game. That puts a VERY hefty price tag on those ships and equipment that you already thought were expensive. That means that if one jump between systems costs you 3 GCr that's still a whopping 12k USD you are dropping to refuel. Also knowing the price in USD you can now convert the cost of your sidewinder (128 million USD) to whatever you need. Wow...sidewinders are expensive.

So 1 credit = 4000USD which is ridiculous. A ton of food cartidges are on averga, 105cr - that's baked beans by the way. $420,000 for a ton of frikkin baked beans.

 

[charognard]

Inflation of 2000 years must be considered

I prefere beer as reference point lol this is the most important thing in mankind forever

 

[Darkfyre99]

So something that barely worked anyway was then removed and nothing else was changed. That's incompetence right there and a developer that doesn't know their own game, like a lot of things in ED. There's really 2 issues here - making the gameplay more engaging but also being able to actually do that whilst remembering the game you made lol

It depends upon what you mean by "barely worked."

Version one of the economic simulation worked like what you'd expect an economy to work.

If an agricultural station wasn't supplied with farm machinery, fertilizer, or biowaste, then it wouldn't be able to produce things like grain, coffee, or tea as efficiently as possible. Stockpiles of tea and coffee would dwindle as Commanders bought these Commodities faster than the station produced them. This would, of course, drive the price of tea and coffee up. As demand for the inputs in the production chain increased, efficiency would decrease, until production reached a minimum level, which simulated the background activities of NPCs. A system left alone would eventually see its stockpiles increase again.

For players like myself, who appreciate this level of detail, and are more experience oriented than goal oriented, this was great. Unfortunately, like many developers before them, they didn't anticipate what their player base will do with this level of simulation. Of course, I'd also forgotten what happened when Ultima Online's attempt to simulate a realistic ecology met the actions of their player base, and it wasn't pretty.

First and foremost, I think most players were not expecting this level of simulation. They were expecting something more simple, like the fixed major and minor imports and exports of previous Elite games. Easy to understand, predictable, with guaranteed rewards.

Second, I don't think Frontier anticipated how... clever the general community could be. Between the size of the Premium Beta player base, the limited size of the Bubble at the time, and the rise of trading apps, any sources of highly-profitable goods would be depleted in minutes, and moderately-profitable goods in hours. Towards the end, highly-profitable goods were so scarce that players would be waiting at a station that produced gold, constantly refreshing the board, in an effort to snag the four tons of gold the station would produce per tick before everyone else.

Finally, if players did make the effort at supplying raw materials to produce high-profit goods, they were very rarely able to reap the benefits of that effort. Production wasn't instantaneous, and thanks to all the factors listed above, once the goods became available, you might be able to do one delivery run before they were gone.

As an experiment of what happens to an economy when the "working class" refuses to work, version one of the economic sim was a huge success. In hindsight, taking what would work in a single player environment, and transferring it to an MMO, the results was predictable.

Frontier's solution to the problem was to greatly increase the base rate of production, and leave the rest of the economic sim in place. As a result, you rarely see the effects of the economic sim outside of CGs and certain high-traffic systems. Its also why most commodity boards are filled with goods that are rarely traded. Frontier put all this effort into the economic sim, so they might as well use it, even if it's just used for window dressing.

 

[Vardaugas]

Inflation of 2000 years must be considered

I prefere beer as reference point lol this is the most important thing in mankind forever

Yup. There is at least as much demand for beer as there is supply. So the value should be near constant over the centuries.

 

[Darkfyre99]

easy : 1ton of beer = 187cr
1liter = 0,0053 cr
1pinte(.5l) =0.0026cr
Irl pinte = 5€ = 0.0026cr.
1cr=1923€
Globaly, 1cr=2k€, by the way, any mission is godly payed lol

Medium pay irl : 1300€, counting 1,5% inflation by year, in 3300, midium income should be 78000000€ = 39000cr/mount

Thankfully, I remembered to bookmark the last time I did a "how much is a credit worth" calculation. I prefer to use the price of grain as a metric for fictional buying power, since everyone needs to eat, but beer's good too.

It really depends upon where you're buying that pint. According to latest statistics from EDDB.io, the price of a ton of beer is worth between 20 and 492 credits, with a galactic average of about 186. There are approximately* 2000 pints per ton. Assume we lose 10% of that for container and mechanisms that keep the beer from spoiling, especially in the vacuum of space, and you can assume a pint will cost you between 0.01 credits and
0.27 credits, with a galactic average of about 0.1 credits. That's the wholesale cost, of course.

Assume that the price you pay in the pub is at least five times the wholesale cost, so the galactic average price of a pint of beer would be 0.5 credits. The price of beer at a pub in the US, in 2015 at least, was about $4, although it used to be much higher in the past. Which would place the value of a credit at around $8 USD... assuming every step of the chain of supply, from farms to bar patron, remains the same.


__________
*"A pints a pound the world around"

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

It depends upon what you mean by "barely worked."

Version one of the economic simulation worked like what you'd expect an economy to work.

If an agricultural station wasn't supplied with farm machinery, fertilizer, or biowaste, then it wouldn't be able to produce things like grain, coffee, or tea as efficiently as possible. Stockpiles of tea and coffee would dwindle as Commanders bought these Commodities faster than the station produced them. This would, of course, drive the price of tea and coffee up. As demand for the inputs in the production chain increased, efficiency would decrease, until production reached a minimum level, which simulated the background activities of NPCs. A system left alone would eventually see its stockpiles increase again.

For players like myself, who appreciate this level of detail, and are more experience oriented than goal oriented, this was great. Unfortunately, like many developers before them, they didn't anticipate what their player base will do with this level of simulation. Of course, I'd also forgotten what happened when Ultima Online's attempt to simulate a realistic ecology met the actions of their player base, and it wasn't pretty.

First and foremost, I think most players were not expecting this level of simulation. They were expecting something more simple, like the fixed major and minor imports and exports of previous Elite games. Easy to understand, predictable, with guaranteed rewards.

Second, I don't think Frontier anticipated how... clever the general community could be. Between the size of the Premium Beta player base, the limited size of the Bubble at the time, and the rise of trading apps, any sources of highly-profitable goods would be depleted in minutes, and moderately-profitable goods in hours. Towards the end, highly-profitable goods were so scarce that players would be waiting at a station that produced gold, constantly refreshing the board, in an effort to snag the four tons of gold the station would produce per tick before everyone else.

Finally, if players did make the effort at supplying raw materials to produce high-profit goods, they were very rarely able to reap the benefits of that effort. Production wasn't instantaneous, and thanks to all the factors listed above, once the goods became available, you might be able to do one delivery run before they were gone.

As an experiment of what happens to an economy when the "working class" refuses to work, version one of the economic sim was a huge success. In hindsight, taking what would work in a single player environment, and transferring it to an MMO, the results was predictable.

Frontier's solution to the problem was to greatly increase the base rate of production, and leave the rest of the economic sim in place. As a result, you rarely see the effects of the economic sim outside of CGs and certain high-traffic systems. Its also why most commodity boards are filled with goods that are rarely traded. Frontier put all this effort into the economic sim, so they might as well use it, even if it's just used for window dressing.

maybe i have not thought this through, however....

i would suggest ..

1) base "ingredients" which are the super cheap mass proguced stuff, ie food, should be in massive supply and essentially never run out....
2) as you move up the foodchain / pyramid there would be 2 potential supply levels a) in rich supply - no restrictions on purchase put in place and b) items in short supply, with limited amounts UNLESS you supply some raw materials needed for the in short supply product, in which case you get a full allowance.

what this would mean

a) small ships not affected too much, even in short supply a hauler could probably get enough to not worry
b) the big ships would have to do more than A B trading.. to be effective they would probably have to set up proper A - B - C - D trade loops to efficiently trade
(this is different to beta because there WOULD still be stock for the big ships but only IF they deliver stuff needed in the supply chain)

why is this good?

a) All products have purpose, and not just the high end stuff.
b) some products would ALWAYS be in limited supply... a system with population of a few 100k would not have infinite supply of slaves.. and this is ok imo.
c) it would be more realistic and be more interesting for trading.

where is the carrot?

profit margins from low demand to high demand can be increased. if i am only doing 1 400 tone run of farm machinery every 40 mins instead of every 10 mins it would be ok if profit margines from high supply to high demand were doubled.

it would mean those with big ships would not just be whales gobbling up supply, they would be key in generating that supply in the 1st place.... and the smaller ships can still compete, esp when it comes to CGs and the like.

where is the stick? i honestly dont see one, if balanced properly it would not necessarily decrease profits.

 

[Cupcake]

First off i do love this game. I would love it more though, if everything wasn't a grind.

Getting Faction Rep = Grind
Getting to Elite = Grind
Finding Engineer Resources = Grind
Getting Good Stats on Modules = Grind
Power Play = Grind
Getting Synth Resources = Grind

Literally every activity in this game results in a massive time sink.

Now don't get me wrong, a game needs longevity and end game goals that take a while to accomplish, like i do believe that you should not be able to get to Elite and King in a month.

Other parts of the game however should not be a massive grind. Right now you can literally spend an entire day just looking for Iron. You shouldn't have to say to yourself, "hmm what should i do today, i think ill go get some iron but that's all i will be able to do in my few hours to play"

Right now i'm on hunt for Sulfur, been on this planet for several hours now and i've only found 4 spots that have materials 1 rock at a time.

Making everything a grind is not the answer to keeping people playing longer, good content, gameplay and community are what do this, not more grinding.

Now the first thing people are going to say is "You don't have to grind for anything if you don't want to" to me this is not a good answer, for some people having a Cutter or Experimenting with ship builds is what makes them happy and interested in the game. It should not take months and months of playing to accomplish some of these things.

In my experience games that do not have anything to offer are the ones that make everything a grind, ED is better than that, we don't need it to be a grind in order to stay interested.

Spot on my friend. The substitution of "time sinks" in place of innovative and engaging content is a glaring issue in ED and they often turn that into a car crash of a launch. I'm old school in regards to games and am no newbie to the grind, the diffrence with ED though is that there is nothing BUT the grind as of now (scripted Thargoid aside). They would have been better off including quest chains and mini-campaigns with rewards like madules or ship chassis for example but no they wont even dress it up, its unashamedley a grind fest.

 

[CapuchinSeven]

This is exactly how it should be. Give us more interesting tools to get the stuff we want that rely on us playing the game rather than relying on RNG

As for Elite rank - pointless. They're worthless in fact and do nothing other than tell everyone you've been in the game for ages.

How can you be "Elite" in an RNG game anyway?

Yup, very fair point. The grind will be there but with depth and decent tools to use while we do it, the grind would feel much less like a grind.