Its true that Frontier have screwed the ballance of earnings in ED.
ANNOUNCEMENT Fleet Carriers - Content Reveal Announcement
- Thread starter Stephen Benedetti
- Start date
Its true that Frontier have screwed the ballance of earnings in ED.
Except I have thousand of hours. I didn't earn all that in a week. I played the game, over time. And I earned it by doing ALL the activities in the game. Not just one niche method.
"It is all about hours"No need to debate anything, just trying to quantify statements.Earning "300m in a week" or "60m in a weekend." doesn't tell me much. It is all about hours. You paint a picture that you engage in a wide variety of activities, and imply each of them is a viable path towards a carrier. I suspect that when you look at how much you earned with each activity, and how much hours you invest in each, you'll find a different pattern. I'm going out on a limb and dare to guess your smuggling income, which you said you enjoy, does not come close to earning you a spare exhaust pipe of a FC.
As for me, as I said: I am elite in all three branches, I've participated in dozens upon dozens of CGs, was among the first to run into a Thargoid (literally two hours after the first discovery), have scoured endless surfaces looking for barnacles when they were discovered, took part in numerous Canonn experiments way back in the day, smuggled weapons into local factions fighting the Empire, I've adopted anarchy factions and helped them spread, and currenly reside in Colonia. I've done, for all intents and purposes, almost everything this game has to offer. And when I look at my stats I notice the following:
1) I have spend less than 1% of my time mining.
2) I have earned >30% of my total assets from mining.
3) Mining is among the easiest, most risk-free things you can do.
That, to me, signals something is fundamentally borked. And I find it a bit puzzling why people insist on defending this reality. You said you earned 60M in thargoid bonds in a weekend. That is the equivalent of 30 minutes of risk-free mining. Does that make sense to you? So far I have seen nobody actually come up with any arguments explaining why this situation is a good thing beyond some "got mine, don't care!" sentiment.
Only if you're grinding. But for the sake of some numbers - 60 million was AX fighting for about 2 hours. 200 million was over the course of a whole day, and involved a lot of time teaching and decontaminating newer AX pilots. I made good money doing it, but that's not why i did it.
"You paint a picture that you engage in a wide variety of activities, and imply each of them is a viable path towards a carrier ... I'm going out on a limb and dare to guess your smuggling income, which you said you enjoy, does not come close to earning you a spare exhaust pipe of a FC."
Amigo, my smuggling doesn't hold a candle (earnings-wise) to mining, or most other stuff I do. If you're smuggling to make a living, that's one thing. That's a grind. Especially if you're only doing it for smuggling profits. If you're smuggling for profit and take some missions to make it more worthwhile, that's less of a grind. If you figure a way to take multiple smuggling missions at the same time, now you're making money. If you're smuggling to tweak the BGS, and it's one aspect of how you play, that's just fun.
"That, to me, signals something is fundamentally borked. And I find it a bit puzzling why people insist on defending this reality. "
I have a mental list of things that are borked in this game. I shake my head, shrug my shoulders, and I play the game anyway. I'm not defending the way the game is made, I'm just playing within it.
"You said you earned 60M in thargoid bonds in a weekend. That is the equivalent of 30 minutes of risk-free mining. Does that make sense to you?"
So? I can go out in the real world and work a difficult, dangerous job for low pay. Or I can go out and make a nice, easy living.
When I fight Thargoids, I do it for the fun, for the adrenaline, for the sake of winging up with friends and showing them how to take out a heart and avoid caustic damage while not overheating. Or maybe I do it solo for the challenge. The money comes either way.
When I go mining, I do it to be in that zen state of drifting through an asteroid field, looking for the perfect target. I used to mine Painite (back years ago when we were lucky to get 40k per unit), but now I just do deep core mining. I prefer the icy rings. I like challenging myself on each asteroid, to see if I can set the explosives faster or in fewer crevices than the last one I did. Do I make money at it? Bet your ass I do. Do I grind at it? Nope. Do I fill a Cutter or T9? Nope. Do some, then off to something else.
You're triple Elite. Kudos. That takes some doing, and from what you put out there, you're doing it right - combat Elite for a reason. There are people who grind at combat too. Does that mean the system is broken? Dunno. Maybe. Does their grind make your journey or experience any different? Not for me. I've been playing since Beta, and I'm not Elite in combat yet (65% Deadly, FWIW). I could be if I worked at it, but you know what? I'll get there when I get there.
Yes, it is possible for a player with thousands of hours to have the credits for a FC without participating in niche activities, I never said it wasn't possible. I am in the same boat as you. All I am saying is that currently it possible for a player with, say, 100 hours (or even less to be honest) played to have more credits than a player with thousands which shows an extreme imbalance with the game. I said at the start of my first post here that 5bn is attainable so I'm not sure where the misunderstanding is here. It's a fairly well known fact that credits/hour mining VO's or LTD's is far more lucrative than most other activities.
Edit: after re-reading my old post I see a line or two that may be a bit ambiguous, just bad wording on my part and probably not stated 100% the way I meant it.
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Yes, but only if you have a 'really massive debt'. Nobody knows the numbers. It could be that an ultra-high end uber-carrier cannot be owned by a solo cmdr who goes away for a few years. We'll get the numbers later.
Oh, 5b is the starting cost. Not the total cost.
It seems so, but I'd wait for next week before formulating anything more because you'll have a definite answer then.
Thank you for the detailed response! Just three small points I'd like to clarify:
1) For sure I dont grind, and from what I read my approach is actually very similar to yours. To be sure, the addition of FC that are beyond my reach won't make the game worse for me, so it is a more academic/principled perspective I discuss from: is this the ideal design of the game or not. Accepting that it is not and will not is, indeed, always wise.
2) I mostly asked for income per hour not from a grind perspective, but because people have very different ideas of how much they play per hour. For example, this gentleman explorer has explored over 200,000 systems, spend an average of 12hr/day logged in and watched a total of almost 6 months 24/7 the hyperspace jump. His perspective on 'weekly exploration earnings' would be different than mine!
3) Personally I don't really care much for comparisons with the real world. The real world economy is a drag (certainly the forseeable future), when I die in real-life I die for real, when I go to prison I have to sit on my bum for many real-time months and so forth. The economy in this game doesn't need to be real, it needs to be fun. For sure privates in the military are experiencing high-risk low-reward. Real life is fundamentally poorly balanced!
Anyway, thanks for the effort you put in your reply, and I hope you enjoy your carrier if you get one. Might pop aboard for a pint if you dont set the tariffs too high!
"The real world economy is a drag (certainly the forseeable future) ... "Thank you for the detailed response! Just three small points I'd like to clarify:
1) For sure I dont grind, and from what I read my approach is actually very similar to yours. To be sure, the addition of FC that are beyond my reach won't make the game worse for me, so it is a more academic/principled perspective I discuss from: is this the ideal design of the game or not. Accepting that it is not and will not is, indeed, always wise.
2) I mostly asked for income per hour not from a grind perspective, but because people have very different ideas of how much they play per hour. For example, this gentleman explorer has explored over 200,000 systems, spend an average of 12hr/day logged in and watched a total of almost 6 months 24/7 the hyperspace jump. His perspective on 'weekly exploration earnings' would be different than mine!
3) Personally I don't really care much for comparisons with the real world. The real world economy is a drag (certainly the forseeable future), when I die in real-life I die for real, when I go to prison I have to sit on my bum for many real-time months and so forth. The economy in this game doesn't need to be real, it needs to be fun. For sure privates in the military are experiencing high-risk low-reward. Real life is fundamentally poorly balanced!
Anyway, thanks for the effort you put in your reply, and I hope you enjoy your carrier if you get one. Might pop aboard for a pint if you dont set the tariffs too high!
Yeah, you're not kidding.
I get your point. I play this in part to get away from the limitations of the real world. Wanting a more equitable world here or IRL is a good thing.
"Might pop aboard for a pint if you dont set the tariffs too high!"
You're always welcome aboard, Cmdr. First round is on me.
Fleet Carriers seems like just a new "end game" feature which won't add much new game play. I hope I'm wrong about that!
Frontier needs to finally learn that adding new and interesting game play is how you keep a game alive, NOT adding ever bigger grind. Other space game makers have already learned this.
Frontier needs to finally learn that adding new and interesting game play is how you keep a game alive, NOT adding ever bigger grind. Other space game makers have already learned this.
I read the whole post Fdev gave us and no where does it say anything about up keep besides refueling and upgrades.. so where did all this nonsense about losing you FC if you go on vacation come from?
I'll take a moment and put my 2 cents in this thread.
I spent for well over 2.5k hours in this game. I've been part of the #1 ALD player faction for most of it. I am deeply invested in this game, I sincerely am.
But ever since the FCs were delayed in favor of some QoL and bug fixes (none of which really significantly changed our experience so far)... I've been cautious.
The fact that it will be a pre-recorded stream makes me nervous.
Hear me out.
Remember when they revealed Multi-crew live and it crashed on them... they promptly promised that it would be fixed by release... which it wasn't. We still get loads of abrupt session drops/crash with it to this day... we can't even combine it with wings yet (albeit this wasn't part of what they planned to do, granted).
Then we had deep core mining... to me the novelty lasted 5 rocks... at best.
This time around... they will stage the reveal to avoid showing how broken it might still be(why else delay it? To make it... "more ambitious"?).
I can't wait to see how it turns out to be at release. I have a firm conviction that It will be entertaining regardless...
But please... don't make yet another dumpster fire with a feature that causes us to crash to desktop and gets buried and forgotten for being game breaking... like multi-crew still is to this day...
Make this one right, please.
Also, just a friendly heads up, I won't bother paying 5 Bil on something that might disapear/become useless if and when I feel like taking a break from space madness... I mean Elite.
Just yeah...
I hope those upkeep costs are just a bad joke for april 1st.
Cause either way, its a bad idea.
Anyhow, fly dangerous cmdrs, 07
Spectral, out.
I spent for well over 2.5k hours in this game. I've been part of the #1 ALD player faction for most of it. I am deeply invested in this game, I sincerely am.
But ever since the FCs were delayed in favor of some QoL and bug fixes (none of which really significantly changed our experience so far)... I've been cautious.
The fact that it will be a pre-recorded stream makes me nervous.
Hear me out.
Remember when they revealed Multi-crew live and it crashed on them... they promptly promised that it would be fixed by release... which it wasn't. We still get loads of abrupt session drops/crash with it to this day... we can't even combine it with wings yet (albeit this wasn't part of what they planned to do, granted).
Then we had deep core mining... to me the novelty lasted 5 rocks... at best.
This time around... they will stage the reveal to avoid showing how broken it might still be(why else delay it? To make it... "more ambitious"?).
I can't wait to see how it turns out to be at release. I have a firm conviction that It will be entertaining regardless...
But please... don't make yet another dumpster fire with a feature that causes us to crash to desktop and gets buried and forgotten for being game breaking... like multi-crew still is to this day...
Make this one right, please.
Also, just a friendly heads up, I won't bother paying 5 Bil on something that might disapear/become useless if and when I feel like taking a break from space madness... I mean Elite.
Just yeah...
I hope those upkeep costs are just a bad joke for april 1st.
Cause either way, its a bad idea.
Anyhow, fly dangerous cmdrs, 07
Spectral, out.
Erm, for 100 millions you don't even get a naked, used B747. The current AF-1 is said to cost about 2 bn, the new AF-1 5.2 bn. And it can not even carry other planes...
I think it's ridiculously cheap, given that a real word carrier costs about 13 bn, while a top fighter costs some 100 millions. So considering a top fighter in ED costs about 1 billion, the FC should cost more than 100 bn, just to stay realistic. I do not say it should cost 100 bn, but whining about a modest 5 bn is inappropriate, to say the least.
Let's wait for the stream for more details : it's not because most of us will never be able to buy one that we won't be able to enjoy the collateral features it will offer.
ED has been a grindfest all along, it's the only gameplay FDEV seem to understand and they can't realize everyone is done with grinding
A couple of days real time. I went base ship-dolphin-anaconda. Any of those can be good pirate ships to get LTD and sell it on the black market for the same high prices. I also wonder if selling black market makes the high price last longer by not effecting it. And piracy is faster, but you take a 25% cut. Very worth it in my opinion. So far, in my limited pirate carreer, I haven't seen a single 1.6m LTD place that didn't have a black market. ;d
I remember when it actually took a while to earn enough money to buy an Anaconda. Now, you can go mine for a few hours and have enough to buy an Anaconda and upgrade it. Same thing goes for earning Federal and Imperial ranks. It used to take a long time just to get the rank to be able to be able to buy a Corvette or Cutter, now you can do it in a weekend.