ANNOUNCEMENT Fleet Carriers Update - Patch 3

[Darth Ender]

I am not looking forward to seeing the mining LTD-price nerf. Just another way to slow us artificially down to mooooooore grind, as if this game wasn't grindy enough.

Instead of nerfing everything to the ground, why won't FD consider buffing stuff like combat? Credits aren't the only currency in the game. The point where money doesn't mean to much is long gone by. So at this point and the current levels of pricing (yes, I look at you, nasty upkeep) this is just another artificial way of keeping us grinding instead letting us do, what we like to (which is mostly heavily underpaid: Combat, Missions and other stuff)

No, instead make sure, you grind your soul out, just to feed the upkeep of your mobile station ... carrier.

All current income roles should be nerfed and accrue very little income because they're all very safe, easy, and things new players can do right off the bat.

New activities need to be created that are more complicated, test player skill in flying and managing their ship and mastery of the game's mechanics. Those should pay much more than the starter activities. They should also be something that can't be farmed on repeat.

Anything you can farm in a single spot or do without fear of dying should not be worth much ... enough to progress a new player to get to mid level ships and then that's it. If you want to keep doing that and grind forever, you could, but players should be strongly encouraged to do the harder activities that offer much higher income rates if the player is good at the game.

 

[Riverside]

I am not looking forward to seeing the mining LTD-price nerf. Just another way to slow us artificially down to mooooooore grind, as if this game wasn't grindy enough.

Instead of nerfing everything to the ground, why won't FD consider buffing stuff like combat? Credits aren't the only currency in the game. The point where money doesn't mean to much is long gone by. So at this point and the current levels of pricing (yes, I look at you, nasty upkeep) this is just another artificial way of keeping us grinding instead letting us do, what we like to (which is mostly heavily underpaid: Combat, Missions and other stuff)

No, instead make sure, you grind your soul out, just to feed the upkeep of your mobile station ... carrier.

Think of it as a gold rush. Get in quick, get what you can before it dries up

In the history of ED there has always been a way to make huge piles of cash, I don't imagine this one will be the last.

 

[Cmdr Nimineza]

All current income roles should be nerfed and accrue very little income because they're all very safe, easy, and things new players can do right off the bat.

New activities need to be created that are more complicated, test player skill in flying and managing their ship and mastery of the game's mechanics. Those should pay much more than the starter activities. They should also be something that can't be farmed on repeat.

Anything you can farm in a single spot or do without fear of dying should not be worth much ... enough to progress a new player to get to mid level ships and then that's it. If you want to keep doing that and grind forever, you could, but players should be strongly encouraged to do the harder activities that offer much higher income rates if the player is good at the game.

Example: Why is a thargoid cyclops kill only 2 Mio? It should be 20..30 Mio as it requires skill, ship fitting and maybe some teamwork, if you do it the intended way. If I do it alone i spend quite an amount of time doing hit and run in my highly specilized krait Mk2.

And I disagree, that all traditional ways to make credits should be nerfed. This game is grindy enough!

 

[whothe]

Stability Issues
Players may find they are having issues with being disconnected from the game when loading into systems with many Fleet Carriers present. We are aware of this issue and are working towards a solution in a future update.

I'll be honest, haven't played much lately, FC's while handy and kind of nice to have, really weren't terribly exciting. But this week I got back on and have been having some fun helping with the Turn the Wheel initiative. Had only read about the orange sidewinder 'bug'. Until today that is... first crashed jumping into a system, now multiple crashes just trying to enter supercruise in the system...

We are aware, and in a future update? The future could be next week or 6 months from now... sorry FDev that's just not good enough. This should be top priority, ASAP. This is your current product and you're trying to sell us on buying Odyssey? LOL not a chance if this is a sign of what to expect.
If you have to drop the FC limits in system, do it?
Why do I get the feeling you guys are sitting on your hands, hoping that people will spread out and leave the bubble, or decommission on such a scale that this problem will fix itself while you focus on hair coloring?

 

[alexzk]

I'll be honest, haven't played much lately, FC's while handy and kind of nice to have, really weren't terribly exciting. But this week I got back on and have been having some fun helping with the Turn the Wheel initiative. Had only read about the orange sidewinder 'bug'. Until today that is... first crashed jumping into a system, now multiple crashes just trying to enter supercruise in the system...

We are aware, and in a future update? The future could be next week or 6 months from now... sorry FDev that's just not good enough. This should be top priority, ASAP. This is your current product and you're trying to sell us on buying Odyssey? LOL not a chance if this is a sign of what to expect.
If you have to drop the FC limits in system, do it?
Why do I get the feeling you guys are sitting on your hands, hoping that people will spread out and leave the bubble, or decommission on such a scale that this problem will fix itself while you focus on hair coloring?

It is broken with 1 too ... had many times, being alone with my FC in deep nowhere and "orange" error on SC try. Complete relaunch of everything including launcher usually fix it.
That looks like memory corruption (bcs need full restart) in some new FC code, which in turn breaks randomly other pieces of game. Some access to already deleted object could be.

 

[Darth Ender]

Example: Why is a thargoid cyclops kill only 2 Mio? It should be 20..30 Mio as it requires skill, ship fitting and maybe some teamwork, if you do it the intended way. If I do it alone i spend quite an amount of time doing hit and run in my highly specilized krait Mk2.

And I disagree, that all traditional ways to make credits should be nerfed. This game is grindy enough!

it's grindy because you're trying to make money doing the beginning tasks. Large thargoid ships aside, ad-hoc trading is beginning garbage. Exploring is beginner activities. Bounty hunting is beginner activities. Mining is a beginner activity. These are all tasks that you can do in 100% safety in the first ship you get in the game using little to no skill.

But those are the only things you can do in the game. It's just that stuff, repeated with maybe a specific target / commodity or location in mind.

That's why it's grindy. You're trying to make billions doing things that newbies do. Buffing those activities isn't the answer. Nerfing them and add new activities is. Or have you just given up on the idea that veteran players should be expected to test their skills and participate in tasks that aren't grind mechanics like all of the current tasks are?

If all you have to choose from is the same tasks that new players do, you're never going to be able to find a balance. The income needs of more expensive ships will never be able to be balanced against the tasks available since those tasks have to also be balanced against the new players flying much cheaper ships ....or there becomes little point to credits at all in the game. You might as well at that point just get rid of credits altogether and make everything free.

 

[alexzk]

it's grindy because you're trying to make money doing the beginning tasks. Large thargoid ships aside, ad-hoc trading is beginning garbage. Exploring is beginner activities. Bounty hunting is beginner activities. Mining is a beginner activity. These are all tasks that you can do in 100% safety in the first ship you get in the game using little to no skill.

But those are the only things you can do in the game. It's just that stuff, repeated with maybe a specific target / commodity or location in mind.

That's why it's grindy. You're trying to make billions doing things that newbies do. Buffing those activities isn't the answer. Nerfing them and add new activities is. Or have you just given up on the idea that veteran players should be expected to test their skills and participate in tasks that aren't grind mechanics like all of the current tasks are?

If all you have to choose from is the same tasks that new players do, you're never going to be able to find a balance. The income needs of more expensive ships will never be able to be balanced against the tasks available since those tasks have to also be balanced against the new players flying much cheaper ships ....or there becomes little point to credits at all in the game. You might as well at that point just get rid of credits altogether and make everything free.

You're asking vertical scale in fact like any other MMOs - gear change, levels etc. Elite is horizontal progression game, that is what u said - noob and vet can do the same. However vet can do it much more effective. I like this though. This is 1 MMO known for me with horizontal scale.
Horizontal progression be definition assumes you will not have any rush to get top level and farm best gear. Game supposes you will "live" inside it. Maybe getting better and more effective in some areas you choose. Or in all (4x elite).
That what elite do. I think we need base construction with involved FC use heavy. Like missions "deliver 50000 new colonists to your new base to make it work".

 

[znôrt]

Sure, several ways to get approximately the same numbers using a combination of in-game and public 3rd-party information.

1) The Distant Worlds method
2) The Squadrons method
3) The Steam Stats method

thanks for the thorough explanation. kudos for effort and inegnuity but there are some weak assumptions and biased samples there. you could use the same methods to arrive at both half and double the numbers just with slight tweaks. the concept of 'somewhat active' is quite nebulous anyway. we know frontier sold millions of copies. any of those can play for a week and not be seen again in years, but you do have to be rather active for a while to grind for a fleet carrier. while i would not accept your numbers i would agree with you that only a minority of total players have one.

however, if you merely look at steam stats over time (a biased but assumedly consistent sample over time) you see a high but not uncommon spike from april to may, which could be attributed to the 'update' effect, the season and also covid19, followed by a totally unprecedented record high in june. all time record. this has to be strongly related to space castles / mining exploits for lack of a better explanation, since nothing else is going on. meaning the majority of current 'somewhat active' players are either playing with their space castle or working to get one.

anyway, it's not the proportion but the absolute numbers what trashes servers. which is consistent, elite never had that many concurrent players.

Given that prior to carriers "a station, but it can change state without a weekly server reset" was a concept widely laughed at with Thargsday and similar ... I'm not going to underestimate just how difficult it was to get stations to move (mostly) reliably to player-defined positions on 15 minutes notice and have most player clients agree most of the time on where they are.

The time taken to develop a feature and the actual bits the players see aren't necessarily related. The bit of code that stops two carriers coming out of hyperspace at the same location as each other and as an NPC station we'll never see, and if it took months to get right, that's months before they can release carriers because we'd really notice if it wasn't there. (The big remaining flaw in this code that drops carriers into the ambiguous zone near rings and sends them running away from their owners most certainly has been noticed...)

It was a couple of years and multiple delays before carriers were released, so I'm assuming it took them a couple of years of work.

i can't really make any sense of all this. you're basically saying that something must have taken years because you can't personally figure out how they did it.

well, i can figure out pretty well several ways how it could have been done, but more important than that i know for a fact that frontier changed goals, design and functionality of fleet carriers barely 4 months before release. so barring some previous 'concept artwork' the whole thing was put together in 3 hectic months, just in time for beta. which is not unusal frontier way and it's really no surprise it's a bit flimsy.

 

[CMDR_A1R]

I can not tell you how much I hope that this happens. Can you imagine the salt? Waking up one morning and your Fleet Carrier is just gone...and it's all your fault because you abused an exploit? ELL OH ELL, CMDR's. o7

I do hope it happens, a lot of cmdrs will be crying like babies

 

[Darth Ender]

You're asking vertical scale in fact like any other MMOs - gear change, levels etc. Elite is horizontal progression game, that is what u said - noob and vet can do the same. However vet can do it much more effective. I like this though. This is 1 MMO known for me with horizontal scale.

the difference between a newb who watched youtube and a player who has played since the game started is non-existent for trading, mining, exploring ....maybe about 2-3 months apart for bounty hunting / merc ...only because flying and combat in general takes some time and engineers can't be unlocked all at once.

Horizontal scale doesn't exist in the game. Unless you're talking about players who have chosen to isolate themselves from the rest of the internet and dont interact with other players at all.

 

[alexzk]

the difference between a newb who watched youtube and a player who has played since the game started is non-existent for trading, mining, exploring ....maybe about 2-3 months apart for bounty hunting / merc ...only because flying and combat in general takes some time and engineers can't be unlocked all at once.

Horizontal scale doesn't exist in the game. Unless you're talking about players who have chosen to isolate themselves from the rest of the internet and dont interact with other players at all.

Edited post above, but will copy here:

Horizontal progression be definition assumes you will not have any rush to get top level and farm best gear. Game supposes you will "live" inside it. Maybe getting better and more effective in some areas you choose. Or in all (4x elite).
That what elite do. I think we need base construction with involved FC use heavy. Like missions "deliver 50000 new colonists to your new base to make it work".

It does exists. Just because last 2 DLC (or 3?) you still use same ships. And you still can use basic E modules and do things. On vertical progression each new tier trashes all content before, makes it obsolete. WoW/SWTOR/many more are bright example of vertical scale. New DLC = trash all, go try new raid to get best new. Repeat once a year.

 

[M4RTH4]

I do hope it happens, a lot of cmdrs will be crying like babies

Probably won't; too many 'what ifs,' lotta technical jargon and even some innocent CMDRs at stake.

Example: Bobby got his carrier with the eggsploit, but his friend Johnny has never done the eggsploit. Johnny stores his ships and modules on Bobby's Carrier. What happens to Johnny's ships and modules if all that money from Bobby gets taken away and Bobby can't afford the carrier's upkeep any longer? What if both of them are out in the black, stuck because they're in their mining ships that have 5ly jump ranges?

Multiply that final possibility by ~300, and then throw all that pressure onto the Fuel Rats, who would have to waste their OWN resources to save all these people. What if one of the DSSA Carriers was obtained with that method? What if someone essentially transferred their credits with the eggsploit to another player? That would count as legitimate, right? Because the sender (With the illegal credits) and reciever are both using the game's own set mechanics for it; owner buys a thing and sells it for super low, reciever buys them and makes like a 4,086% profit per unit of thing sold to a nearby station importing the thing.

WAY too many 'what ifs,' especially with the infancy of a player-run economy in this game.

Also they 'fixed' the Eggsploit once already but nothing was taken away...

 

[CMDR_A1R]

one bug you can depend on Fdev fixing pronto is 'the one that's paying players' - hope your gonna roll back all the exploited accounts while your at it. Not only can new players be Elite & own everything in a week, just about everyone has a fleet carrier now.

well they nerfed the other exploits and removed all their ill gotten gains, so will wait and see with wide eyes and sit back and smile when they start crying in the forum.

 

[yianniv]

I don't like the issue tracker, so I'll report it here: I've visited 3 different crystalline shard sites on 3 planets in the HIP 36601 system. When you hit the spikes they fall on the ground as spikes, they don't turn into the relevant materials. Their description changes to indicate "ruthenium", "tellurium", etc but their form remains spiky. This makes them easier to hide behind things and become unreachable.

 

[CMDR_A1R]

force the carriers pilled up in systems to move, spread them out so servers can cope better, no more than 15 in a system because so many are camping happily for weeks and weeks in popular systems preying on miners to sell their goods like parasites then making a killing on credits re-selling them on using miners like slaves while they sit on their arses. Sorry but this needs saying like, just like real life, in game users exist.

 

[M4RTH4]

force the carriers pilled up in systems to move, spread them out so servers can cope better, no more than 15 in a system because so many are camping happily for weeks and weeks in popular systems preying on miners to sell their goods like parasites then making a killing on credits re-selling them on using miners like slaves while they sit on their arses. Sorry but this needs saying like, just like real life, in game users exist.

I'd go with maybe 25, or possibly 30 if they put the Engineer systems behind an easily obtainable permit, ie 'Mostly X' in all 3 ranks.

 

[CMDR_A1R]

very happy to see some of these mining and LTD price changes incoming. i know its strange to get excited about a potential nerf, but lets face it mining income has been getting out of hand. good to see the first steps being taken to address game balance.

totally agree, should be good payout but a lot harder

 

[CMDR_A1R]

and I do hope this has been addressed on patch 3 as this has been a massive issue for a lot of players trying to mine in hotspots

This has been confirmed by quite a few cmdrs and FD recognise it as an issue to fix.

Come on I want to get back to mining in single hotspots where they generate whats advertised using standard mining lasers etc.

webapp

issues.frontierstore.net

 

[znôrt]

well they nerfed the other exploits and removed all their ill gotten gains

sorry what? nerfed, sure, but removed gains? i can only think of one instance of that which was the removal of tainted module modifications created with the g1-5 exploit. which was as blatant as it can get. regarding gold rushes, there have been exploits on around a quarterly basis for 6 years already. what have they removed?

so will wait and see with wide eyes and sit back and smile when they start crying in the forum.

i'd say pass the popcorn but ... save it, it aint gonna happen.

 

[rootsrat]

Probably won't; too many 'what ifs,' lotta technical jargon and even some innocent CMDRs at stake.

Example: Bobby got his carrier with the eggsploit, but his friend Johnny has never done the eggsploit. Johnny stores his ships and modules on Bobby's Carrier. What happens to Johnny's ships and modules if all that money from Bobby gets taken away and Bobby can't afford the carrier's upkeep any longer? What if both of them are out in the black, stuck because they're in their mining ships that have 5ly jump ranges?

Multiply that final possibility by ~300, and then throw all that pressure onto the Fuel Rats, who would have to waste their OWN resources to save all these people. What if one of the DSSA Carriers was obtained with that method? What if someone essentially transferred their credits with the eggsploit to another player? That would count as legitimate, right? Because the sender (With the illegal credits) and reciever are both using the game's own set mechanics for it; owner buys a thing and sells it for super low, reciever buys them and makes like a 4,086% profit per unit of thing sold to a nearby station importing the thing.

WAY too many 'what ifs,' especially with the infancy of a player-run economy in this game.

Also they 'fixed' the Eggsploit once already but nothing was taken away...

There is but one answer to all of your what-ifs: TOUGH.

You cheat, you suffer. But I'm 99.9% sure it won't happen. I've seen FDEV not do it before and I don't think they'll do it again.

They conveniently ignore all the questions about that too. That's an indication they won't do anything about it.