“Free” ARX: Broken by Design. Fix Inside.

alterNERDtive

alterNERDtive
So, let’s please not forget how incredibly broken the “free” ARX thing is over the Crap Credits™ outrage. The current design of earning ARX for certain actions in-game is horribly unfair and a nightmare to balance properly, if that’s even possible at all.

Here are some of the problems involved:

  • How and to what extent you earn your “free” ARX is not disclosed to the public. The only thing that effectively does is lead to lots of confusion and anger until some players put in the time to reverse engineer how the system works. More transparent == better. Period. If you can’t disclose how it works because you fear it will be abused, the system is broken. If you do it properly, it can’t be abused; or rather, “abusing” it would be doing what you intend the “free” ARX to encourage players to do.
  • Exploration payouts are broken by design; I’m assuming other professions aren’t much better, but I don’t dabble in them too often. I scanned / mapped some systems on the way back from a long range rat rescue. Gathering ~22 mill in data gave me 47 ARX. Selling the data gave me 175 ARX. That means that you are being shafted on weekly “free” ARX income if you are exploring out in the black for long amounts of time. Additionally and much worse it encourages you to hold on to your data and sell it in weekly chunks when you come back to not “lose out” on your “free” ARX. And to not play in between because you might lose your several billion in data and thousands of things that won’t have your name on them. That’s the opposite of what the “free” ARX were intended to do: incentivise you to play more and more regularly.
  • At least for combat I’ve heard (careful, second hand information) that you do not get ARX for killing players in PvP. You do, however, get ARX for dying. Double-U Tee Eff⁉
  • The fastest and least involved way to gain your “free” ARX was to buy an expensive module and immediately sell it again x40. Bam, 400 ARX. That has now apparently been badly patched. The next fastest way will be found momentarily.
  • On the other hand, earning your weekly cap the “legit” way is basically impossible right now – unless, again, you know what to do to exploit the system.
  • I don’t know if many of you guys noticed, but when the store went down on patch day, you couldn’t earn ARX by playing until the store was back up. No comment.

Feel free to add more bullet points to this list below. I’m sure there are a couple dozen more. All of the above are inherent problems with the design of the weekly “free” ARX. You won’t fix them by adjusting some numbers.

Now, for the fix. You will never be able to properly balance a billion ways to gain ARX by playing the game. There will always be a way to cheese it for players that want to do so or simply don’t have the time it takes to find out how best to do it in a “proper” way. The current desgin, however you will tune the rewards, will always be an overly complicated mess. Replace it with something much more simple, yet transparent and true to the design goal of “free” ARX: to make people play more, and more regularly.

Give people ARX for playing the game, no matter how they are playing it.

Have a daily login bonus (e.g. 20 ARX/day) and give people ARX for time played (e.g. 1 ARX/minute). You can easily tweak the numbers there to reflect how much time you want players to have to put in for it. No cheesing. No exploiting. No confusion about what to do to actually get your “free” ARX. Simple, yet effective.

Yes, you will get people that will login and just idle for a couple hours. Those are the same people that will find the exploits for your current system, you won’t get them to play nice anyway. But that won’t give them any advantage over just playing, and the rest of the community can benefit from a clean set of rules.
 

Florenus

Florenus
Daily login and time based ARX discriminate people who play ocassionally, f.ex on the weekends, which also sucks.

But I also don't like the fact that I can easily get a lot of ARX in relatively short time by shooting NPC's and then selling bounties, while for trading between already known systems (so no ARX for discovery), I get very little, while it might take more time.
So, despite what Fdev claimed, it's not true that every gameplay style is equal in terms of earning ARX.
 

alterNERDtive

alterNERDtive
Florenus said:
Daily login and time based ARX discriminate people who play ocassionally, f.ex on the weekends, which also sucks.
Click to expand...

Yeah that’s why I said the numbers could be tweaked however they feel appropriate. It becomes a simple balancing issue instead of a horribly complicated one. The fact that people that have more spare time can earn more weekly ARX (up to the cap, duh) will be true for whatever method you choose, unless you just give everyone 400 ARX for logging in once per week (I wouldn’t actually be mad if they did this, btw).

Florenus said:
So, despite what Fdev claimed, it's not true that every gameplay style is equal in terms of earning ARX.
Click to expand...

The only way to make all activities pay the same amount of ARX per time invested is to make the calculation time-based.
 

metatheurgist

metatheurgist
I like that different activities give different arx. I would prefer it to be better balanced. Right now mining gives zero. Each NPC you kill gives 1. But if it were the same across the board it would be boring, being able to leverage a bit more because I'm a better fighter than a miner adds spice.
 

Babellon

Babellon
I keep seeing these threads popping up about maxxing arx earnings...I'm curious why everyone thinks you're supposed to max out every week. You're not being screwed out of something you're being given for free firstly and secondly you earn arx by playing the game normally gaining nothing of intrinsic material value making the whole argument pointless. All those paints, skins, decals you didn't want to spend money on before arx was introduced are the same ones you can get by playing the game and earning a pseudo currency in a video game now.
People are on here complaining about the "unfair" business practice. the "rip off" of not getting the maximum amount immediately or fast enough.
The game didn't magically become a better experience with the introduction of arx, nor does arx make the game less than it was before.\and just to respond to the thread title "broken by design" I submit there are several elements of the game that are "broken by design". This game seems to have a minimalist design plan in that its designed with the minimal elements to technically function leaving the majority of useful broader player information and input up to the player base to design and develop. You can't cash that pseudo currency in, you aren't going to make actual money from it, and if the only currency floating around the store page is that which is gotten for free then the developers won't be getting any real money either. Why are you people having a panic attack over this?
 
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Old Duck

Old Duck
alterNERDtive said:
Give people ARX for playing the game, no matter how they are playing it.
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I agree with this, not because I care about Arx, but because I agree with that Astronomy guy that Arx is too interwoven into core game mechanics, introducing bugs and even more tangled spaghetti code. Frontier really, really needs to study KISS (keep it simple, stupid) design. Arx as currently implemented is definitely not KISS.

BTW, people are exploiting Arx-earning mechanisms already, so complication and obfuscation isn't a solution to this exploitation, so just KISS and let people sit in stations all day if that's what they want to do. This is what caps are for.
 

dreampage

dreampage
I agree with the OP. The current system is ambiguous and I was correct by saying it would lead to confusion among players. It's not true that you get ARX regardless how you play. I was out exploring and it's an unfair system - you only get ARX when you are back and sell the data. Otherwise you barely get anything from jumping from system to system and scanning. It's just pointless. Players are creating tables and spreadsheets trying to solve how the system works, and they are giving advice to each other about what to do to actually earn meaningful amounts. This is where the system fails. Everyone should get the same amount regardless of what their playstyle is. Because the moment you treat different activities differently, you automatically sort those activities one above the other. Is combat more important than mining? Is exploration gameplay worth less than trading? It's clear the system treats players differently by their playstyle and thus the system is wrong.

The emphasis of this system should be simple: If you play a lot, you can reach the weekly cap, period. What counts as "a lot" can be adjusted and debated but at least it would rule out every other factor. It shouldn't matter what you do in the game - what should matter is how much you dedicate yourself to the game.

In my opinion the system could be so much simpler:
  • You earn ARX by time elapsed (for example, 1 ARX every 2 minutes, or 30 ARX/hour).
  • Only active gameplay counts: button pressing, in other words. If you're inactive for more than a minute, ARX generation stops.
  • Repeated / continuous button presses don't count. If you rubber-band your controller or keyboard and the game registers the same input for more than a minute, ARX generation stops.
This way, no matter what you did in the game you'd get the same amount of ARX as anyone else. Yes, a Hutton run may not generate many ARX this way (since you just fly in a straight line for 1.5 hours) but it's still a better method than this confusing, ambiguous and complicated algorithm that last but not least quite spectacularly broke many things in the base game as well.

The above system could still be abused? Certainly. But who cares? Would Frontier go bankrupt if a tiny minority of players somehow boosted their way to the weekly cap? I'm sure not. Yet normal players would know what to expect and they would be treated equally. This is what's missing from it right now, and seeing the insultingly low payouts after a game session one considers if it has any use at all.
 

Bigmaec

Bigmaec
Sooner or later we have the list of ARX earnings figured out anyways OP.
Why don't you help and add your findings in Facta's thread here.

And when we are there, the complains will shift to
Why is my way of playing not giving more ARX and We need more ARX.

shrugs

Just play the game, and don't mind the ARX.
 

[VR] M4st0d0n

[VR] M4st0d0n
Maybe dailys wouldnt have screwed every gameplay loops with gamebreaking bugs. Sometimes tried and true design are the way to go instead of putting more strain on spaghetti code with a skeleton crew.
 

alterNERDtive

alterNERDtive
dreampage said:
Because the moment you treat different activities differently, you automatically sort those activities one above the other
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Especially since they are already horribly imbalanced in regards to credits and to rank gained.

dreampage said:
Only active gameplay counts: button pressing, in other words. If you're inactive for more than a minute, ARX generation stops.
Click to expand...

I don’t think that’s a good idea. The game has way too many situations when “normal” gameplay has you doing literally nothing for extended periods of time (flying out to mission signal sources, flying out to that high-profit station, flying out to those high-paying worlds to map, sitting next to an asteroid waiting for your limpets to finish collecting, …)

The second you start adding conditions to the “x ARX/h” formula, you get back into the complexity rabbit hole you just got yourself out of.
 
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