A lot has happened in the short amount of time since then. We've collected and analysed your feedback and are happy to confirm that Anti-Xeno combat and Powerplay (the most frequent topics in your replies) will be part of our long term plans as well as many other aspects of Elite Dangerous that were mentioned.
If you're able to add frequently mentioned things to the rebalance list then for all that's good in the world
add smuggling to that list.
Do not operate under the assumption current smuggling rewards are sufficient.
Smuggling currently DOES NOT WORK, and offers no rewards in almost all cases.
I know the -25% debuff issue was acknowledged, but I don't think it's understood how much it affects smuggling. This isn't a "reduced profits" issue, this is 25% off the raw cost of goods when selling to the black market. That is, the only way to turn even a minimal profit is to make
over 25% profit on the purchase price. That's only found on the most expensive commodities such as Nerve Agents, occasionally Narcotics and Illegal Rares, and even then that means you only break even at that point. Everything else is guaranteed to spin a loss.
I can understand the want for smuggling to be substantially different to standard trading, but I also think a false assumption is being made that Smuggling actually works.
Smuggling
does not work. It must be part of this balance.
Bounties
Bounties from NPCs will see significant increases from approximately four times as much for the highest paying ones to ten times as much for the lower paying ones. Please note that the number of credits shown immediately in your HUD when you destroy a criminal ship won't display the newly increased amounts. This will need to wait until we're certain of the final numbers. Accurate bounty figures can be found in the Transactions tab in your left panel.
I notice here you're just talking about "NPCs" generally. I think the nuance is missed in the different difficulty of NPCs, specifically Engineered NPC pirates at Threat 5/6 Pirate Activity sites.
The issue with combat payouts is not the general payouts, but that the hard targets pay out insufficiently for the increase in difficulty. A vanilla Anaconda is substantially easier than a fully engineered Vulture NPC. Yet an Anaconda will reward anywhere up to 300-400k in bounty, where the Engineered NPC vulture will only earn roughly 50-100k. This is back-to-front.
I can only highly recommend that the overall bounty payout tables get revisited, and that the discrepancy between engineered and non-engineered targets be addressed. To spitball, I would suggest that an engineered variant pay 10 times what it's vanilla counterpart would, using pre-balance figures as a guide. (i.e 500k for an engineered vulture, up to 3-4m for a fully engineered conda/similar.
Solo Combat Missions
We're also increasing the payouts for Massacre and Assassination missions.
Assassination missions, sure, that's fine, but increasing payouts for Massacres? That's pure insanity!
Cross-stacking massacre missions was the only activity which could compete with pre-balance mining incomes. Last balance iteration you nixed mining profits, expected. But now you want to
increase massacre mission payouts? That's the exact opposite of what needs to happen. Massacre payouts need to be either:
- drastically reduced; or
- cross-faction stacking be removed; or
- rework massacres into USS-based wave combat scenarios so they can't cross-stack, rather than be arbitrary kill counts.
First two are the only feasible ones I imagine, if tweaking numbers is the plan right now, but the third is really the main target you should be aiming for.
On an aside, WRT AX Combat payouts, I do note that Thargoid commodities got a buff at Betancourt Base, which is welcomed and actually pretty considered. But the issue of Thargoid tissue sampling being horribly broken is still extant. This is a great change, but when less than 25% of research limpets actually return a biopsy, it's a pretty pointless exercise.
issues.frontierstore.net