ANNOUNCEMENT Game Balancing

[greent]

Since this is popular thread, i have to take advantage and mention SCB ammo synthesis 0

 

[G4RY]

Can i just say that new players don't need to make 200+mil an hour to get anywhere in this game... just saying.

If youve managed to get an anaconda within 2 weeks of playing the game... expect to fall flat on your face within a month.

And soon enough you'll be jumping on the "cutTer iz betta than EverYthin" bandwagon.

 

[AlSki]

What's Next?
Next, we intend to adjust combat rewards in the form of bounties and mission payouts. You can expect to hear the planned changes before the date is announced in a post similar to this one.

I'm a bit early but... the Combat missions for Wars are currently all "kill x of y faction" and once you get to Elite combat rank they become more of a time constraint than a skill constraint. e.g. Kill 90 of xyz faction for 9million, instead of kill 1 of xyz for 100,000

This might work when you many hours to burn, but when you juggle work, a family and a BGS, its less feasible.

Is there any chance you could look at this as part of combat reward balancing?
Maybe 90 kills over 3 days, or 9 missions of 10 kills with 1/9 the reward (Cr, Inf and Rep)?
Maybe it could be that the combat rank has to scale e.g. 9 Kills of at least Deadly status, 9 Kills of Spec Ops?

Thanks

 

[Darth Ender]

Can i just say that new players don't need to make 200+mil an hour to get anywhere in this game... just saying.

If youve managed to get an anaconda within 2 weeks of playing the game... expect to fall flat on your face within a month.

you can play forever and manipulate the bgs to your heart's content without ever fighting an alien, fighting another human, or being in any type of danger of losing your ship, 0.

So while you say there's a downside to fast-tracking wealth, the reality is that there absolutely isn't. It 100% benefits every player to make credits effectively worthless by getting as much as possible. Even if they do end up wanting to pvp and such, falling on your face when you're super rich is immensely different from falling on your face when you can barely cover rebuy costs.

 

[Gleitfrosch]

Can i just say that new players don't need to make 200+mil an hour to get anywhere in this game... just saying.

If youve managed to get an anaconda within 2 weeks of playing the game... expect to fall flat on your face within a month.

Excatly, the biggest fun was to watch how my ships improve. be it modules or getting a new ship. Still remember when I finally could afford my cobra III.

The current money earning system takes that away from new players. It is like sidewinder -> X -> Anaconda and then get bored or frustrated becuase you can't fly it and get blown up at every corner.

 

[Gendo Ashina]

You should really think about letting us bring in wanted NPC pilots alive for a considerably large payout compared to normal combat.

Give wanted ships the ability to jettison an escape pod prior to their ship destruction. Then you would need to scoop up and bring to authority contact at a station for a large credit bonus. If the escape pod gets destroyed, you would just get the normal payout for the kill.

This would be an exciting way to give players more choice, better reward combat risk, and in general make the combat loop more interesting.

 

[Vetinari]

And soon enough you'll be jumping on the "cutTer iz betta than EverYthin" bandwagon.

Or the 'mile wide inch deep' one....

 

[[VR] CMDR TYRTHEMIS]

I see that FDEV wants to increase salvage prices, that’s cool, while you’re at it, can you make search and rescue more viable? I’d love a nice bonus for scooping up escape pods before engaging an interceptor. My real life career is going to be search and rescue so I love my multi tool anaconda that can help people in many predicaments but it’s not financially rewarding at all.

 

[Vetinari]

You should really think about letting us bring in wanted NPC pilots alive for a considerably large payout compared to normal combat.

Give the wanted ship the ability to jettison an escape pod prior to their ship destruction that you would need to scoop up and bring to authority contact at a station. If the escape pod gets destroyed, you would just get the normal payout for the kill.

This would be an interesting way to give players more choice, better reward combat risk, and in general make the combat loop more interesting.

With bonuses for delivering straight to Prison Colony or Ship and associated missions for bringing them in alive. I like this one.

 

[Speedcuffs]

I see that FDEV wants to increase salvage prices, that’s cool, while you’re at it, can you make search and rescue more viable? I’d love a nice bonus for scooping up escape pods before engaging an interceptor. My real life career is going to be search and rescue so I love my multi tool anaconda that can help people in many predicaments but it’s not financially rewarding at all.

I think S&R comes under the 'Salvage' umbrella.

 

[G4RY]

Excatly, the biggest fun was to watch how my ships improve. be it modules or getting a new ship. Still remember when I finally could afford my cobra III.

The current money earning system takes that away from new players. It is like sidewinder -> X -> Anaconda and then get bored or frustrated becuase you can't fly it and get blown up at every corner.

Yeah!! I went from Sidey > Adder > AspX which i used for EVERYTHING because its a decent allrounder > Anaconda. Got my Conda around 4 months of playing purely legit.

 

[The Chairmaker]

When discussing risk reward re mining i wouldnt just look at material payout income, but also the risk of carrying certain mined minerals.

If a system is paying optimum value for premium mined products eg Void Opals. Then that should also attract the most Elite NPC Pirates. Players could therefore chose to sell their wares in such systems, and risk being attacked by Pirate Ships with Engineered weapons/shields/ engines etc, possibly said ships will operate in a wing.
This would then provide consistency with Wing assassination missions, in which combat pilots need to fight three or four ships that carry engineering.

Conversely if you chose to sell your wares in a system at galactic average price you just run the risk of getting standard npc pirates.

I also think that going forward Frontier should look at introducing a variation on the Detailed surface scanner probes but one which is used by pirates to locate mining ships in ringed systems ( think of it like an active sonar that ships use to find submarines). Having located a signal of a player ship in ring, pirates either player or npc could then drop into the instance and demand cargo.
This would open up gameplay opportunities for both pirates and also mercenaries protecting miners.

 

[Ozric]

This is a popular opinion, but I disagree with this. Why? Because the vouchers could easily be farmed, it's just nobody's doing this yet simply because they aren't worth much. But as long as things stay the way they are, trying to make getting Codex vouchers into a decent source of income could easily put farming them into "gold rush of the month" territory. The way NSPs spawn and/or vouchers are awarded for them would have to be reworked first.

Having NSPs reliably spawn would indeed be a good start.
I don't think that vouchers should be hugely increased, but at the moment if you are confirming a discovery you get a voucher for just 2,500 credits. Which really doesn't seem like any incentive to go and discover things, unless you are doing it for the sheer hell of doing it (which is why most of us explore anyway, but not too relevant for rebalancing). Even if you make it 10k, it's not that much in the grand scheme of things but will give a nice addition. I just feel they could do with work as opposed to the main rewards, which I'm concerned they will just raise.

 

[[VR] Orodruin]

PS: some values should be adjusted since for example a Hydra takes a hell long time to solo and all that but the idea is there I guess

It also needs to be adjusted to the fact that a Hydra in general requires a non-negligible amount of materials for synthesis and that gathering these materials takes a long time as well with no payout in and off itself. In particular, many will need premium gauss ammunition to make the fight even remotely possible.

 

[Rubbernuke]

You mean the PP UI that updates up to like 30 minutes AFTER a delivery occurs? You can dodge that in so many ways.

In BGS the mission NPCs may send assassins and all similar stuff you'd get on PP when holding merits. If you change the specialized scanners to show what kind of work a player has been doing and current missions they have, you'd achieve similar tracking that you get when you target a player and see their pledge.

The PP UI is as real time as it gets- capitals update very quickly in my experience. But it also maps to cargo (in PP you have either prep or expansion cargoes) and explicit territory (so a Patty pledge in a Hudson expansion is easy to guess what they are doing- can the same be said for a trader you've never seen? No pledge, no intentions etc.)

 

[Rubbernuke]

Absolutely. Bounties are already by far the most effective BGS lever in terms of effort-to-effect on top of being insanely versatile due to the fact that you can gather them in one system and use them to swing influence in another. That second part alone makes them pretty broken - if you control a haz-res anywhere and expand into a system with a long cruise to the station, a carrier with a redemption office parked next to the star will let you push your influence up to control without ever docking at that system's station.

Also make murder more effective. Since you can rack up billions in bounties it should have more influence than now really. And close the assault exploit too.

 

[Thatchinho]

I'm pro Open-only Powerplay and BGS personally. I understand this is a long standing debate and know a few of the reasons it hasn't happened before. Maybe we'll be ready to have that conversation again sometime in the near future.

Hey Bruce,

Might be good to get some clarification on this (if it hasn't already been provided). OOPP - fine. It's the BGS part that I think would benefit from some clarification.

To quote Dav on what the BGS is.

"To us, the whole point of the exercise of all the technical systems in Elite Dangerous that can be branded 'the background simulation' is to try and bring the galaxy to life. It's a really big galaxy, we've got an awfully large number of players, and we need to make sure that the galaxy responds and tracks every single player action, no matter how big or how small."

Is it genuinely your position that people playing in Solo and PG's should be disassociated with the above?

In my observation, calls for open only BGS are rooted specifically in the 'playing' of the BGS. Personally I'm not convinced that the fact that some players 'play' the BGS means that it's more general purpose should be overridden or that it warrants disassociating solo and PG players from that general purpose.

I would suggest that every discussion about this particular topic would be drastically improved by it being absolutely clear about what is being discussed:

1. The BGS in the sense of its general purpose; or
   
   
2. The BGS in the sense of it being 'played'

As it stands, what some people are saying is that A should be Open Only, which again means completely disassociating Solo and PG players from that general purpose. If what they're really talking about is however actually B, then making that clear would move the conversation forwards substantially.

(For reference, I personally only play in open anyway.)

 

[TheSisko]

The Great Unbalance
Born December 2018 - Died November 2020

Haven't gone mining yet on my Xbox Series X. I think I'd do it tonight. For science, you understand.

Its great to see FDEV fixing this but:

Mining has been the most lucrative role within Elite Dangerous for a long time. While this makes perfect sense as pilots find, extract, and transport huge quantities of precious minerals, the gap has become disproportional.

We said this back in early 2019. Mining overshadows everything to the point that hotspots got more updates in 2 months then Piracy has got in 5 years. Even after this overdue round of balancing, I hope FDEV reviews it for all professions, once a year maybe?

 

[[VR] CMDR TYRTHEMIS]

Bruce, this is very minor in comparison to the much larger and more important things in your rebalancing efforts but I sure would like to see smuggling get some attention.

tl;dr -- simple change --> illegal (prohibited) goods should sell at a premium on the black market and not a discount compared to prevailing prices in legal markets. Just have the software check the status -- apply the premium if flagged as illegal (contrasted to simply stolen).

Here's the deal: apparently the black market buys goods at ~75% of the price the same goods are going for on the open market. Apparently illegal goods are in the same pricing schema as stolen goods.... when they shouldn't be.

That 25% discount is perfectly reasonable if the goods are stolen but otherwise legal. To use a current day example, a stolen car/TV/computer/whatever sold on the street will be sold for far less than what it can be purchased for from a legitimate dealer. That's why people buy stolen goods (discount); if it didn't sell for less the buyer would simply purchase it from a legitimate seller. Since both thief and vendor have little or no investment in the goods they don't mind selling at a discount since it's still a hefty profit margin.

On the other hand, goods that are illegal are not available from legitimate dealers. They are hard to obtain. But the people who want them really, really want them... whether it's booze, narcotics, explosives, whatever....it's a seller's market. Buyers are willing to pay a premium for them and it's the premium that makes the initial investment (buying in a legal market) and the risks of fines and intervention in getting them to the black market worthwhile.

Illegal goods should be sold at a premium on the black market, not at a discount. Otherwise it makes more economic sense simply to avoid the risk of fines and sell those goods on the open market in a system where they are legal. Leaving aside any discussion of the slave trade, as it stands now there isn't much incentive to engage in game play as a smuggler -- smuggling illegal goods that aren't also stolen (low or zero cost basis) -- as the smuggler is going to take a loss every time, even if there are no fines involved. It wouldn't take much of a premium to make it viable -- maybe as little as 25%.

can’t agree with this more, smuggling is fun, but even less rewarding than trading normally. If we are truly evaluating the risk to reward aspect of balance. A trader looking to make a bit more should be enticed by the prospect of smuggling, it should also have different levels of risk, whether goods should be cause to blow you up, or simply slap you with a fine. Also, rescuing slaves from a slave trader should be a supported mechanic, I would love the prospect of “freeing slaves” but currently you can only “sell” them on the black market. Impromptu Missions that tell a CMDR “help, my daughter and her friends were abducted by pirates of [a certain faction] go rescue them.” would be fantastic.

 

[Phoenix_Dfire]

I'm pro Open-only Powerplay and BGS personally. I understand this is a long standing debate and know a few of the reasons it hasn't happened before. Maybe we'll be ready to have that conversation again sometime in the near future.

I've always felt that playing in open should get "slighty" more reward that the other modes, mostly because of the risk of attack from other players. As far as PP is concered, I've always throught a hybrid model would suit it better. Make the Preparation part of powerplay available in all modes and the Control and Expansion Parts Open Only. That way both solo and private group players can still earn merits for their faction (but lets be honest, mostly for the modules), while the other two parts will provide meaningful PvP whilst cutting down on the Bots which can ruin the game mode.