So you want Fdev to go out of business. Just say that then. Because that would effectively kill the game, alot of us worked very hard for the stuff you're suggesting to wipe and we seek not to do it again.That would be equally unfair towards all existing customers.
I'm all in for resetting credits back to 1000 for everyone, and pilots federation ranks that depend on earnings (Exploration, Trade).
Maybe lose all stored materials, ships, FCs and modules. Keeping only the ship one's currently flying, with the loadout untouched.
Engineer access, system permits, combat rank, superpower ranks, exploration 1st discoveries/mappings all should stay intact.
Of course, I'm not expecting any of this to happen, the crying and whining would be apocalyptic.
But I'd welcome the kind of balance pass I outlined above.
ANNOUNCEMENT Game Balancing
Lol, no!
Just like I said, I won't expect any ot that to happen, and your response is exactly one of the many reasons why.
it's a bit of an extreme suggestion.Lol, no!
Just like I said, I won't expect any ot that to happen, and your response is exactly one of the many reasons why.
I would suggest a lot of folk don't like mining.
So why mine then?
And there's your answer: because credits.
Exactly what I was saying right from the beginning but was shouted over by pro-nerf zealots...
Precisely the reason why I have fully kitted Python for mining parked in the station near Painite hot spot... I would like to repurpose it into murderboat and blow stuff up but I'll wait a bit to see what else FDev will break apart from mining...
That's called Community Goals. You should try them, when they come around. Today's a break, but still...
I also want players to add to that content. I remember there being a link for that, but I'm not sure it's proactively monitored...
Community goals suck. They never payed out, and the last time I tried, the event was so badly made that it put me totally off. I might take a look at Odessey when it's released --- or maybe not. Odessey probably won't fix the boringness; they can crank the selling prices of minerals all they want, and that won't fix anything either.
And what are players who haven't arrived at the end of the game yet supposed to do?
Leave the selling prices of minerals alone and do some substantial improvements instead ... Maybe start with the scanners/hotspots and see what happens. If you do that, I'll come back and do some mining.
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I have no problem with rebalancing, but i think some commanders should probably be reimbursed with credits from lost trade first. Having put many thousands of hours into the game I can tell you there are still many carrier owners with thousands of tonnes of diamonds in storage from when the bottom fell out of the diamond market a few months back. We've been patiently waiting for the value to go up again to sell our stock and maybe turn a profit (as it ran like clockwork before) weekly infact the price would peak and fall but its been flat around half the price and consistently less since then. Can you consider allowing us to sell this now defunct commodity maybe at the cost we paid before you implement more changes (1.2 mill per tonne wouldn't be unreasonable for something that fetched 1.7 on a good day) Or why would i now turn to mining/dealing in opals if i just lost 3 billion in trade and you could also decide overnight that opals from this point forward are only worth 300'000 and nevermind whatever you might have paid for them!! Carriers aren't cheap to run and this kinda feels like a kick in the teeth for anyone trying to offset that cost trading. Or am i missing the realism of gambling in the stockmarket?!!
Yes, I think so. The value of your investment may go down as well as up, etc.
Look at it this way, if you've got a hold full of 25k of Diamonds and have to sell them for the 700k max Frontier stated for LTDs in the first post, that's still 17.5 billion credits, which will fund a max upkeep carrier for the next decade (or a basic trade carrier probably for the rest of your life) and still leave you plenty spare to buy ships, even if you never earn another credit ever.
Once you get to the sort of ultra-wealth where you can be gambling on the price of kilotons of precious gems, I very much doubt Frontier really cares whether you have 10 billion, 20 billion or 50 billion credits worth of combined cash and commodities (on top of your actual carrier + ship fleet), as it makes absolutely no difference to how much you can actually buy. Sure, it hurts to have 20 billion when you did have 40 billion, or whatever, but it's only your score with the rest of the multi-billionaires club rather than anything affecting what you can do in game.
(I mean, I have far less wealth than that, to the point where I couldn't buy 25k of gemstones for my carrier in the first place at any reasonable price, and it's still been four years since I actually had too few credits to buy something I did want ... so it's really not people like us that the credit balancing is for- it's for the people who don't yet have carriers)
If you invest in Opals at 1M credits, to sell later at 1.3M credits, you're getting paid 300k per tonne for the convenience of the miner not having to do the work finding a top sell spot ... and that pay is mainly for the risk that you'll actually only get 900k/tonne for them, because 300k/tonne is over ten times what the (low-risk, near-guaranteed profit) NPC trading will pay.
There aren't many high-risk high-reward activities in the game, and this is definitely one which should be that (and not no-risk high-reward, which it would be if Frontier always gave so much notice you could definitely sell up)
They've given some hints in the first post about some categories of trade goods which it might be worth grabbing cheaply now to sell on when the price goes up, too. Again a risk - the price might not go up for that specific trade good - but a relatively safe one as long as you don't pay too much over the odds to start with.
Community Goals? That's a miserable example of proper quests. Why? Because they are all temporary situations. I'm talking about available quests that any player can sign up whenever he feels like it. With interaction. With proper cut-scenes, speech, and dialogue/action choices. Not a stupid linear mission of hoarding cargo from one place to another.
Ex: A mission to transport sensible cargo from A to B (long distance), together with a group of shady and annoying mercs that are supposed to protect it. But someone else comes after you, with a colonial ship and many fighters, because that cargo is really something very very important. And one of the mercs is a traitor that sabotages your ship. And the cargo has a mind of its own on where to go, disturbing your hyper-jumps. And another one of the mercs could fancy you and do something really stupid for love. You would need to choose how to deal with the situation (different choices available), and the adventure would develop differently according to it. (deliver the cargo and mercs to the guy chasing you, try to hide somewhere, try to outrun them, try to go where the cargo wants to, hell, even try to face them on, leading them into an chaotic combat zone.)
Like a said before, Elite Dangerous is just a sandbox.
I am not sure that that many players like mining, I think the majority that mine think it is the way to gain huge amounts of credits and some fuel for FCs.
It is not the most unpleasant activity in the game but I wouldn't want to do it that often.
The thing is if people liked mining for its own sake then they wouldn't be as bothered by it providing fewer credits.
Community Goals are supposed to be mainly about completing the task for the benefit of the community the earnings are a bonus, asking them to pay out big time is like asking DIY SOS to earn the team a profit.
What end of the game? The joy of Elite is that it doesn't end.
I agree...
I think it’s by design because ED doesn’t have an immediate story mode to follow or an end game boss to conquer.
I’ve always felt that the lions share of the games content is in the players career and ship progression which is mostly determined by credit balance...
How long it takes to go from the classic ‘Sidewinder to A rated Anaconda’ provides a very crude baseline for this.
I surmise that if a player is capable of going from Sidewinder to Anaconda within a small number of play sessions that they bypass the lions share of the games content.
Given that the game does currently let a player do this I feel a credit rebalance is very overdue, although early indications are leading me to think that the hammer isn’t going to drop nearly hard enough...
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Two things first.
Bruce, thank you for opening this discussion. That means a lot to many of us. We can only hope that real, meaningful, two-way feedback is going to become the way things are going forward, and I am sure you realize that both players and FDev will not only benefit from, but do also require, such a change. I cannot stress my gratitude enough to get it across, and I know I can't stress it enough for the rest of this post to come off as particularly happy with FDev. Understand please that this post isn't written out of ire, that I'm not going anywhere, that I'm not leaving the game. Even with everything I'm about to get into, Elite: Dangerous really is incredible to me. This is probably my first major post here on the forums. Might be my last - I'm not much for forums, but I figure now is a really good time if ever. I do hope you read this.
The rest of you - look. There are 37 pages in this thread as I'm typing this. There will be even more by the time I'm done. Yes, some of you will have mentioned what I'm about to say first, or mentioned the same solutions. I'm not going to go looking and quote you all - I don't have the time, but I do apologize. You all know who you are, and yes you all deserve individual credit. But there's just no way.
OK, let's get into the meat of this thing....
I love Elite: Dangerous. I really, really do. Perhaps my favorite game of all time, perhaps not. It's something that I was looking for, for decades. I'm sure that's true of many of us here. At the same time though, I'm not a super-successful CMDR. I've been playing on and off for more than a year, got around 570 hours in the game. I've never done CQC yet, I don't own a Drake yet, I've got less than 500M CR at the moment, I'm not a bigshot zeno hunter (well, maybe yet, we'll see). I'm just a guy who runs a small squadron, that I'd like to see grow, who does exploring and combat and powerplay and who's working slowly at the grind to engineer his three ships and eventually, to get that Cutter I'm dreaming of squishing bugs and CMDR Corvettes and NPCs alike in. Part of the reasoning for my status? I honestly don't really enjoy mining. Another part? Exploring cuts me off from the CMDRs I want to play with. And that drives them away from the game, because they (understandably) look at it as an MMO. A social experience.
For me, half or more of the game is broken. Let's count the ways.
- PP isn't working. The balancing encourages not only turtling but also is a credit sink (and probably shouldn't be, since that discourages more players who haven't got a huge bank from participating!). The opportunity for massive wars and a dynamic landscape is there, if the balancing were changed to encourage player agency instead of the status quo. The numbers shouldn't put such weight on avoiding conflict. Also, Empire should probably lose a power, and can we get that weekly drain bug fixed?
- Engineering is a real crawl on multiple levels. The best ways to get most mats? Find x place. Go around collect all the things. Log out. Log in. Go around. Rinse and repeat. The best engineering options? 1-2 realistic ones for most modules. Functionally, there aren't a wide variety interesting ship builds out of engineering, which was a big part of the draw to engineering (by intent, I think). Engineering needs more and better mat obtaining (missions?) and more and better modules.
- A central module (pulse wave) for mining is currently broken to the point of almost uselessness. This leaves, realistically, laser mining as the primary income source for mining right now, and further means that any changes to the mining economy are putting the cart before the horse. If the engine on the car is broken, you don't want to look at fixing the climate control system until the engine runs.
- Xeno hunting basically requires a significant bank to draw upon because the rewards are so low compared to the expenditure. Even if you have a wing and a low-cost, engineered, specced, effective, set of ships, you're going to go get one and be done. This really should feel rewarding above anything else because of the huge amount of skill and risk that's baked in. Instead, it economically (distinct from gameplay) is the experience of being the local exterminator.
- PVE Combat, the thing I enjoy most of all? Yeah I'm barely going to make any money doing it. Sometimes I won't even make my costs back. I'm skilled enough (there's always room for improvement), and my ship specced out well enough, that the issue comes down to luck thanks to the payouts being so low. Will the targets that I can handle be available when I transition from supercruise? Or will it just be empty? Or perhaps they'll all be elite ranked and I know I'm not engineered enough (which is kind of ridiculous, frankly, that I've had to come to the expectation that high-ranked NPCs will be engineered to hell when it's something players have to work for, but maybe I'm just salty on this). I have no idea why I often see multiple big 3s on one side in a low-intensity CZ. A huge chunk of people have combat as their first gameplay priority, as far as I can tell - and they're either broke or bored and ganking! That's a remarkably bad space for a big part of the game to be in.
- Networking and instancing does not work properly, and issues with blocking functionality is tied into this. This one is ridiculous and as a core component of the game, it NEEDS to be fixed post-haste. I really don't think I have to expound further here.
- Non-CQC, non-gank PVP is not profitable at all. It really should be, especially in PP. Yes, we know you're concerned about exploits, but really, some folks have legitimately earned 50+B CR. I don't think there's a reasonable argument that exploits should really be a high-priority issue.
- I can't give someone a leg up, get them out of tiny stuff and hand them a build that works, maybe a Viper or a Cobra, then help them work on their skills. This is a barrier to entry to some folks, for whom the frustration of the learning cliff is going to turn them off the game entirely. There's really no good reasoning for this. If I want to spend CR on another player, let me spend CR on another player. Again, yeah, a few bad apples are going to find exploits in it but really benefiting the playerbase is more important than shoving down the odd few. There are ways and means to determine if someone is trying to enrich themselves (one of my squadron mates and I live in the same house. Therefore, same IP. If you put in trading and it looks like I'm enriching an alt, have a voice call in game. Hear two people, move on.); and you could tax player-to-player transactions anyway to make it a negative sum.
- We haven't had much in the way of meaningful choices of time-sensitive stuff. Thargoid war has slowed down to nothing. CGs (which were gone for ages; why??) are always one-at-a-time, though of course you've given us multiple options within one of them. But this is a big galaxy. More than one thing should be happening at any given time.
- Exploration's intersection with the social reality of an MMO needs to be given more thought. Yes, it is immersive, and realistic, to be out in the black for weeks at a time. But that drives people away from the activities they want to do, because you are locked into that ship and that context until you take your ship back to civilization - which could be weeks later. Exploration needs a telepresence option. Or something like it.
- CQC really needs love: I want this game mode. I don't want to be soured by a half-baked experience in it.
- There are various issues with the background economy regarding trucking and commodities. It just doesn't feel alive.
Mining as a first priority doesn't make logical sense and leads me (and seemingly others, if this thread is evidence) to worry that FDev has no interest in fixing core, underlying issues hampering my fun and driving away many potential new and longtime established players. Credit rebalance makes sense. But putting mining first creates the concern that rebalance, bug fixes, and the rest, is not as important as ensuring the new player credit grind is wherever FDev wishes it to be. In other words, the potential implication that I and others on the thread are seeing is that longstanding issues and existing players are not as important to FDev as new player experience.
Please address this. Thanks.
Yep. I like mining. I used to do a fair bit even before it was overhauled, it never payed well, didn't matter.
I just think (some) people are drawn, (maybe even feel forced) to do mining for credits and progress even if they don't like it.
I welcome the coming balancing, because (fingers crossed) you can do something you enjoy, and earn credits and progress.
Naysayers: Last two CGs I earned a billion credits for each. One was through carrier sales, one was through pure combat (and nothing to do with FCs, before that comes up!).
Edit: I'll repeat this again, they are twiddling a few credit acquisition dials, not rebuilding the gently caressing game. Pfft.
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