ANNOUNCEMENT Game Balancing

[aRJay]

Why not lock that data to the CMDR name?? So whoever will find it and deliver to cartographic wont profit from this (or maybe a little) as the data will already be added to the right owner's name...

The reward for turning in the data should be a reasonable percentage of the full value otherwise pirates will claim there aren’t enough rewards for their chosen role.

 

[aRJay]

So after all, the Danger can be different and come from everywhere. And that's what the game is called – Dangerous Elite. So we all knew what we needed to be prepared for. Namely, to different Dangers (and with force majeure).

And I thought the game name was related to the rank.

 

[F4fred]

And? Do we need to adjust the game balance every time someone is wrong online? Do you think they'll somehow complain less when they lose their first anaconda if it took them months to earn instead of weeks?

It only breaks the "game" because at its core the game is nothing but a giant treadmill you run on to earn stuff. Changing the speed of the treadmill will never change the fact that once you've earned all the stuff there's nothing to do but keep running.

You're literally describing the same problem with the game that I am - the game must always strive to keep player progression as slow as possible because people leave once they realise there's not much of a game at all beyond grinding for stuff. The only difference is you see it as fundamentally unchangeable for some reason.

You're missing the point, obviously the game world doesn't exist when players aren't around, the point is that it doesn't even try to pretend that isn't the case. The world of Elite: Dangerous has zero internal consistency because it's all built around "keeping pilot's federation pilots away from being rich for as long as possible". It's the Truman Show in space. Everything is implemented with the barest minimum of effort and it's a large part of what makes the game get boring quickly. As an example of what I'm talking about, the first time you're hauling cargo and an NPC turns up saying "there's the ship with the big haul I heard about", you might think "oh wow, word got out about what I'm doing and pirates tracked me down, maybe next time I can be sneakier and avoid detection" but by the tenth time that happens you've worked out that it's literally just a trigger that goes "IF cargo THEN pirate" and it doesn't matter who you are or what you're hauling. The whole game is like this and it doesn't need to be.

Have you genuinely never stopped to consider that maybe the game being boring once you take away the gear treadmill is the problem that should be addressed?

You think the game is ever going to change in a fundamental way? I would call that a triumph of hope over experience. Maybe in Elite 5 (Elite Plausible?) it will. No the best we will get is tinkering like this, which may help our friend with the T9 not to rush headlong into buying a ship that they haven’t got the experience to equip or handle or it may not. We shall see.

No I do get the failings of the sim and could easily list a dozen more. Playing ED does require a large dollop of suspension of disbelief. Trouble is can’t find anything that does it better in the open world, sandbox type of game. There are narrative driven RPG type games where you follow a story through with a side order of go off and do your own thing between quests to improve your ship which do it better, at least for the narrative bits, which of course you only do once. The side order missions tend to be of the if x then y happens as per ED.

To answer your final question, no I haven’t considered that. I have finished the gear treadmill and found enough in the game to keep me interested despite the limitations. If I hadn’t I would have stopped playing. The gear fest is what drives a lot of MMO’s though and I can’t stand games like that. Everyone is waiting for the next game changing thing, which true you can get for free if you grind for several months or for just £49.95 here is a pack with all you need to get it right now! No thanks!

 

[Meresiga]

What you talking about is rubbish. You talking about a destruction of CMDRs carriers in one simple step... There is no word to describe people like you worth repeating here... Are you also a someone hunting down defenceless Sidewinders??

I never entered Open mode in the entire game, so I didn't meet any real players, and I didn't kill anyone. Although - it could have been in self-defense.

 

[BL1P]

Great job, FDev, you outdid yourselves. Just more nerfs with only 2 day's notice, instead of first buffing other activities as people have asked.
In an attempt to do some trading with my Fleet Carrier, I bought 4000 LTDs for 1.4M right before the last huge less-than-24-hour-notice economy nerf, planning to make a margin of 100k ferrying them to the sell location. That unannounced update screwed me over completely, so I've been waiting to see if FDev would revert some part of it so I could finally sell my cargo. BUT NO, LET'S MAKE IT WORSE. Now there's an artificial cap of 700k? Thanks for the 2.8 BILLION loss.

Edit: I wouldn't be upset if I took such a loss as part of the game. But when the devs artificially alter the economy while you're basically in the middle of a transaction, it really sucks. FDev, if you see this and there's any restitution you could give me for what happened, I'd really appreciate it.

I would cut my losses now if I was you.
I think the payouts are still too high, unless they plan to make 1hr of res shooting pay ~250mil an hour, which I doubt.
I expect mining prices to drop again. Sell now before you loose more.

 

[F4fred]

While I agree that smaller ship handle much better I am fine with player choice. I still fly Cobra and I use my other bigger ships for just specific tasks. Player chose T-9, player failed... Nobody's fault but player's own mistake. And let them make those mistakes, they will never learn otherwise...

I agree it is the players mistake, but as the post pointed out they don’t see it that way they blame the game. This is a
problem for the rest of us. Player get disillusioned and quits after a few weeks blaming the game. They now think they have wasted their money and tell all their friends not to buy it and post on the internet what a poor game it is. That puts people off buying which means less revenue for FDev and less incentive for them to improve the game.

 

[skananote]

I agree it is the players mistake, but as the post pointed out they don’t see it that way they blame the game. This is a
problem for the rest of us. Player get disillusioned and quits after a few weeks blaming the game. They now think they have wasted their money and tell all their friends not to buy it and post on the internet what a poor game it is. That puts people off buying which means less revenue for FDev and less incentive for them to improve the game.

You are correct but IN MY VERY PERSONAL OPINION this game is done deal... Looking at the current development Fdev paints the picture of being not fully aware what is going on around them. We shall see what are they going to provide in the coming weeks but as you said: "You think the game is ever going to change in a fundamental way?" - it is not and fundamental change is required in order to fix years of underlying issues that never been touched... I get that my opinion will cause a bit of a storm here but that is how I feel. I also understand that Fdev is trying to recover a bit of a good PR before releasing next DLC, is it going to be enough, only time will tell...

 

[Scoob101]

I agree it is the players mistake, but as the post pointed out they don’t see it that way they blame the game. This is a
problem for the rest of us. Player get disillusioned and quits after a few weeks blaming the game. They now think they have wasted their money and tell all their friends not to buy it and post on the internet what a poor game it is. That puts people off buying which means less revenue for FDev and less incentive for them to improve the game.

I get the logic, but I think we're a bit past that now. The game is 6 years old and the state of the core game is such that Frontier have a really tough time applying bug fixes without breaking parts of the game. That isn't likely to change, so some pragmatism is in order.

If at the end of this process we have a financial incentive to engage in combat, and mining is still relevant (and the PWA is actually fixed!) then that will be a big improvement.

We shall see what are they going to provide in the coming weeks but as you said: "You think the game is ever going to change in a fundamental way?" - it is not and fundamental change is required in order to fix years of underlying issues that never been touched...

Exactly. And that Fundamental change isn't going to happen, there's zero incentive for Frontier to touch it. Lobby for truly game-breaking bugs to be fixed and server-side tweaks to the credit rewards for certain activities, that's the best you can hope for.

 

[Alexymus70]

I really happy that FD wants to fix mining.
IMO would be nice if devs would play their game and realize what is broken.

• When you land in a hotspot, PWA not showing asteroids with juice.
• If you scan constantly some of the rock will light up, but almost never find material in them what hotspot suggests.
• If you happy to find one, yield is unbalanced, normally 1 or max 2 chunk extracts if no LTD. LTD 3-5.
• Tritium what you require thousands are earnable low AF, give so many as the broken LTD times and lower the price. FC owners need them for fuel. MUCH!

Suggested fixes:

• reseed the material content according to the hotspot type, now it seems totally random
• let miners find desirable amount of yellow rocks... fix the PWA to show them correctly
• let the deposits number be at least 1-3 per shining asteroids
• yield 1-4 chunk from every deposit

I dont really care the material prices tho, you can nerf then as you wish, i liked the LTD mining from SSDs because of the fun not the income.
When i decide to spend my time on mining i want quality time in the ED universe, money is secondary option. ( Dont get me wrong, its important tho )

 

[oztrich]

Part of the problem is that the economy is artificially rigged to encourage/force certain playstyles. Take Painite as an example:

Painite is "Highly sought after by socialites throughout occupied space ", it's a hot commodity (slight pun intended). Many stations will buy it from you for a high price relative to other commodities....and yet, nobody will sell it. That's counterintuitive to how the market as a whole works. There are a number of commodities like that, but if we were going for "realism" that would be one of the most highly traded things with a spread of prices that would encourage long trips full of cargo to buy low and sell high. Or you could spend time mining it if that was your preferred approach. This opens up multiple routes to achieve the same thing (sell Painite for sweet sweet profit), whilst making the game itself more immersive.

And you can extend that to materials. Why can't I buy iron? Why can't I find/mine iron and then sell it for a profit to players who are desperate to use it for engineering or synthesis? It's a maguffin to force a particular gameplay aspect which runs counter to other gameplay aspects such as the market. If you opened up materials as commodities you'd have genuine mobile markets (fleet carriers) going around providing stocks near CZ, RES or engineers (I'm not advocating removing engineers specifically, I think that aspect is pretty cool). It could become a vibrant sub-economy that allows FC owners to follow a path as a shopkeeper. Or something like that.

 

[Scoob101]

Part of the problem is that the economy is artificially rigged to encourage/force certain playstyles. Take Painite as an example:

Painite is "Highly sought after by socialites throughout occupied space ", it's a hot commodity (slight pun intended). Many stations will buy it from you for a high price relative to other commodities....and yet, nobody will sell it. That's counterintuitive to how the market as a whole works. There are a number of commodities like that, but if we were going for "realism" that would be one of the most highly traded things with a spread of prices that would encourage long trips full of cargo to buy low and sell high. Or you could spend time mining it if that was your preferred approach. This opens up multiple routes to achieve the same thing (sell Painite for sweet sweet profit), whilst making the game itself more immersive.

And you can extend that to materials. Why can't I buy iron? Why can't I find/mine iron and then sell it for a profit to players who are desperate to use it for engineering or synthesis? It's a maguffin to force a particular gameplay aspect which runs counter to other gameplay aspects such as the market. If you opened up materials as commodities you'd have genuine mobile markets (fleet carriers) going around providing stocks near CZ, RES or engineers (I'm not advocating removing engineers specifically, I think that aspect is pretty cool). It could become a vibrant sub-economy that allows FC owners to follow a path as a shopkeeper. Or something like that.

I think the underlying problem here is that players are going in with an expectation that there has been an attempt to actually design a simulation of an economy in the game, and therefore people are understandably expressing disappointment that the simulation is not working or doesn't make logical sense.

I question that - I don't think the framework in the game which controls prices is anything like a simulation of an economy, and therefore changes to that simplistic framework will always be unsatisfying in some way because the simulation is so badly incomplete. The expectation here is too high.

Rather on focus on things which cannot and will not be fixed, how about discussing what can be? Like the prices that people expect to get from certain activities in order to shift the Credit earning activities away from just mining.

 

[BraVo]

One noob question to mining: Yesterday evening I was mining LTDs and tried to sell them on different stations with a high demand. Actually no station gives me more than 200k where Inara shows me a price of about 700k with nearly the same demand. The Galaxy average is currently at 86k. That doesn't match the Balancing Message in this thread by making a cap at 700k.

Could the balancing be the reason or is there something else, that could drop my prices?

 

[Maymo]

One noob question to mining: Yesterday evening I was mining LTDs and tried to sell them on different stations with a high demand. Actually no station gives me more than 200k where Inara shows me a price of about 700k with nearly the same demand.

Could the balancing be the reason or is there something else, that could drop my prices?

Everybody is probably panic selling at the moment due to the changing markets...this will often drive the price down before you have chance to sell.

I’m currently trying a bit of bulk trading to see how things are going, people are mass buying palladium and gold before even the in-game market prices have chance to catch up! It’s chaos...

Think I’ll just avoid commodities for a few weeks!

 

[oztrich]

I think the underlying problem here is that players are going in with an expectation that there has been an attempt to actually design a simulation of an economy in the game, and therefore people are understandably expressing disappointment that the simulation is not working or doesn't make logical sense.

I question that - I don't think the framework in the game which controls prices is anything like a simulation of an economy, and therefore changes to that simplistic framework will always be unsatisfying in some way because the simulation is so badly incomplete. The expectation here is too high.

Rather on focus on things which cannot and will not be fixed, how about discussing what can be? Like the prices that people expect to get from certain activities in order to shift the Credit earning activities away from just mining.

It's nothing to do with the simulation of an economy really. Painite could easily be made tradeable and have a range of prices. You could mine it for free and sell for pure profit, or buy low and sell high for less profit (but you avoid having to mine, if you don't want to play that way). Having closed loops where you can only get something one way is purely to force a specific type of play. That's why you end up with the creep of mining being by far the most lucrative way to earn credits compared to anything else.

It has been suggested that something like this is being looked at anyway, where there will be larger ranges of prices for some commodities. Not specific to Painite (that was just my example of something that forces a certain way of playing), but maybe it's a thing that can be fixed ultimately.

 

[Loretharn]

I hope this is the right thread to write about an issue due to the new balancing.

While metal prices went up, so e.g. you cannot buy palladium under 40000 Credits at a refinery station, the prices for selling metals at hi-tech stations stayed the same, e.g. you can sell palladium for 12000 Credits only. Should not the metal prices at the demanding stations go up even further?

 

[skananote]

I hope this is the right thread to write about an issue due to the new balancing.

While metal prices went up, so e.g. you cannot buy palladium under 40000 Credits at a refinery station, the prices for selling metals at hi-tech stations stayed the same, e.g. you can sell palladium for 12000 Credits only. Should not the metal prices at the demanding stations go up even further?

Hehe, yes it should by pure logic but looks like long list of issues just starting to unravel...

 

[Florenus]

It's really not. They'll mess around with incomes again and again and again and it'll never be good enough because it's not addressing the underlying issue. Space legs will bring people back for a bit, just as every other big feature has done but eventually the novelty will wear off and everyone will drift away again because the core issues the game has had since launch continue to go unacknowledged.

We can have plenty of things on top to sink earning into (the more the better), but if the core of the game is unbalanced, it will always fall short of expectations. And the core of the game is Trade, combat and exploration.
I've played this game for a long time - but I get bored when trade earnings are either too large, so there's no incentive to look for some other solution, or there's simply no sense in trading anything else than few selected commodities.

 

[Deleted member 38366]

On the high-value ores that were introduced in V3.0 in general :

IMHO there'd be nothing wrong with having something sell for i.e. 1.7M Cr/ton, be that due to Faction States creating dynamic prices or other factors driving prices up eventually (i.e. persistently unsatisfied demand creeping prices up, so they become interesting eventually).

However, I'd have placed such ores into Deep Space and make them a Resource that actually can be depleted, i.e. via shrinking Hotspot size for ease of purpose.
Thus, requiring Exploration, Mining and increasingly some logistical effort to be a successful Deep Space miner hauling in various types of very valuable "Unobtanium".
Carriers then later would have nicely complemented the logistic part.

Instead, it's the exact same Hotspots found everywhere, 100LY from SOL is no different than some never-before visited F-Mass Code monster of a System 45000LY away with a huge amount of Resources.
In my mind, things shouldn't be this way.

I'd prefer to scan some Asteroid Ring 30000LY out and maybe suddenly see Hotspot labels I've never even heard of, making it very valuable Discovery and Information I can decide to share or exploit myself.

Alternatively, I'd love to see my Prospector hitting some Core somewhere far in Deep Space and get surprised by Core type I'm not familiar with, requiring delicate handling depending on what it is. Might be synthetic (Alien Artifacts), a risky thing (a highly unstable compound) or anything SciFi.

All that would have avoided (at least require a whole lot more effort) than almost everyone cramping into the "meta Hotspot of the Galaxy" conveniently near or even inside the Bubble.

PS.
All that aside, obviously we still lack Planetary commercial Mining as an alternative to Deep Space Mining. That's long overdue now and should have been a thing at Horizons release already. Total no-brainer.

 

[Maymo]

I hope this is the right thread to write about an issue due to the new balancing.

While metal prices went up, so e.g. you cannot buy palladium under 40000 Credits at a refinery station, the prices for selling metals at hi-tech stations stayed the same, e.g. you can sell palladium for 12000 Credits only. Should not the metal prices at the demanding stations go up even further?

This kind of thing happens whenever FD makes changes to the market prices. The market will struggle for a few days to accommodate the change as it tries to catch up and prices on third party apps can't be trusted...

On the other hand you can also take advantage and make some good coin. It's a good time for Pythons as most of the markets at large pad stations get battered by Cutters and T9's, outposts and also surface ports fly under the radar...

 

[limpetdwarf]

Yeah, if the game wasn't so close to being great I probably wouldn't care. I really wish I could see metrics for player retention and satisfaction because aside from the handful of super vocal forum posters who simultaneously hold the contradictory positions of "the game is fine actually, don't play it if you don't like it" and "all the biggest ships need to cost more and careers need to pay less so that we can trap players for as long as possible" I don't know anyone who isn't frustrated with how the game turned out.

I really love this statement

However, this handful of posters may yet be frustrated with the game like everyone else, only for other issues than an assumed imbalanche in the ways for players to make money in the game and for ideas about what should happen to players according to their income.

I think the developers would be well advised to put their balanching plans on hold and to maybe take back the latest pimp. These plans are fundamentally flawed because pimping player income one way or another is not going to change the problem that ED is no more than a magnificient and empty shell, a great framework that, if filled, would make a game that is a hell of lot of fun to play.

That framework is even extremely well made, and I think it will get much better with the addition of Odessey in terms of being a framework. Some issues like hotspots not being hotspots, too much repetitive grinding, the system scanner not working automatically, some parts of the interface being awful, not being able to use all input methods simultaneously, problems with getting multiple players into the same instance, certain activities yeilding not as much income as others, crucial instruments moving out of sight during combat, etc., those are merely technical issues that could be fixed. Fixing them would make the framework even better.

After so many years, the framework is somewhat matured, and now would be a good time to start filling it while fixing the remaining issues. Quests, created by developers and by players, might be a very good way to do that, having all the information required to play it within the game might be another (and quests could help a great deal with that), and letting players have some kind of influence on the galaxy through their gameplay is yet another. And I'm sure there are more ideas than that to fill the wonderful framework we have.

Players aren't going to keep living in a dead place, no matter how much you pimp their income.