ANNOUNCEMENT Game Balancing

[redthorne]

I hear a lot about skill vs reward. What I don't hear is anyone saying a definite "there will be a way to earn the same income per hour, across all of the major playstyles, as a baseline."

There needs to be a balance of credits per hour earned, that is the same, for all playstyles. Regardless of skill as a baseline! If I want to earn xxxx credits per hour shooting ships, I should be able to. Same for trade. Same for exploration. Same for any type of way I want to shoot at rocks. That needs to be a baseline minimum. Otherwise you end up punishing people who do not want to play one of the playstyles, for what basically amounts to "not playing the game the way the developers want." And that baseline minimum should allow enough income to advance at a reasonable rate, which again...needs to be defined by developers. If our new pilots HAVE to work for 6 months to get a Conda, you are going to lose players.

Now if you want to richen the pot for those who do have more skill, go right ahead. Want to deliver all that Painite to a troubled pirate system? You'll get a little more, but you're also going to get shot up. Want to smuggle stuff? Same thing. See where I'm going? Things other than prices increases/decreases can be added to games to help guide the economy.

 

[Zieman]

They're both similar in the fact that your efforts can be undermined in both but with the ability to do those things by hiding, you may not be able to do anything about it.

I personally also think that both should be made open-only. If you're brave enough to oppose my power/faction, you better damn be ready for consequences.

That's completely missing the point. Like I said, the BGS is dreadfully too fickle, it really should stay in the backfround and not be something single players or even small groups can game easily.
And with blocking, no crossplay, instance limits and different timezones, all that talk of 'facing conseguences' is empty.

Powerplay should be decoupled completely from the BGS, and could be open only. Having pledged should nullify all blocking and friend lists alike when considering matchmaking server.

 

[Rubbernuke]

@Bruce Garrido

Can you also get Dav to look at Archon Delianes R5 bonus- fines and bounties are removed (as advertised) but they also remove all BGS impact from those negative actions (unlike the positive BGS modifiers other powers enjoy). It means the bonus is in effect a burden and broken.

 

[Bruce G]

For players talking about smuggling - we're don't intend to change the rewards for illegal goods just yet. First, we'd like to have Authorities deliver more dynamic fines based on local conditions, not just the galactic average.

Until then, we risk it becoming essentially the same as regular trade but more powerful and we'd prefer it to be a 'higher risk, higher pay' alternative rather than strictly better.

 

[Ozric]

@Bruce Garrido A secondary point on the Smuggling, it has been raised to me by a couple of people in reply to my thread that since 3.3 there was an incorrect penalty of -25% added to selling stolen goods.

So it's already losing an extra 25% before you even get into the main balancing issues. JManis found his old issue for it https://issues.frontierstore.net/issue-detail/12357

 

[Vingtetun]

Diminishing returns could certainly help with this - good thinking!

The other consideration is to potentially make CQC not be a cash reward but a material one of the more rare elements, data and materials that can be used for engineering.

This in itself would limit exploitation as it would provide a reason to play without leaving it open to ongoing cashploitation.

 

[Kiloren]

In my opinion powerplay and BGS was doomed from the start to be simply a hauling grind as it's just too easy to hide in solo from players who want to mount a trade blockade in open play instances. It just doesn't make sense that a player versus player gameplay allows players to skirt past the PVP aspect of it.

We can add the impact of Bots on PP and BGS in the game. Their impacts are very harmful for many groups. Leaving BGS and PP interactions accessible in private or single player game modes does not help to resolve this issue.

It seems to me that the community has mostly already made a wish for open only after a post from Sandro.

 

[Darth Ender]

Nice! Will you be updating Powerplay rank bonuses and weekly rewards too? They have never been adjusted from 2015 levels.

hahaha rubber. You know nobody cares about powerplay ... trying to make fdev laugh ?

 

[DragoCubX]

Definitely something for us to consider! Only concern is any system that generates rewards from interaction between players is open to be gamed.

I haven't looked at CQC rewards enough to know how it currently works, but I support the notion that it should pay much more than now.

On the interaction between players part, I think it should be fine to simply increase rewards depending on how many players participated in the match. As it becomes more difficult to gather more people "just to game the system". It would also be rewarding to players as matches with more players are more difficult in my experience (it's easier to "gang up" on others). Well, I say this, but I obviously don't want to say that it should be the only factor affecting payout here

I believe CQC should at least pay as much as mid-level bounty hunting (500k-1M per hour roughly) on the low end and as much as high-level conflict zones (5-8M per hour) as I'd argue the challenge to the player hovers in that area.

 

[nrage]

Mining and Trade
...
These approximate maximum prices offered by markets for the following commodities will be introduced:

• Painite - 600,000
• Low Temperature Diamonds - 700,000
• Void Opals - 1,300,000

To recognise and reward the extra effort and skill needed for core mining, the majority of minerals extracted this way will see an increase in price, barring Void Opals mentioned above. Several mining commodities which can be bought will have the range of their prices increased, resulting in a higher number of goods with strong profit margins (25,000+) when commodity markets are in suitable states.

To benefit trade, we'll also bring the following changes:

• Commodity markets will offer the average price rather than minimum price when selling in bulk. This will affect all commodities.
• The base prices of a number of general salvage items will be increased.

I think the reduction in profits for mining make a lot of sense, given the super low risk.

It would be nice to see similar profits but at a higher risk/skill level. For example, if the overlapped hotspots had many more pirates to deal with, rather than just the very few we typically see when we arrive this would increase risk, and slow down the process of acquiring the stuff. To balance this, the quantity of ore etc to be obtained here should actually go up. High risk, high reward, more skill, and more varied ship loadouts. Perhaps a quick in and out miner in a clipper or a more tanky gunship build would appear.

I love the idea that core mining brings more reward as I would much rather do this, as it's more interesting and fun - it was only the poor returns that lead me inevitably back to laser mining.

Awesome, can't wait to see how it goes.

 

[Bard Voronwe]

I saw another comment on this earlier in the thread. I'd be concerned about continual bounties placed on players maliciously for reasons outside of the game. What do you think?

I think you could make it work if you "control" it. What about this way: players can only put bounties on players when they are killed by them, with a maximum amount of the bounty that the perpetratore would have gained if the crime was committed in a lawful system. Sounds good?

 

[Deleted member 192138]

Thanks for the suggestion! For PvP payouts specifically, how would you account for players gaming the system with friends and alt accounts?

Why would they now that carriers can be used to transfer assets?
The only benefit to doing this now would be in BGS - for example the anti-anarchist alliance farming bounties to push BGS in Carcosa. Seeing as the person who has the bounty to claim has to pay it, all you get is an inefficient asset transfer, and potential BGS push. Most PvPers aren't concerned about the BGS element, so it's generally something used by PvErs that want to farm each other for influence rather than the activity of the PvP community. Weird that PvPers get blamed for it, though.

 

[Oblivion]

Thanks for the suggestion! For PvP payouts specifically, how would you account for players gaming the system with friends and alt accounts?

Is that really a problem though? You're basically just transferring money from one person to the other, which is already possible with fleet carriers.

 

[Dexter7]

For players talking about smuggling - we're don't intend to change the rewards for illegal good just yet. First, we'd like to have Authorities deliver more dynamic fines based on local conditions, not just the galactic average.

Until then, we risk it becoming essentially the same as regular trade but more powerful and we'd prefer it to be a 'higher risk, higher pay' alternative rather than strictly better.

Perhaps if players are scanned and found with illicit cargo they have their docking permits cancelled?

 

[dariofern]

@Bruce Garrido

I think a nice reward for CQC would be Engineering Materials.
To be fair, I havent thought about how it would scale, but I do believe getting some Mats based on performance would be great.

 

[Solsticide]

I believe the CQC payouts were originally intended to scale based on prestige level. At present there's no reason other for a different badge to prestige more than once. It takes a reasonable amount of effort to get to level 50 in order to prestige even once, so a possible solution would be to add a prestige level multiplier to the existing payouts.

 

[[VR] Orodruin]

These are good figures to go with.

My only thought here is that I personally feel the Cyclops payment is too low. Whilst some players can one shot the Cyclops, other players struggle with it. For some people the Cyclops is their end game. So I'd like to see the payment for this increased, even if only by a little.

I would agree that it was too low if the insta-gib mechanic was fixed. If not I would leave it as is to avoid exploiting.

 

[Orange Spark]

For players talking about smuggling - we're don't intend to change the rewards for illegal good just yet. First, we'd like to have Authorities deliver more dynamic fines based on local conditions, not just the galactic average.

Until then, we risk it becoming essentially the same as regular trade but more powerful and we'd prefer it to be a 'higher risk, higher pay' alternative rather than strictly better.

Please, pretty please with a cherry on top, take a good close look at smuggling. They were some of the most fun, most exhillerating days I had in the game.
I'd love to relive them with friends, or even share them with new players.

 

[Darth Ender]

good luck with the balance without altering the risk involved in acquiring rewards or doing the different tasks that are scaled at different credit values.

All you currently have to justify the different values is a time sink. Time sinks aren't good gameplay mechanics. You know, in case you've never played a game before and that's news.

Better, and more risks are need to be added to the game's mechanics to justify varying rewards for infinitely available things.

 

[CMDR Surdra]

I can't confirm it for now, but can see already it's one of the main points being raised here. The post is not exhaustive in all of the changes we have planned and there's a lot of room for acting on your feedback.

Can I just say THANK YOU? I've come back to Elite after a year since you guys started pumping life into the game again. This is what the game needs - feedback from Devs. What you are doing, why you are doing it, listening to feedback and occasionally (lets be real, some of our feedback is whining) going along with it. Please - keep up this atmosphere!