It is absolutely inexplicable that fdev would be so clueless and reckless implementing a MASSIVE mining nerf, demanding deep core mining be done to make the most money, yet having an essential piece of hardware with the PWA broken and unusable. Who in their right minds would think its a good idea to implement such changes before getting the PWA fixed. They should have held off with the nerf to mining and increased combat. Then once they get the PWA fixed, look at mining if they must.
ANNOUNCEMENT Game Balancing
can we please please please please pllllllleeeeassseee get the pulse wave analyzer fixed...
as for combat, low combat missions and zones should give maybe a couple thousand more... medium of the same should give 2-5 thousand more and hard/massacer missions should give like 5-7 thousand more... how do we stop the bodies? No idea... just giving my two cents.
which youtuber had the complaint video? I hadnt heard that one?Whoa.. just wanting to make sure you're thinking about the game. What's been proposed is missing enough stuff to come across as answering a social media youtube video rather than considering the health of the game.
The people that complained were specifically 1) combat focused / exclusive pilots. 2) Didn't like mining. That's nice, and its been addressed, but to me, the real target of balancing is more than checking the boxes of a youtube complaint video.
For the ultimate health of the game, id suggest a different set of targets:
1) ALL activities, not just combat and reduced mining, be brought to the same level, including the outliers to give bubble exploration (and bgs states) have a purpose. The benefit here is all players, not just combat players who made noise, can come in and choose from all activities without getting checked by the credit meta. This is nice and inclusive and works for everyone.
2) The new common rate matches a considered rate of progression for new players, not just marketing / PR band aids. Do a 2020 pass on what subject experts believe is the optimum experience for players today, and size the progression duration accordingly. Not to short, not too long. Maybe make a decision on what should be done with all the progression ships that will not be required anymore.. better to delete them?
Also, the repeated focus on skill is also implying that the social media wins are too much part of the point of this exercise, because a little thought completely erodes skill as something the game should be discriminating by:
- Core mining is RNG + minigames.
- PVE combat is very easy once you're enginnered, and the mission board scenarios are always designed to win (there's not graceful you failed scenario etc). You dont die in pve combat unless you make a mistake.
Some possible food for thought there.
Also some out there suggestions for credits:
- A complete reset of all earnings and costs might be okay. "Stat squish". Its fine to leave current players unchanged as they are already out of scope, have far too much credits anyway.
- While grinding for a second carrier, kept looking at the numbers and thinking the numbers were stupid.. how about removing 6 digits and rounding the minimum payment up to 1. Almost makes sense
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You should have to fix it in-game using mats. The different mats will have rules on how they interact when you synth a new scanner part. There's no set recipe for creating the new scanner part. There's no listed specs for what combining each material will do or how many materials you should use. You'll have to figure out the best recipe ...and you may never know what the absolute best recipe is given the number of combinations of materials and the unknown effect of stacking the same ones has on the formula used to determine the outcome behavior.
Everyone's scanner will only work as best as they've been able to fabricate.
Hello FDEV. I've been playing this game since when powerplay was released. I have invested considerable time into all, and I mean all, aspects of the game, and considering my also extensive knowledge of the meta (which is what mostly matters for PvE) and my reasonable knowledge of PvP, I feel I'm in a reasonably well placed spot to provide what in my opinion could be valuable feedback. My question to you is, should I write up a list of concerns/problems, will it even be looked at?
I know in the past such things have not been (not written by me, I never cared because it never seemed like it would even be considered). Even if I tried to keep it short, it would probably be two or three pages long. I can do this, because even though I've quit playing the game after the massive amount of bugs and crashes that have in recent times been plaguing the game, plus the announcement of ODYSSEY, which only told me as a player that the company was not focused on fixing the many problems the game already had but instead wanted to release new content, I would still like the game to be in a place where I could play it in my spare time and not feel like all I'm doing is pointlessly grinding, and having anything but fun.
I know in the past such things have not been (not written by me, I never cared because it never seemed like it would even be considered). Even if I tried to keep it short, it would probably be two or three pages long. I can do this, because even though I've quit playing the game after the massive amount of bugs and crashes that have in recent times been plaguing the game, plus the announcement of ODYSSEY, which only told me as a player that the company was not focused on fixing the many problems the game already had but instead wanted to release new content, I would still like the game to be in a place where I could play it in my spare time and not feel like all I'm doing is pointlessly grinding, and having anything but fun.
@Bruce Garrido
Please, don't lock Poweplay behind a 'open' only mode. The reason Elite Dangerous works is nobody is forced to do anything to enjoy its content. Yes, possibly add additional credit awards to people who want to play in open - but nothing else and even then I'm not sure its's a great idea.
The Open Vs Solo discussions have been beaten to death since 2014 - even at the early kickstarter stages and it has never gained any ground either way.
Please, don't lock Poweplay behind a 'open' only mode. The reason Elite Dangerous works is nobody is forced to do anything to enjoy its content. Yes, possibly add additional credit awards to people who want to play in open - but nothing else and even then I'm not sure its's a great idea.
The Open Vs Solo discussions have been beaten to death since 2014 - even at the early kickstarter stages and it has never gained any ground either way.
Virtually all of them have posted vids on it and it wasn’t just about combat. An off quoted piece was David Braben’s statement to the effect that there should be no meta for making credits.
the reason why it's not great is because everything people can do is equally viable and that none of the content is required.
and nobody is changing powerplay. Nobody is going to spend 10 minutes on thinking about powerplay. So dont worry.
Does this grand plan for game balance involve making the cost of ships and equipment relate in any way to their value to the player? Because if we're starting with nerfs to mining then it's honestly hard to believe that combat is ever going to pay well enough to justify the cost of A-rating a corvette based on how little it increases your earning potential as a combat pilot, for example. Module prices have always been "balanced" around nothing but the idea that it should take the player longer and longer to fully upgrade each ship and bear zero relation to their actual worth.
There is basically zero hope of balancing combat while this issue goes unaddressed - combat earnings plateau long before you get to what you call the "highest performing" ships but their price doesn't reflect this in the slightest, so if combat earnings are increased to the point where A-rating a corvette is possible in a reasonable timeframe, A-rating the actual highest performing ships (the mid-range stuff where combat earnings peak) becomes trivial. If on the other hand it's balanced around earning those mid-range ships in a reasonable timeframe, then people who want to try out the high-end ships are left facing a demoralising grind or jumping on whatever credit exploits get discovered.
For a game where so many design decisions have supposedly hinged on immersion, it's kind of weird that we're expected to believe that the entire galactic economy is completely nonsensical and the price of equipment bears no relation to how long (if at all, carriers I'm looking in your direction lol) it'll take that equipment to pay for itself.
We know that focus feedback didn't mean that it will be implemented, but the fact was that Focus Feedback was advertised BY Fdev as feedback on things they want to change or implement, 90% of the focus feedback were things that were reworked (if not more than 90%) they were not reworked BASED on the feedback, that was clear, but I do not remember much anything aside from Powerplay that had a Focus Feedback and was not worked (even if the rework disregarded the feedback completely). So if there was any other area of the game that did not get a rework other than Powerplay, I would like to know which?
To give feedback on these changes, twiddling with prices does nothing to address some fundamental issues of value within the mining profession.
That being, laser mining 45t of painite is equal to or easier than laser mining 45t of a lower- price commodity such as methane clathrates[1].
This makes no sense, as the source of value of an item is derived from either
- it's difficulty to obtain (in terms of equipment or time requirements)
- it's scarcity (how rare or common an item is); and
- it's demand
A common pattern in Elite is low price items having high demand, and high price items having low demand. This is fine as a setup.
Where the issue presents is the fact gathering 45t of painite (600k/t) and 45t of, say methane clathrates (1k/t)
Even if you took an extreme club to this and cut all high- end minerals down to just 10k/t, it doesn't change that equation; high end minerals are still as easy to collect, and just as voluminous as low end ones... so the proposition of value fails.
Tweaking numbers will never fix this. To take current prices of, say methane clathrates (1kt) and painite (600k/t), balancing this while making mining both worthwhile requires methane clathrates to be around 100-1000 times more scarce than painite.
That is, in the time it takes to gather 1t of painite, i should have been able to gather 100-1000t of methane clathrates, where the extremities of this chance represents either striking it rich with a big painite vein, or pulling up donuts, where some of that time wasn't lost and instead used to gather methane clathrates.
This is the fundamental concept that is falling foul here. It is also best observed through mining missions. A common mission might offer 2m credits to mine 45t of methane clathrates. Why bother when you can get 45t of painite in the same time?
So, okay, 25k/tonne profit on trade goods. Already possible in the current markets, but more options.
With an 800t hold (Cutter) and 5 trips an hour (easy with carrier assist, possible without with a bit of luck), that gives a nice round 100M/hour.
Fine, probably necessary to make bulk trading competitive with trade missions, mining, certain combat missions, etc.
But it's not going to solve your "brand new Commanders" problem at all.
Let's say you do this to Bertrandite, so it buys at the current ~2k/tonne and sells at 27k.
- Noobwinder pilot with 8t hold, scrapes together 16k credits from something else and makes the trade. They now have 216k credits
- That's enough for an Adder with a 24t hold and the cargo to fill it. Up to 800k credits.
- Second run with the Adder gets up to 1.4M credits
- Now there's enough money for a T-6 with a 100t hold and the money to fill it. Selling all that gives another 2.5M credits. Probably about an hour so far.
- Another hour of T-6ing and there's enough to upgrade to the T-7 with a 300t hold
- T-7 makes 7.5M per trip, so two hours of that is enough for a (cheap) T-9 with almost 800t of cargo space
- T-9 makes ~20M per trip, so two or three more hours is enough for a decently-fitted Anaconda
Not quite as fast as mining currently allows for, of course, and a genuine beginner (rather than an experienced alt) would be slower still due to inexperience, but none of this rebalancing - if it allows earning rates capable of purchasing a Fleet Carrier in reasonable time at all, which it of course has to - is going to stop beginners getting to the (much cheaper than a Carrier) big ships really quickly if they know what they need to do.
Income isn't really the balancing problem - much as people like to complain about it - the exponential cost curve is.
Nobody spends 10 minutes thinking about powerplay? Really? Except the around 2000 to 3000 powerplayers who's entire Elite game revolve around strategy and how to beat the enemy, billions of credits and millions of merits moved each weak... yea no one think about Powerplay more than 10 minutes
Every single new recruit we get into powerplay get engage because they discover a new purpose for playing the game, as in, a narrative, a goal collectively with others, that doesn't mean that all the other aspects of Elite do not have a purpose but not as engaging as powerplay from a Role Play perspective, those who think that "no on spend 10 m minutes on thinking about powerplay" are those who do not want to believe that there is a large part of the Elite Community who have been playing powerplay and have been battling each other in a Games-of-Thrown like gameplay for the past 6 years, it is just that Fdev chose to ignore all that, we have a complete narrative that can fill 4 novels about all the history politics betrayals and battles fought in powerplay, a small reddit search with "Powerplay" and "Role Play" tag will show you a world you probably do not know exist in Elite 
No body is forced to do anything to enjoy the content? Not true, those of us who are powerplayers have spend endless time practicing, training and learning new skills and working hard to achieve our goals in Powerplay, it is not fair that all our hard work is disregarded because some people want to play Elite "Dangerous" as a casual Farmville in space game. It is your right to not want to be an actual gamer but a casual one who do not want to waste time learning new skills and become talented in a game, but why ruin it for those of us who want that?
Nobody spends 10 minutes thinking about powerplay? Really? Except the around 2000 to 3000 powerplayers who's entire Elite game revolve around strategy and how to beat the enemy, billions of credits and millions of merits moved each weak... yea no one think about Powerplay more than 10 minutes
The discussion was about fdev doing or not doing to change powerplay. My comment was that nobody (at fdev) would spend 10 minutes on it. Because they have had half a decade of not caring about or spending time on powerplay ...much less finish implementing it. Powerplay players have known since that 1st year how little time would be allotted to caring about powerplay.
I've been pledged since the 1st week of powerplay and have remain pledged the entire time - never switching or dropping it. Utopia forever ! (and that's mainly possible because powerplay will remain unfinished forever)
Ooooh let's make ships really expensive then*.
*Just kidding
Let's not give FDev ideas
Yes I realised I misunderstood after I posted, and I am like you been pledged to Winters since I started playing and never switched, we have been suggesting small changes (because we know Fdev won't do big ones to powerplay) like changing the pathetic modules locked to powers (which drive a lot of people to "module shop"), but man, even misleading texts and even blatantly wrong texts about Powerplay they have not fixed, sad how they created a Beautiful game but then went on making it a low quality product.
Let's not give FDev ideas
I vote the cost of ships and modules (anything that costs credits) be a percentage of your asset worth + credit balance with a fixed floor that the cost can't drop under.
Pilots Fed has to fund those insurance policies somehow.