ANNOUNCEMENT Game Balancing

[Harrassa]

Great! FDevs fiddling with the game again. The smart thing to do would have been to start your "rebalancing" with buffs to parts of the game, such as combat that were lacking, instead of leading with a nerf.
This would have given peeps more of a heads up, especially casual players like me, that changes are coming that will effect their current game play. I have a fleet carrier full of painite that has cost me more than its now worth. You've undone months of time and energy I've put into the game.
Ive been playing ED since early access on Xbox. Once upon a time I looked forward to coming changes to the game. Now I cringe. Game seems to get more broken every time you touch it.

 

[skananote]

Flat price change would have been fine, changing demand to dynamic was too heavy.

Even if you changed max selling price of painite to like 400k it would still be fine as long as the way demand was working stayed intact.

So they did it. Nerfed mining into oblivion. Exactly as I predicted good few days ago... What else got broken as I am not really playing last two days??

 

[efoo]

Great! FDevs fiddling with the game again. The smart thing to do would have been to start your "rebalancing" with buffs to parts of the game, such as combat that were lacking, instead of leading with a nerf.
This would have given peeps more of a heads up, especially casual players like me, that changes are coming that will effect their current game play. I have a fleet carrier full of painite that has cost me more than its now worth. You've undone months of time and energy I've put into the game.
Ive been playing ED since early access on Xbox. Once upon a time I looked forward to coming changes to the game. Now I cringe. Game seems to get more broken every time you touch it.

Another one?

Sorry, couldn't help myself again

 

[skananote]

Great! FDevs fiddling with the game again. The smart thing to do would have been to start your "rebalancing" with buffs to parts of the game, such as combat that were lacking, instead of leading with a nerf.

I was saying that right after announcement of "rebalancing". I hope pro-nerf zealots got what they wanted - they now shout that more things should be nerfed (ranking system because it is to easy to get Elite). The game will probably become "old fart playground" with those with 3000+ hours in the game left to play it... Me on the other hand will be probably departing before all those changes will be delivered. If you look at the comments on YT, Reddit and in other places players are fuming. For good few of them game lost its appeal as their fav activity is now worthless...

 

[Husanak]

And you have done all what you have described in only a month? That's hard to believe.

I have never seen 16 pieces at once coming from an asteroid core or from a subsurface deposit. And how did you even manage to find any place that had any mineral worthwhile mining? I've wasted hours trying to find minerals at hotspots, even double ones, there were never any worthwhile.

I'll have to see it before I believe it. All the hotspots I tried had none or at best only trace amounts of the mineral indicated by the hotspot. That's why I keep saying that they need to fix the scanners.

Can someone explain this to me? I've been asking this before and I'm not getting any answers.

On the 16 rocks... I don't know perhaps I dreamed 16. This night everything I popped seemed to be 10 or 12. In any event its still fun... despite the broken scanner. (although after you blow everything off you tend to average 16 tons or so... perhaps that is why 16 was in my mind)

I have made the vast majority from void opals... found a nice double spot after a few days of prospecting. (I would say 3/4 of the cores I found there where VO... easy to run in with a haul of 70-80 Opels and 15-25 whatever else (I mined most everything accept the Benitoite... decent value on most of it when your poor) I did notice the scanner is messed up early on... I resorted to 2 methods. One is the thruster pan... 1) pick a direction normally I target one of my VO hotspots I move in that direction but left to right sweeping as I go. 2) start at far left/right and start arcing the opposite direction and fire your thruster. This gives you a nice quick left to right motion and you can catch more rocks that the stupid scanner misses. Its labour intensive of course as you will be g rocks. As a new player it probably wasn't bad thruster practice anyway.
Two... I fly like a helicopter. Nose down and forward thruster and bottom (up) thruster on so I fly at sort of a 45 degree angle while scanning. This seems to do a decent job of catching cores below you, as you rock 45/90 degrees and back.

Of course it seems VO are over... or at least worrying about mining them specifically. This evening I tried to find some new spots... haven't found a good double spot yet but found a nice presitne ring with low traffic and some Musgravite hot spots. Made a couple runs in a python... best sell station I could find was a 250k ls trip from the star which sucked but at least they where paying over a million a ton. Made around 160 million this evening but it was probably closer to 4 hours play time and ended up with 3 different rocks in my hoppers. I guess one advantage of the shuffle on pricing... probably not as important to find a triple or even double hot spot. The cast off cores I found where still Serendibite which was selling for 700k at the same sell station.

Obviously after a month I'm not expert... but as I understand at and some very loose messing around the number of cores seems to be the same hot spot or no. Just increases the odds that the cores are X. I have noticed for sure if you hit up the popular hot spots, or the well known ones, odds are its going to be fished out. I tried to stay away from systems with tons of fleet carriers parked around the ring planets. I for sure got a bit lucky and found a nice double that no one else seemed to really notice... I assume as the system never has fleet carriers sitting around. Probably a good time to go on a few prospecting runs. Do some exploring (the data is nice to insta pop rep with a faction) and hit all the decent looking rings, book mark systems close to stars, with doubles or nice quite looking pristines with some decent hotspots.

 

[Maymo]

I hope pro-nerf zealots got what they wanted -

I feel like this about it.

 

[Florenus]

Big earnings don't make the game worse, small earnings do. It's no fun for me when I have to keep staring gaspingly (if there is such a word) at the prices of ships I'd like to try, knowing that I'll never be able to afford them.

This game is not a sprint - it's marathon. If you come to Elite with idea that you'll "finish" it like some single player game in 50-100 hours, the you've chosen the wrong game. Progressing through ships is supposed to be a series of long time goals, not something you just skip through. You can do anything in any ship, so you're not excluded from activities, but I enjoy having perspective to work for. If there's nothing to spend credits on, game looses some of it's appeal.
If earnings are too small it might be discouraging, but it's hardly the case with Elite - quite the opposite.

 

[K7L3]

This game is not a sprint - it's marathon. If you come to Elite with idea that you'll "finish" it like some single player game in 50-100 hours, the you've chosen the wrong game. Progressing through ships is supposed to be a series of long time goals, not something you just skip through. You can do anything in any ship, so you're not excluded from activities, but I enjoy having perspective to work for. If there's nothing to spend credits on, game looses some of it's appeal.
If earnings are too small it might be discouraging, but it's hardly the case with Elite - quite the opposite.

As a new player; who bought the game early this year but only started playing about a week ago... let's not get into my timing and how the game went free lol.
I started doing combat, made a couple of million credits in my sidewinder and bought an exploration ship, jumped around 100 systems across 2 play sessions scanning planets and made about 60 million, logged in on my 4th session of playing, and went mining for about 30 minutes, and brought back more than 200 million. I was buying new ships each time i got paid, outfitting them; A-rating, and then buying a new ship before I even finished learning the previous one.

The game moves way too fast!! It's a shame really, nothing felt rewarding because all i had to do was just wack a rock with some lasers for 30 minutes to earn 5x more than the previous 3 days took me.

 

[Scoob101]

This is absolutely laughable - they can add an entirely new first person mode to the game but changing anything else other than player incomes is beyond them? Don't be ridiculous.

Creating something from scratch (Odyssey) is not the same as attempting to modify undocumented spaghetti code.

Frontier have clearly lost control of the code in the base game, which is why they have such a hard time patching the game.

I personally belive that they are now very reticent to apply further patches because of this situation. Thats not to say we wont get game patches, but their cadence will be seriously affected by this ongoing issue.

 

[Dreaders]

As a new player; who bought the game early this year but only started playing about a week ago... let's not get into my timing and how the game went free lol.
I started doing combat, made a couple of million credits in my sidewinder and bought an exploration ship, jumped around 100 systems across 2 play sessions scanning planets and made about 60 million, logged in on my 4th session of playing, and went mining for about 30 minutes, and brought back more than 200 million. I was buying new ships each time i got paid, outfitting them; A-rating, and then buying a new ship before I even finished learning the previous one.

The game moves way too fast!! It's a shame really, nothing felt rewarding because all i had to do was just wack a rock with some lasers for 30 minutes to earn 5x more than the previous 3 days took me.

Welcome to the game. You haven't even begin to discover how slow the game is (and that's great by the way). I bet you were influenced by drivers to make you meta, competitive rewards, get rich quick guides, etc. Ignore them. Credits does not advance the game. Most of these people posting saying 'nerf nerf' have a long history of using these metas and sit on billions. It's easy to preach philanthropy when you've already got rich using the techniques - but a lot of the time their 'nerf this nerf that' leave them sitting pretty and actually impact people who try to play the game non meta. There is so much to do and discover in this game here are my recommends:

Buy each ship in turn. Dont buy the next until you kit it and try a new playstyle. Smuggling for instance sucks reward wise, but I had fun learning how to do it in my Diamondback Scout. Ive learned so much by properly using every ship to the best of its limited ability, and it takes a long time believe me. Im not in game but I expect Ive probably earned plenty to maybe even knock on the door of a getting towards fleet carrier - but instead I have a depot full of role equipped ships that is a museum of my journey. And Im not done yet - nearly, not quite. About 4 ships left IIRC.

Dont use spansh or other get rich quick route tools. Exception would be trade - you dont have the tools in game to do trade well and so you have to use market information in 3rd party tools.

Go for credits when you need credits. Forget them when you have other goals. What goals? Mine shift all the time. I am some way through Canonn Science codex of in game discoveries - finding them all in the order they were discovered. It's wonderful. I'm halfway through unlocking all the engineers. I'm halfway through filling up on mats. I did the Ram Tah discovery missions. I've only got a few permits left. I wanted to self discover 500 systems (not quite there yet). You have the CG goals, you have Fed/Imp/All ranking. Listen to the amount of people preaching nerf having been in game for ages who are sitting on the ranks where you get Corvette and Cutter because there's no 'reward' for the other ranks - that tells you not to listen to the preaching. I have SO much to do there is never enough time, and often when I try to achieve a goal I realise I need to do other things, either first or as a result of the goal I am on.

See the sights! Forget exploration credits. Take part in the Canonn challenge. Take part in the Turning the Wheel initiative. take part in the CG's - form an opinion. Be pro - or anti Thargoid. Are they the menace? Or did we start it? You decide. Read the lore, research if you like. Fight pirates. Be a pirate. Leverage how to guides and resources when you need to achieve something, not like gamefaqs. People who rush always feel disenfranchised - and sometimes they push that disenfranchisement on to making sure other players remain have-nots.

Welcome to the game. It's a wonderful universe. I hope to see you in the black. o7

 

[Barlog M.]

Look forward when players start sell their fleet carriers and using galaxy map on console became comfortable again.

 

[Sidrat2019]

When it comes to balancing the game it's tricky as the economy is a resource sink that goes into the convoluted and mostly hidden BGS.

Balancing the games activities isn't something that should be done in a vacuum however I appreciate it's difficult and usually unwise to make too many changes in one go. Personally I would have preferred the balancing to have started on the bottom up to make the most pressing need the attention it craves; namely combat income for all three PvE, PvP and AX.

As for "Gaming" PvP encounters from bounties. Who cares? The bounties can be viewed as another credit faucet in to the game, lord knows there aren't that many of them in the grand scheme of things.

It would be good to know what FDEV as a group; or at least from the top producer person in charge of these things, believes the top end should be as a theoretical maximum per hour for the best of the best, the Most Elite Players at the top of their game. This way we will be able to give critique on a much narrower frame of reference.

Balancing the game comes down to being a postal worker and earning the title of "Duke", or "Supreme Being"; it's just a tad silly and it would be much better to build up a story line campaign that unlocks the ranks and provides the ship and system access as you play through it. This will also help introduce people to the amazing missions that people don't do unless by accident. Now it could be part tutorial at the beginning but the scope of the story line is as big as the imagination at FDEV which I know to be above average.

The premise of "Interesting activities doesn't have to be well paying because it is its own reward" - may be true to a certain degree however most of the missions are too opaque to be interesting and are easily failed by accident. There's also respecting players time and giving them just enough information to provide a sense of clarity in what is expected of them.

I know Elite Dangerous of the past is all about forging your own way through the Galaxy. It just seems a little.... low effort at this time.

Add in Odyssey stuff too.. Oh wait that's an optional content so probably not a good idea to include in any campaign based progression. Oh well.

TLDR: Can FDEV tell us what they believe the maximum credits per hour is for the most talented and luckiest of pilots? Can rank upgrades be tied to a campaign based experience instead of the postal worker as being made "Supreme Being"?

P.S - I do believe postal workers and couriers should be respected more at least the ones that don't throw packages over walls or put them in bins for safe keeping but not to the extent it is in game.

 

[D.D.Hariman]

Is it a skill? I can see the display moving at random speeds, wich prevents me from releasing the trigger at the right time. Unless the speed changes aren't random and some skill can be learned to predict them, the skill is more in hitting the deposit with the drill.

I haven't found many asteroids with subsurface deposits or cores though, only maybe a handful. Mining has been dead ever since the developers dried out the only place that yielded worthwhile money about half a year ago.

I have not been mining since a couple months before the F___ C(ommoners) triple drops that seems to have broken everything except gankers being able to get into Pilots Fed Space to club newbies, (or are the newbies leaving the safety of Pilots Federation Space before they have the skill/knowledge to survive?).
The next piece is that I have never mined inside the bubble so maybe I found more combination rocks because I had no competition since as I understand it, events in all modes have some impact on people in different modes. That is why the PG and Open Power Play people are so upset about each other thwarting their attempts to subvert or support stations/factions/systems.
I don't remember the Drill indication speeding up and slowing down. I just remember figuring out that to get maximum yield from a subsurface I had to start from the top and work my way in, so release at the first peak, pop out a fragment. Should be able to drill again and release at the first peak and pop out a second fragment. If I am lucky there is still another fragment so I get 3. Most rocks that had Subsurface had 3 so it was possible to get 9 from subsurface and even a bad split for the core would yield 9 more. That was what I remember as average from my last mining because the Core Optimum Yield meter had became meaningless for anything other than telling me that if I let the charges go off, the rock would split.
YMMV

 

[Scoob101]

It would be good to know what FDEV as a group; or at least from the top producer person in charge of these things, believes the top end should be as a theoretical maximum per hour for the best of the bes

This is a brilliant question, and I don't think Frontier are capable of giving an honest answer.

Why? - Because for a long time now, as has been attested to by many posters here, you can amass huge amounts of credits in a very short space of time - and that has become normalised.

So, privately Frontier may well have a very low number in mind (which would cause outcry in the community) knowing full well it's not possible to implement it. Hence they are constrained in the actual balancing they can do - the outcome may well be far more balanced - but you`ll still be able to earn far too many credits per hour - just from different activities.

 

[limpetdwarf]

On the 16 rocks... I don't know perhaps I dreamed 16. This night everything I popped seemed to be 10 or 12.
[...]
Obviously after a month I'm not expert... but as I understand at and some very loose messing around the number of cores seems to be the same hot spot or no. Just increases the odds that the cores are X. I have noticed for sure if you hit up the popular hot spots, or the well known ones, odds are its going to be fished out. I tried to stay away from systems with tons of fleet carriers parked around the ring planets. I for sure got a bit lucky and found a nice double that no one else seemed to really notice... I assume as the system never has fleet carriers sitting around. Probably a good time to go on a few prospecting runs. Do some exploring (the data is nice to insta pop rep with a faction) and hit all the decent looking rings, book mark systems close to stars, with doubles or nice quite looking pristines with some decent hotspots.

From a core, I get maybe 3--4 deposits and that's it. You must be extremly lucky. I've been going about to many so-called hotspots even before someone noticed that the PWS scanner got broken, and every place had only very few asteroids, usually no cores and only very few asteroids with subsurface deposits.

I can be 100% sure that I will not find any of the mineral indicated by the hotspot other than in trace amounts. It took me about 6 hours to mine 10t of Painite for an engineer.

So I can assure you that mining is not a way to make money. Why are you getting different results?

 

[Grace McClain]

From a core, I get maybe 3--4 deposits and that's it. You must be extremly lucky. I've been going about to many so-called hotspots even before someone noticed that the PWS scanner got broken, and every place had only very few asteroids, usually no cores and only very few asteroids with subsurface deposits.

I can be 100% sure that I will not find any of the mineral indicated by the hotspot other than in trace amounts. It took me about 6 hours to mine 10t of Painite for an engineer.

So I can assure you that mining is not a way to make money. Why are you getting different results?

Weird. Almost every single LTD core I pop (if I don't totally screw it up) gives me a minimum of 8-10 deposits. Always. Sometimes I get lucky and it's up to 13. Also not had much trouble in finding reasonable amounts of said cores, too. Takes me an average of an hour and a half, maybe two if I'm also watching an episode of TNG, to mine at least 80-100 tons of LTD's. I can't imagine there's a massive difference between these, and Painite.

 

[GraphiteGB]

Trade update=
Primary item is longer jumps now 5 round trip for max profit..
secondary Item is still only 2 jumps round trip... but makes less..
For cutters/T9... pythons will be making less and doing x3 the trips to get the same as a T9 doing the secondary item in a single trip...
With the Mining crash its way over that per hour now...

 

[F4fred]

No, you don't learn to sucessfully play the game by playing it. You get a tiny little bit of introduction when you create a new commander, and that's it. From there on, there's nothing.

You don't learn anyhing about engineers other than that they exist, and the first one wants something which I don't have (Sulphur? Meta Alloys? I don't remember which.). I have no way to get those, so forget about the engineers.

Powerplay? I still have no idea what that is all about and what the point is.

Items you can get from powerplay? You learn nothing about that.

Famous places like Colonia? You find nothing about any of those in the game. (IIRC, Colonia was mentioned in Galnet news once, but no mentioning where it is and how to get there, and there have been times when there were no news at all. Or it is mentioned in the codex? I found it irrelevant because it's too far away, and I don't remember. But someone mentioned places in this thread I've never heard of before.)

Guardian stuff? You find nothing about that in the game.

Try to go mining. Good luck with that.

Elite history, like CMDR Jamesones crash site and other interesting places and things? There is nothing in the game about it other than the crash site itself, which you will never find. There's 24 hours or so videos about that, outside the game.

Using Neutron Stars to increase jump range? There's nothing in the game about it.

Interdictions? Nothing, and I have never tried to interdict.

Using heat sinks? There's nothing in the game to learn how to use them. (I tried and I couldn't figure it out, and I gave up trying to avoid being scanned because there is just no way to do that. I can't dock that fast.)

If you ever get that far: What are the modifications that engineers can make will actually do? There's nothing in the game except some vague information that gives you more questions than answers, and the relevant numbers all remain hidden.

Need to find a particular material? There's is misleading information in the game indicating where to find some of them and it makes you spend many hours uselessly.

You want to make reasonable amounts of money? There is nothing in the game that would tell you how to do that.

Using the ignore list of the refinery? There is some obscure and entirely unclear information in the game which tells you only that there might be some way to exclude things from being picked up by limpets. I would never have found it if someone hadn't told me, and the stupid referinery plugged up all the time before that, how fun ...

I haven't learned much yet, so the list isn't very long. I don't have a way to make reasonable amounts of money, either.

And everything I have learned about, I have learned /outside/ the game, with one exception: The information about crime and punishment, fines and bounties isn't too bad. Still it would be nicer to get that kind of information as a side note in a quest, for example, as by trying to figure out how to get rid of a fine or a bounty about which you don't even know how you got it in the first place. Reading the codex isn't exactly playing, it's reading, but at least it's in the game, which is good.

You may have fun getting killed in your small ships without escape pods, struggling to pay for the fuel while doing some trade and carrying passengers once you can finally do that. Combat is forbiddingly expensive, so you have to avoid it unless you have done a ridiculous amount of engineering (at least I guess, I haven't made it that far). I don't care about the rank because I am already Elite since about 30 years, and I have been doing the struggle in little ships, desperately trying to get something better, several times now. I like the bigger ships. Maybe it's fun for you, and that's great. But there is no learning, the information just isn't there. It's all outside the game.

Even an unrelated thing like using the headlook mode with a HOTAS can not be learned inside the game. It simply doesn't work, no matter which button you assign. Then someone on this forum finally told me that you have to hold the assigned button and use the rubber thingy on the stick to turn your head. I'd never have learned that. Headlock on the controller is a toggle, so of course, I expect that to be a toggle.

Sure you can learn things by chance, but that's not a good way. You can learn things by trying them out /if they occur to you/, but that requires huge amounts of money, and when you don't like your ships being blown up, especially when you can't have an escape pod, it's no fun. If you don't have that kind of money, it's not even an option.

Now I'm just waiting for someone to tell me that we in fact do have escape pods and I only didn't learn which button I need to press because there is no information about that in the game other than the computer yelling "eject, eject!".

Or is that some kind of revenge of the computer or a bad joke? Like the Daleks yelling "disintegrate, disintegrate" maybe.

Oh and yes, the guy who had his T-9 blown up /was/ playing the game. Or wasn't he?

Well I am sorry you are having such a bad experience, maybe ED is not the game for you and I don’t mean that in a nasty way. But I promise you, you can learn the game by playing and using some of the tools available online. I started playing just under a year ago with the same resources available to you, the tutorials, the codex and google. The tutorials gave me the basic details of how the game worked. The rest I figured out by looking at the codex, googling stuff and playing the game.
To take some of your points. Interdictions. I knew nothing about it until the first time a NPC interdicted me. Having got over the initial shock it seemed obvious to me that I should keep the nose of the ship pointed at the white circle marked escape vector. Doing that caused the white bar on the left of the HUD to go up and not doing it caused the red bar on the right of the HUD to go up. So I figured white bar going up good, red bar going up bad. Frantic joystick yanking ensued as I fought to keep the white circle centred, which fortunately I did then the white bar reached the top and it ended. After calming down from the adrenaline rush I thought Wow! that was intense and Wow! that was fun. I was well on the way to learning something new about the game and all without watching any YouTube vids or reading pages of stuff. Some learning experiences don’t end so well. Like the first time you sail through the mail slot having forgotten to request docking and get the trespass warning. Then frantically try to request access, only you can’t and then frantically trying to leave and then your ship blows up. Or the time you accidentally engage silent running, only you can’t remember what key you bound to it and seeing your ship overheat and blow up. Such hard lessons in a cheap ship don’t set you back too much and you get the rebuy and keep going. Gaining credits. I just played the game, took missions, mostly courier and small deliveries to start with and then as I started getting more experience tried some of the others. It didn’t seem hard or difficult to make work.
Engineers. I found out about Felicity Farseer when I got the invite message having reached scout rank. First I knew about engineers. Looked in the Codex and got the basic information about what they do and how gaining rep with them works. Googled Elite Dangerous Felicity Farseer which lead me to the Inara page. Got all the information there on how to unlock access and what things she could improve. That told me she needed 1 unit of Meta Alloys and clicking on Meta Alloys took me to the Inara page including details of where to get it.
I could go on, but you get the picture. I have managed to become quite proficient in the game without spending hours watching YouTube videos or wading through mountains of text. Just playing the game, asking questions and using google.

 

[limpetdwarf]

This game is not a sprint - it's marathon. If you come to Elite with idea that you'll "finish" it like some single player game in 50-100 hours, the you've chosen the wrong game. Progressing through ships is supposed to be a series of long time goals, not something you just skip through. You can do anything in any ship, so you're not excluded from activities, but I enjoy having perspective to work for. If there's nothing to spend credits on, game looses some of it's appeal.

If earnings are too small it might be discouraging, but it's hardly the case with Elite - quite the opposite.

The idea is that the game is not to force a particular way of playing it upon the player, isn't it?


But you (and the developers, if you read the first post) want it to be an endless grind. Like I said, I have done the progress thing in other games before, and I don't want to do that anymore. It's fine having to work for things, like for another ship --- but at the rate I have been able to make money without mining and considering the prices, there is no reason whatsoever to play because it would take way to long and I won't even try because there is no point.


I was playing because I wanted to try out the ships. After a lot of pain and frustration, I finally manged to get there --- and I found that the game remained frustrating for lots of reasons I have mentioned here. These reasons aren't going to go away through pimping player income. Balancing is a good idea though it doesn't address the reasons why the game fails so miserably, and whatever the final outcome of the balancing may be, the game will still have failed miserably.


These reasons need to be addressed. If they would only just do a bugfix for the hotspots not being hotspots to begin with, I'd come back and check out the result. I tried to make bug reports a while ago, and their web site wouldn't let me log in, so I sent an email to the only address I could find on their web site and never got a response. That shows clearly that they don't care if anyone plays their games or not. Now they are asking here, or at least pretend that they're asking. I still haven't seen any response from them to all the feedback they got.


Anyway, when these things are being addressed, then it is not necessary to make the game into an endless grind nobody wants to play. There is nothing wrong with players getting ships quickly.


I have never had any idea that ED is a game that is being "finished". Elite has always been a game that is never finished and I don't have it any other way.


So your suggestion that the game should make players grind for as long as possible to prevent progress in the form of accumulating money to get get more ships because the game would be finished once they got the most expensive ship is a very bad suggestion. It's not supposed to be finished at all, so nothing speaks against players getting ships quickly. Why do you and the developers want to destroy the game?

 

[Florenus]

The idea is that the game is not to force a particular way of playing it upon the player, isn't it?

You're confusing things.
You think that means the game is supposed to be without any restrictions? It wouldn't be a game then.
It just means you can climb the progression ladder however you want (one of the reasons current balancing takes place is to make sure all approaches are more or less equal - not that mining is just super easy way to skip the progress), or avoid progressing it if you don't feel like it.
The fact that you just want to test ships isn't gameplay - you're just curious about rewards that come from playing the game. You could say that you want to test every weapon in Skyrim for example, so the game is broken, because it forces you to play it before you'll aquire all of them. It would be equally ridiculous.
If you don't like playing it, then you're going to be quickly bored when you'll have those easy rewards anyway, while others will have their game ruined by having too fast progress, without feeling of achievement.