ANNOUNCEMENT Game Balancing

[ADAMtheWELSHMANz]

Seeing as it's already possible to make 100m/hour through pirate MM's solo I hope the combat tweaks are more aimed at;

• Assasination missions
• CZ payouts (especially as you can't stack those missions)
• Thargoid combat

Those 3 could all do with a significant boost to bring them inline with farming a haz rez/ mission poi for easy kills.

If anything I think pirate MM's should have their payout lowered as out of the 4 they're the easiest to do and pay out the best atm.

 

[skananote]

According to the info I have seen the combat buffs start next week. Have a little patience. Trading buffs have started already. Made 150m in under an hour and a half last night.

I am a very patient person. I just don't believe FDev will do something good w/o breaking stuff. History shows that every time they attempted to make changes stuff got broken. PWA is not fixed till today...

 

[CMDR_Brantford of FLC]

Some reports are out there that missions payouts are less then what you have to pay to buy the commodity. I've not seen a bug report at the Issues tracker reporting that - yet.

I am a very patient person. I just don't believe FDev will do something good w/o breaking stuff. History shows that every time they attempted to make changes stuff got broken. PWA is not fixed till today...

 

[skananote]

Some reports are out there that missions payouts are less then what you have to pay to buy the commodity. I've not seen a bug report at the Issues tracker reporting that - yet.

If that is true then just LOL...

 

[Gully Foyle]

Don't know about FD in Nova Scotia but the rest is exactly what players wanted FIRST. Buff the poop income from other activities FIRST and kill mining later. For now we have nerf and nothing to replace it with. For some reason however pro-nerf activists here do not want to accept that nerfing mining was the wrong thing to start with... God only knows for how long it will stay like that. I don't believe FDev is capable of delivering on own promises...

I'm capable of believing that they deserve a chance.

 

[xenoborg007]

Why do you actually want to discourage new players, its a 5 year old game.

"This has allowed even brand new Commanders to become wealthy enough to buy the highest performing ships very quickly. For the health and longevity of Elite Dangerous, we're going to considerably reduce the payout of this activity"

There is nothing wrong with new people, who use outside sources of information (youtube, eddb, the forums, reddit - etc / cause lets face it without those you wouldn't know how to do a damn thing) to make speedy progress of content, let alone content in a 5 year old game. You already have a gated system in the form of some convoluted engineers to insure your "vets" can still tear little jimmy to pieces in their Übermensch cutter even if he is in a 1 billion anaconda that he went and mined for in a week.

Vets maintenance credits will be in the exact same position, all this is doing is making it harder for new people to start progressing and enjoying the ships most players have been for 5 years now. A players wealth has so little impact on other players in this game that it doesn't matter how fast you earn credits.

If you want to discourage laser mining without ruining it for the newbs, its dead simple make the mining laser unequipable on ships with more than 64 slots of cargo space or even less.

 

[Maolagin]

Why do you actually want to discourage new players, its a 5 year old game.

"This has allowed even brand new Commanders to become wealthy enough to buy the highest performing ships very quickly. For the health and longevity of Elite Dangerous, we're going to considerably reduce the payout of this activity"

There is nothing wrong with new people, who use outside sources of information (youtube, eddb, the forums, reddit - etc / cause lets face it without those you wouldn't know how to do a damn thing) to make speedy progress of content, let alone content in a 5 year old game. You already have a gated system in the form of some convoluted engineers to insure your "vets" can still tear little jimmy to pieces in their Übermensch cutter even if he is in a 1 billion anaconda that he went and mined for in a week.

It's not "discouraging new players", it's Frontier setting up the progression experience they want to create in their game.

This point usually winds up being made from the other side, but it still holds: on a day-to-day basis, the amount of credits other players have doesn't really affect your game. Normally people are telling this to the vets, that new players earning lots of money doesn't actually diminish their billionaire experience. (Big picture of course it does a little bit, mainly in the form of too many carriers.) But the same applies in the other direction: it doesn't matter to a new player if the veterans have all the ships plus a million credits, or plus a hundred billion.

I'm personally of the opinion that the progression rate should be set at a level where a "normal" gamer playing an average amount can work their way up to a top-tier ship in several weeks to a few months. That's mostly based around steering the typical player toward having at least several dozen hours in the cockpit before they try flying big ships that are hard to handle and hurt a lot to lose. Obviously "several dozen hours" of average intensity play means that someone set on speedrunning the thing with the help of detailed external guides will always be able to slam through it in a week or less. Which is fine, I guess, although it makes me wonder if buying a carrier should require a calendar time condition like the Powerplay modules do.

 

[ADAMtheWELSHMANz]

^^^ well said.

All we're asking in terms of progression is that what took us (vets) months or longer to earn takes them (noobs) a few weeks at least.

With the mining imbalance we had those months and weeks have been reduced to mere days.

This leads to a few issues;

- New players losing big expensive ships because they haven't learnt the basics in smaller, cheaper ships.

- They grind for the credits. Then they need a Cutter/ Vette so they grind out the rank. Then they remember engineering ....... more grind.

None of us vets are asking that the newer players not have what we have. All MMO's speed up progress as the game ages to allow new players to catch up, what we're asking for is an adjustment as to how long that "catch up" takes.

 

[efoo]

Went for one mining run last night in a single Tritium hotspot, still slow as before but found a couple of Void Opal core asteroids, I noticed each chunk of VO now can be refined to nearly one ton of VO, instead of previously needing two chunks to be refined into one ton. Seems like core mining percentage has been buffed, but that was only one run from two core asteroids, too early to tell.

As for all those players rage quitting this game with this current credit balancing, all I can say is good riddance, don't need them in this game. Humans are over-rated anyway.

 

[xenoborg007]

Its about 5 years too late to be setting up the progression experience lets face it, conveniently right after they get an influx on new players, myself included via the free epic games store.

The progression in these types of games have always been back loaded, you start off slow and the bigger and better ships allow you to increase the speed of your progression, I made about 300 million in roughly 15 hours of play over the weekend pre nerf, most of that time was spent in an adder trying to mine a measly few LTDs before switching to Painite I only needed like 16 to get a pretty decent asp explorer kitted out, but those 16 took me 70% of 15 hours and that was using the knowledge base and experience of people who have been playing this game for 5 years. That's a natural progression of a games lifespan things become easier and quicker as time goes on not SLOWER. Again there are still gated items / ships behind things other than credits, which is also a good thing in these games.

They want to kill laser mining but at least realise its the new players way of getting introduced to mining, so as I suggested they just make them available to low cargo ships and revert the nerfs.

 

[efoo]

Nope, new players don't need to earn 100 million per hour to learn about mining. Credit is just credit. If you want to learn mining, you should be doing it for free or low pay, just like in real life.

 

[xenoborg007]

^^^ well said.

All we're asking in terms of progression is that what took us (vets) months or longer to earn takes them (noobs) a few weeks at least.

With the mining imbalance we had those months and weeks have been reduced to mere days.

This leads to a few issues;

- New players losing big expensive ships because they haven't learnt the basics in smaller, cheaper ships.

- They grind for the credits. Then they need a Cutter/ Vette so they grind out the rank. Then they remember engineering ....... more grind.

None of us vets are asking that the newer players not have what we have. All MMO's speed up progress as the game ages to allow new players to catch up, what we're asking for is an adjustment as to how long that "catch up" takes.

What other people have doesn't affect you really at all. Complaining that you started the game from day one and it took you months of grinding to get that anaconda, yet little jimmy can do it in a fraction of the time using YOUR METHODS. What does it matter that I was able to buy an anaconda within 15 hours to you really? if anything its one more cool ship you can maybe see flying around the universe. But lets face it you want little jimmy to just be in awe of your shiny ship while hes in his crapbox.

 

[ADAMtheWELSHMANz]

Why not just start every new player with an FC and 2 billion in the bank?

How many new (last 12 months) players have gone on an exploration trip/ taken part in a CG/ fought a Thargoid?

People seem to be credit crazy atm and are missing out on vast swathes of the game because it "doesn't pay well enough."

These balance checks may cost a few thousand players short term, but long term the ones that stick around will be doing so because they enjoy the game, not just watching a credit number go up.

 

[ADAMtheWELSHMANz]

What other people have doesn't affect you really at all. Complaining that you started the game from day one and it took you months of grinding to get that anaconda, yet little jimmy can do it in a fraction of the time using YOUR METHODS. What does it matter that I was able to buy an anaconda within 15 hours to you really? if anything its one more cool ship you can maybe see flying around the universe. But lets face it you want little jimmy to just be in awe of your shiny ship while hes in his crapbox.

Spoken like a true child of the credit revolution.

Believe it or not, if you look past credits there's quite a lot of game hudden back there too.

 

[efoo]

Why not just start every new player with an FC and 2 billion in the bank?

How many new (last 12 months) players have gone on an exploration trip/ taken part in a CG/ fought a Thargoid?

People seem to be credit crazy atm and are missing out on vast swathes of the game because it "doesn't pay well enough."

These balance checks may cost a few thousand players short term, but long term the ones that stick around will be doing so because they enjoy the game, not just watching a credit number go up.

Yep. I wonder if these credit crazy players just want to see that big billion credits under their names and get an orgasm staring at that number

 

[skananote]

It's not "discouraging new players", it's Frontier setting up the progression experience they want to create in their game.

However you name it I still do not get the issue with new players flying more expensive ships. Argument here is they skip the gameplay, I call it a B/S. Getting bigger/better ship is also a gameplay. Another argument is that those players skip game progress - another B/S. Ship is just a means of delivering your virtual butt from A to B. Progress is in what you achieve not what you fly... In most cases you still need rank, engineering etc. What difference does it make what you fly... I don't like bigger ships anyway as they don't land very well on outposts, I fly Cobra MK3 for everything really. But that is my choice...

 

[xenoborg007]

Why not just start every new player with an FC and 2 billion in the bank?

How many new (last 12 months) players have gone on an exploration trip/ taken part in a CG/ fought a Thargoid?

People seem to be credit crazy atm and are missing out on vast swathes of the game because it "doesn't pay well enough."

These balance checks may cost a few thousand players short term, but long term the ones that stick around will be doing so because they enjoy the game, not just watching a credit number go up.

Spoken like a true child of the credit revolution.

Believe it or not, if you look past credits there's quite a lot of game hudden back there too.

Congratulations you've failed to realise that the front end of the game is gated behind credits (I mean it has been a good few years for you since you've had to deal with a lack of credits - using the same mining that is somehow now a problem cause oh no the new players can have the same ships as me), or do you expect little jimmy to go off exploring in his 10ly jump sidewinder? or take on the Thargoid. You get and upgrade ships to be able to do all the cool things that's how this works. You want people to enjoy the later game content, you speed up early game.

 

[limpetdwarf]

That's nothing but an arbitrary opinion. With my auto-regulation everything would be balanced over time. Let's look at combat for example, as you suggested: Imagine, combat would still be the least rewarding activity, as it is right now more or less. Over time all credit rewards for combat would slowly increase over time, until combat would become the highest rewarding activity in the game (this state would cost some time of course), at which point it slowly will be auto-nerfed again and replaced by the second rewarding activity. Rinse and repeat.

Sigh ... How do you figure out "player activity"? You need to consider that time is the most valuable resource any player has.

Since you mention combat, it takes no more than a single hit of an NPC in a RES and the player only needs to wait for the security forces to shoot down the NPC to collect the bounty. So this "player activity" consists of sitting and waiting for suitable NPCs to show up (which the player has no influence about), using the kill warrant scanner for the 15 (or 30?) seconds it takes to scan the NPC and another second to fire the shot.

Next thing is that players will ask for an increase in the frequency in wich NPCs and security forces show up so that they can make more money with this "player activity".

I basically like your idea. The problem is that when you start to think it through, it doesn't work in too many ways. Is it "player activity" when the player has to sit in his ship for a while waiting to arrive at a REZ with supercruise assist enabled? Or is it "player activity" when the player has disabled the assist? Is it "player activitiy" when the player has to keep holding the button to fire the PWS for a couple hours while waiting in his ship that flys about a ring until he finds an asteroid worth to mine?

I suggest that "activities" that are more time consuming should pay better than activities that don't take much time. Besides that time is the most valuable resource, spending time on doing whatever "player activity" should be rewarded because it means that the player makes some kind of effort and because he is doing gameplay. For example, if you spend a lot of time on a sightseeing mission because you have to do a lot of flying and because your passengers are demanding, that should pay better --- as well as if you have to spend a lot of time on tracking down a mission target.

That also means that if you take a week to shoot down a single NPC and collect a bounty for that, it means that you spent a great deal of time and have done a lot of "player activity" and you should get a lot of money. How much money should you get next week for the same player activity? What if you spent two weeks on it or three?

How do you factor that in?

 

[skananote]

Nope, new players don't need to earn 100 million per hour to learn about mining. Credit is just credit. If you want to learn mining, you should be doing it for free or low pay, just like in real life.

It's a game... Above is a really stupid idea, this EXACLY shows how bad veteran players are. It must hurt that newbs get stuff in so unreasonable time... It is sad actually...

 

[efoo]

Congratulations you've failed to realise that the front end of the game is gated behind credits (I mean it has been a good few years for you since you've had to deal with a lack of credits - using the same mining that is somehow now a problem cause oh no the new players can have the same ships as me), or do you expect little jimmy to go off exploring in his 10ly jump sidewinder? or take on the Thargoid. You get and upgrade ships to be able to do all the cool things that's how this works. You want people to enjoy the later game content, you speed up early game.

LOL that’s like asking for lil Jimmy that he does not want to play through many early levels of an FPS game to earn better guns. He just want to get that BFG fast so he can skip ahead to fight those end level bosses. Yeah what ever.