ANNOUNCEMENT Game Balancing

[skananote]

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

Why not? Does it really hurt that much that new players ENJOY the game?? Why should new player grind like you did 20 years ago?? It is 2020, everything is different now...

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

What difference does it make?? Why would you assume that going for exploration trip is fun for everyone?? What about none combat players, why would they kill 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."

Why do you assume new players are missing on anything. Why is that your way of playing ED is the only way?? Not everyone will be interested in what and how you play. TBH very honest I could not care less what anyone is doing in ED. They paid for the game, they have a right to enjoy the game the way they want it...

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.

And I agree here. Not because of what you've said above but because this is natural outcome from every game as long as the game is fun to play, ED has a little bit of a problem with this. But hey, we have nerfs for new players...

 

[efoo]

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...

That’s right, it’s a game, play it how the game is designed though it is pretty much a sandbox game. Don’t like how it is now, don’t play it.
BTW I only play in PG mode, not in Open, so I don’t see other human players around. Don’t really care what ships other commanders are flying.

 

[LsX]

Merci pour l'équilibrage, sortez enfin de l'extraction de masse, personnellement je ne suis pas le mien, je n'aime pas ça et je ne me force pas à mien pour les gros navires. J'ai le jeu depuis 2 ans et je n'ai qu'une seule exploration d'Anaconda et 200 millions en banque, rien de plus. En voir de nouveaux après 8 heures de jeu avec 2 milliards de crédits est ridicule. Désolé pour le mauvais anglais que j'utilise Google Translate.

 

[xenoborg007]

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.

And his method is better? expecting little jimmy to fight the end game boss with a water pistol?

 

[skananote]

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.

This is actually pretty bad example. In this case Little Jimmy still plays the game but Little Jimmy is also smart enough to use wealth of external tools to get that gun faster. Nothing wrong with that...

 

[skananote]

That’s right, it’s a game, play it how the game is designed though it is pretty much a sandbox game. Don’t like how it is now, don’t play it.
BTW I only play in PG mode, not in Open, so I don’t see other human players around. Don’t really care what ships other commanders are flying.

Yet you still complaining what newbs can afford... So what is it?? You care or not?? By the way you do realise that players actually play the game as it was designed. Mining is very much designed in-game feature...

 

[CMDR Shuuichi Muraii]

So I just conducted a 5 HR mining trawl ( due to liberal distractions by FB and my ex lol) and I noted several things. This is my first time mining since the market "crashed". I went to my normal VO hotspot. In this 5 hours I saw:

• 10 core asteroids
  • 3 VO
    • Oddly enough, one VO core had some LTDs I could laser mine. Not a lot mind you, not enough for more than 75% of 1t.
  • 2 LTDs
  • 1 Grandidierite
  • 4 Bromellite (why?! I see this more than anything, laser or core!)
• Colors from the PWA seem more vibrant. I mean I saw a non core asteroid with high content that had all the markings of a core color wise. Just no deposits or fissures (it was water 100% )
  • Several normally pale asteroids were notably brighter or deeper in color. Based on color alone they were high content of whatever ( my guess? Bromellite)
• I mine in open (recent thing normally I play solo) so color me surprised when I saw my first evidence of other Cmdrs... Mining in either PG or solo! Core asteroids just exploding! I didn't even see them but to notice sudden ice cloud and cracked asteroid nearby! ( and no goodies for me )
• I had something else but I keep forgetting it. Will edit when I remember.

So..maybe they played with the PWA without notice? No clue, just speculation. This HS has a slight overlap with TRITIUM, why the Bromellite?!

 

[aRJay]

"Game Balancing" in other words nerfing, bringing mining down to combat level to add more grind rather than balancing both

If they bring the lowest earning activity up to match the highest then eventually the costs of all FCs, ships and modules would have to rise as they would be too trivial pricewise.

 

[aRJay]

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.

I am hoping they also buff the ability to earn money in combat without having to lower your standards by doing missions.

 

[D.D.Hariman]

I was told that mining doesn't deplete the resources. Why would events (other than mining) have an impact on how much can be mined at a particular place? Unless there's a supernova or some kind of collision or something, the asteroids shouldn't be affected. (Realistically, we would have automated mining ships that swallow a bunch of whole asteroids, melt them down and spit out the unwanted components --- something like that would affect the asteroids ... The current methods are for hobby miners who do it for the fun of it ...)

The display with the blue bars moves at uneven speeds, going faster and slower all the time. Maybe it doesn't do that on other platforms than xbox? It makes subsurface mining a game of luck because it's only luck whether you let go of the trigger at the right moment or not. Maybe there is a way to tell how/when the speed changes; if there is one, I don't know it. Hence my question if it's a matter of skill ...

This Game Bouncing is going to persist across all modes.
Power Play persists across all modes.
The F___ C(ommoners) exist across all modes and every fix for them has broke something else for everyone else in every mode.
Resources do "regenerate" but the question is,, Does a ship in SOLO and a ship in PG sitting at the same rock both get to mine it, or, will the first ship that mines it "deplete" it for the other ship in the other mode?

Humnnnn.. Since I fly two ships on side by side computers, when I get my mining stuff I may try an experiment.

Hummnnnn . I think you could be onto something.

 

[CMDR Shuuichi Muraii]

Resources do "regenerate" but the question is,, Does a ship in SOLO and a ship in PG sitting at the same rock both get to mine it, or, will the first ship that mines it "deplete" it for the other ship in the other mode?

From what I can tell it depletes it. See my post above but tl;dr I saw core mining being done around me but no other ships were present. I was mining in open.

 

[aRJay]

1. What other people have doesn't affect you really at all.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. But lets face it you want little jimmy to just be in awe of your shiny ship while hes in his crapbox.

1. True with the exception of FCs.
2. I have never complained that it took several months of playing the game and having fun to get an Anaconda but I resent the implication that I ground for it I was having fun all the way. Little Jimmy would not be able to do it hugely faster using the same methods as the methods I used did not include activities that have become insanely lucrative.
3. I feel somewhat saddened that you were in too much of a hurry to enjoy the journey.
4. Not everybody shares such motivations.

 

[aRJay]

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.

I think I was up to my Python or Fer de Lance, so 6 months into the game before I looked at and ignored for years mining.
I basically bounty hunted in my Sidewinder into a Cobra III then started doing CGs of most types until I got an AspX and no I wasn't taking on missions.
I want people to enjoy all the game content, not just the expensive stuff.

 

[aRJay]

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.

To be fair I have in the distant past when I did FPS games used hacks to get the BFG or sniper rifle from the start, but I had struggled through the map to the end before I did that if I enjoyed the game. Of course that was back in the day when you could play a game as a standalone.

 

[Maymo]

^^^ 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.

Hmm...interesting choice of words...

When considering balance I don’t really see it as a noob vs vet/us vs them thing. I just see players...

I’m what you might call a career noob, I reset my CMDR rather frequently. My last reset was on the 3rd of November, the one before was on the 5th of September if i’m reading Inara right...

It’s a little embarrassing really. But I’ve always played this way and I’m very familiar with being back in the Sidewinder with no credits...

The reason i’m so supportive of nerfing credit inflation in certain activities is that I’ve been around long enough to see what its done to the game...

Check out this thread from 2016...

Link

The OP asks what the best way of making credits is and gets numerous answers, everybody is off doing different things and a few mil per hour is considered good.

Cmdr’s were hungry back then, the OP is running a Vulture and a T7 and is carefully considering a Clipper......not just shooting an extra rock or two and going straight to Python, it just wasn’t possible.

The game made you think outside the box and plan ahead/take notes/make compromises...it was just better.

Now you can argue that it’s now 2020 and I should just get with the times but despite all the changes in the game since 2016 ship prices are still the same...

...so when I see ‘modern’ cmdr’s getting wound up over losing 100m credits per hour....well.....i’ll leave it to you to guess what I think.

 

[D.D.Hariman]

• I mine in open (recent thing normally I play solo) so color me surprised when I saw my first evidence of other Cmdrs... Mining in either PG or solo! Core asteroids just exploding! I didn't even see them but to notice sudden ice cloud and cracked asteroid nearby! ( and no goodies for me )

So..maybe they played with the PWA without notice? No clue, just speculation. This HS has a slight overlap with TRITIUM, why the Bromellite?!

This would kind'a go along with an experience I had some months ago while I was still mining and I had posted the name of the system I was in after I had sold the Cartography Data. Logged into PG as usual and found some ICE clouds I couldn't remember having made.

 

[ADAMtheWELSHMANz]

@Maymo Due to the length of the post I abbreviated newer players to noobs, though re-reading I can see how some would see that as derogatory.

My point stands that credit inflatiomln IS required to allow NEWER PLAYERS to have the chance to catch up with older players....... the same as any MMO does.

However, as you've probably seen through your resets the issue isn't so much that newer players can catch up faster, but HOW MUCH FASTER.

Mining payouts should have been nerfed so much more quickly, but as they were allowed to continue a lot of newer players consider anything less than 250m/hr a waste of time.

This means they will argue any activity not paying out that sum is not worth it and thus miss out on so much gameplay.

For my money I think credit earning should be in the 50-100m/hr range, as high as any gold rush we had prior to last years mining, but achievable across a range of activites.

Whatever FDev finally settle on I've no doubt a lot of vets will still consider it too high, and an equal number of newer players will consider it too low.

And to all that say I want to stand on this poor Jimmy's neck (who is he anyway?), that would still allow a dedicated player to get a Corvette/ Cutter (un-engineered of course) in around a weeks worth of gameplay, with the help of a few guides........ orders of magnitude faster than was possible in the past.

 

[This Forum Sucks]

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.

This is absolute nonsense. Just a complete and utter fiction created by someone who doesn't know what they're talking about. Even if they somehow wrote the entire engine without documenting any of the code and they fired everyone who worked on it and nobody working on the game now is capable of working out what any of it does, Odyssey would still need to be integrated into the engine, wouldn't it? Or do you think when you get out of your chair the game will launch an entirely different exe running the unreal engine or something and players in SRVs or ships won't be able to see you anymore?

 

[skananote]

@Maymo Due to the length of the post I abbreviated newer players to noobs, though re-reading I can see how some would see that as derogatory.

My point stands that credit inflatiomln IS required to allow NEWER PLAYERS to have the chance to catch up with older players....... the same as any MMO does.

However, as you've probably seen through your resets the issue isn't so much that newer players can catch up faster, but HOW MUCH FASTER.

Mining payouts should have been nerfed so much more quickly, but as they were allowed to continue a lot of newer players consider anything less than 250m/hr a waste of time.

This means they will argue any activity not paying out that sum is not worth it and thus miss out on so much gameplay.

For my money I think credit earning should be in the 50-100m/hr range, as high as any gold rush we had prior to last years mining, but achievable across a range of activites.

Whatever FDev finally settle on I've no doubt a lot of vets will still consider it too high, and an equal number of newer players will consider it too low.

And to all that say I want to stand on this poor Jimmy's neck (who is he anyway?), that would still allow a dedicated player to get a Corvette/ Cutter (un-engineered of course) in around a weeks worth of gameplay, with the help of a few guides........ orders of magnitude faster than was possible in the past.

That is actually pretty good post...

 

[limpetdwarf]

Not that complicated. For general price adjustments simple statistics over certain activities would do, e.g. what total income would be rendered by all players with a certain activity during one week. Not on an individual base of course, that's nonsense. A simple means to dampen so called no-brainers while making forgotten activities more attractive over time.

Ok, perhaps you could account for each commodity, each type of mission, each exploration data sold, each ship type, each module type etc. how much is payed out or payed in during the week. You can't do it in bulk, as in trading, exploration, missions etc. because it won't make sense to change price gaps on all comodities or to generally lower rewards for all types of missions because you'd have certain commodities and missions that noone trades in or does because they don't pay out well. If noone buys ships or modules, you'd have to lower their prices as well.

How do you do that for combat? Make combat in RES pay less so players go to CZ? Make massacring pirates pay less because many players do it? I'd rather see the rarity of pirates to be massacred increase because they were all killed last week, in which case such a mission should pay more because it's a rare opportunity and the remaining pirates are likely harder to kill or they had already been killed. You could say something similar for commodities becoming rare and their prices rising dramatically because noone delivers them.

Then what if I wanted to go mining or to do some trade because I feel like doing it? So I look at the forum and notice that the activity I would like to do pays miserably this week --- or log in to the game and see that the prices are bad this week --- so I just wait until next week, hoping that I still want to mine or to trade and that the prices are better. Or I forget about it and play other games in the meantime and come back after a couple weeks just to see that what I feel like doing happens to pay miserably.

And what about activities not many players want to do? You make it so that they pay better, but players still don't want to do them. You could make them pay even better, but you need to consider which activities should be removed from the game because noone wants to do them anyway. What will you put in to replace the unwanted activities?

At that point, you should do it really detailed. If players buy a lot of ships or a lot of pirates or security ships are shot down, that should create demand for the resources needed to build more ships, and if traders or miners don't deliver, the shipyard will be sold out. If there are more deliveries taking place, more pirates should show up (if they can get ships somewhere), and there would have to be more missions that pay well for killing pirates. But when a system runs out of money and can't afford to pay for killing the pirates? Once the economy is down, the whole system may become abandoned --- or players step in and take it over.

It would be difficult to get this right, though. You may have to limit the amount of money that is in the game ... If you want to do what you're suggesting, then please do it right and go all the way.