I figured it was a matter of time before the market caught up. Give it time and there will be another way to make millions/billions. I liked the mining though. No one ever mined until double painte came. It made people play that part of the game to build credits. Before that it was passenger missions, before that pirate missions, before that massacre missions, before that Ceo - Sothis runs, before that long range rares, beofre that I didnt play so I dont know ......
High-end mining material prices seem maybe a little bit TOO volatile
- Thread starter JetsonRING
- Start date
I figured it was a matter of time before the market caught up. Give it time and there will be another way to make millions/billions. I liked the mining though. No one ever mined until double painte came. It made people play that part of the game to build credits. Before that it was passenger missions, before that pirate missions, before that massacre missions, before that Ceo - Sothis runs, before that long range rares, beofre that I didnt play so I dont know ......
Just to be different, I really don't care if the price for X (pick your favourite) is volatile as I have no intention of wasting time mining for huge amounts of credits that have very little use apart from being something to brag about.
When I need Y credits to buy Z I'll do some missions, or explore a bit, even mine for a couple of hours - but if I don't, well I'll do the things I enjoy and, in comparison to our mega-miners, earn a pittance...
The only times I've gone out to earn large amounts is to buy ships or modules, or even to transport my fleet to Colonia. when we know how much FC's will cost (assuming we ever get to see them) I'll work toward getting one, it may take a while
When I need Y credits to buy Z I'll do some missions, or explore a bit, even mine for a couple of hours - but if I don't, well I'll do the things I enjoy and, in comparison to our mega-miners, earn a pittance...
The only times I've gone out to earn large amounts is to buy ships or modules, or even to transport my fleet to Colonia. when we know how much FC's will cost (assuming we ever get to see them) I'll work toward getting one, it may take a while
My friend, I hate to be the bearer of bad news but it seems you are playing the game wrong. Yes I know, it is hard to comprehend that there is a wrong way to play this game but evidently you have achieved that distinction. You have been around long enough to know that to progress in this game one must stop all other activity and focus solely on that one thing that will assist you in achieving your goal in minimal time, even if it entails doing the same mind numbing task over and over again. You must do this to truly call yourself a valid player of this game. Of course, once you have achieved your goal you must then jump on the forums and tell everyone how utterly boring the task was and how it should now be deleted/nerfed or at least changed. Of course these changes won't effect you as you have already completed the task.Just to be different, I really don't care if the price for X (pick your favourite) is volatile as I have no intention of wasting time mining for huge amounts of credits that have very little use apart from being something to brag about.
When I need Y credits to buy Z I'll do some missions, or explore a bit, even mine for a couple of hours - but if I don't, well I'll do the things I enjoy and, in comparison to our mega-miners, earn a pittance...
The only times I've gone out to earn large amounts is to buy ships or modules, or even to transport my fleet to Colonia. when we know how much FC's will cost (assuming we ever get to see them) I'll work toward getting one, it may take a while
The sad thing is you are not alone, it seems more and more players (myself included regretfully) are just playing for fun and not treating this like a second job. Us misguided players are illegally having fun in the game, finding that one can partake of the various activities available in the game and still manage to obtain these elusive mats to assist in engineering our ship. It is a blight on the game that we are permitted to do this, how dare we enjoy the game and not panic about the inability to do something the exact moment we decided it needed doing. How dare we fly our ships not fully engineered from the moment we buy them, how dare we don't whine about the exchange rate at the Mat traders, how utterly despicable are we for just finding mats during normal game play. We should all be banned from the game for doing any activity that doesn't generate the maximum amount of both credits and Arx at every opportunity. No more leisurely jaunts to see some sights, no more just flying around admiring the scenery, no more having fun.
it's not that you're illegally playing the game. It's that you're not a player in the game... but a bystander that will contribute nothing to the in-game universe. Which is fine. But obviously not what a lot of people want out of the game. They want recognition. That comes from bending the BGS or other players to their will. That requires lots of credits and/or lots of repetitive tasks because that's how fdev designed the game to be played.
If there was a social aspect of the game that was organic and allowed player content to be included into the game then it would be a very different picture of what it means to play the game and the whole grind aspect would be vastly different. As it stands, there is very little players can do to instil content into the game to keep it going... we're left with just the narrative and that stalls between every release and the bgs...which is shallow.. but all there is.
and i'm not all about taxing rich players. I'm about making being rich rare without having to fully update the gameplay everywhere. A scalable price system would make the spirit of the cost of things retained regardless of how rich you are ...which is what is most important to gameplay. There would be a floor , which would be the current costs and then once you start accruing over a certain asset amount, your prices of things would scale with your assets. The result being that the relative cost of things stays the same as they were when you were starting out in the game. That's a fairly simple fix to a dumb infinite economy like in this game.
If there was a social aspect of the game that was organic and allowed player content to be included into the game then it would be a very different picture of what it means to play the game and the whole grind aspect would be vastly different. As it stands, there is very little players can do to instil content into the game to keep it going... we're left with just the narrative and that stalls between every release and the bgs...which is shallow.. but all there is.
and i'm not all about taxing rich players. I'm about making being rich rare without having to fully update the gameplay everywhere. A scalable price system would make the spirit of the cost of things retained regardless of how rich you are ...which is what is most important to gameplay. There would be a floor , which would be the current costs and then once you start accruing over a certain asset amount, your prices of things would scale with your assets. The result being that the relative cost of things stays the same as they were when you were starting out in the game. That's a fairly simple fix to a dumb infinite economy like in this game.
Too late!
And for what result?
If a module costs 150m, why should a poor schmuck only be charged 150m while bleeding through the roof for it, who can barely afford it, and the other guy, who lugged several 1000s of tons of stuff and has a few billions, be charged 450m for it, just because he worked his Arx off?
It's like in real world - if a car costs 45k, you will pay 45k for it, doesn't matter if you make 20k a year, 60k or 100k a year. Sure the latter one will be able to afford it much more easily, but the car dealer will not charge him 60k, because he has more. Doesn't make sense at all.
If I'd be the buyer, I'd just go to the next car dealer, who doesn't charge me more just because "I have more money than the other guy who can barely afford food for the day".
Your logic doesn't make sense nor does it hold up in a real world scenario.
How would you feel, if you'd be on the rich side of the stick and you'd get charged more?
Go to star bucks, and your coffee is $15 because you wear a suit and you look like you have money?
For everyone else it's $5.
Because you aren't working hard for it. Nothing in this game is hard. At best it is time consuming. And with situations like this where you can make over a billion in one day of no risk of death playing, a system without inflation is broken.
Edit:. And I'm rich enough for sure. I have been playing since the game released and game multiple accounts with billions in assets each. A scaling price system would make credits relevant to everyone instead of only relevant to poor new players
There has always been a way to make billions of credits. Maybe not at the current rate of 200m/hr, but still at 20-50m/hr from memory.
If you found a good trading route, you milked it dry because you could.
Today it's just a bit simpler - get your initial cash, gear up a miner and make more money. Anyone could get started with say 20m Cr. I mine 20t of VO, drop it for a newbie and they can take it from there. Not hard.
This would have also worked in older days - run rares, run slaves, do skimmer massacre missions then self destruct and repeat.
FDev made the grind for credits a bit more bearable for newbies. And for those who got everything and just want more, well, they can grind away. Why punish them if they put all the effort in?
You seem to think one day is enough effort to purchase everything. If that's your argument then money only matters for a tiny portion of the beginning of your game. Why have it at all? Just get rid of it entirely then. Same game at that point with less nonsense
Well, while personally I think scaling prices according to player cash is, well, let's say "unintuitive" for all the reasons Tikonderoga mentioned, on the other hand us CMDRs also enjoy the luxury of not paying a single penny of our income in taxes, anwhere, ever. Granted, the super-rich also do that in real life. Anyway, one can only imagine the Pilot's Federation has used its considerable political leverage to negotiate all those favourable terms for its members in the entire Known Galaxy: no docking fees, no berthing fees, no storage fees, no fitting fees, no import tariffs, no sales tax, no income tax, absolutely nothing.
Back to the actual topic of the thread: just checked ingame for myself and yes, Painite has totally crashed. Now it will be interesting to watch how quickly the demand (and prices) recover. If they don't, I'll switch to other forms of trade to complete my last Trader rank, because mining isn't really that enjoyable. So... what are some good trade routes again? ^^
Anyway, one can only imagine the Pilot's Federation has used its considerable political leverage to negotiate all those favourable terms for its members in the entire Known Galaxy: no docking fees, no berthing fees, no storage fees, no fitting fees, no import tariffs, no sales tax, no income tax, absolutely nothing.Back to the actual topic of the thread: just checked ingame for myself and yes, Painite has totally crashed. Now it will be interesting to watch how quickly the demand (and prices) recover. If they don't, I'll switch to other forms of trade to complete my last Trader rank, because mining isn't really that enjoyable. So... what are some good trade routes again? ^^
I think that this whole situation has highlighted the need for a a player-run mining guild. We can be like the DeBeers corporation.
Prices too low for painite? Stop mining that until they come back up. With enough consensus we could manipulate the market and make trillions
Prices too low for painite? Stop mining that until they come back up. With enough consensus we could manipulate the market and make trillions
Wow! Amazing! I'm totally flabberghasted that I'm just a bystander in this game... Gosh, I've not had any experience of BGS manipulation because I don't have billions!!
Tell me, Master, will the masses hail you as a hero, will they even know your name?
Recognition....
Thanks, I needed a good belly laugh!
in the same sense that people participate in the stock market (at least in the US) aren't really playing the same game as all the people doing high frequency trading. Anyone who thinks they have the same sway to the bgs and whatever little else players can impact in the game while having a reasonable amount of credits as a player who has billions is in need of more than a belly laugh. Powerplay is likewise swayed much more easily with fewer people when you dont ever have to worry about funding your massive powerplay commodity purchases every week. Like i said though, you can choose to play in a way that ignores all that, and that's fine. But that's ignoring a massive aspect of the game and a good portion of the playerbase does not ignore it and is impacted by the lack of inflation to combat the lopsided ease of gaining wealth.
I liked it.
That's like, your opinion, man.
Why does that make you so mad? I do remember painstakingly accruing merits for ALD to get that sweet weekly paycheck of 50mil. 50. mil. After a week. After killing hundreds (thousands?) of NPCs with wingmates. This was before horizons, even.
I don't really get salty at the fact that with the "bug" I could do a couple of billions easy. It allowed me plenty of rebuy for my Annie, which was a-rated and engineered in, like 2016-17 (still have some legacy engineered modules). All this to say, I am a returning player. I see no problem in the easy credits. The fun of the game is somewhere else.
tl;dr Just because it got me so much time and effort to get my credits initially when the game launched, I DO NOT WANT to see everybody go through the same pain. Credits are for rebuys. Ships need engineering and you can't buy that with credits. There's still plenty of grind to do for anybody willing.
PS from the ADS time, I have seen that also exploration has been significantly buffed. I gained about 14 mil in an hour of running around DSSing ELWs. IN THE BUBBLE. Back in the day the whole trip to SagA* (with an unengineered ASPX, didn't have engineers back then) and back netted me MAYBE 150mil. Maybe less. Do we want to ask for a nerf in exploration earnings too? That is too much money compared to what I used to make in v1.x
Last edited:
getting rank 5 in power play didn't take 1 hour. Getting rank 5 in powerplay meant spending at least half a dozen hours doing nothing but CZ zones with wings or about as long trucking pp commodities and spending your 50 million on them. The net profit from power play was only positive if you did the CZ's all the time and not truck. If you still had time to play after maintaining your rank 5, there were bonus benefits to being rank 5 you could take advantage of, but dont try and lie and pretend like maintaining rank 5 was half an hour of your time per week.
Mining painite and other previous 100-300 million an hour bugs in the game are playing in a totally different field.
But regardless though, a scaling cost to items to each player's wealth would have balanced both situations. It automatically corrects for runaway wealth without punishing poor players while still allowing there to be a benefit for being rich and without having to re-write most of the game to have a more sane economic system.
Edit: and it certainly has real world examples, though maybe not scaled to personal levels currently. Places everywhere will regionally price the same goods at different levels depending on the local wealth levels of the region or the estimated wealth of the people who pass by. MLB (US) was just in the news about how they use video cams and market tracking of all individuals who visit their stadiums to create a wealth index on each person so they can better adjust pricing... so this is easily something you can imagine being the case in a future.
Mining painite and other previous 100-300 million an hour bugs in the game are playing in a totally different field.
But regardless though, a scaling cost to items to each player's wealth would have balanced both situations. It automatically corrects for runaway wealth without punishing poor players while still allowing there to be a benefit for being rich and without having to re-write most of the game to have a more sane economic system.
Edit: and it certainly has real world examples, though maybe not scaled to personal levels currently. Places everywhere will regionally price the same goods at different levels depending on the local wealth levels of the region or the estimated wealth of the people who pass by. MLB (US) was just in the news about how they use video cams and market tracking of all individuals who visit their stadiums to create a wealth index on each person so they can better adjust pricing... so this is easily something you can imagine being the case in a future.
Last edited:
Not entirely true, it is possible to lose money through a combination of factors but I would agree that hot-spots for more valuable resources should attract more attention from pirates either on-site or en-route. The later is probably the easiest for FD to introduce at a suitable level to address the risk element.
Time and risk - higher value items should be both harder to come by, carry more risk to both acquire and transport, and last but not least have a suitably balanced economic throughput via the economy model.
Based on this - mining gold (for example) should be easier to come by (and relative to Painite and similar typically has been), carry less risk to both acquire and transport (debatable - designated hazres zones have been the classic way of managing yield and piracy risk in ED), and on balance per hour should have the rate of economy absorption (rate at which the economy will be able to consume/buy a given resource) balanced appropriately (what FD have seemingly started to properly address wrt previously less well regulated higher value items as of 3.6).
In the case of risk being considered equal - a resource worth 10 times that of another resource should be both harder to come by (lower mining yields) and be harder to sell over time in the same quantities. If neither of these apply, then the higher value of the higher value resource is essentially unjustified and FD should probably consider appropriately nerfing the resource in question.
The concept of a "Gold Rush" (a surge in availability of any given high value mined/gathered commodity) is reasonable but possibly should be managed better by FD.
Outside of a notionally time/location limited "Gold Rush" the availability of the higher value items should require either higher (acquisition/transportation) risk, or more time to acquire (lower yields), or a mix of the two. Prior to 3.x and the introduction of the "Gold Rush" mechanic, alternate mining tools, and the introduction of Void Opals this was always typically true. As of 3.6, FD have seemingly started to address an apparent problem that they inadvertently introduced and over time I suspect there will be further re-balancing over one or more updates in the future (based on whether the sustained effect over time of the 3.6 updates meets FD's intent or not).
So to bring us back to your question - Mining Gold for example should be easier to do (only standard mining laser required for example - less mining kit should mean able to defend yourself better), be in effectively higher yields (less time required mining), carry a lower risk of NPC piracy, and be easier to trade in (higher buyer storage capacities and more free flowing in the economy).
LTDs and Painite (at least) used to be (pre-v3.x) the go to item for high-end mining and typically required having to deal with HAZRES sites to get them at a sufficient yields to justify time spent specifically hunting for them. Mining gold or other lower value resources on the other hand could be mined specifically outside such sites.
The introduction of deep core mining added a skill/reward balance element and at least one additional high value resource (Void Opals) to seemingly encourage individuals to engage in the new mining mechanics. However, the pre-existing balancing factors are still relevant and should have been properly considered at the time of the mining changes but seemingly was not hence the changes in 3.6 - not surprising to me since IMO the whole of the 3.x series of updates has been mostly poorly thought through and badly executed overall.
[EDIT]To re-iterate, I would not be surprised if FD introduce further re-balancing in one of the future big updates - but not necessarily any time soon.[/EDIT]
Last edited: