High-end mining material prices seem maybe a little bit TOO volatile

[Linnunrata]

I'm still guessing mining for anything else is pretty much waste of time, right?

(I'm at the Gallipolis myself, so the nearest market is several thousand ly away).

 

[lenna]

I'm still guessing mining for anything else is pretty much waste of time, right?

(I'm at the Gallipolis myself, so the nearest market is several thousand ly away).

Not necessarily, the problem is the rate of return some have got used to was perhaps too ridiculously high.

Mining has nearly always been pure profit (even before 3.x) - the only cost is time and a little patience.

 

[Lestat]

More like 1 billion credits every 4 hours.

made more credits in a single hour there for my second account than I had acquired in the month of regular bounty hunting i had been doing with him. Couple more hours and now credits dont matter (something that took close to a year for my primary account that i've been using since the game released).

if this kind of income is intended with no risk or really much thought. I dont see why fdev doesn't just get rid of credits altogether. They literally serve no purpose now. Maybe they should just go the borderlands route and make all the prices for things scale with your total income with a floor value on items. That way credits would matter to some extent no matter how much you had.

I went with my Experience. I restarted my Account so I was in a sidewinder. I had an Elite Trader by the end of the day. Pointing out this would be too easy for new players.

 

[Darth Ender]

you can fill 200 ton of painite in like an hour or less. if you can do that with anything else and those things sell for more than 500k a ton , then go for it. I doubt that exists tthough.

Painite was never supposed to be something that exists in this quantity to mine this rapidly. The "normal" high income levels for players has been fairly stable at between 1-3 million an hour. Higher values should generally be seen as bugs in the system, as there is no in-game inflation mechanics, no way to lose money unless you want to...and no incentive to not abuse the mechanic that is getting you the higher wages.

if fdev wants to keep this kind of thing around. . then painite hot spots should be pirate catnip. I should have to fight them off with many sticks repeatedly while i'm mining. To the point where i'm limited to the standard 1-3mil an hour. Unless i bring a wing of players who want to run defense while i blanket rocks in limpets.

 

[CMDR Big Mike]

obscene mining bug

Thank you for eliminating Epic 1 Billion credits a day mode.

A bit dramatic?

 

[Lestat]

you can fill 200 ton of painite in like an hour or less. if you can do that with anything else and those things sell for more than 500k a ton , then go for it. I doubt that exists tthough.

Painite was never supposed to be something that exists in this quantity to mine this rapidly. The "normal" high income levels for players has been fairly stable at between 1-3 million an hour. Higher values should generally be seen as bugs in the system, as there is no in-game inflation mechanics, no way to lose money unless you want to...and no incentive to not abuse the mechanic that is getting you the higher wages.

if fdev wants to keep this kind of thing around. . then painite hot spots should be pirate catnip. I should have to fight them off with many sticks repeatedly while i'm mining. To the point where i'm limited to the standard 1-3mil an hour. Unless i bring a wing of players who want to run defense while i blanket rocks in limpets.

We both did mining different I focus on Void Opal. I stopped Mining painite when the new mining came out. But I do agree with you It was too easy to make so much so fast.

 

[Retropolitan]

One thing to remember when using the external tools is that market data is uploaded when a CMDR docks at a station. If that CMDR was a miner, then demand may have already been met by the time he or she was done there.

It may turn out that the best market to aim for is one where the prices are a little bit older than the others because demand might build up there sooner.

 

[Linnunrata]

Not necessarily, the problem is the rate of return some have got used to was perhaps too ridiculously high.

How so? I mean, if gold costs 12k tops everywhere and painite at least tenfold that everywhere, there's basically still no point mining gold.

if fdev wants to keep this kind of thing around. . then painite hot spots should be pirate catnip.

Heh, it's already borderline silly that I can jump a few hundred ly's from the civilization and there's still some random bozos declaring their robbery intentions.

 

[Fenwe]

There is likely to be quite a bit ( a lot ?) of lag in external site reporting of prices and the actual price when you get there, which will make the price appear to fluctuate faster than it really is.

More people should use something like ED Market Connector.

Looking at Inara today, not only is it getting hammered, it's also being updated lots by commanders.

It's going to be the only way of remaining 'profitable', but we will have to see what happens.

 

[Lestat]

A bit dramatic?

We did not buy this game to be super-exploit mode. When I did my first post on Void Opal I wanted to see how fast I could get an Anaconda. What I found was I got an Anaconda less than a day after restarting the game and got a bonus of Elite Trader and a billion credits. It seems if I followed Darth Ender mining of painite. I could have done it in a few hours. Elite Easy?

Now the question I have. How will this affect Third-party sites? and finding the best prices.

 

[Darth Ender]

you can be profitable trading and mining anything anywhere. The problem is when situations exist for you to literally make over 200 million in an hour with absolute no risk to yourself and no need to worry about inflation mechanics in the game. So the game is balanced for credits being something that will take an hour to make a million in a highend ship ...roughly. And now it's being played by people who make 100 times that. It makes the entire thing (credits) useless. That can't be what fdev intended, though historically they dont really care.

 

[Darth Ender]

We did not buy this game to be super-exploit mode. When I did my first post on Void Opal I wanted to see how fast I could get an Anaconda. What I found was I got an Anaconda less than a day after restarting the game and got a bonus of Elite Trader and a billion credits. It seems if I followed Darth Ender mining of painite. I could have done it in a few hours. Elite Easy?

Now the question I have. How will this affect Third-party sites? and finding the best prices.

I did it in 1 hour. medium trader ship with 50 million credits to my secondary character's name in total assets that I acquired from over a month of constant bounty hunting to well over anaconda purchase price in 1 hour. then well over an a-rated conda in another couple hours. Be a billionaire in roughly 4 hours of mining with 0 risk. And it's being done by tons of players. My primary character took about two years of heavy playing to hit a billion credits and that was with obscene hours of gameplay when the game came out.

Now you could go from sidewinder to conda in a single easy sitting. Spend a bit longer and go from new player to elite trader in a lazy weekend.

 

[Fenwe]

I did it in 1 hour. medium trader ship with 50 million credits to my secondary character's name in total assets that I acquired from over a month of constant bounty hunting to well over anaconda purchase price in 1 hour. then well over an a-rated conda in another couple hours. Be a billionaire in roughly 4 hours of mining with 0 risk. And it's being done by tons of players. My primary character took about two years of heavy playing to hit a billion credits and that was with obscene hours of gameplay when the game came out.

Now you could go from sidewinder to conda in a single easy sitting. Spend a bit longer and go from new player to elite trader in a lazy weekend.

What's it matter though how we play the game as long as we all enjoy it while we are playing?

The other thing your failing to keep in mind when you are tossing out playing hours per credit hour is that your numbers don't include the hours you spent playing the game.

No one can just jump into this game and become a productive miner in a few hours unless they all ready have game experience.

 

[znôrt]

Finished up a mining stint, checked local prices and travelled to the indicated station, a single jump away. In the 5-6 minutes it took me to get there the price of Painite at that station had dropped by almost a third, from 797k to a bit over 540k. Minute-to minute price volatility of that range is a bit excessive IMO. o7

a split second is what it takes low demand to lower the prices. the very instant people don't need any more from what you're offering, price plummets.

it's indeed sad that this is not really how the simulation works, but a quirk added on top of it to address what amounted to be yet another exploit in practice. but what he said:

It's still stupid money.

and in elite it's even stupider.

 

[myothershipisacobraiv]

More like 1 billion credits every 4 hours.

made more credits in a single hour there for my second account than I had acquired in the month of regular bounty hunting i had been doing with him. Couple more hours and now credits dont matter (something that took close to a year for my primary account that i've been using since the game released).

if this kind of income is intended with no risk or really much thought. I dont see why fdev doesn't just get rid of credits altogether. They literally serve no purpose now. Maybe they should just go the borderlands route and make all the prices for things scale with your total income with a floor value on items. That way credits would matter to some extent no matter how much you had.

I actually think that credits-as-a-game-mechanic should be strongly looked at before the console-launch re-release. Elite is only fun when you're doing what you want to do. There is a bit of give to this in the early days, but in the later game, credits can trigger the desire to drop the game if they get in the way.

You could apply some deflation and then reduce payouts or options (low grade bins can't process diamonds. low rep traders can't pick up expensive commodities) for very early game. You could also provide a flat payment buff to higher-rep/longer-playtime.

Dunno. But I don't play as much because I have been playing other stuff. There are a few ships I've had the idea to put together, but engineering everything is unappealing and I would need to do a stint of credit grind, which stops me. I haven't done a tone of deepcore mining and I've never double-painite mined or used this latest thing, mainly cause I don't like using eddb to play the game. I wonder what the percentage is of the playerbase that uses eddb and things like it.

 

[CMDR Big Mike]

When I did my first post on Void Opal I wanted to see how fast I could get an Anaconda. What I found was I got an Anaconda less than a day after restarting the game and got a bonus of Elite Trader and a billion credits.

So what?

what do you think this proves? It seems obvious to me that an experienced player would be able to get a conda in a matter of hours. You should already know how to play the game.

I don’t think that there are any day one rookies that unlock an anaconda in their first session

 

[Oldviboy]

I did it in 1 hour. medium trader ship with 50 million credits to my secondary character's name in total assets that I acquired from over a month of constant bounty hunting to well over anaconda purchase price in 1 hour. then well over an a-rated conda in another couple hours. Be a billionaire in roughly 4 hours of mining with 0 risk. And it's being done by tons of players. My primary character took about two years of heavy playing to hit a billion credits and that was with obscene hours of gameplay when the game came out.

Now you could go from sidewinder to conda in a single easy sitting. Spend a bit longer and go from new player to elite trader in a lazy weekend.

Nobody really can think that, perhaps, over the years, things have made them easier on purpose so that all players adapt to the current game and not the launch or beta?
when elite turns 10 years and plan to close the server, will you also tell the last players to join the last year of the game,that they will lose half of the content they paid for, because they had to play more years?
This always sounds a bit selfish and unreasonable, somehow the game should be more accessible as it get older and new players are incorporated, otherwise the frontier plan would not make much sense for the last players to join.

I am not addressing only you, it is for everyone who thinks that way and i dont understand the more "veteran or experienced" players, who once know how to do things after years, start grinding things as quickly as possible or make videos, just to see how easy it is now,but nobody does that the first time buy the game,
I don't know what you are afraid of or that you feel you have lost.

Sometimes the game gets tired by itself and you want to see so many things,like to get elite trader in a day or month the first time you play....those assumptions are really quite unreal, the first time in the game, you will be quite lost for a long time as we all were.

 

[Darth Ender]

What's it matter though how we play the game as long as we all enjoy it while we are playing?

The other thing your failing to keep in mind when you are tossing out playing hours per credit hour is that your numbers don't include the hours you spent playing the game.

No one can just jump into this game and become a productive miner in a few hours unless they all ready have game experience.

this argument that as long as you're having fun it doesn't matter only works for single player games. For better or worse, that's not what elite is.
having an unlimited supply of credits means everything that is balanced by credits is pointless and moot. So things like BGS manipulation that is heavily credit balanced is now open season. Things like power play that is heavily credit balanced is now no different than if everything was free. Access to certain things based on ranking of elite (where that ranking can come from trade) is now pointless. Etc. Everything based on credits is now the same as if the cost of those things are 0.

That completely changes the dynamic of the game for everyone who cares at all about the bgs, power play and essentially the shared universe aspect of the game.

this isn't about "back in my day it was harder to do xyz" this kind of income makes credits meaningless and doesn't replace it with any other barrier. That's almost never the intention of any game to make the rewards free and remove all risk. That's what has been done here.

 

[777Driver]

Finished up a mining stint, checked local prices and travelled to the indicated station, a single jump away. In the 5-6 minutes it took me to get there the price of Painite at that station had dropped by almost a third, from 797k to a bit over 540k. Minute-to minute price volatility of that range is a bit excessive IMO. o7

Seems ok here, as long you find your own sell location. Following these websites for sell advice is going to be unreliable, just like trading.

I did a quick test run, mined around 60 tonnes of LTD's, filtered the galaxy map for Industrial / Refinery, picked a system on the edge of the bubble. First station didn't have great prices, the commodities market advised selling at an outpost in the same system.

 

[Darth Ender]

Nobody really can think that, perhaps, over the years, things have made them easier on purpose so that all players adapt to the current game and not the launch or beta?
when elite turns 10 years and plan to close the server, will you also tell the last players to join the last year of the game,that they will lose half of the content they paid for, because they had to play more years?
This always sounds a bit selfish and unreasonable, somehow the game should be more accessible as it get older and new players are incorporated, otherwise the frontier plan would not make much sense for the last players to join.

online multiplayer games work that by their nature when designed in a way that assets can accrue indefinitely. Unfortunately that's how fdev designed the game so that players who started long ago will acrue more things over time and keep them than players who started much more recently.

The difficulty of acquiring stuff shouldn't get easier with time though. That's not how things work in a online multiplayer game. Once a proper balance is found, it remains pretty much static or is dictated by the economy if it's player based. Either way it's normalized over the length of the game unless it's very broken at some point.

The fact that older players can get tired of the grind is a different matter and besides the point. I dont care how much you want to see or do and how long you spent playing the game and that you're tired of having to care about credits/materials/reputation etc. Those are the game mechanics that price rewards. This isn't a single player game where you can just run a cheat trainer or mod the game to make everything free. You dont get a break because you want one. The game should be the same game for people whether they have been playing it for a decade or just started.

The problem with elite is that these inbalances happen frequently and the economy is static and insanely simplistic so that it can't deal with them and fdev has little to no incentive to care about how it impacts anything because in the end it's covering up the fact that the gameplay needed to get credits tends to be mostly boring so nobody complains about free credits.