This is how I see exobiology: Honk a system with the discovery scanner gives you some money. Using the FSS to scan the bodies gives you more. Map the planets with DSS gives you even more. Now going down to planets to scan biology should give you even more. I would suggest at minimum 1 million lowest paypot (bacteria, grass, whatever) reaching several millions for some more rare species.
How much should Exobiology be worth?
- Thread starter DemiserofD
- Start date
And yet, to solve the issue of players "finishing the game" what does fdev do? They create engineers that operate on dozens of different currency found in only specific game loops or areas. This re-ignites activity by players and is by all accounts quite successful at creating a much more flexible system of progression and balance despite having players doing repetitive and in many cases, tedious activities identical to or very similar to the stuff they did for credits.
this fixation on credits is a step in circles ..not a step forward and not a step towards a real solution. You tweak income in one area and because the activity is different, it creates a different time/boredom to profit equation. When that tips you have to adjust other roles so that they're worth more and players wont see them as worthless. And this just repeats ...over and over for the last 7 years. Until now you have half a million credit bounties and hundred million an hour trading/mining loops etc. Everything nets you so much money that it is meaningless. Credits aren't the answer, and chasing a balance among all of the roles with credits is futile and a waste of time.
We have already been shown how to balance this role and every role. Not just in this game with isolated content and multiple currencies but in most other games, progression is separated by different currency that can acquire different things. They all come to the same conclusion because it's the best solution to be the most fair to players across skill sets and areas of play. Having isolated content doesn't stop you from flipping to something else and doing things there, we see it all the time with on foot playing and in space ship playing. The benefits that are exclusive to one do not help you or even have a purpose in the other and that apparently works.
80 million an hour looking at loading screens and dodging murderous planets and frightening hills and evil big boss trees and you think the answer is credits? i guess if you wanted the activity you already do anyway regardless of profit to make you profit you would suggest credits. Because that's the most self serving option to go with. It doesn't address why someone considers the role out of balance. It doesn't address why credit metas keep happening and move between roles as they're "balanced" with credits. And it doesn't address why this isn't good for the game overall. It just makes you richer doing something you're already too rich for profit to matter because it makes you feel a bit less like you're wasting time and missing out on making more profit just for the sake of making the bank number go up.
The humorous notion that exploration has risk and requires skill because some people make more doing it than others would also have to come to the same conclusion that trading (Space trucking) requires skill and has risk since they also have differences in credits per hour doing the same thing between players. But we know trading easily doesn't have skill or risk. It's just a matter of copying or creating a routine, googling a trade route that hasn't had others doing this too much already, and repeating the action like a robot. The main difference between a good explorer and a "bad" one (that isn't a newbie still learning how things work) is that the bad one is just slower. Not because they're worse at solving puzzles or being more cautious ...but because they either can't bring themselves to care about grinding a min-max routine hard or are busy looking around or busy working their second screen.
It's not a matter of having mastered exploration that makes one more profitable as it is a matter of deciding to play in a way that gets things over with as fast as possible so you can cram as many repetitions in a given amount of time as possible. That's something that matters in a race. This game isn't a race. the mechanics aren't built to be a race. It's not what the role is supposed to be about. But it's not your fault that you treat it like that. There isn't really much else to do with it because the game doesn't care about what you find exploring and exploring itself doesn't require you to really do anything but spend time. it just turns everything you do while participating in it all into credits. And you dont see why credits are a problem, not a solution? Everything devolves into this efficiency game instead of what it's intended to be because of credits being the primary and common reward. it's a bad way to address any problem in the game and it's lazy short sightedness that keeps having it be used as a balance.
this fixation on credits is a step in circles ..not a step forward and not a step towards a real solution. You tweak income in one area and because the activity is different, it creates a different time/boredom to profit equation. When that tips you have to adjust other roles so that they're worth more and players wont see them as worthless. And this just repeats ...over and over for the last 7 years. Until now you have half a million credit bounties and hundred million an hour trading/mining loops etc. Everything nets you so much money that it is meaningless. Credits aren't the answer, and chasing a balance among all of the roles with credits is futile and a waste of time.
We have already been shown how to balance this role and every role. Not just in this game with isolated content and multiple currencies but in most other games, progression is separated by different currency that can acquire different things. They all come to the same conclusion because it's the best solution to be the most fair to players across skill sets and areas of play. Having isolated content doesn't stop you from flipping to something else and doing things there, we see it all the time with on foot playing and in space ship playing. The benefits that are exclusive to one do not help you or even have a purpose in the other and that apparently works.
80 million an hour looking at loading screens and dodging murderous planets and frightening hills and evil big boss trees and you think the answer is credits? i guess if you wanted the activity you already do anyway regardless of profit to make you profit you would suggest credits. Because that's the most self serving option to go with. It doesn't address why someone considers the role out of balance. It doesn't address why credit metas keep happening and move between roles as they're "balanced" with credits. And it doesn't address why this isn't good for the game overall. It just makes you richer doing something you're already too rich for profit to matter because it makes you feel a bit less like you're wasting time and missing out on making more profit just for the sake of making the bank number go up.
The humorous notion that exploration has risk and requires skill because some people make more doing it than others would also have to come to the same conclusion that trading (Space trucking) requires skill and has risk since they also have differences in credits per hour doing the same thing between players. But we know trading easily doesn't have skill or risk. It's just a matter of copying or creating a routine, googling a trade route that hasn't had others doing this too much already, and repeating the action like a robot. The main difference between a good explorer and a "bad" one (that isn't a newbie still learning how things work) is that the bad one is just slower. Not because they're worse at solving puzzles or being more cautious ...but because they either can't bring themselves to care about grinding a min-max routine hard or are busy looking around or busy working their second screen.
It's not a matter of having mastered exploration that makes one more profitable as it is a matter of deciding to play in a way that gets things over with as fast as possible so you can cram as many repetitions in a given amount of time as possible. That's something that matters in a race. This game isn't a race. the mechanics aren't built to be a race. It's not what the role is supposed to be about. But it's not your fault that you treat it like that. There isn't really much else to do with it because the game doesn't care about what you find exploring and exploring itself doesn't require you to really do anything but spend time. it just turns everything you do while participating in it all into credits. And you dont see why credits are a problem, not a solution? Everything devolves into this efficiency game instead of what it's intended to be because of credits being the primary and common reward. it's a bad way to address any problem in the game and it's lazy short sightedness that keeps having it be used as a balance.
What does fdev do? The extend the progression. And yes, it was limited...to start with. Until everyone complained.
Now, the things required for engineering can be found in many, many different ways. And on top of that, they later added materials traders, precisely because players hated the kind of gameplay you're trying to create. Now, you can get any engineering currency doing almost anything in the game. Exactly like credits.
Don't get me wrong! I see what you're after! It's just that most players don't care. They just want their 'credits' - or whatever other currency lets them achieve progress - and no questions asked. It doesn't matter how you craft it, how carefully or elegantly you conceal it, players will complain, and whine, and quit, until the devs give in and change it right back into a credit variant once again.
Also, trading absolutely has skill. There are plenty of players who don't bother to pursue it, but then, there are plenty of players who just equip gimballed multicannons and beams on a corvette and rack up billions in bounties, too. That doesn't mean doing so is the limit of skill in pve combat. I wish you'd stop trying to denigrate the aspects of the game you see as 'lesser' - especially since it seems you consider about 90% of the game to be that way.
Lastly, everything is a race. That's basically what skill is. If one player kills a hydra in 5 minutes and another takes an hour, which is more skilled? If one player clears a conflict zone in 10 minutes and the other in 20, which is more skilled?
Converting currency is a symptom of a different problem. Limited gameplay. Not a symptom of the currency being isolated. Players have no option in a given game loop but the base level grind. So they have to either suffer thru something boring at usually tedious rate or not partake at all. There is no game loop that actually requires a test of skill built over it that would allow a player to get good at something to skip the grind and accomplish something in less real time but maybe at a higher level of effort on their part. So currency conversion is a bandaid because it's easier to do that than implement decent game mechanics.
but even that is better than the single currency system. because you control the conversion rate and so maintaining balance between various roles is done easily here without impacting the local use of the individual currencies in whatever balance was set for them.
If i'm say, exploring and getting some kind of reward that is associated with exploration that I accrue, rather than this reward being an impact to the bgs/game, then that reward can be balanced in a way that is balanced to the costs of me exploring. compensating my activity fairly. If i then shift to something like bounty hunting or merc stuff etc, i get some kind of bounty hunting/merc reward. Now if i want to convert remaining exploration rewards to something usable in bounty hunting, a conversion (trader) could be visited that would convert them. but the conversion rate would maintain the balance based on how the developers feel each activity compares in difficulty to acquire. Simple. intuitive. No need to have this arms race of reward buff cycling that we have now.
That's a problem that is created because the gameplay is not something players enjoy in of itself. It's something they loath. so they look for ways to reduce having to do it. It's an odd behavior to have in a game that you aren't being forced to play but it's just psychology. Some people want to like elite, and people generally get addicted to getting stuff. Even if that stuff is pointless. But the gameplay is basic and quickly becomes repetitive and boring. So players demand to keep getting that fix of winning but without having to continue doing what they were doing as much. Since there are no game play loops beyond what they are already doing they demand either nerfs to the time sinks (FSD jump range extensions, mission stacking, predictable markets, mining hotspot overlaps, etc) or buffs to the rewards (credit reverse inflation).
We're (and we've been) at the point where credits are acquired so quickly to such a huge amount by players that it really only punishes new players for credits to exist at all. They are meaningless to anyone else having played more than a month at most. Rather than buff the credits in yet another role that will just cause more buffs to credits in other roles after and continue this endless cycle, it would make more sense to just eliminate credits. Even if you dont replace credits with another currency, it would be better than the continued waste of time credits cause the developers in trying to maintain balance. They could place certain things behind achievements from activities or reaching certain triggers if they didn't want to adopt the method most other games have come to find as the best option. I would easily see and accept a total elimination of credits before continuing to use credits to buff compensation as a means of trying to cover up boring gameplay grind loops.
Nobody is not doing xeno biology because it doesn't pay a lot. They're not doing it because all things being equal, other things may be paying more or because they realize it's really pointless and lacking actual gameplay and dont want to play it. All making it pay more could do is exactly what you described you dont want to do, force players to feel like they have to in order to make the best profit. Because if it's not buffed enough, there will be no impact to player participation, the same people already choosing to play it will be the ones playing it after. If you want xeno biology to be rewarding enough to draw players or even feel rewarded yourself, the real solution here is to actually have something worthwhile to do in the role and make the game actually care that you're doing it. Then credits become a distant second or third consideration, like it should be since nobody is hurting for credits.
you're trying to paint exploration as dangerous and requiring skill when it only requires staying awake and having a lot of time available to watch loading screens and look at things that dont respond to you. I'm not denigrating anything, i'm actually observing it for what it is and you're trying to romanticize activities that players do when they first learn how to play the game and then that's all they do ever after. Trade is safe, There is no risk there. exploration is safe, there is no risk there either. That's why players can do it and rack up millions and billions of credits repeating the same game loops and never die. Not the best players, almost all players easily and quickly make more credits than the game costs can support. The only difference between them is how fast they want to complete the repetitions before that either burns them out or they feel like doing something for some reason other than rewards. PVE combat is in the same boat, but pve combat is one of the few places where there exists a way to actually scale skill despite the limited activities because it's one of the few things that allow the game to alter the difficulty of an activity to the player. It's not leveraged well, but it's an order of magnitude beyond the progression scale of the other roles. PVE combat is safe because it's predictable and entirely optional - you can easily choose who to fight and when so you're never faced with a situation that you'll lose unless you want to be. So while there is a bit of skill to combat, there is no risk despite the rewards being balanced as if there were.
That's not just my opinion, that's why players whine about buffing all of the various things these game loops have in place as a "cost" to players. Because there is no progression of skill in the gameloops so what was at the beginning a fair cost, is now a tedious annoyance - but with a single currency and a single game loop, you can't improve the situation for one level of player without impacting all of them. So now players spend a few dozen hours playing and now have enough credits to buy everything in the game. You have costs that are still at launch levels and pointlessly low for some things and new items that are at costs that dont make any sense when compared to the costs of older things (foot costs vs ship costs).
Trading does not have skill. Trading is just about who can repeat the same actions over and over again after looking up whatever the market has said is worth the most that has the shortest travel distance online that everyone else hasn't already started doing.
This is why it's the goto for newbis to make credits, because it's the safest activity to get the most credits in your time playing. Not because it's full of risk and requires so much skill.
likewise with mining, if they were dangerous ...hard things to do requiring skill, it wouldn't be the thing everyone tells new players to do as soon as they can to eliminate having to care about credits. This romanticized version of the game you have is amusing, but just doesn't mesh with reality.
No, that's the only thing the game has in most roles to delineate player experience because in a grind loop all you have is how fast you can do the grind loop so you can do it again. You speed run the game loop because you dont care about the game loop's content ..because you've seen it before and it never changes and doesn't matter. And since you're in the grind loop for the reward, you just go after the reward. Even if you dont need it.
most players who dont quit the game for various reasons will gather their credits in the various easy money ways and then they do the things they want to do not caring about credits and speed running the game loops to repeat it as fast as possible. The game loops dont require skill. Skill is not speed running. Because credits dont matter soon after playing. you have plenty. And speed running the only content in the game doesn't make sense. But some players with more addictive personalities will continue anyway or maybe they just got tired of what the game has and made their own goal of finding out how fast they can do a certain thing.
The point is, a skilled game loop allows you to master an activity doing a more difficult task that tends to also impart a higher risk with a reward that scales either how well you succeeded or by succeeding at all. Completing any task slower or faster, might be something that requires skill or it might be something that just requires not caring about playing - it really depends on the task. If i can beat a level in mario faster than everyone else, that can be seen as a skill but it's at the expense of all of the content in the level that i'm skipping to do so and I'm getting none in return because i've converted the game into a race instead of what it was designed to be. That's what completing grind loops faster is. Depending on the task at hand, it could require being more skilled to accomplish and some players couldn't do it (like clearing cz's). but doing the only activity available faster and having that be what you actually care about is a symptom of a problem in game design than what you should be striving towards. You shouldn't want to cram as many repetitions of the same action into as little time as possible. That's not what is meant by having a skilled game mechanic or roles requiring skills. That's just players finding the most efficient way to not play the game to get at your reward or having given up on whatever the point of the game was and making their own personal objectives.
Proper skilled gameplay is that which you aren't able to do from the start of the game or if you can, you're not reliably successful. You have to learn how to do a certain task or beat a certain kind of opponent or solve a certain kind of puzzle. And a mechanic has risk when attempting a task, even slowly has a non-zero chance of failing even if you dont want to fail. Anything players do to make crazy money is easily provable at not having either. Something with risk or requiring skill to do would not be something grindable and reliable for even newbies to accomplish. And setting a game up so your players are always looking for the best way to not really play or appreciate what's going on because they're too busy speed running is not how you want your game to be played. It just tells you that it's not the game they want to experience, just a means to an end.
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The tedium of it makes the question irrelevant. Maybe if it paid a million credits for a full sample I might consider doing it a few times, but I'm not convinced even that would be enough.
Exploration used to be the main reason I played the game, now frame rates on the ground and the new planet tech with it's cut-n-pasted hand crafted assets is the reason I've stopped playing the game.
Exploration used to be the main reason I played the game, now frame rates on the ground and the new planet tech with it's cut-n-pasted hand crafted assets is the reason I've stopped playing the game.
Hey Ender, you should invite demiser round to your pond for the evening. You're getting on like nothing. Just remind him of the fence.
It's a welcome reprieve from the topics about communication and console odyssey.
Sounds like he's agreed, poor chap.
Make sure to come up for air every so often, you don't want to end up all blue and swollen.
I'm sorry, but it really sounds like you want a completely different game from elite. Everything you have described - about problems with credits and lack of skill and so on - applies to every aspect of the game, not just exploration or trade. You ignored what I said about AX combat, but it's the only aspect of gameplay that could be called 'skillful' by your definition, and even it is most profitable when doing it the least skillful way possible.
You want to create entirely new currency systems, based around entirely new gameplay, giving entirely new rewards.
That's not Elite Dangerous at all, anymore. It's something else.
And given that such massive changes are almost completely unlikely to happen, mind just letting me get away with making exobiology a bit more profitable, to the point where players who feel like doing it don't feel pressured not to do so for the sake of credits?
I don't think that's too much to ask.
it's not changing things in entirely different ways, it's just applying what's already implemented in some areas to others.
We have isolated rewards that do not impact other aspects of the game. We have varied currency in the form of materials. We have everything i've suggested as better alternatives to credits on the reward side of the equation and that would be enough to be a better option all by itself. We have things that can directly impact the BGS due to a particular activity you do that isn't related to a credit exchange.
Saying it's not elite dangerous doesn't make sense, it's already in elite dangerous. Just not applied here currently for this purpose.
The thing that elite doesn't have is the additional game loops i've mentioned. Adding them wouldn't change the nature of the game, since it's not replacing what you can currently do in the game if you want to keep doing it. It just gives developers an option to balance gameplay to different player experience without only have two tools to do so (credits and time). Letting them adjust the game to still be engaging to experienced players without putting it out of reach to less experienced and vice versa.
Are those new gameplay ideas massive changes? sure, and they require creativity and insight into how the game is played to do properly and likely why we only see mini-games put forth to fill this role and doing a bad job at it. But the reward side of things is certainly within fdev's current capability, since they're already doing it in places and have experience on how to set it up so it works.
Given that no current content matches what your demands entail, I'd say that yes, it's entirely different ways, and yes, it's 100% beyond their capabilities. If it weren't, they'd have done it already.
Either that, or they made the economic decision that to do so was not an economically viable way to design a game.
Either way, it's not something that's likely to happen in this game.
Again, if you want to make your suggestion elsewhere, I'll totally support it, but it should not be a justification for why this suggestion shouldn't happen, especially given the comparative timescales involved. Your changes will take years, while tweaking exobiology upwards could be done in a month.
Seems a bit born of frustration from Dolly Parton.
Sengineers uses multiple currencies to operate across multiple activities and isolates the usefulness of those currencies to specific areas.
Foot gameplay is isolated both in activities, rewards and consumables from ship gameplay and vice versa.
This is all of the implementation context needed to pivot those concepts into other areas of the game such as the various pre-existing and new roles.
That's not beyond their capabilities to do, they've already done it.
The only thing that is unlikely to happen is adding something other than skill-less grind loops as gameplay. That i agree will probably never happen, but it doesn't mean it shouldn't be constantly requested to happen anyway.
The alteration to the way the game rewards players though is something fdev has already done in some places...they just need to expand the concept out to others. And that could certainly happen. Less likely than whatever requires the absolute littlest effort to shut the noisiest players up or less likely than what will work in the short term so future problems are dealt with by future fdev ...but still well within something that can be done without rewriting the game or anything as drastic.
Changing a credit amount would be super fast and simple to do, it's just editing a number. but it wont fix why that number is being changed. it just pushes the problem forward like these identical changes have done since the game was launched. That's the justification. Not only does this kind of fix not solve the problem and force us to have to deal with it again in the future but it erodes the game balance. Because while profits keep getting buffed to improperly balance player time costs.. the cost of items in the game remain static and unchanged. That devalues credits as a balance mechanism. Which is why it would make more sense to just eliminate credits from costs and profits altogether if we're to remain on this path. It's only purpose seems to be to punish new players ...which is the last thing you want to do. Since it's not something players who survive the initiation phase to ED have to care about. Making everything 0 credits is also quick and easy to do and it solves more problems than buffing income rates.
The argument that tweaking credit payouts erodes game balance just doesn't stand up. The game is in its best balance state ever at the moment. Players can choose between a wide variety of activities, and do whatever they like.
This has not come as a result of preserving the status quo, but rather as a series of Progressive modifications, both upwards and downwards.
People hated the original version of the game. It took far too long to get anywhere. The current version is only bad for players who have been playing for far too long. For the vast majority of players, it is essentially perfect.
if i can spend a couple hours and make tens of millions of credits an hour, how does that balance properly to the cost of ship repair, the cost of ship refueling, the cost of ship ammo? How does the cost of ships themselves make any sense compared to the cost of personal weapons on foot? The cost of suits? How does the cost of ships balance against the income players have in a way that makes players have to care about losing them?
How does the cost of upkeep balance with income when players can have years and years of upkeep in a couple days of gameplay?
none of these things are balanced. Income's reverse inflation has done nothing but make credits irrelevant a balance mechanism to the game to everyone except newbies. They're the only ones still impacted by the costs of things ..at the most vulnerable stage of the game for players.
That makes no sense and since credits arent' something you have to worry about at all later on, it serves no purpose at all existing as-is since it only serves to harm the game, rather than benefit it in any way.
The vast majority of players that only play for less than 60 hours and abandon it or the vast majority of players who try and eliminate credits from mattering in the game as fast as possible or the vast majority of players who tell everyone that it's not about min-maxing your profit and getting grind burnout, it's just about doing what you want to do when you want to do it? Where are these players who dont immediately make credits not matter as soon as they can and play the long game keeping their income in balance with the costs of their activities so that risk of loss and consumables retain their balance as originally intended? they dont exist outside of 2nd or 3rd characters with long term players.
Your idea of players being happy and thinking things are perfect simply comes from a defacto removal of credits from the game. because they spent the time to just make gobs of credits and now credits dont matter. Removing credits is what made them feel that way. I'm saying if you're going to suggest staying in this path ..then stop the pretense that is only doing harm and just remove credits from mattering to everyone. Set the value to 0 and keep everything the same. You change nothing for veteran players, and you improve the situation for new players. Win win.
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Nobody actually likes upkeep costs; the reduction of the impact of things like reloading and refueling it is, overall, a good thing. By contrast, the removal of progression would not be a good thing. Players play the game to move forwards, not to sit in the same place. And the removal of credits equates to the removal of progression.
Not only would doing so reduce the average playtime significantly, as most players would just try a few ships that they're interested in and then quit, it would also probably eliminate a significant portion of the long-term population, a players who continue to play in some part because of the continued accumulation of credits.
And a significant portion of their value comes from the fact that they are not specific. They have no specific purpose, and therefore their purpose is Limitless. You don't see players grinding engineering materials to the maximum, but you do see players grinding credits pass the trillion Credit Point.
Overall, the reduction in the importance of upkeep costs over time has been a good thing. At the same time, the increased rate at which players can progress- to a point- has also been a good thing. It went a bit too far there for a while, with the LTD meta, but since that has been reduced, things have reached a state of functional perfection.
And it has resulted in the best state of gameplay balance in the game's history.