How much should Exobiology be worth?

[Bottom Hat]

It's like looking at a broadsheet, and realising you'd rather read it instead.

 

[Sysmon]

It's like looking at a broadsheet, and realising you'd rather read it instead.

I read "eat it instead" <heads off for a snack>

S

 

[Frop]

You don't see players grinding engineering materials to the maximum

 

[Darth Ender]

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.

there is no progression with credits after you can afford whatever you want. Zero. they serve no purpose just accruing in your account if you're not having to spend them. At that point, you're playing for fun or some external objective to the game like seeing how fast you can do something. Credits only serve a purpose to pay for things that cost credits. That's it. That's their only function and purpose.

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.

players dont play to get credits. Well, partially true, they play for credits to get enough credits early on so that credits no longer matter. Then they play the things they want to play. If you remove credits, you skip having to do that step of needing to make credits not matter, but that's currently such a short amount of time that it doesn't matter.

Players play the game because the enjoy the activity involved, because all except newbies have already eliminated credits from the equation. It only registers to players as a reward they care about because they have it there in their face measuring the worth of their activity and everyone wants to think of what they're doing as worth something. But there are easy ways to do that without credits, and for many players what little impact credits had in deciding what they were going to do in the game would vanish if the number just wasn't there.

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.

credit's value doesn't come from not being specific - and like all currency in games, it has one purpose, to balance cost. Is credits doing a good job at balancing cost? no.

sure you see people maxing out their materials, but the cost continually eliminates them from stock and there is a max limit of how many you can hoard at one time. It's a much better balanced currency than credits is because of that.

Players dont keep getting obscene levels of credits because it's awesome. it's become a thing to do because you can. a bragging right in of itself. But by the time you've gathered a billion credits or even in most cases just a few hundred million credits, the value of credits as a balance mechanism to gameplay is gone. The costs of items will never consume your wealth ...credits no longer have meaning to you as a item of value. It's just a number you can make go up and with nothing else to really care about, you do. ideally while doing something that doesn't bore you.

You have this general idea that players like the profit levels in the current game better than prior, and that may be true, but it's not because improving profits helped ..it's because improving profits allowed players to eliminate having credits matter in game loops that they preferred so they didn't have to do just trading for a couple days or just mining for a couple days. These happy players exist in a state of defacto credit elimination already. And the inflation has made that journey to that point take so little time that it doesn't make sense to even have it anymore.

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.

reducing costs is good ...increasing profits is good. You're constantly making the argument that credit value = 0 is ideal. And that's something you're only suggesting to make happen faster and easier, which further only means that newbies are negatively impacted by cost.

You're construing balance with freedom. The game is not in balance, we've just gotten fdev to eliminate one of the main balance mechanics in the game around their grind loops and are now free. Well, everyone except newbies. But hell with them, right? we worked long and hard for a few hours to make more money than ever needed for anything short of a carrier in the game. Cuz we're awesome players and probably the best the world has ever seen, and totally not because profits are now totally disconnected from risk and cost and effort to sidestep needing to make the game loops more fun.

 

[Flimley]

The very most important aspect of the new exobiology gameplay is that is super compelling.
Currently, it is not. I sincerely hope additions will be imminent.
When update (11) Fleet carrier interiors arrives, some proper exploration could be super duper awesome and really turn the game around. For peace, justice, and the Flimley way \o/

Flimley

 

[DemiserofD]

players dont play to get credits.

I think this is your single greatest misconception. Look at the LTD craze; there were more players playing then than almost any other time in Elite history, and there weren't even fleet carriers then. People were grinding billions of credits for no reason, just because they could.

reducing costs is good ...increasing profits is good. You're constantly making the argument that credit value = 0 is ideal.

No, that's the exact opposite of what I'm saying. I'm saying that there is a balanced point of credit gain, and that most of the game currently rests at that point, other than a few exceptions like Piracy and Exobiology.

You are taking a few basic facts and extrapolating them FAR beyond the truth, to suit your own biased viewpoint as a player who has played for much longer than average. That is not the standard viewpoint, and you need to recognize that.

 

[Darth Ender]

I think this is your single greatest misconception. Look at the LTD craze; there were more players playing then than almost any other time in Elite history, and there weren't even fleet carriers then. People were grinding billions of credits for no reason, just because they could.

LTD craze happened when we knew carriers were coming and that they were expensive. We didn't know how expensive, and so people stockpiled.

And people will play to just make the number go up because they can, as well. Sure. But that's not really because they want credits, it's because credits are the only thing they get in the game for doing things. They want a reward. they're not married to credits.

No, that's the exact opposite of what I'm saying. I'm saying that there is a balanced point of credit gain, and that most of the game currently rests at that point, other than a few exceptions like Piracy and Exobiology.

I know it's not what you're saying but it's what you are meaning. The game gets better when the profit is up and the cost is down. Ordinarily that is true to a point and then you start having a negative impact on the game because the rewards become meaningless. But in elite, the rewards became meaningless long ...long ago for most players. They escaped the value of credits early in playing (within the first month of playing). So the benefit of increasing profit and reducing effective cost keeps happening the more you go until the effective cost of things in the game are zero. And yet people still play. The value you're leaving credits is as an addiction - because it has no game one. And there are better ways to appeal to an addictive need in the game than screwing up the balance of it.

You are taking a few basic facts and extrapolating them FAR beyond the truth, to suit your own biased viewpoint as a player who has played for much longer than average. That is not the standard viewpoint, and you need to recognize that.

What isn't truth? Players dont easily make tens and hundreds of millions of credits per hour very early in gameplay? No, that's true. The game loops are easy and safe and repeatable, making it trivial to acquire said quick wealth with little to no skill? No that's true too. The income inflation has outpaced any kind of cost adjustments to the game to compensate for only having grind loops for gameplay for all players from newbies to half decade veterans? No that's true too. That this isn't the Nth time fdev would have adjusted profits in the game to shuffle players into a certain game role they feel is being under utilized or away from one being over utilized? No that's true too. That the existing credit cost of items only impacts the early game players at a time where the game suffers the highest dropoff rate of players because everyone over that learning curve hump has obscene amounts of credits? No that's true too.

what is being exaggerated into hyperbole here? The only thing that is being stretched beyond truth is the idea that exploration is dangerous and requires skill. That landing on a planet is super risky and if not equal to something like combat, even greater and requiring more skill than it and that any of these base level game loops require any real skill to be wildly successful and acquire cost-breaking amounts of wealth. There's a reason why players have demanded profits outpace costs and it's not because the game loops are engaging and fun - you dont have to pay people more and more to do something they're gonna want to do anyway. It's because they wanted to be free of the slow progression thru ships and modules that was originally envisioned (and what the original cost and reward balance was set for) because the gameplay was monotonous and mindlessly repetitive. They're happier now than before because that freedom happens faster. What provides that freedom is eliminating the value of credits. All you do by continuing to buff profits is make that easier while at the same time keeping all of the negative that you're escaping with the newbies and only the newbies. Why push for something that benefits the vast majority of players who aren't going to quit and only excludes newbies? That's what doesn't make sense with your whole pro-credit stance.

And if you're still stuck on this idea that players will stop playing if their bank account numbers aren't going up despite there being any number of other things they could attach their focus to...keep the credits. Just zero out the cost of everything in the game that uses them. Boom. you have your need for credit balances to focus on...and none of the negative aspects of newbie hating.


edit: this is what balance is

Income progresses in a linear (ideally) slope up from low experience to high experience
Cost progresses with this income (cost, not just being currency, but cost in effort or difficulty etc).
So that at any given point on the graph, the amount of gameplay expected from the player is the same if they choose the activities that are intended for what they're doing. It's the type of gameplay involved that varies to account for the progressive cost and rewards. This creates a healthy game that keeps players playing regardless of their experience. Players could participate in an activity far below their current experience level - it would be less difficult and risky but also less compensation and so take much longer to leverage it for your current costs in the game to sustain your current capabilities.

Elite suffers from not having that scale of cost thru to the end. It exist only at the beginning ...and as reverse income inflation has piled on, that flattening of the cost curve happens earlier and earlier just a little bit. Compounded on that is that in multiple roles, it's not experience that drives profits but simply scale capability ...so progression accelerates as you get larger ships with no accounting for experience at all. So the only players that suffer cost are newbies. Everyone else is playing a game where cost is meaningless.

 

[DemiserofD]

LTD craze happened when we knew carriers were coming and that they were expensive. We didn't know how expensive, and so people stockpiled.

No, LTD craze was ongoing for over a year before carriers were announced.

And people will play to just make the number go up because they can, as well. Sure. But that's not really because they want credits, it's because credits are the only thing they get in the game for doing things. They want a reward. they're not married to credits.

Wrong. Players grind credits because they represent progression, in a vague, nebulous way. There are players who have ground for over a trillion credits; do you really think they're doing that because they intend to do something with them?

I know it's not what you're saying but it's what you are meaning. The game gets better when the profit is up and the cost is down.

I know what I'm meaning, lol. Removing progression is the worst possible thing you can do in a game, because it's how games work. The brain is coded to reward you with dopamine when you achieve objectives, and computer games give you little hits of success constantly to trigger that response. All people who play games are following this biological impulse. Some are addicted, but most are able to balance this desire with the rest of their lives, just like they do with, say, sports. But for both cases, it is that hit of dopamine that makes games fun.

You're basically making the case that drinking alcohol would still be fun if it didn't get you drunk, or that drinking coffee would still be done if it didn't give you energy. That's not how it works. That's not how anything works.

I mean exactly what I say; the increased rate of progression currently offered by the game is ideal. The reduced punishment of upkeep in the game is also ideal.

What isn't truth? Players dont easily make tens and hundreds of millions of credits per hour very early in gameplay? No, that's true.

No, that is not true. Most actual beginner players don't make heaps of credits very soon at all.

The game loops are easy and safe and repeatable, making it trivial to acquire said quick wealth with little to no skill? No that's true too.

No, that is not true. Beginner players often die to many things that experienced players can handle easily. They fail interdictions, they crash into stations, they can't dock in time and get blown up.

The income inflation has outpaced any kind of cost adjustments to the game to compensate for only having grind loops for gameplay for all players from newbies to half decade veterans? No that's true too.

No, that's not true. The increases to income were fully intentional, in response to criticism from those exact same veterans. The devs realized that having a game that takes full-time engagement to succeed is not a pragmatic business model.

That this isn't the Nth time fdev would have adjusted profits in the game to shuffle players into a certain game role they feel is being under utilized or away from one being over utilized? No that's true too.

This is true, but it only supports my point. The devs have consistently tweaked income rates, and have slowly reached a point of decent balance. With only a few more tweaks, they could reach a perfect point of balance.

That the existing credit cost of items only impacts the early game players at a time where the game suffers the highest dropoff rate of players because everyone over that learning curve hump has obscene amounts of credits? No that's true too.

Again, this only supports my point. Older players will always have more credits than they know what to do with. This happens in every game. Hence, the important balance point is for newer players, not veterans. We are developmentally irrelevant.

what is being exaggerated into hyperbole here?

Basically everything. You're basing your statements on a gameplay experience only experienced by a tiny percentage of players and extrapolating that to say the game is completely and fundamentally broken, which is, of course, absurd.

And if you're still stuck on this idea that players will stop playing if their bank account numbers aren't going up despite there being any number of other things they could attach their focus to...keep the credits. Just zero out the cost of everything in the game that uses them. Boom. you have your need for credit balances to focus on...and none of the negative aspects of newbie hating.

You constantly refuse to see the point. Players must have a sense of meaningful progression in multiple fields, or they'll quit the game, just like so many did after the LTD craze ended.

And you're still dragging your massively overblown viewpoint into a topic that has nothing to do with it! I don't want exobiology to pay more than other activities! I just want it to pay enough I can feel justified in doing it without sacrificing huge amounts of potential income!

Worst case, even if everything you say is true(and that's a big if), it has nothing to do with my suggestion, because my suggestion does not worsen the 'problem' in any way.

 

[Anticon]

So how many Exobiologists can dance on the head of a pin? That's the REAL issue here.

 

[Straha Yeagar]

Here is a very recent example to show how difficult it is to set an appropriate payment for this. This was undoubtedly the most difficult bio-scan I have come across. Not only does this species seem to prefer the bumpiest regions on the planet, it is also very difficult to detect (small and almost the same colour as the surface). Without the help of my composition scanner and hovering very slowly over the surface, I probably would never have spotted it. This is the second sample (the third is still in progress) and the first was just as tricky.

Now when I compare the result with that of the other genus on this planet, we have this situation: this one (Fonticulua Digitos) has a base value of 127,700 while the other, a bacterium and much easier to find, is only at 89,900. The "balance" between the two may be reasonably fair, but taken on its own and relative to the difficulty, it is still far too low. I would start with at least 500,000 here.

This genus is not particularly rare and so it is quite possible that it is much easier to get the same samples on another, more smooth planet. Balancing this globally against both visibility and the difficulty of landing seems to me an impossible task. But there is also the fun factor: if I were doing it just for the money, I would have just moved on. However, the challenge appealed to me immensely and that alone was reward enough for me. Others who are primarily interested in income will certainly disagree with me.

p.s.: The last one proved much easier to spot and land. This fundamental indeterminacy is then also added to...

Here is a hint...turn on your ships night vision, even on sunny side of the planet. The bio outlines really stand out.

 

[Darth Ender]

No, LTD craze was ongoing for over a year before carriers were announced.

LTD craze happened around 2019. There's no talk about triple ltd prior to that year. Carriers were known about and discussed early in 2018. You're flipping your sequence of events.

You'd have to go back to 2017 to be a year before carriers were announced.

Wrong. Players grind credits because they represent progression, in a vague, nebulous way. There are players who have ground for over a trillion credits; do you really think they're doing that because they intend to do something with them?

you can't define this progression and so you're going to go in circles here. What can you progress to when credit's only function is to buy things and nothing in the game costs anything that would impact you after you've made a few hundred million credits? This is getting sad. Wealth progression stops when the cost of things no longer matter. You've reached 100% and adding numbers to your bank will never get you to 101% Unless you find a new thing to sink your credits into, the progression is over.

I know what I'm meaning, lol. Removing progression is the worst possible thing you can do in a game, because it's how games work. The brain is coded to reward you with dopamine when you achieve objectives, and computer games give you little hits of success constantly to trigger that response. All people who play games are following this biological impulse. Some are addicted, but most are able to balance this desire with the rest of their lives, just like they do with, say, sports. But for both cases, it is that hit of dopamine that makes games fun.

Nobody is removing progression. You just dont know what progression is. The motivation is one of two things once players have eliminated value from credits.
1. They play because they want to
2. They play to feel rewarded.

The progression available to players is in things they can buy and wealth. Wealth is easy get more than you'll need in. That's why fdev setup engineers the way they did with multiple currencies where you couldn't stockpile them all at one time doing one thing. This draws progression of engineers out extremely longer than the progression of buying things with credits is. That's good,

When someone is playing for reason #2, credits is only the motivator to eliminate it from mattering, because it's easy and can be eliminated. So the progression for things you spend credits on is over quickly.
There are a few ways to fix that if you wanted to.
A. You could scale cost to match up with wealth ...so the effective cost of things are the same regardless of how many credits you've managed to acquire. Putting profit and cost back in balance.
B. You can give up on credits and move to a different ...more directly tuneable currency or set of currencies that allow you to re-set the cost and profit
C. You can just eliminate cost if it's been shown that the reason players play isn't in the reward, but in the gameplay itself. Then the reward numbers really dont matter to the game.


Elite dangerous has been living in C in a defacto state for years. Players quickly eliminate credits from having any meaningful value by having just obscene margins betweeen profit and cost. Yet they still play. There's no progression in credits at that point, no purpose to accruing tens of billions. The only function credits currently have in the game is to be a barrier to newbies. That's it. they dont matter to anyone else.

And as I mentioned, if you just like seeing numbers get bigger ..that can still remain. Zeroing out the cost of things that cost credits only impacts newbies. Nobody else's game changes.

You're basically making the case that drinking alcohol would still be fun if it didn't get you drunk, or that drinking coffee would still be done if it didn't give you energy. That's not how it works. That's not how anything works.

You already know the credits aren't valuable when you've got hundreds millions of them and things cost 20,000 credits here and a few million there and you can make tens of millions in an hour. Yet your dopamine hit seems to still work. What makes you think it suddenly wouldn't work if the cost of items (that cost credits) was 0? Your bank account would still go up. Your addiction should still function just the same. There's literally no difference in your game experience. It only improves the new players.

The playerbase has already decided they aren't interested in having credits be balanced to cost...yet it still is for the very new player.

I mean exactly what I say; the increased rate of progression currently offered by the game is ideal. The reduced punishment of upkeep in the game is also ideal

It's ideal in your mind because the cost is negligible. It has no pain response because your income is insanely disproportional to what the things cost. You want credits to not matter, but keep saying you dont. Paying for things is supposed to hurt. It's tied to the same part of the brain that pain is. This drives strategy and decision making (since you know you'll have to pay for things and you dont want to) which are usually things you want in a game. But not elite. There's no need for strategy or decision making in a game loop that doesn't really require any. All you get is time sinks that you may enjoy or may loath. And so the pain of paying is just pain for the sake of pain. And rightly rejected. Which is why we're at where we're at with profits and cost. i'm just suggesting to stop beating around the bush and punishing only new players with a game mechanic barrier that the playerbase has decided it doesn't want, the developers have allowed to be eliminated with ridiculous ease and no longer serves a purpose once you've fast tracked yourself to a python. It's just wasted time and energy shuffling credits when they dont matter and leading the addicts around by making one thing more or less profitable and easily grindable does't solve any problems.

You want to feel rewarded doing exo biology - demand that exo biology actually involve gameplay. Then you wont feel like you need to be paid off just to participate in standing and staring at a static 3d model of some fungi. Shuffling credits for accomplishing this dangerous task isn't going to do anything at best, and at worst, it'll drive players who are looking for the fastest way to make credits not matter or how to make the most credits so they can brag about how many they've made in an hour.

meanwhile we haven't addressed balance at all, and potentially created new arguments between players who dont think staring at something or half a minute is worth whatever it is they've got to do for that reward. And so the cycle continues.

No, that is not true. Most actual beginner players don't make heaps of credits very soon at all.

Yea, i'm sure it takes players a whole month of daily game play to make enough credits to get an anaconda. Totally doesn't take less than an hour to get a newbie sidewinder and go mining and have over 40 million credits. And sure, that sidewinder knows how to play already. So lets add a few days to learn the basics, Then in less than a handful of hours, they have enough credits to buy an anaconda or any other large ship and start compounding that credit rate.

New players that survive past the abandonment due to learning curve are most definitely making crazy money right from the early stages of the game. It'll likely happen later than when they still only have a sidewinder for the actual newbs...but long before they get to a python.

There hasn't been a scaled balanced progression from python to anaconda in many years. You have to purposely go out of your way to play in away that profit is not outpacing costs.

No, that is not true. Beginner players often die to many things that experienced players can handle easily. They fail interdictions, they crash into stations, they can't dock in time and get blown up.

are you seriously suggesting that the cost of 30,000 credit ship rebuys and such are painful to players and that they die so frequently that the income keeps pace? How new are these player that you're even talking about anyway? as soon as players begin trading and mining they'll be making millions of credits in an hour when they want to. They watch youtube... they're not playing the game in a bubble. Dying is only painful to the very new player. Which has been my point multiple times in previous posts and above. Cost in this game -ONLY- impacts newbies. Cost impacting newbies wouldn't be a problem if it was something players deal with throughout the game. but in elite dangerous, it only exists painfully for newbies. It's like the game is singling them out to punish them and only them in this manner. It doesn't make sense.

this period of dying during trading runs or mining runs doesn't last all that long either. learning how you can 100% reliably always avoid death is one of the first things you learn how to do in the game. And you only need to really try to avoid it for a few hours ...then you'll have more than enough credits to not have to worry about however many times you die testing your limits.

But i think your "beginner" is a narrow span of time that lasts a few days once basic flight is learned and they've decided to not quit. Because even if you die a few times along the way, that amount of time where their income is keeping pace with cost ends abruptly with the way credit reverse inflation has impacted the various roles. Everything is too profitable for the newbies unless they pick things that aren't...but they wont because the profitable things are done in exactly the same way as the non-profitable things and are equally accessible. It's no harder to mine a expensive thing than a worthless thing. It's no harder to truck a profitable good vs a worthless good. It's no harder to explore an earth like vs a ice moon. You seem to want to imagine that beginners are in this phase where cost matters for dozens and dozens of hours of gameplay and it's not true. You dont have to be a billionaire to have cost not matter. It scales with what you're looking to spend. So a few tens of million when your ship and everything in it only cost you a few hundred K to rebuy if you lose it is more than enough. That's a fraction of an hour of gameplay that is more than doable in such a ship.

None of that is balanced. But it hasn't been balanced for many years. Balance isn't all that important in elite dangerous. Which is why eliminating credit cost wont negatively impact the game if we're not really concerned with putting it back into balance.

No, that's not true. The increases to income were fully intentional, in response to criticism from those exact same veterans. The devs realized that having a game that takes full-time engagement to succeed is not a pragmatic business model.

Not true? What do you think the reason was for wanting more credits? the game was balanced initially so that it took a long time to get things and so that the cost was balanced. But fdev only implemented grind mechanics. Once you mastered these trivial game loops you have nothing else to move on to do. So players were having to repeat the same action over and over and over hundreds if not thousands of times to get to fully upgraded anacondas and there was no engaging new content along the way or any change in these cycles. Just mindless repetition and it was driving players away. Buffing credits and reducing time sinks (fsd jump buffing) is how Fdev responded. Players could then get what they wanted in less repetitions.

If there had been engaging gameplay, scaled mechanics on top of the beginner game loops then the initial balance of income and cost would have been more than acceptable to players. Because it wouldn't have been seen as a barrier to achievement without any justification.

But since credits are a common currency across the game, these changes do not scale with player experience. So while reducing the time cost veteran players faced was accomplished, it broke the cost to profit balance in mid-early to mid-late gameplay. Because there is no tiered activity between veteran and newbies...they do the same things, and so the same rewards are available to both. The only thing left putting a limiter on profit/cost is scale. That only last as long as you can keep the player out of a python. Then you're at critical mass and cost loses all meaning.

Fdev didn't just decide to break their carefully balanced profit and cost model for fun. They did it because they had to and it was easy to do this vs the alternative and make the existing balance more fun and so less painful and thus less costly. Engineers were designed to avoid these same problems with credits that the base game had with controlling progression. Instead of a common currency, it would have multiple currencies that can all be tuned separately. And instead of a fixed number of things you can acquire and be done ...it would allow an unlimited variety to be added of things you can purchase with this new currency. And instead of this currency being able to be acquired in unlimited fashion at a single time, it would have hard ceilings so you could never outpace cost.

That wasn't an accident. They recognized the problems with credits and adopted a solution that would attempt to correct those problems. And it's worked pretty effectively. Players have switched from collecting the ships and being done to being on a neverending quest to get he most OP engineered ship in whatever aspect they're aiming for. As much as players may hate the tedium of engineers, it's concept is much more effective than credits at doing the job.

This is true, but it only supports my point. The devs have consistently tweaked income rates, and have slowly reached a point of decent balance. With only a few more tweaks, they could reach a perfect point of balance.

Yea, this perfect point is more profit in whatever areas you like to play or your hypothetical players doing something worthless like playing in that doesn't pay well and all costs remain the same. Shocking. This is called reverse inflation ...it's great when you dont want to feel any kind of pain of cost. It's bad for game design when cost is how you keep players playing. But in elite that's not what keeps players playing or most players wouldn't be playing. Just drop the pretense that this is an attempt at perfect balance and eliminate credit cost like you want. Set it to 0, make the profit point whatever makes you happy and nobody loses. Keep the status quo and all you do is punish newbies with a game mechanic that only hurts them.

Again, this only supports my point. Older players will always have more credits than they know what to do with. This happens in every game. Hence, the important balance point is for newer players, not veterans. We are developmentally irrelevant.

A. No it doesn't always happen until players have purchased everything they can and no longer incur costs from dying or using resources because nothing is difficult.
good games will scale rewards to experience so what costs you had at he beginning keep pace with what costs you have either dynamically or via currency specific to that level of gameplay you're at. Later on different currency may be required to buy higher level things or augment them etc. and the costs will be balanced. As long as things are available to spend currency on, the game can balance income rate with costs. An open world - sandboxy kind of game is not supposed to let that end-game scenario happen. Because then players just end up leaving the game, having nothing further todo. Elite has not taken any of these measures to scale income with cost. That's not because they can't ...it's just that they dont feel they need to.

And we're not talking players that are years into the game. Players have more credits than they can spend within the first couple dozen hours of gameplay assuming they're making it that far. Tens of millions is cost-breaking when you have a viper or other small ship, and it's trivial to get that kind of income right from the start.

B. What's the purpose of buffing this role for newbies who have costs in the thousands of credits? The current income amount seems more than adequate for them. it only looks ridiculously low to veteran players who have way more profitable options. So who are you wanting this change for? The newbies would only be impacted by this in the same sense that other inflated income has impacted them, by accelerating when credits no longer have value. But that would only be helpful for newbies who are looking to really grind out surface bio signals ...which isn't really all that newbie friendly because it is tedious and has multiple steps that take a long time to travel to. They dont need the buff to income for balance because they're already in balance. Newbies' costs are extremely low, so their profits dont need to be high at all.

if you're looking to help newbies thru reducing the impact of cost ..it makes more sense to just set it to 0 at this point because after a couple dozen hours, it effectively is for players.

Basically everything. You're basing your statements on a gameplay experience only experienced by a tiny percentage of players and extrapolating that to say the game is completely and fundamentally broken, which is, of course, absurd.

Never had i said it was broken, i said it was not balanced. Nothing i have said is only experienced by a fraction of players, it's experienced by most. Pretty much any player that has done any trading or mining in recent history likely has more profit than cost will ever consume.

That's the reality of the game. It's played in a game state where cost effectively doesn't exist for anything costing credits. The game loops do not scale with experience and yet plenty of players still play. If it was fundamentally broken, that wouldn't be the case. Instead, players have found other reasons outside of what would be good game design that keeps them playing. One of the most important aspects of that is the elimination of credit value in gameplay.

You constantly refuse to see the point. Players must have a sense of meaningful progression in multiple fields, or they'll quit the game, just like so many did after the LTD craze ended.

Your point is invalid. Players have been playing for years without any progression in terms of credits and what credits can buy besides the introduction of the carrier. There is no progression to wealth when you no longer have a cost that pains you to pay. You've won that part of the game at that point. If your goal is to just get a larger number then fine, i'm not saying not to. But you dont need cost to do that, it already is 0 for you. But most players even when they choose something that rewards more credits vs something that rewards less and they dont need the credits, only do so because of a reward existing. In the hypothetical absence of credits, that reward can be replaced with any number of other things.

The most important other thing would be good gameplay. Or it could be a result in the BGS. Or it could be a different kind of currency that is better positioned to be balanced.

And you're still dragging your massively overblown viewpoint into a topic that has nothing to do with it! I don't want exobiology to pay more than other activities! I just want it to pay enough I can feel justified in doing it without sacrificing huge amounts of potential income!

And that's what i've been saying what you really want. It's got nothing to do with newbies. It's got nothing to do with being balanced. It's got nothing to do with anything but making your own perception of reward happy and damn all concern about balance because who cares at this point.

And that's fine, the game isn't balanced, so trying to balance an activity as pointlessly devoid of gameplay as exo biology is with something that actually has gameplay associated with completing it is not really helpful. All you really need is a number increased ...and I'm cool with increasing that number. As long as you just zero out the cost of everything that uses credits in the game so we can stop punishing the only group of players where cost matters and finally abandon this pretend balance mechanic that doesn't work and move to something else if it's needed or nothing at all. You get your thing, newbies get to join the game everyone else is playing ...we all win.

Worst case, even if everything you say is true(and that's a big if), it has nothing to do with my suggestion, because my suggestion does not worsen the 'problem' in any way.

Oh but it does. Because then it still is being treated as a balance mechanic, and as such it's not doing it's job, it's moving further away from it's job - which should be to align with costs incurred and costs of items associated with playing the game at a given level. And almost definitely it's being mis-used as a carrot to bribe players into being less upset that this game role is staring at a static image than they should be - which if successful, just reduces the pressure to implement something for it.

 

[DemiserofD]

LTD craze happened around 2019. There's no talk about triple ltd prior to that year. Carriers were known about and discussed early in 2018. You're flipping your sequence of events.

You'd have to go back to 2017 to be a year before carriers were announced.

Carriers were not officially announced until 2020, mate. Until that point people had no idea if or when they'd be released, or any idea whether they'd be available as an individual asset. Now, you could argue that players were still grinding towards that goal, but yet again, that only supports my point; players collect credits for vague and nebulous goals that don't exist yet.

I'm gonna be honest, I don't have time to read all that, so I'm not going to bother. But just reading the last paragraph,

Oh but it does. Because then it still is being treated as a balance mechanic, and as such it's not doing it's job, it's moving further away from it's job - which should be to align with costs incurred and costs of items associated with playing the game at a given level. And almost definitely it's being mis-used as a carrot to bribe players into being less upset that this game role is staring at a static image than they should be - which if successful, just reduces the pressure to implement something for it.

You're complaining about short-term balance changes because it reduces the pressure to make your dream long-term changes. If we followed that perspective, nothing would ever change in this game. You could make the argument that the lack of changes to powerplay, for example, has encouraged a larger change in powerplay...but no such change has occurred. In like 8 years. So that strategy is clearly hogwash.

Please just get out of the way and let the game gradually evolve, rather than be completely changed.

 

[Bottom Hat]

Please just get out of the way and let the game gradually evolve, rather than be completely changed.

Ender complains about anything, and normally just for the sake of it. You should see some of the arguments in the SotG thread before people got bored and left!
So with no major disrespect to him, it might be worth cutting your losses D.

 

[DemiserofD]

Ender complains about anything, and normally just for the sake of it. You should see some of the arguments in the SotG thread before people got bored and left!
So with no major disrespect to him, it might be worth cutting your losses D.

It's all good. Worst case, he's keeping the thread on top, and most people don't read past the first page anyway. Thanks for the background, though!

 

[Bottom Hat]

It's all good. Worst case, he's keeping the thread on top, and most people don't read past the first page anyway. Thanks for the background, though!

No worries mate! They say learning the hard way is best, but I sympathize with you having to trawl through the weird essays you get in reply!

 

[Darth Ender]

Carriers were not officially announced until 2020, mate. Until that point people had no idea if or when they'd be released, or any idea whether they'd be available as an individual asset. Now, you could argue that players were still grinding towards that goal, but yet again, that only supports my point; players collect credits for vague and nebulous goals that don't exist yet.

I'm gonna be honest, I don't have time to read all that, so I'm not going to bother. But just reading the last paragraph,

https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/7z85u8

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/7z85u8/regarding_fleet_carriers/

look at the date. Players knew about fleet carriers coming at the beginning of 2018. Way way before the diamond rush. Players didn't need details or specifics to know that whatever fdev did with it, it was likely going to cost a lot and the only currency in the game at the time being credits, it was a safe assumption that this would be the "end-game" credit sink that players had been waiting for.

i can keep tearing your bad info down if you want.

You're complaining about short-term balance changes because it reduces the pressure to make your dream long-term changes. If we followed that perspective, nothing would ever change in this game.

No, i'm not suggesting not doing anything and just bleeding players until fdev does something proper. There are a lot of things i suggested doing, but these faux fixes generally end up being permanent and not short term like they should be and it delays making the changes that would be more of a priority if those changes hadn't been done. And in this case, the short term change has better alternatives, so it offers less of a pro than this con than other short term changes may involving other areas of the game where a similar scenario exists (like the short term change to cut out the exo biology mini game).

You could make the argument that the lack of changes to powerplay, for example, has encouraged a larger change in powerplay...but no such change has occurred. In like 8 years. So that strategy is clearly hogwash.

powerplay isn't unchanged and not getting fixed because players are telling fdev we want this X complicated feature and nothing in between until we can get X. That's not why no changes have occurred in it. I'm not sure if you're just making up reality at this point or if you've gone space mad from the exo-biology "game" loop.

There are many theories as to why powerplay was abandoned nearly immediately after release. But no where on that list of reasons is that players said "no" to baby steps or short term solutions that maybe wouldn't have been the right solutions but better than nothing. That's a completely different situation from game balance.

Please just get out of the way and let the game gradually evolve, rather than be completely changed.

you realize nobody in this forum is in the way or helping or has any power to leverage change one way or another with how the game is developed, right? Nothing discussed here is getting seriously considered by Fdev because it was discussed here . They're going to do whatever it is they plan on doing and it's completely separate from players in the forum putting out posts and ideas. This forum is fan fiction for us ... to either imagine , vent, trade info, report bugs, read news. It's not a committee though. Sometimes the complaints here align with the overall userbase and the developers themselves and it might appear like they're doing something the forum wants, but that's coincidental. We're all here just along for the ride and these hopes and dreams are just bouncing between players. Not anyone who will actually act on them.

 

[Frop]

look at the date. Players knew about fleet carriers coming at the beginning of 2018. Way way before the diamond rush. Players didn't need details or specifics to know that whatever fdev did with it, it was likely going to cost a lot and the only currency in the game at the time being credits, it was a safe assumption that this would be the "end-game" credit sink that players had been waiting for.

For what it's worth, from the Wiki:

• Fleet Carriers were conceived as early as 2017. During that year's Frontier Expo, the Frontier Developments art director stated that carriers had not been designed yet, but their functions had been decided.[13][14] Fleet Carriers were originally planned to be included in Chapter Four (3.3) of Elite Dangerous: Beyond alongside the Squadrons feature, but were delayed.[15]
• Fleet Carriers were originally planned to be tied to Squadrons, and a Squadron would have been able to purchase and operate a Fleet Carrier collectively. This was changed to allow individual players who may not belong to a Squadron or do not desire to join one access to the Fleet Carrier feature.[2]
• In the original December Update content reveal in July 2019, Fleet Carriers were planned to be tailored to specific roles through the acquisition of Support Vessels, which would have changed the Fleet Carrier's loadout of available services and modules. Support Vessels did not possess Landing Pads, and accompanied the main Fleet Carrier in formation as a visual indicator of the Fleet Carrier's role. A Fleet Carrier would only be able to have one Support Vessel active at a time.[11][5] Support Vessels were dropped during development prior to April 2020 in favor of giving Fleet Carrier owners more direct control over their vessels' loadouts and services,[3] though the assets created for them were repurposed in the Layout cosmetics.

 

[DemiserofD]

look at the date. Players knew about fleet carriers coming at the beginning of 2018. Way way before the diamond rush. Players didn't need details or specifics to know that whatever fdev did with it, it was likely going to cost a lot and the only currency in the game at the time being credits, it was a safe assumption that this would be the "end-game" credit sink that players had been waiting for.

i can keep tearing your bad info down if you want.

They unofficially knew about fleet carriers for years, but that's on the same level as ship interiors, which have been vaguely planned for a decade. The official announcement didn't come out until much later.

As I said, this only supports my argument; players grind credits because it affords progression towards vague and nebulous future goals.

powerplay isn't unchanged and not getting fixed because players are telling fdev we want this X complicated feature and nothing in between until we can get X. That's not why no changes have occurred in it. I'm not sure if you're just making up reality at this point or if you've gone space mad from the exo-biology "game" loop.

There are many theories as to why powerplay was abandoned nearly immediately after release. But no where on that list of reasons is that players said "no" to baby steps or short term solutions that maybe wouldn't have been the right solutions but better than nothing. That's a completely different situation from game balance.

Lol, that's not my point at all. My point was that if a lack of changes correlates to big change, then powerplay would be the number one example. But it doesn't, and it isn't.

No, i'm not suggesting not doing anything and just bleeding players until fdev does something proper.

It certainly seems like it. You don't want to make exobiology viable until it can happen via a massive change in the currency systems of the game.

you realize nobody in this forum is in the way or helping or has any power to leverage change one way or another with how the game is developed, right?

Our power is like 3% of their decisions, but I'd be lying if I said our comments were completely irrelevant. The recent moves around the modified FSD are enough to disprove that we're completely irrelevant, for example.

 

[Frop]

They unofficially knew about fleet carriers for years, but that's on the same level as ship interiors, which have been vaguely planned for a decade. The official announcement didn't come out until much later.

As I linked before:

News - Important Community Update

Greetings Commanders, First of all, we would like to take a moment to thank you all for the continued support and making Elite Dangerous the incredible, community driven, phenomenon that it is today. We started our Elite Dangerous journey over 6 years ago and today hundreds of thousands of...

forums.frontier.co.uk

As part of pre-production, the team investigate all areas of the content and scope them out thoroughly. It’s important to take the time to be clear on what the vision for this is and how we imagine the content working. During this process, we have made a decision to adjust the focus of content that were previously planned for the Chapter Four update, adding some significant new gameplay, but it also means some other aspects will have to change. This means that some elements of content such as Ice Planets (which many of you will have seen some fantastic progress updates from LaveCon earlier this year) and Fleet Carriers for squadrons will not be coming as part of the Beyond – Chapter Four update. Some of the technology from the ice planets specifically will be used within our wider and global visual upgrade, so there will still be general improvements, but not everything we originally envisaged. However, we wanted you to be aware that these two elements specifically would be reprioritised out of the upcoming Beyond - Chapter Four update. What this does mean is that the rest of the content will be able to benefit for the changes in scheduling through deeper and richer gameplay mechanics. The Chapter Four update still has the same, if not bigger scope and continues to promise the largest update of the Beyond season and a truck load of great features for all Horizons Commanders for free. We’re very excited to be sharing the details with you over the coming weeks, so stay tuned for more info.

 

[DemiserofD]

As I linked before:

News - Important Community Update

Greetings Commanders, First of all, we would like to take a moment to thank you all for the continued support and making Elite Dangerous the incredible, community driven, phenomenon that it is today. We started our Elite Dangerous journey over 6 years ago and today hundreds of thousands of...

forums.frontier.co.uk

Not sure what you're trying to say, here, or above.