I know I missed a few things while not playing, but

Traveller_GG · Jun 11, 2017

What the hell happened to the exploration pay outs???

I got over half a million... HALF A MILLION!!! just for flying between the bubble and Maia (okay in a Corvette which has the same range as a bilious fart, but come on). I only got 130 Million for flying halfway around the Galaxy, including the Eastern Edge, the Northern and Beagle Point!

Kids today... they don't know how lucky they are...

I want to retrospectively demand at least a Billion in back payments. Give me my money.

:x

....wanders off in a huff....

Macros Black · Jun 11, 2017

Mr. Buff happened.

Just imagine how much a circumnavigation would give!

SMcA · Jun 11, 2017

Traveller_GG said:
....wanders off in a huff....

When it was changed at the end of last year. All of these payouts counted towards your Exploration ranking. This has now been changed and only a percentage goes towards it.
It caught me out as I was trying to hold off getting to Elite as long as I could. Well at least until the second anniversary.
Grrr!

Now I use them when I want some easy cash. [yesnod]

Iskariot · Jun 11, 2017

Traveller_GG said:
What the hell happened to the exploration pay outs???

I got over half a million... HALF A MILLION!!! just for flying between the bubble and Maia (okay in a Corvette which has the same range as a bilious fart, but come on). I only got 130 Million for flying halfway around the Galaxy, including the Eastern Edge, the Northern and Beagle Point!

Kids today... they don't know how lucky they are...

I want to retrospectively demand at least a Billion in back payments. Give me my money. :x

....wanders off in a huff....

Good you posted this.
It puts things into perspective.

Traveller_GG · Jun 11, 2017

MacrosTheBlack said:
Mr. Buff happened.

Just imagine how much a circumnavigation would give!

That's not Mr Buff. That's Mr Anabolic Steroids with a side order of EPO and a red blood cell injection starter.

I guess this is all old hat to people who kept playing but by 'eck it's a shock to the system when you come back - it's like PEDdling (think about it...) cheap wares to the masses. That's so bad the UKAD should be told.

I may be slightly irked.

Valije · Jun 11, 2017

Traveller_GG said:
That's not Mr Buff. That's Mr Anabolic Steroids with a side order of EPO and a red blood cell injection starter.

I guess this is all old hat to people who kept playing but by 'eck it's a shock to the system when you come back - it's like PEDdling (think about it...) cheap wares to the masses. That's so bad the UKAD should be told.

I may be slightly irked.

space voyager · Jun 12, 2017

Compared to other professions, exploration is still not a lucrative bussiness. Ferrying passengers can yield you millions per hour. Payouts like 5 million for a 500LY trip are pretty normal if you are an elite explorer and allied to the faction. 600.000 credits or more for gathering 3 or 4 objects floating in space one jump away os also paid better than exploration. Etc. So I don't think it is overpowered in any way.

Cmdr Frawd Digger · Jun 12, 2017

Traveller_GG said:
What the hell happened to the exploration pay outs???

I got over half a million... HALF A MILLION!!! just for flying between the bubble and Maia (okay in a Corvette which has the same range as a bilious fart, but come on). I only got 130 Million for flying halfway around the Galaxy, including the Eastern Edge, the Northern and Beagle Point!

Kids today... they don't know how lucky they are...

I want to retrospectively demand at least a Billion in back payments. Give me my money. :x

....wanders off in a huff....

Welcome back Cmdr...again. Yes I too have been on-again off-again since 2.3 dropped.

I too would like a back payment for crossing the galaxy and back.

Frawd

MacrosTheBlack said:
Mr. Buff happened.

Just imagine how much a circumnavigation would give!

Ah, and now I see your motivation for the upcoming circumnavigation trip (which I am considering joining by the way).

Frawd

Jaiotu · Jun 12, 2017

Valije said:
http://i.imgur.com/2A7lZG1.jpg

Your reference sheet excludes the hologram for Raxxla and is therefore useless.

On topic: I reset one of my account and, after earning enough to purchase an Adv. Discovery Scanner flew the starter Sidewinder out to Colonia. 22,000LY = 90 million credits.

Cmdr Frawd Digger · Jun 12, 2017

Jaiotu said:
Your reference sheet excludes the hologram for Raxxla and is therefore useless.

On topic: I reset one of my account and, after earning enough to purchase an Adv. Discovery Scanner flew the starter Sidewinder out to Colonia. 22,000LY = 90 million credits.

If I remember correctly, my sidewinder trip (with ADS) to Beagle Point and back earned me in the order of 100-200 million credits

Frawd

metatheurgist · Jun 12, 2017

The weird thing is way back when everyone knew the payout was miserable and yet they just stalled until the dedicated explorers had already got their elite rank. I guess they really do have something against explorers.

osser · Jun 12, 2017

I made 1.54 billion on my trip.
~1600 systems were on the new payout. (12 ElW's)

I'm going out again.

On a very Long Trip.
I'm working on upgrades to the Sagan Voyager 1041.

This trip might be measured in years.

We'll see what happens.

CMDR Tootiny

Friedenreich Xante · Jun 12, 2017

Now Exploration is finally attractive to those who wouldn't explore otherwise. Don't think the true Explorers will be able to discover the 400 Billion stars by themselves... this would take 60.000 years according to EDSM.

Ziggy Stardust · Jun 12, 2017

Traveller_GG said:
That's not Mr Buff. That's Mr Anabolic Steroids with a side order of EPO and a red blood cell injection starter.

I guess this is all old hat to people who kept playing but by 'eck it's a shock to the system when you come back - it's like PEDdling (think about it...) cheap wares to the masses. That's so bad the UKAD should be told.

I may be slightly irked.

I heard about the buff, but didn't actually look to hard into it. Was occupied with getting an Orca to Colonia and checking whether the 30+ Planetary Nebula I had bookmarked a long time ago were all tagged. Well, 4 of 'em weren't, which was nice. But when I sold the data I got 90 mil out of it, about 10 days playing time. To compare, the entire 5 month (there and back) DWE trip yielded me 130 mil.

Kind of screwed up my personal long time goal. I always set the Elite Explorer mark at 1 billion. With the old pay out, it would be some time before I got there. When 2.3 dropped I had made 575 mil in exploration. After playing a few weeks of 2.3 I now have 975 mil. The epic target of 1 billion is not so epic anymore.

Frankymole · Jun 12, 2017

MacrosTheBlack said:
Mr. Buff happened.

Just imagine how much a circumnavigation would give!

I'm a quarter of the way to finding out

Who knew there were so many undiscovered Earthlikes in the Abyssal Plain?

Nagual · Jun 12, 2017

There was a reason for the increased payouts, and it wasn't that they felt explorers were getting the short end of the stick. It was down to passenger missions, and the fact that you could earn a fairly substantial sum for doing relatively short distance missions. However the payout for these passenger jobs was linked to exploration rank meaning that players doing these mission very quickly went up in rank in Exploration while explorers were asking wth? So the solution was do reduce the amount of rep gained from the payouts but increase the payouts for actual exploration so that passenger running wasn't a quick run to Elite, and explorers still got the expected rep gain.

Speccy · Jun 12, 2017

Nagual said:
There was a reason for the increased payouts, and it wasn't that they felt explorers were getting the short end of the stick. It was down to passenger missions, and the fact that you could earn a fairly substantial sum for doing relatively short distance missions. However the payout for these passenger jobs was linked to exploration rank meaning that players doing these mission very quickly went up in rank in Exploration while explorers were asking wth? So the solution was do reduce the amount of rep gained from the payouts but increase the payouts for actual exploration so that passenger running wasn't a quick run to Elite, and explorers still got the expected rep gain.

I'm sure they also did it to get more people exploring, irrespective of the passenger missions issue. I'm much more likely now to stop and scan in potential terraformable HMC planets. A couple of those gives you the best part of a million CR, before the 50% first discovery bonus. It just wasn't worth my time before, I'd usually only scan in water worlds and ELWs, and metal riches if in scanning range from the star.

marx · Jun 12, 2017

Nagual said:
There was a reason for the increased payouts, and it wasn't that they felt explorers were getting the short end of the stick. It was down to passenger missions, and the fact that you could earn a fairly substantial sum for doing relatively short distance missions. However the payout for these passenger jobs was linked to exploration rank meaning that players doing these mission very quickly went up in rank in Exploration while explorers were asking wth? So the solution was do reduce the amount of rep gained from the payouts but increase the payouts for actual exploration so that passenger running wasn't a quick run to Elite, and explorers still got the expected rep gain.

I'm fairly certain that they removed the rank requirement from all missions, so it's no longer a required rank, but a recommended rank. I can certainly take Elite combat missions even though I'm still Dangerous, and I don't think they'd work otherwise for passenger missions.
Also, said missions scale up substantially with 6-8 first class passengers.

The reason why after all these years they decided to buff the exploration payouts was that somebody seriously messed up when the passenger missions contributed their credit payouts as 1:1 to exploration rank progression, and they had to fix that. Then they likely remembered that maybe they should run the numbers on exploration payouts again, and behold, we got the massive buff then. Let's not forget that the last time they increased exploration payouts (2x across the board) was in 1.2.03, a bit over two years ago. During the years that passed since, other professions have seen a steady increase in payouts - although it was mostly combat that did, since trading reigned supreme for a long time.

"Back in my day, we got 30,000 Cr for an Earth-like, we could only plot routes to 100 ly away and we didn't have these fancy rngineered drives and boosts and supercharges and whatever toys"

Valije · Jun 12, 2017

I wonder how the final payout of my circunnavegation will be (assuming I survive), since I scan ELW, WW, AW, HMC (TC), Metal Rich and Type II GG. Almost all the stars in the edge of the galaxy are A,F,G and K and because of that the amount of those kind of planets you find is not bad (not bad at all).

I am not the first visitor of most of those systems (CMDR Allitnil and CMDR Hamsterlbaster explored a big portion of these systems, maybe half the border between the both of them), but it seems they were only interested in the main star and the rare "blue sphere" here and there