Hello everyone,
I am likely beating a dead horse here when I say that there seems to be a huge disconnect in the amount of profit you can attain per career choice. When I first started the game I was all about them bounties so let's start there.
Combat Credits:
I spent my time roaming RES sites and Nav points, both in controlled territory and in anarchy systems and what I found was that the cobra mk 3 targets tended to be the most credits per hour, netting an average of 15k a piece with a kill warrant scanner. Yeah occasionally a big juicy conda would pop in with a hefty bounty on their head but this was rather rare, almost to the point of not really worth mentioning.
I tried assassination missions, and they were okay, not a bad profit for turning them in... but the problem I found is that it never seemed to give a mission reward higher than 164,000 credits to go kill a dangerous foe.
So then I tried helping out in the warzones, but the profit vs risk was not scaling properly. In the warzone you run a much higher risk of losing your ship and the targets only generate a very miniscule amount of profit compared to killing their wanted counter parts in res and nav point locations.
All in All I have earned:
4,556,052 credits from bounties
110,000 credits from combat bonds
325,270 credits from assassinations
with the highest reward being 160,486
- total bounties claimed 463
Next up - Smuggling:
I have yet to find a worth while profit run with smuggling. There seems to be very little information to learn how to do it properly so most of my smuggling came from goods i picked up on killing wanted people.
56,432 total profit - pathetic i know haha.
I tried sneaking 100 tons of imperial slaves into a place that said slaves were outlawed, only to find the station had no black market, so i went to the other stations in the system with the same result. At least I was good at sneaking them in. As such I have not yet been successful in smuggling to really know if it is a profit gaining venture or not.
Trading -
To me it feels like Elite Dangerous should be renamed to Elite Trading Simulator. The amount of profit you can pull in with very little effort through trading outscales everything completely. To the point that it seems to be worthless to try the other routes in order to attain better ships. It would take months and months to get even just a python through bounty hunting. Where as with trading it can be done in a short period of time.
Profit:
19,821,501 total profit
10,457 - commodities traded
78,345 - Average Profit
328,372 - Highest Single Transaction
The numbers are crazy here.
Mining:
I have very little experience with mining, but the biggest problem I found with it is that you don't have a tractor beam to pull the mined chunks in. I think that if you could tractor beam in the junks you blow off of the roids it would be a lot more viable. As it stands now you blow off bits and hunt them down for a while, then get back to blowing off more chunks.
In my exploration I did find a very very nice ring of metal roids around a dead star that had almost nothing but pure plat in it. The trouble was it was about 200 LY away from civilization.
Total mining profit 130,898 - for 12 tons which is really nice, but time consuming due to having to chase down the chunks.
Exploration:
This is something that I love, it's fun to find interesting new planets, and stars and so forth. It is not though a profit gaining venture at all. This is something to do after you have a nice nest egg it seems. I have a shiny fully kitted out ASP that I have ventured out into the stars with and have found some water planets, some metal ones, gas giants, the whole nine yards, even got first discoveries on a lot of them the other day. The problem is, it takes a LOT of time to find the good stuff out there, and the reward for the good stuff is quite pathetic if you ask me.
At most you can get 45,000 credits for finding an earth like planet that has not been explored before. But good luck finding that. The most credits I ever saw from a system was ~250,000 credits. It was a star rich, metal planet rich system that I discovered on my own. Take a look at
wredguia gw-e d11-92
Really far out there from civilization. What could be done to help improve the exploration profit is determine a better reward for things like distance, and type of finds based on where you turn them in at. Like If i were to take all that metal rich data back to a mining corporation, it should give me a better profit than taking it back to just joe shmo on the edge of civilized space.
Systems explored: 509
Profit from Exploration: 1,611,110 credits
yeah this is with the advanced exploration device, and the detailed scanner.
Really sad that trading seems to be the only real way to make money in the game. It's more involved and fun to pew pew, but there's no profit to be had there compared to trading. I think that there should be ways to help your profit in combat. You should be able to say, enlist in the Federation, Alliance, or Empire and get like a massive bonus for fighting in warzones that they support.
I am okay with trading being the highest profit gain, what I am not okay with is that the gap in profit between them is far too great.
Like I said, this game should be renamed to "Elite Trading Simulator"
That being said, I enjoy the game still, this is not a hate on the game thread, just my observations after a couple weeks of playing.
*** Edit: I edited the title of the thread from imbalance of profit to imbalance of progression as that's really what I am trying to get at here. The trade profession has a very nice progression, but all other paths dont even come close even when you combine them together.
