Incomes balance in Elite Dangerous

[Wendake]

Hey all !

first of all, I truely love ED - it's a fantastic game in which I've put over 1000h and I'm very excited to hear more about all the new content coming this year =)

That being said, I have one question for FDev (keep dreaming you'll tell me) :

Incomes balance in Elite Dangerous : is it something that FDev is planning to work on at some point ?

Why mining is paying so much compared to every other activities in ED ? If we look at it on a player retention base it's not in FDev advantage to have only one activity in the game that is paying well. People will get way more satisfaction if they can make good money from a variety of activities instead of only one.

Best example : A player that hates mining but love fighting...it's almost insulting to see the difference of incomes between BH and mining...skills, risks & expenses are way higher when BH than mining...mining isn't dangerous at all...you only have to wait for the first scan when you drop in the belt and than you're good to go for hours without any risk (blasting asteroids is far from dangerous when you have a shield)...

This situation can be a good reason for a player to lost interest and leave the game from frustration / rage quite (can I haz your stuff?).

Incomes balance is broken as hell and with all the FC discussion going around it's more obvious than ever. IMO mining is paying way too much (if we don't consider the FC price which was fixed by FDev because the incomes in game are broken so they don't have the choice to boost the selling price). The most expensive ship in ED that doesn't require any rank is the Anaconda (146M cr)..and you can get it in less than 24h now...

Why doing risky missions for a friendly faction is not as lucrative as mining (or more) ?

Right, if you're playing ED only to make credits it's not a good reason but we have the first "end game" content to sink credits in and it's 5 billions...what other choice do we have (if we want to get the FC) than mining (except from Robigo that is still an option but in my case mining is way more fun than hauling humans =P) ?

Can't wait for your answer FDev Even a "we are aware of this problem and are planning to address it in a patch this year" will do !

o7

 

[Backelaer]

You're not wrong or anything, but I guess you haven't been around since the launch. Back then, it was bounty hunting that (relatively) made a load of credits. Then people asked why mining and exploration paid so badly. And then they bumped exploration earnings. And then they bumped mining earnings -well, bumped, more like gave it an epic kick into the stratosphere.

There never really was a true balance in income. And you'll never reach a perfect balance anyway. I don't really care. I just do what I feel like doing, and every once in a while I go out and mine when I need some dough. Now I'm lucky because I actually like mining (and to be fair, they did actually make mining more fun in that particular update), but isn't this something that pops up in every game? There's always that one way that is the meta for acquiring credits. If you like doing it, you're lucky and if not, well then, tough luck I guess.

 

[ebbrell]

Yep, to easy you are correct things like mining pay too much. Other activities should NOT be brought up to compete with mining.

Mining should he put back into line along with exploration, both pay to much.

People don't get chance to work their way through early smaller ships anymore. They just jump right passed them to larger ships due to getting rich quick.

I remember when you felt like you achieved something moving to the next ship.

Shame some of the best and differcult parts are early on with smaller ships.

It took me 4 months to earn a python, asp and cobra, Including upgrades on most not everything.... before it all went silly

 

[gorankar]

Maybe Cr. Per hour is inverse of expected fun level?
A way to encourage occupational diversity?
Many seem to consider mining a grind so........

 

[Sunyavadin]

I mean, it's in the name of the game.

"eLTDgerous"

 

[Wendake]

You're not wrong or anything, but I guess you haven't been around since the launch. Back then, it was bounty hunting that (relatively) made a load of credits. Then people asked why mining and exploration paid so badly. And then they bumped exploration earnings. And then they bumped mining earnings -well, bumped, more like gave it an epic kick into the stratosphere.

There never really was a true balance in income. And you'll never reach a perfect balance anyway. I don't really care. I just do what I feel like doing, and every once in a while I go out and mine when I need some dough. Now I'm lucky because I actually like mining (and to be fair, they did actually make mining more fun in that particular update), but isn't this something that pops up in every game? There's always that one way that is the meta for acquiring credits. If you like doing it, you're lucky and if not, well then, tough luck I guess.

Started playing in april 2018 so before the mining and exploration overhaul and got around 1000h in the game now. Even though making money was already easier when I started than early days (2015-2017) you still had the feeling of reaching a huge goal each time you were able to buy a bigger ship. Damn I was proud to get that Python after playing a few months.

It's fine if FDev want players to make credits faster than before so they can have the ships they want without having to put hundred of hours but what they did with mining is a bit too much #EpicKickIntoTheStratosphere

I'm not asking for a perfect balance but I think that a lot of other activities could be more lucrative.

I do love the new mining too (unlocking Selena Jean before the mining overhaul was an horrible experience). FDev did an awesome job with the mining overhaul.

Perhaps it's something you see in every game - except for ED I never been a big gamer so I don't have a lot of games to compare to (playing DCS World too but it's not a game with virtual money or any grind).

Yep, to easy you are correct things like mining pay too much. Other activities should NOT be brought up to compete with mining.

Mining should he put back into line along with exploration, both pay to much.

People don't get chance to work their way through early smaller ships anymore. They just jump right passed them to larger ships due to getting rich quick.

I remember when you felt like you achieved something moving to the next ship.

Shame some of the best and differcult parts are early on with smaller ships.

It took me 4 months to earn a python, asp and cobra, Including upgrades on most not everything.... before it all went silly

I also think that other activities should not be brought up to compete with mining but they would deserve some love. Market price for mining is also weird... I don't understand why demand in 169 G. is around 3000 for over 24h and even with all the CMDRs bringing LTDs in price still at 1.6M / t ...

 

[Drelthar]

Hmmm....

Quote:

"One of the things that we want to do, with the Alpha, and Beta tests, is to ensure that no one role, is a massive generator of cash. What I don't want, as a game like this is being forced to, forever asteroid mine or whatever it is...."

 

[wetwire]

Time spent on an activity should reflect appropriate profits.
The time it takes to gain 1 million credits regardless of game play loop you are using should be equal across the board, or similar. the offset should be how well equipped or proficient in the activity you are that adjust credits per hour.
If it takes me an hour to find ,crack open, and scoop up 20 LTD then fly to a station and sell. The profit should be similar to someone bounty hunting for an hour, returning to the local station and turning in bounties.

 

["Red" the Pirate]

Yep, to easy you are correct things like mining pay too much. Other activities should NOT be brought up to compete with mining.

Mining should he put back into line along with exploration, both pay to much.

People don't get chance to work their way through early smaller ships anymore. They just jump right passed them to larger ships due to getting rich quick.

I remember when you felt like you achieved something moving to the next ship.

Shame some of the best and differcult parts are early on with smaller ships.

It took me 4 months to earn a python, asp and cobra, Including upgrades on most not everything.... before it all went silly

It's going to take ages to buy a carrier for even some of the more hardcore cmdrs WITH the absurd diamond payouts. Now you want to just flat out nerf the higher paying jobs, instead of just bringing combat up-to-line?

Are you mental?

 

[marx]

Mining was the best-prepared part of the last major update, Beyond: Chapter Four, back at the end of 2018. Personally, I think that Frontier have originally decided to have it make so much income so that it would attract players to try it out.
Then players realised that double and triple hotspots exist.

By this time, the game was well into the "focus on the next expansion and spend minimum on the live game", so if the developers wanted to balance things, they would have a choice to make:
1. Bring mining down to the income levels of other activities
2. Balance things by buffing everything else
Now, option 1 would upset players. (See: the mining, hm, nerf.) Option 2, on the other hand, would require too much effort. Just one balance patch almost certainly wouldn't have been enough, because something else always pops up, and so, you need multiple patches to achieve some sort of balance. We're in low effort mode, remember.

Then there's more: if Frontier went ahead with it and started releasing career balance patches (not just small amounts of bug fixes), then people would also complain about why only incomes are getting balanced, and not combat, or ships, or... You get the picture.

Frontier rarely does rebalancing anyway, and the game is now over five years old. It all adds up over time.

 

[Jmanis]

Right now, you can break the game down

Maybe Cr. Per hour is inverse of expected fun level?
A way to encourage occupational diversity?
Many seem to consider mining a grind so........

You can lump the game's activities into two major categories in terms of income:

Big income earners (200m+ an hour), being:
1. Core Mineral Mining
2. Broken edge cases, and exploits

Everything else (20-50m an hour, if lucky)

By broken edge cases and exploits, I refer to (listing only edge cases, not "exploits", though there's plenty of them too) things like:

• Sothis/Ceos missions
• Meta Alloy runs
• Cross-stacked Wing Massacres (as a wing)

I'm guilty of saying "Mining is unbalanced"... it's not actually a completely true statement. Core Mineral Mining is what's unbalanced.... if you look at mining as a more wholistic activity, it's just as low-earning as everything else:

Spoiler

Like I said when I posted that original thing, none of these "Miners" would ever have done any of these activities, because your choice is 200t of Bromellite for 8m (32m, in a full wing) credits, or 200t of LTDs for 320m. But that just continues to exemplify how brokenly unbalanced core mining still is, and what FD actually think rates of income should be like.

But because of these edge-cases, most people thinking the income from core mining is "fine" cite "But other activities can earn you just as much!"... thing is, they don't mean "Missions can earn you just as much!"... they mean "Running specific mission type X in Systems Y and Z can make you just as much".... where the other 20,000 populated systems won't earn you anywhere near that. Do you really think FD created such a large, procedurally generated universe, only to have the most effective means of progress being to lock yourself into a singular activitiy which doesn't embrace that huge universe?

"Oh, just play the game better" really means "Learn to exploit the broken mechanics" in this case. It's a pretty tragic state of affairs, and I'm happy to explain any of the "big income earners" are just broken edge cases. To give you an example, here's a quick history lesson on Missions.

Spoiler

Back when the game first launched, most systems were within 20-40LY of each other... and so procedural mission mechanics went "OK, pick a selection of the closest systems and use them as target destinations. Base the rewards on distance in LY to the target system". This resulted in a fairly homogenous set of missions.

Then, places like Maia and Robigo got set up, which were several hundred LY away from the nearest station. But the rules didn't accomodate for this, resulting in an infinite supply thus "Robigo Runs" were born; a byproduct of the mission generation algorithm selecting only the closest destination. FD fixed that by reducing the effect distance in LY had on reward. Robigo Runs were still a thing, but nowhere near the cash cows they were.

Then players complained that haul missions had no logic to their payouts; shipping 2t of biowaste could be as rewarding as 180t of palladium. Pretty fair complaint, but rather than the sensible choice of adjusting reward based on tonnage, they adjusted it to the value of the cargo. When this happened, it gave rise to exceedingly high paying missions, so high, anything over 50m actually broke the mission boards. FD clearly didn't intend that nor had even tested for it... and so the hard limit of 50m on rewards was put in place, and the reward values got nerfed.

Following from that, we got a reasonable change so that mission reward scaled based on distance to the target in-system. Of course, this is fine for fixed-distance missions (deliveries to stations), but to-date remains broken in the case where a mission USS spawns 500k Ls away from jump-in (because that's random, it could be anywhere). So you'll never find really rewarding assassination, salvage or surface-scan missions anywhere, only hauling, courier and passenger missions.

Along the way we also got greater conditions placed on the generation of missions, and now we've got a system that can be senselessly gamed. The game tries to generate 100 missions, regardless of any other consideration. And the game has around 30-40 odd mission types you could get generated at any one time.

How the game is meant to play is to take advantage of states and circumstance to make profit. Instead, we now just game the internal logic to find situations where the game is too dumb to do anything else except be a cash cow.

A standard mission generated on a "typical" board will be:

• Of a random type of up to 20-30 odd templates
• To a random system, of up to a dozen systems;
• (optionally) To a random station, of anywhere between 20-60 stations, anywhere from 50-500k ls from jump in
• Of a random target, cargo or other situation

The broken edge-cases people cite as being "Other activities which earn as much money as mining" are specific, broken edge cases which mean:

• Only two or three template types will generate
• They'll always be to the same system and same destination

In other words, there's nothing random to them.... it's a broken edge case where the result of procedural generation produces the same thing, repeatedly and indefinitely... the exact opposite of what procedural generation is meant to achieve.

tl;dr the game doesn't reward skill, competence or embracing challenge, risk and diversity. It just rewards exploitation of it's broken mechanics and unintended outcomes, and subsequently grinding them endlessly.

Might as well put the unpatched Rockforth Fertiliser back in.

More constructively... now FD has decided they're going to cost things based on broken edge-case or unbalanced income sources... if there's no wont to "nerf" mining down and fix those edge cases to bring it inline with other activities... other activities need to be brought inline with it.

That 200t of Bromellite mission I cited? Should pay 50m (200m, as a wing of 4), if that's the path we're going down.

 

[gorankar]

Hey, I was just offering a possible reason why they have not fixed this. They have had over a year, they could have if they really wanted to. It's certainly not that I don't believe further correction of mining profits for certain commodities at the supply and/or market side is warranted. It is.

 

[Faded Glory]

Personally, I think that Frontier have originally decided to have it make so much income so that it would attract players to try it out.

I think that's pretty spot on, and we've seen it through the history of the game. They did it also with exploration with the release of the FSS...

 

[Just Paul]

I a little conflicted about income balance.
On one hand I would like to see all professions having the ability to make the same amount of cr/hr.
On the other hand I'm happy that people are mining and not taking all the trade and source missions offered at our station. Especially as Chief Serene Meadows thinks scan missions are the only way to get inf. I have no problem with people mining billions in a day, if it means I don't have to work overtime for our bgs. That leaves me enough time to go pirate the miners once in a while. Everybody wins.

 

[metatheurgist]

Yeah, it's weird. It's not just FD, it's like game designers have no middle setting. For years we complained mining income needed to be better, we never said it needed to put noobs into condas in one day, but that's what we got. It's like the middle ground just doesn't exist.

 

[BL1P]

I think the only way fdev could go, is to get the numbers on the average per hr credits for all activities and increase all to match the top per hr.
And whilst doing that insert a system to be able to manage this on a weekly or monthly basis or have it automated.

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

The only problem with your plea is you're assuming frontier made an honest mistake and its just there waiting to be fixed like a bug.

I think i've seen all but one or two (started in robigo post rares) eras of credit inflation in elite.. and its not just an honest little mistake. The only thing that could explain it is at a strip club the designers talk to a gambling psychologist who keep telling them that the only reason they can get people to log back in is more credits even though there's nothing to spend them on.. just increase the credits.

Or they've been making the exactly the same mistake religiously, without failure every new feature, for at least 4 years. You can't assume they're that stupid. They aren't going for balance, they're doing something else.

 

[Cmdr Eratosthenes]

24 hrs for a Conda ? You're not trying hard enough....

 

[BL1P]

24 hrs for a Conda ? You're not trying hard enough....

24hrs for a fleet carrier. that better ?

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

Started playing in april 2018 so before the mining and exploration overhaul and got around 1000h in the game now. Even though making money was already easier when I started than early days (2015-2017) you still had the feeling of reaching a huge goal each time you were able to buy a bigger ship. Damn I was proud to get that Python after playing a few months.

It's fine if FDev want players to make credits faster than before so they can have the ships they want without having to put hundred of hours but what they did with mining is a bit too much #EpicKickIntoTheStratosphere

I'm not asking for a perfect balance but I think that a lot of other activities could be more lucrative.

I do love the new mining too (unlocking Selena Jean before the mining overhaul was an horrible experience). FDev did an awesome job with the mining overhaul.

Perhaps it's something you see in every game - except for ED I never been a big gamer so I don't have a lot of games to compare to (playing DCS World too but it's not a game with virtual money or any grind).



I also think that other activities should not be brought up to compete with mining but they would deserve some love. Market price for mining is also weird... I don't understand why demand in 169 G. is around 3000 for over 24h and even with all the CMDRs bringing LTDs in price still at 1.6M / t ...

Damn, you had it easy. Too me it took best part of a year to get to a python.

I remembered doing missions for 500 credits in my sidewinder. In my view it should still be like that. These days you can get to a cobra in a few hours and an anaconda in a few days. Kinda ruins that sense of achievement.