Is this a joke?

Jmanis

Jmanis
So, I get colonia missions aren't meant to be total cash cows... but this seems pretty damn ridiculous. Bugreported it here, for reference. All these screenshots are from the same faction, to which I'm allied.

Firstly, courier missions to Colonia:
OYOTf25.png

This is fine. 1.4m credits, I stack twenty, do the run to colonia, get 28m in addition to whatever exploration data I pick up along the way. All good, not a problem.

Now, a VIP Business-class tourist mission.
h8ynLit.png
34m credit reward for a return trip to Colonia and back. Sure, sounds great, hop on board.

And now, this doozy. VIP Luxury-class one-way transportation to Colonia from a "Rich Tourist"
Wx8TI5U.png

900k? What the actual? That pays *less* than a courier mission which needs zero specialised equipment, whereas this needs a Passenger Liner plus Luxury-class cabins, *and* it's VIP so I can't put anything else in the cabins.

Is this for real? What logic has that making sense?
 

rOmiLaYu

rOmiLaYu
Jmanis said:
900k? What the actual? That pays *less* than a courier mission which needs zero specialised equipment, whereas this needs a Passenger Liner plus Luxury-class cabins, *and* it's VIP so I can't put anything else in the cabins.

Is this for real? What logic has that making sense?
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Isaid this just yesterday in a thread about the Beluga. Outside of bulk economy passenger missions, which the T9 does better, the ship is useless because Luxury Passenger missions are broken.
 

Stealthie

Stealthie
I think the idea is that if you're heading out to Colonia, taking a bunch of those missions could make the trip profitable - or maybe even pay for your ship.

Probably not the best use of your time to travel to Colonia just to complete those missions though.
 

GeneralIdea1964

G
CMDR QUANTIS TRAP said:
It almost seems that there are more things which have been broken in this game in the last year than have been fixed.

I love this game, but this really gets me down!
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Quit with the negative attitude man!
some bits make sense some don't. ;)

But have you seen some Government legislation?
I figure ED legal system makes more sense, and at least it is properly policed and enforced. :D
 

Stealthie

Stealthie
Don't really understand why people are suggesting this means something is "broken" or an aberration of the RNG.

If I asked you to take a parcel to Australia for 3 quid, I doubt you'd be interested.
If I asked you to fly me to Australia in your plane for £800, you're not going to do it.
If I asked you to take me on a cruise to Australia aboard your superyacht for £1500, that's not going to happen either.

And yet... companies do this stuff every day, and turn a tidy profit on it too.

This is really how a lot of stuff should work in ED, IMO.
Systems (or, at least, the fancy stations in a system) should offer heaps of cargo and passenger missions along defined trade-routes and it should be possible to filter all the job-offers by destination.
You should the be able to pile up 20 small cargo missions or 20 passenger missions to the same place.
 

M00ka

M00ka
Never having done passenger missions but maybe they are just fillers put in by FD, there to be taken to fill your ship. I see similar ones quite often with haulage and fetch missions, normally don't pay much but better than flying with empty cargo space or making minimum filling the vacant space with biowaste or something.
 

Jmanis

Jmanis
Stealthie said:
I think the idea is that if you're heading out to Colonia, taking a bunch of those missions could make the trip profitable - or maybe even pay for your ship.

Probably not the best use of your time to travel to Colonia just to complete those missions though.
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M00ka said:
Never having done passenger missions but maybe they are just fillers put in by FD, there to be taken to fill your ship. I see similar ones quite often with haulage and fetch missions, normally don't pay much but better than flying with empty cargo space or making minimum filling the vacant space with biowaste or something.
Click to expand...

As I mentioned, I can get behind that idea, and I'm totally aware these are "filler" in so far as you're going to Colonia, so "take some missions along the way". But courier missions set the standard in that regard. There's no prerequisites other than "Got a ship that can jump and a fuel scoop" to do courier missions, and they pay out ~1m. If I was expecting absolute proportionality (and I'm not), I'd expect something along the lines of 50m from a courier mission to Colonia as a balanced reward vs effort... but this is not my argument, nor is it in any way how rewards for these missions should look.

The courier mission is the baseline, they're always around 1m if you're allied. As I mentioned in the bugreport, if this was economy class trip for bulk passengers to Colonia, 800k is pretty reasonable as far as I'm concerned. But a VIP, Luxury Class one-way trip to Colonia? That should pay around 8m, noting I'm currently doing a 3-stop tourist mission, economy class, each site is just 120LY away, and that's paying 13m. 8m is far less than the return trip I posted at 34m.

I'm not after megabucks, just after internal logical consistency.

You could make an argument of "Oh, well not all offers are going to be good, if you don't want to take it don't take it." but that logic only holds in a gameplay perspective when choosing between different types of activity. Having your generation system create ridiculously lowballed content just for the purpose of it being ignored is daft at best.

Just to wargame it a bit more... My expectations would look something like.

Economy Bulk passengers: 500-1m
Business Class Bulk passengers: 750-2m
First Class Bulk passengers: 1-3m

Economy VIP: 1-2m
Business VIP: 2-4m
First Class VIP: 4-7m
Luxury Class VIP: 7-10m

This isn't even offering much (if anything) over standard one-jump mission distances, but at least it would be consistent. If I lucked out with five or six luxury VIP missions, I might get up to 60m one way... and if I'm lucky I might get the same back to total 120m both ways... but contrast that against loading up a five or six two-way tourist missions @ 35-40m a pop (most dont even need luxury class cabins), you'd be looking at 200m total, and that's easily achievable. I don't think this is out of the realm of reasonableness.
 
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Garand1987

G
Long haul trips to colonia used to pay A TON of credits, as well they should honestly. But for whatever reason FD decided that making a 44,000+ ly round trip for 100million creds wasnt enough of a grind so they decided to make them pay less than making one or two hop local deliveries.
 

Red Anders

Red Anders
I would quite happily fly a regular passenger mission loop between Colonia and the bubble but there are two issues with doing it, which OP's post highlights nicely.

1. The timer - the whole reason I don't do sightseeing to Colonia is being tied to returning within 4 weeks. A four day timer for one-way trips is equally lame, would a week really break the game in some fundamental way?

2. The payout. Seriously, ever since the passenger mission nerf they're back to being senseless in terms of payouts. I'm tired of seeing stuff like this on the boards now, if the intention is that to make decent money I do 5,000+ tons of cargo as a wing mission (and even then the payouts are fairly crap vs time spent to be honest) or a couple of hundred passenger missions, or a 54,000 LY round trip leaving little time for anything else, I think I'm done with the game because I'm just not into repetition enough to want to waste my spare time on it.

Here's the thing - players who are happy flying small ships all the time or just bimbling about without caring how much they can make will be able to do that regardless of any improvements to mission payouts. People who want to be able to make a good income, using end-game ships that cost them a fortune, won't.

Considering that FDEv know what the average play time is for the game (i.e. not 2 hours + a day) I think they have a very odd idea of the kind of earning potential activities in the game should offer when we have ship builds that can cost well over a billion credits.

Not even getting into the joke that is the Beluga when I can't even find enough worthwhile luxury passenger missions to fill my Orca.
 
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Bacalao

Bacalao
It's cause they got passenger ships and missions the wrong way around. Cruise ships (the beluga) specialize in large volume, bulk vacationing and transport. VIPs charter private vehicles.
 
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