Lets talk about Earning Money (with spreadsheets)

[jasonbirder]

Firstly the game would Scale your pay accourding to you Pilots Federation Ranks and Power (Empire/Federation) Ranks NOT the kind of ship you are driving.
Secondly it would scale because its a game, and because with ranks giving extra bonuses, they become meaningful. Achieving Tripple elite takes time, for that time you would have earner the right to earn more credits.

Still doesn't really address the WHY of it? WHY would you be paid more to EG Massacre 24 Pirates if you're Deadly Combat ranked...than if you're Dangerous? They'l leither have been killed or they won't payout or not...
It doesn't seem logical that the payout would Scale with the Player...

The OLD system made SOME sense (Rank-Locked Missions) that seemed like an "Interview Process"...only "Master" nope...you're not what we're looking for at all...next please! Not sure why they removed THAT tbh...

 

[Genxav]

Still doesn't really address the WHY of it? WHY would you be paid more to EG Massacre 24 Pirates if you're Deadly Combat ranked...than if you're Dangerous? They'l leither have been killed or they won't payout or not...
It doesn't seem logical that the payout would Scale with the Player...

The OLD system made SOME sense (Rank-Locked Missions) that seemed like an "Interview Process"...only "Master" nope...you're not what we're looking for at all...next please! Not sure why they removed THAT tbh...

Because if you are dangerous you got a higher rank inside a faction called the Pilots Federation, so your status is higher and you receive more for being higher up there.

 

[Adam Bourke-Waite]

Hi,

Just to make a quick note, mission rewards already take your relevant Elite rank into account. In fact they provide a much more considerable impact than is displayed here. Your Empire and Federation military ranks are not currently taken into account and that is something to think about. However, when doing so please consider what happens to the non Empire/Fed factions and the potential knock on effect to the BGS.

What I think your spreadsheets really show is the difficulty of getting one single system that deals with the 10,000 credit reward area (new players) and the 1,000,000 credit reward area. It's obviously not impossible but you start seeing how small increments have major effects.

Adam

 

[Genxav]

Yours is not - sorry if i made that point not clear enough. As said, i appreciate your approach and agree that it would be nice if ranks would give something more than the status quo offers. I just don't think that something like that will settle the different ideas about what income is reasonable, as the mindsets behind the reasoning on both ends are vastly different. Then again, i don't know if course if this idea of yours had this intend to begin with. Hopefully that clarifies my previous posts.

The idea for my example is simple, try to get the payouts to Scale with the seniority of players, getting ranks takes time, and gives no benefit. So if they give you some sort of bonus towards income, income being something Lots of people agree its unbalanced and does not pay well on higher "levels". Having something linked to ranks should in theory make things work more homogeneous. New pilots earn the same as today, older higher rank pilots earn more if they got the ranks achieved. In my mind its really that simple.

The curve could be linear or something else, to make the gameflow work.

"In the 1970s a psychologist named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi experimentally evaluated Flow. He found that a person's skill and the difficulty of a task interact to result in different cognitive and emotional states. When skill is too low and the task too hard, people become anxious. Alternatively, if the task is too easy and skill too high, people become bored. However, when skill and difficulty are roughly proportional, people enter Flow states."

"While in these states, people experience:

Extreme focus on a task.
A sense of active control.
Merging of action and awareness.
Loss of self-awareness.
Distortion of the experience of time.
The experience of the task being the only necessary justification for continuing it.
Csikszentmihalyi also outlined four characteristics found in tasks that drive an equilibrium between skill and difficulty, thus increasing the probability of Flow states. Specifically, these are tasks that:

Have concrete goals with manageable rules.
Demand actions to achieve goals that fit within the person's capabilities.
Have clear and timely feedback on performance and goal accomplishment.
Diminish extraneous distraction, thus facilitating concentration.
It is these four task characteristics that game developers should consider if they want to increase the likelihood of causing Flow states in gamers playing their games. I will now go into more detail about each characteristic."

Edit:
Green text extracted from, refer to :https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/166972/cognitive_flow_the_psychology_of_.php?print=1 for more information.

 

[Daiyus73]

I like the concept of Pilots Federation and Superpower ranks having a factor in the payouts. We're already some of the way there with the Minor Faction reputation playing a part in how much the missions pay out too.

The only other way around it is like jasonbirder mentioned; rank locked missions. This mission for 1MCr requires x rank with the Superpower, y rank with Pilots Federation and z reputation with the Minor Faction. Don't have that? Well sorry, you're just not qualified for the job. How about this 500KCr mission instead? Of course we already have Minor Faction reputation locked missions so the payouts for missions with other requirements would have to be higher still.

I definitely want to see loyalty and time served bearing more of an impact Cr/h. I have no issue being in a Keelback earning 5MCr an hour with a good rapport with the local factions and few ranks with the superpower. If I'm Triple-Elite and a Rear-Admiral as well I want to be paid as such; you wouldn't give a minor bounty job to someone with that reputation (or if you did you'd be expected to pay handsomely still) just as you wouldn't ask somebody without the credentials to take out entire squadrons of pirates.

 

[Genxav]

Hi,

Just to make a quick note, mission rewards already take your relevant Elite rank into account. In fact they provide a much more considerable impact than is displayed here. Your Empire and Federation military ranks are not currently taken into account and that is something to think about. However, when doing so please consider what happens to the non Empire/Fed factions and the potential knock on effect to the BGS.

What I think your spreadsheets really show is the difficulty of getting one single system that deals with the 10,000 credit reward area (new players) and the 1,000,000 credit reward area. It's obviously not impossible but you start seeing how small increments have major effects.

Adam

Hi Adam, thank you for commenting, but they only work on missions, and to be hones one really cant notice their benefits. Maybe the game needs to explain that to its users. I imagined what you mentioned was the case, but only on missions.

Is any other payout affected by our ranks?

My idea was that all payouts would get affected by ranks missions, bounty hunting, search and rescue, etc.
On the Power Ranks, well give those bonuses only for missions that are given by power factions, if you do empire missions on fed space that faction pays you taking you empire rank into account or something of the sort. The closer you are to the empire capital planets the better the pay? many things could be brain stormed.

1,000,000 Credits turned into 1.900,000 Credits by being Elite at combat does sound bad. My Tripple Elite bonuses in the chart could be a bit generous because they are adding up all of your 3 elite bonuses. It could be reduced, but if you are an Elite pilot you need credits to maintain a fleet or big ships if you used them, credit sink scales well in the game but credit pay does not.

 

[Adam Bourke-Waite]

Hi Adam, thank you for commenting, but they only work on missions, and to be hones one really cant notice their benefits. Maybe the game needs to explain that to its users. I imagined what you mentioned was the case, but only on missions.

Is any other payout affected by our ranks?

My idea was that all payouts would get affected by ranks missions, bounty hunting, search and rescue, etc.
On the Power Ranks, well give those bonuses only for missions that are given by power factions, if you do empire missions on fed space that faction pays you taking you empire rank into account or something of the sort. The closer you are to the empire capital planets the better the pay? many things could be brain stormed.

1,000,000 Credits turned into 1.900,000 Credits by being Elite at combat does sound bad. My Tripple Elite bonuses in the chart could be a bit generous because they are adding up all of your 3 elite bonuses. It could be reduced, but if you are an Elite pilot you need credits to maintain a fleet or big ships if you used them, credit sink scales well in the game but credit pay does not.

Sure, I can't really comment on areas outside of missions and the BGS. In regards to the BGS the issue is that earnings are linked to rep/inf/states and that means that empire/fed factions would be at a strong advantage. If you remove even that as consideration, the idea that empire/fed players are able to earn more allows them to potentially support their faction in a way that a non emp/fed player would not be able to match.

However, I think that is outside of the area that you are wishing to discuss, I just want to clarify the difficulties I was referring to.

Adam

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

Hi,

Just to make a quick note, mission rewards already take your relevant Elite rank into account. In fact they provide a much more considerable impact than is displayed here. Your Empire and Federation military ranks are not currently taken into account and that is something to think about. However, when doing so please consider what happens to the non Empire/Fed factions and the potential knock on effect to the BGS.

What I think your spreadsheets really show is the difficulty of getting one single system that deals with the 10,000 credit reward area (new players) and the 1,000,000 credit reward area. It's obviously not impossible but you start seeing how small increments have major effects.

Adam

I don't actually like the fact that rewards scale with rank. They should scale with difficulty of the job in hand. Why would any employer use an elite pilot to do some safe cargo transport missions when a harmless one can do it just as well and they only have to pay them a much smaller amount.

What could be done is have the higher the rank you are the better option of reward you get. But the rewards shouldn't be higher for no reason.

Missions to anarchy should be high risk and therefor pay more and maybe not for inexperienced players. It used to be like which I prefered. You had the recommended rank for the mission. You choose whether you want to go for it or not.

And then wing missions should be much easier to balance out especially if they are done as a share of the reward instead of a duplication of the reward. And if you have it as a share of the reward, then all missons can be wing missions as there will be nothing to balance between wing missions and non-wing missions. All you have to do is put down when a mission is wing recommended if the mission is going to be especially dangerous.

 

[Adam Bourke-Waite]

I don't actually like the fact that rewards scale with rank. They should scale with difficulty of the job in hand. Why would any employer use an elite pilot to do some safe cargo transport missions when a harmless one can do it just as well and they only have to pay them a much smaller amount.

What could be done is have the higher the rank you are the better option of reward you get. But the rewards shouldn't be higher for no reason.

Missions to anarchy should be high risk and therefor pay more and maybe not for inexperienced players. It used to be like which I prefered. You had the recommended rank for the mission. You choose whether you want to go for it or not.

And then wing missions should be much easier to balance out especially if they are done as a share of the reward instead of a duplication of the reward. And if you have it as a share of the reward, then all missons can be wing missions as there will be nothing to balance between wing missions and non-wing missions. All you have to do is put down when a mission is wing recommended if the mission is going to be especially dangerous.

Rewards aren't the only elements of the missions that are impacted by your rank. A simple example is that the rank of spawned enemies will also be impacted by this. We don't want missions for harmless missions forcing them to take on Elite rank pilots!.

Missions do still have a recommended rank unless something has gone wrong.

 

[Andargor]

The idea for my example is simple, try to get the payouts to Scale with the seniority of players, getting ranks takes time, and gives no benefit. So if they give you some sort of bonus towards income, income being something Lots of people agree its unbalanced and does not pay well on higher "levels". Having something linked to ranks should in theory make things work more homogeneous. New pilots earn the same as today, older higher rank pilots earn more if they got the ranks achieved. In my mind its really that simple.

The curve could be linear or something else, to make the gameflow work.

"In the 1970s a psychologist named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi experimentally evaluated Flow. He found that a person's skill and the difficulty of a task interact to result in different cognitive and emotional states. When skill is too low and the task too hard, people become anxious. Alternatively, if the task is too easy and skill too high, people become bored. However, when skill and difficulty are roughly proportional, people enter Flow states."

https://www.gamasutra.com/db_area/images/feature/166972/figure1.png

While in these states, people experience:

Extreme focus on a task.
A sense of active control.
Merging of action and awareness.
Loss of self-awareness.
Distortion of the experience of time.
The experience of the task being the only necessary justification for continuing it.
Csikszentmihalyi also outlined four characteristics found in tasks that drive an equilibrium between skill and difficulty, thus increasing the probability of Flow states. Specifically, these are tasks that:

Have concrete goals with manageable rules.
Demand actions to achieve goals that fit within the person's capabilities.
Have clear and timely feedback on performance and goal accomplishment.
Diminish extraneous distraction, thus facilitating concentration.
It is these four task characteristics that game developers should consider if they want to increase the likelihood of causing Flow states in gamers playing their games. I will now go into more detail about each characteristic.

Nice cut-and-paste, but please refer to the original article and author: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/166972/cognitive_flow_the_psychology_of_.php

 

[ArchEmperor]

Should not the bonuses be inverted? It should be hardest to play as Elite, and easiest at Harmless.

 

[Bob Lighthouse]

Because i am one of those "evil" oldschoolers who like that things take its time. Thats what i bought when this game was released, thats what i expected from what i have heared, read and seen before i bought it.
To me, nothing needs to be changed but a bit of balancing out all professions so each and every one of them is something worthwile.

Nevertheless, i do appreciate your effort to seek some common ground and the idea that Ranks would actually be more than just a name and that comes with some ships. Still at least i would certainly not want to make such modifiers increasing my payout tenfold. I could go into detail now, but that would be wasted effort. Why? Because and as already said, for such a thing it would first need a stable foundation across the board of activities and their inccome. And second...

This whole discussions is not really about credits, its about mindset. And its not even a new topic. Even in the past there were discussions like "Should i be able to earn that fuge rebuy of my ship in one hour" etc. etc. yada yada. And as much as i appreciate that idea of yours, and as much as i hope that FD might pick up on that and at least looks if something like that, just not as extreme, could be done - i don't think it will solve the "problem" or end the discussions. Why?

Stretch your arms to the side. And in both palms you have one of the groups that are currently debating what is reasonable. The mindset of those two groups and the idea of "what income is reasonable" is just too different imho to ever be put to one common ground. The area where one group would start think "Now this is reasonable", is already far beyond good end evil for the other one. And nice versa. Maybe i am wrong there, but that was always my impression so far.

So what?
It's not as if widespread agreement is a prerequisite for a company to apply a change.
It's not up to them.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

Rewards aren't the only elements of the missions that are impacted by your rank. A simple example is that the rank of spawned enemies will also be impacted by this. We don't want missions for harmless missions forcing them to take on Elite rank pilots!.

Missions do still have a recommended rank unless something has gone wrong.

Why not. Ships should spawn for the grade of mission not the grade of the pilot taking on the mission. You take on an elite combat rank mission but you are only harmless in a sidewinder, don't expect to survive, but I see no reason why they shouldn't have that option though. It used to be like that and I enjoyed it more. There was a sense of danger if I took a mission which was way above my rank. At the moment I only see missions that are one rank above or below my rank.

Maybe we need another built-in missions system. You get the generic ones on the mission boards which are downloaded from the server that are the same for everyone and are shareable, but also have some which are specifically generated for you within the game on your computer which only you can see, still using a procedural system. This could also be a great way to introduce more targeted missions that feel like a mini campaign but only use the systems and factions in your facinity.

I know what is next, and that will be there may not be enough missions for them to take on. That is why I think there should be more then one place to get missions.

The security contact should be there for all bounty hunting contracts which can have a mixture of different missions from very easy to very difficult.

The black market contact should have item/passanger smuggling missions.

Assasination missions should be by another underground contact. What "legitimate" entity openly advertises assasination missions on a jobs board.

For passangers - remove all economy passangers from the passanger mission board and introduce the passanger hub which lists a number of desintations in a 40ly bubble with a certain amount of passangers going to each of these destinations. These will be economy passanger passangers (a bit like commodities). You can fill up your passanger seats with these people.

Then the rest of the passanger missions can be a mixture of first class, business class or luxury. Giving the passanger ships more chances of getting the very rare luxury passanger missions. It makes these passanger missions a bit more unique and special.

 

[Adam Bourke-Waite]

Why not. Ships should spawn for the grade of mission not the grade of the pilot taking on the mission. You take on an elite combat rank mission but you are only harmless in a sidewinder, don't expect to survive, but I see no reason why they shouldn't have that option though.

Sorry for any confusion, it is the rank of the mission not the player, however the rank of the player influences what rank missions the player sees. Hope that makes sense and I'm not muddier the waters further!

 

[Theodrid]

Why not. Ships should spawn for the grade of mission not the grade of the pilot taking on the mission. You take on an elite combat rank mission but you are only harmless in a sidewinder, don't expect to survive, but I see no reason why they shouldn't have that option though.

Maybe we need another built-in missions system. You get the generic ones on the mission boards which are downloaded from the server, but also have some which are specifically generated for you within the game on your computer which only you can see, still using a procedural system. This could also be a great way to introduce more targeted missions that feel like a mini campaign.

I know what is next, and that will be there may not be enough missions for them to take on. That is why I think there should be more then one place to get missions.

The security contact should be there for all bounty hunting contracts which can have a mixture of different missions from very easy to very difficult.

The black market contact should have item/passanger smuggling missions.

Assasination missions should be by another underground contact. What "legitimate" entity openly advertises assasination missions on a jobs board.

For passangers - remove all economy passangers from the passanger mission board and introduce the passanger hub which lists a number of desintations in a 40ly bubble with a certain amount of passangers going to each of these destinations. These will be economy passanger missions (a bit like commodities).

Then the rest of the passanger missions can be a mixture of first class, business class or luxury. Giving the passanger ships more chances of getting the very rare luxury passanger missions.

Give this man some Corned Beef!

 

[Stu92]

So the price of me shipping a package with postal service should depend on the driver's seniority rank?

Its not a postal service though, its a private contracted courier. You generally pay more for a courier, they deliver to more places, deliver nonstandard cargo, will enter gate codes/attempt a person to person delivery, offer better tracking. And offer better insurance. Or think of it like a taxi cab vs an uber driver with a luxorious mercedes. You pay more for a better/more expensive service, although the service provided is exactly the same.

 

[Genxav]

Nice cut-and-paste, but please refer to the original article and author: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/166972/cognitive_flow_the_psychology_of_.php

Woops sorry i tough it was obvious that it was cut and pasted from that website >_< my bad and it is now corrected
thanks mate

 

[Genxav]

Its not a postal service though, its a private contracted courier. You generally pay more for a courier, they deliver to more places, deliver nonstandard cargo, will enter gate codes/attempt a person to person delivery, offer better tracking. And offer better insurance. Or think of it like a taxi cab vs an uber driver with a luxorious mercedes. You pay more for a better/more expensive service, although the service provided is exactly the same.

1+ on this Stu92.

the funny thing is that the poster you responded is fixated with the courier mission i mentioned and doesn't seem to think beyond that.

so lets ask him What about all other types of missions? why wouldn't they pay more if the contract a a higher rank individual?

In the end Elite is a game not a job, there needs to be a middle ground that respects players time.

 

[Genxav]

Rewards aren't the only elements of the missions that are impacted by your rank. A simple example is that the rank of spawned enemies will also be impacted by this. We don't want missions for harmless missions forcing them to take on Elite rank pilots!.

Missions do still have a recommended rank unless something has gone wrong.

Adam,

They do have recommended rank and they do spawn elite pilots against you if you take those, and imo that is fine
I remember when missions were locked by rank, it cause all the problems of many places having no missions to lower ranks and frustrating people all around

On the rank bonuses, maybe the game should communicate better these bonuses to its players? how does one know ? is there currently a way to know what benefits i get from my ranks?

Sidenote: Elite should have some sort of Elitepedia ingame, like games as Civilization have their Civilopedia with bunch of information that would be a nice addition to the game

 

[Almondclint]

I 100% agree. Today we pay people on their competence, expertise, and the job requirements.

The fact that rank is meaningless has always appalled me. I also think we should have to do things, special missions, to maintain rank.

Also, wth is a data mission? Its 3300, we have subspace comms, and Im flying an interstellar USB delivery mission? Never made sense to me.