i dunno, always playing open and there are not a lot of CMDRs visible in the New Borann system despite the chat is overflooded. Also was not ganked there ever.
LTD mining is overpowered and it kills all other activities
go on, I'm playing open all the time, including mining in the new borann spot. CMDR Norlin.
lol right now the sub-surface thing oa exactly which causing the hype i nthe New Borann sustem, not the laser mining. Also it will not fix the issue, nerf is not an answer.
I don't get it, LTD is great. I've been playing on PC for a while and I have 5bill. Is it wrong? Sure. Is it game breaking? Not really.
Because one way or another players will learn how ED works...the grind is still there, the learning curve is still there, and you can't progress through the game mining. I consider the LTD mining as a safety net, if you're low on money, go mine LTDs.
Since I now have the credits, I am doing normal missions and slowly engineering my ships.
If I the piggy bank gets low, I know where to go.
Let's look at it from another perspective;
There are more players in ED...May not last forever.
That will usually lead to people buying ARX, because "pimp my ship".
If players skip the ship tiers and go straight for the big ones, that's fine. Maybe they will soon find that the T10 sucks (I fly the T10 so calm down) and instead try out the other ones...or just quit there. (Players like that won't stay to play Elite anyway because having the biggest ship doesn't mean you win).
Because one way or another players will learn how ED works...the grind is still there, the learning curve is still there, and you can't progress through the game mining. I consider the LTD mining as a safety net, if you're low on money, go mine LTDs.
Since I now have the credits, I am doing normal missions and slowly engineering my ships.
If I the piggy bank gets low, I know where to go.
Let's look at it from another perspective;
There are more players in ED...May not last forever.
That will usually lead to people buying ARX, because "pimp my ship".
If players skip the ship tiers and go straight for the big ones, that's fine. Maybe they will soon find that the T10 sucks (I fly the T10 so calm down) and instead try out the other ones...or just quit there. (Players like that won't stay to play Elite anyway because having the biggest ship doesn't mean you win).
Sure it won't help with personal skills/knowledge progression, but it allows to skip a huge part of the game with all the newbie activities, other than mining stuff, and at the same time makes all the credits, economy, etc completely meaningless.
I do agree that it is a big skip button, but a newbie will remain a newbie without skills and knowledge. Example: I have an engineered ship and even I think twice before accepting a "Assassinate Pirate Lord wing mission", a newbie in a A rated Anaconda will probably not survive. 3 things to take from that.
1: The learning curve becomes a learning Cliff, except you have to climb it.
2: Having the credits will just give someone a false (and yet literal) sense of security.
3: There was no need to do the mission in the first place because money.
It does make credits useless to a degree. If a player is happy to sit there and fly a big ship then so be it. Eventually they will either get bored and have to start playing Elite. Somewhere down the line they will either stop playing or they will have to find a purpose to keep playing.
Believe it or not, lets use the engineers as an example...Every activity in Elite has to be done to unlock most if not all those glorified mechanics. Combat bonds, black market, exploration, trading, mining (for painite), combat (materials or rank), missions (Reputation or modular terminals) and that's all I can think of, all those activities will be required to progress down that line.
Sure but my point is just about the "skip button". And this "skip" is applied not just for newbies, but for everyone who wants to make some credits in game.
In ED there are already power play and BGS, plu war with Thargoids. Though neither is a way to earn credits.
Players that already know how to make money and know where to go will always make money, albeit not at the same rate. If a player wants to take a shortcut then there is nothing wrong, it's a choice, newbies will eventually experience everything in Elite. Even if they revert the mining or remove LTDs from subsurface, it will still be the fastest way to make money. The only difference is that they will have to mine for longer.
Sure. And that's exactly the point - right now with LTD it's only the single viable way to earn money, because all other activitieas are x10-x20 time less profitable.
I just want to have a choice in game, instead of just "want money - go mining LTDs EGG EGG EGG"
I'm pretty sure LTD mining is by choice...unless people are there against their will. Right now the fastest way to earn money is LTDs, however, so was Ceos and Sothis Biowaste runs in its days. At one point the passenger missions in Rhea were the fastest way to earn money, and before that, stacking surface scanning missions were the way to go.
Some are broken mechanics and other are simply over-performing. Most people that ask "what's the best way to earn money?", just want money, not experience or skill.
No need to rebalance the game economy, 3LTD mining should be a thing. Fdev have nerfed it by 25% so far, I think that 3LTD mining should be further away from the bubble to balance it out. Mining will always be the most profitable, nothing will change that...However, you can adjust the rate of profitability by relocating it.
Things like this can almost never be avoided, unless testing is done, it can't be prevented. However, you can't simply nerf it to ground, you have to take steps and see if its the right direction until it is considered balanced.
First of all nerf is when gameplay remain unchanged, but 'numbers' got tuned down. What i proposed does not fall into "nerf" category at all.
Second - what WILL in your opinion fix the problem?
That's not true though. There are plenty of viable ways to earn money, it's just that LTDs is a highly accelerated way to earn money.
If you want to get to the "top level" in the shortest possible time and then become bored with the game and move on, LTD mining is the way to go.
Sadly you'll be missing a lot of what the game has to offer.
The big issue is that mining (esp LTD) is out of whack in terms of risk/reward.
Combat has a very high risk, plus risk of a rebuy, which outweighs the reward by far.
Eating a 24m rebuy for a 2m reward is not really worth the risk, considering you have to succeed on the next 12 missions just to make up for that one fail.
AXI even more so.
What are the risks in mining? After the initial pirates off, you start mining and haul your load home. Worst case you have to play a game of "Interdict me" and done. Lots of money. Don't forget an extra refill of ammo that will set you back 10000 credits.
Not just risk/reward. But complexity/reward as well.
Sure there are few technicalities with laser mining on how to rip most reward with least time wasted. But it's still nothing compare to even to deep core mining. It neither not nearly as complex as current implementation of exploration, which, frankly do pay decent amount of money nowadays, but still nowhere near to profit you earn from laser mining LTDs
I don't think the conclusion follows from the premise.
Credits are usually the barrier to entry to other activities, so having a reliable way to get a lot of credits allows more players to actually begin to engage with the game's other activities because they can afford better ships and modules to do them with.
And further progression in the ability to do everything but mining is mostly gated through engineering and prospecting for engineering materials or specialist materials like from guardian sites, in which credits don't help anyway.
Credits are usually the barrier to entry to other activities, so having a reliable way to get a lot of credits allows more players to actually begin to engage with the game's other activities because they can afford better ships and modules to do them with.
And further progression in the ability to do everything but mining is mostly gated through engineering and prospecting for engineering materials or specialist materials like from guardian sites, in which credits don't help anyway.
Just to give a suggestion about how I think mining would make more sense:
- Ring systems contain overall percentages of various mineable resource
- These percentages define the probability of you encountering a particular kind of resource anywhere within that ring
- Composition scannable via probe and displayed in system map, like materials on landable planets
- No more "hotspot" regions, since at different distances to the parent body objects orbit at different velocities and also would frequently collide with each other, such regions would never be stable in reality anyway
- Whenever resources are extracted from the ring system, composition is updated according to amount extracted, overall mass of ring system and percentage of said resource
- --> logically, if many players mine lots of a resource, the ring will eventually be depleted of that resource
- NO way to ever regenerate extracted resources. Once a resource is depleted, it's gone forever and a new source of that material will have to be found
- Keep in mind this is still a 1:1 representation of our milky way galaxy, even with non-regenerating resources there is no way we would ever deplete the wole galaxy or even a small bubble around inhabited space in our lifetimes
- This allows for a dynamic supply / demand driven economy (how much of a resource has been identified via scans and is mined, how much is wanted by the economy simulation?) while at the same time remains realistic (does in real life a mined vein ever reappear? of course not) and avoids extremely high output deposits like triple hotspots, by capping the max percentage of materials in a ring system - precious rings with a lot of a high end resource should ofc still exist but be rare, and eventually automatically deplete without manual intervention by the devs
- Oh, also asteroid belts should work the same way as planetary ring systems do now - basically just be like a huge ring around a star