making money is too easy?

[Le Flambeur]

I find it really amusing that some people actually think the current rate of progression is actually correct! The game would be on the shelf in a fortnight if it stayed the way it is - progression is ludicrously fast! As others have said the ship and equipment prices must be placeholders specifically to allow us to advance quickly, thus testing more mechanisms within the game.

So you advocate being stuck in the sidewinder for 20-30h because otherwise it goes to fast? It would take me two weeks given I can play 2h tops a day due to family/work so I would have to spend 10 days or more suffering in this to get the the hauler, then another 10 days to get to something other than a starter ship for the role I want to play, more if I want the insurance?
What I would like is to be able to buy a ship for a reasonable price in a relatively short time after starting, but then have to spend a lot more to outfit properly to fit the role I want it to do. Be it hull upgrade, engine, let me play in the ship I want and then pay to get it better. Obviously I am not talking about the anaconda or the type 9, but a viper/cobra or a type 6 should be relatively "easy" to get and not take 30h of grind. Otherwise it is WoW all over again.

 

[Technotica]

I think there will never be the perfect way for the game systems to be tuned, people will either complain something is too easy/fast or too difficult/slow.
That is why it is a good thing FD are making the game how they think it should be and not just do what the masses (one way or the other) want.

 

[Le Flambeur]

Yeah agreed Technotica, I just wonder what their way is?

 

[Lugalbandak]

So you advocate being stuck in the sidewinder for 20-30h because otherwise it goes to fast? It would take me two weeks given I can play 2h tops a day due to family/work so I would have to spend 10 days or more suffering in this to get the the hauler, then another 10 days to get to something other than a starter ship for the role I want to play, more if I want the insurance?
What I would like is to be able to buy a ship for a reasonable price in a relatively short time after starting, but then have to spend a lot more to outfit properly to fit the role I want it to do. Be it hull upgrade, engine, let me play in the ship I want and then pay to get it better. Obviously I am not talking about the anaconda or the type 9, but a viper/cobra or a type 6 should be relatively "easy" to get and not take 30h of grind. Otherwise it is WoW all over again.

4 hours and you in a cobra at current stake , really with not much effort , i even smoked a joint or 2 between it to slow me down. and then im not even using slopeys market tool. wich is all great for testing.

how do you trade then? maybe you stuck on something , and yeah sorry , i have also a family and play around 5 a 6 six hours in a week , but would hate to see myself within a month in a fitted cobra with final game

For starter now i did this: take the 1 ton cargo missions in sidewinder and trade more with left over space. tey are from 2000 till around 4000 credits each mission + extra trade. then you have a hauler , same approach and within couple of hours you have atleast 100.000 credits.

succses.

ps , is it really a grind in this game?

 

[Andromalius]

When you get up to the bigger ships, margins get better - as they should.
The way I think about it is to determine what this game actually is - is trading and money making the be all and end all of your game ?

No, but systems I'm most interested in are not in the game yet. So trading was a good way to learn the ropes of the game, learn to dock, etc. (Lesson learned, 4 pips to shields while docking)

 

[Le Flambeur]

That's what I did, I did get to 200k but it took me 10-15h not 4h. Maybe because I was new.
What I am trying to say is grinding for the sake of slowing the player down to make it spend time in the game doing mundane tasks in safe sector is not my cup of tea. That's what the subscription model MMO do and they do it because they want to you to spend month to get the mount, then to get to top level...
While I am not saying that it should take 2h to get to a cobra but it should take you less than 2 month to get the basic cobra. Last time I was buying stuff for my viper I saw some of the upgrade for your hull are very expensive. What I would hope is that you can get to the basic ship relatively fast and then you have to equip it. So each ship won't be the same as you would outfit it for you play style.

 

[cmdr_dibbles]

In Frontier that the larger ships required a minimum amount of crew to operate them. If you purchased a Panther Clipper you'd need to recruit many members of paid staff before you could leave the star port. You'd have 5 or 6 crew members who'd roll over to the new vessel (e.g. Puma to Panther) but then need to find 4 or so more to operate the larger ship.

If there are only a couple on the bulletin board (when you upgrade your ship) you could be waiting days, weeks or months for the correct complement.

However, the Frontier way would need to adapted to suit the new game metric (e.g. no time acceleration) as I doubt even the most dedicated player would want to sit in dock for 3 months in real-time!

I think a staffing cost penalty on the larger vessels could bring some balance to the game. It wouldn't be practical to pay per day, week or month though. I'd make the pay increments for crew on a dock-to-dock basis. So on each trade run you pay the staff.

To make this interesting you could use a staff "quality" mechanism that determines how much they are paid.

There should be two different pools, expensive "professionals" such as ex-navel personnel or cheap un-skilled labour.

However, if you have low-quality staff the ship should be at greater risk of random failures (mis-jumps ect...) and modules should degrade at a really high rate (costing significant credits to repair after each mission).

I think someone mentioned the "risk" with 900K of stock on-board. I believe this metric will help. Some people will be risk adverse and others risk takers.

If you employ quality staff their cost might be 80% of the profit on each trade run but offer a 99% chance of reaching the destination.

You could have cheap staff that only take 10% of the profit in pay, but the chance of reaching the port is only 50%.

If, as some people have been suggesting, they are making 250k per run this could drop the reward to 50K but with only a 1 in 100 chance of losing the capital that is tied up in the stock if disaster strikes.

On the other hand, the risk takers could make 225K per run but there is a 1 in 2 chance of jumping into oblivion. Even if you do make the run, you might need to spend 200k fixing degraded modules due to lack of skilled crew.

 

[Windsaw]

I have seen all this talk about how easy it is to get money in this game.
This is funny, because I do not thing this is the case at all.
Or at least, I think it is much more complicated than that.

I think making money is easy for those who know exaclty where to look for it. For everybody else it can be difficult as hell.
I started late in premium beta. And I deliberatly tried to play it like a more casual player, meaning I didn't read forums to get the best tips and didn't use trading tools. I stumbled across more than just a few beginners mistakes that made me lose a lot of my hard earned beginners' credits. During those two weeks of premium beta I did not succeed in buying another ship.
Now in Beta 1 I have alread managed to get to the Lakon 6. But it was hard as well.

Let me tell you why. When I finally got my Hauler (mostly through delivery services) I tried finding better trade routes in more remote areas. I thought I found one in a remote area. I tried using the info from the Galaxy Map to trade on the way there. When I finally reached it, it turned out to be a bust. So I went back to where everybody seems to be. I installed the trading tools and did some brainless grinding, thereby reaching my goals. With setbacks this took me the most part of the weekend. This was not fun anymore. And I felt especially cheated when I realised how much bigger reach the Lakon has compared to the Hauler. The whole detour was totally senseless.

Now, I know now what I did wrong. I guess now, if I used the trading tool from the start, if I knew how to save ensurance money, what jobs to take and which ones to decline, know which tricks to use to get away from pirates and suicidal station ships, I can make as much money far more easily, maybe even as easy as people claim.
But as experienced players we should not delude us to think this is easy in general.
The problem as I see it is twofold.
It seems getting money in the beginning is too easy for good or at least well informed players, but too hard for everybody else. Okay, right now delivery missions are easy money, but it will not stay this way I am sure.
The second problem is that once you reach a certain point, trading becomes ridiculously easy for everybody. Usually when you get the Cobra or the Lakon. IMO this specific balancing has barely started.
Getting these balances right is essential for the final game. I wonder how it will turn out in the end.

As for now I hope that there will be no more wipes until the release, because grinding has burned me out. After the next beta wipe I will stay in my Sidewinder. I also hope that the people at Frontier will realise that these wipes will reduce the number of non-powerplayers who get their hands on expensive equipment more and more. If this is going to a decend beta test beyond bugsquashing this should be avoided.

 

[BennyBoyW]

I still say we're focussing on the "money making" aspect of the game too much.
Making money (as a previous poster replied) is good for learning the ropes in the game. However, it's just a means to an end - you get to a certain amount of money, get the ship you want to use, fit it as you want and then get on with whatever it actually is that you want to do.
So the making money aspect is kinda irrelevant to me - I just want enough to get the ship I want and the fitting I want and then I'm off to have some real fun

 

[Tharsys]

Basic PvP-player can get going with equipment for 100k (viper and a standard equipment). Endgame, dedicated PvP-player without hesitation will pay 100kk for a simple chip that allows a one second more fire before overheating. The basic equipment is quite easy to obtain, but we have no idea what prices will be for the best technology required for example, to take military mission at the level of the elite.

 

[Cryptonomica]

I still say we're focussing on the "money making" aspect of the game too much.
Making money (as a previous poster replied) is good for learning the ropes in the game. However, it's just a means to an end - you get to a certain amount of money, get the ship you want to use, fit it as you want and then get on with whatever it actually is that you want to do.
So the making money aspect is kinda irrelevant to me - I just want enough to get the ship I want and the fitting I want and then I'm off to have some real fun

Pretty much agree with this sentiment. Some people seem to be equating making money in Elite with levelling up in WoW, and that once you're in your Anaconda or Lakon 9 that you're somehow in the endgame.

Fair enough if your objective was to get an anaconda, well done! But now what are you going to do? Is it going to sit in the hangar or are you going to go out there and use it to pirate, hunt for bounties or explore the galaxy? That's where the real game is for me

 

[BennyBoyW]

I agree wholeheartedly.
The previous post about PvP just doesn't work for me as PvP is such a tiny part of this game (and I believe it should remain that way too).
The game has so much scope for any number of ways of playing