Mode switching for missions and Smeaton Orbital [200mill/hour]
- Thread starter Red Fox Four
- Start date
This thread to me just under lines the fact that board flipping needs to be fixed so it can be taken out of the equation of mission payout balance.
I can't be that hard FD
If they remove boardhopping, theyshould make a way to fill all cabins.. leaving half a ship empty is just silly. Its means you can use a smaller ship for the same task..
I agree we should be able to request as many of a particular type of mission as we want to do. Payouts need to be balanced to be sensible though.
I hopped from station to station.
Ok. So I've gone and had a smoke and a drink lol. Ok so i may have over done it a little. Sorry guys and girls. Just annoyed at knee jerk reaction of going in complete opposite direction and making time and distance irrelevant.
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Just to pick up on this...
It'd be nice if FDev could take the opportunity to take a step back and rethink the way ALL this stuff works.
Right now it seems like we've just got 3 types of mission; cattle transport, annoying VIP transport and annoying VIP tours.
It'd be nice if there was, instead, a range of mission-types available with a range of different tiers (requiring the different cabins) as well.
The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of just making the cattle transport missions into "charters" with big volumes of people to fill up ships in one go.
You go to the passenger lounge and, instead of stacking"X refugees want to go to Y" missions together, it'd be "World's End Tours wants to hire your ship to transport 131 passengers to X for Cr40m".
If you accept, you've hired your ship to the company so you simply can't take any more missions until you complete that charter flight.
They could deliberately offer the charter missions in group sizes of around 20, 60 and 140 to suit the max capacity of the Dolphin, Orca and Beluga - paying, say, Cr10m, Cr20m and C40m respectively.
And if the configuration of your ship doesn't allow you to take biggest group, that's just tough cookies.
You make some good points
The problem though is that the devs nerfed long distance smuggling and delivering patch after patch after patch after patch because people were getting 20-50mil an hour
We used to get random back end nerfs to specific stations all the times where the devs would "fix" (ie bypass) the BGS to make it not as profitable.
Now these types of missions are basically dead because for over a year the devs tried to push everyone to passenger missions - and they succeeded! But they let people earn a lot more per hour from them for MORE THAN A YEAR than they ever accepted from deliveries without saying "it's wrong, we'll fix it" or actually back end breaking the BGS!
The BGS is such an awful broken mess it isn't even funny! You can go to a boom system that is a producer of stuff they should be exporting and you can be allied and if you are lucky you will be offered a mission for 120t of somthing for a mil or two.
Or you can click passengers and you can find less than 10 economy passengers going somewhere for 10's of millions! Its like the old slave missions back in the day only a lot more exploitable due to the size of the stations (in general) the fact they all go to the same place, rather than 10 destinations +, the significantly less number of interdictions and the fact the devs mostly just ignored it because they wanted people to buy horizons!
And the BGS for passenger missions seems even more broken than the one for delivery missions! Last week I picked up some refugees going from a to b, a was in a state of civil war. at b there were refugees wanting to go to A! What refugees go to a war zone? I mean really?
And these aren't new issues.
These are longstanding, delivery missions had them first too, but the devs didn't learn from those! Didn't want to learn, didn't want to listen!
Now you say "trust the devs" now? Ok fine, I say trust but verify.
And in several years of experiance of the devs trying to fix the BGS for different missions do I have confidence they will this time finally get it right?
No. No I don't!
And I say this as someone who "took the long road" I had almost a 1000 hours on my game clock before I got a conda...I only just recently got the rank for a cutter at 1600 hours, I generally avoid passenger missions because IMO they suck, but in all honesty...the devs did this! They broke the game, they skewed everything towards passenger missions deliberately and on purpose. They think that 5mil an hour is too much for basically any other activity no matter how dangerous, but have been fine for 50+ from passengers for over a year! They quite simply have no concept of risk v reward and what their target "earnings per hour" should be for various activites!
You want to go back to how it used to be? Me too!
I want it back when doing illegal stuff actually (sensibly) paid more! I want low risk activities like running passengers 1 stop with no interdictions to pay very little! Most passengers are actually pathetic amounts of risk so only those that take a longish amount of time should pay, I want combat to pay more to account for the risk you are taking! I'd like elite in exploration to actually mean somthing again rather than these days where people who've only done one trip and maybe to colonia at that have it! (though i think the payments should be kept as they are just the rank requirements re done) We need interdictions to be dialled up to make stacking missions more risky...remember when you'd be interdicted and you'd have 5+ ships drop down trying to get you? We need mission refreshing canned but we also need boards to generate PROPER MISSIONS!
I'll say it again: The number of systems producing goods I've been too in the last 6 months that are in boom that I'm allied with that have no or very few poorly paying missions is frankly moronic.
The entire system needs canning and redoing from scratch!
But that's not "sexy" is it? That doesn't sell game units, or skins so the odds that will be done?
Trust but verify....my verification experiance says "don't trust, believe it when you see it"
This is basically what they tried a few months back when they massively upped the number of VIPs to try and reduce stacking. Odd that at the same time they didn't do what they've done with delivery and a mission that used to be for 2-10 you now take 120 cargo for less money! They could have upped the passenger numbers needed way back fairly easily. But they didn't.
Because IMO Passengers sell units. Simple as that
I didn't board hop, and I rarely made a trip without a full ship (Beluga). I just visited three or four stations until i was full and then headed to Smeaton. Always made more than 100 million, sometimes over 150.
If there isn't demand, you can't fill all cabins. Sometimes a small ship is more appropriate.
British Airways London to Glasgow Tickets from 75 pounds...c400 Miles equals nearly 19 pence/mile
British Airways London to Sydney Tickets from 700 pounds...c10,000 Miles equals nearly 0.13 pence/mile
Cost doesn't rise Linearly with distance
I'm just glad that after 1836 hours in the game, I finally managed to get into a decent cash cow before it dried up..
I now have a 1.3 billion bank roll to play the game my way....
I now have a 1.3 billion bank roll to play the game my way....
Depends on the demand, time, day of the week,month,year. and start and finish point. If the finish point isnt the best and they struggle to fill the plane on the return journey they raise the price. Also basically bidding wars between airlines. Elite doesn't have bidding wars to drive prices down. Smeaton doesn't have the demand to leave so filling up is harder. Its the same as taxis here in Australia if you want to go somewhere were they aren't guaranteed return fare either they refuse to take you or they have a bigger flagfall. Same as peak times.
Also here in Australia say you want to fly to broome from perth in the same state. It costs more than flying to adelaide in a different state. Or it costs more to fly to sydney from perth than from sydney to perth.
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A 25% reduction would defiantly re-balance the missions.
Honestly I think FDev's heart is in exploration and they won't let one branch be more profitable than exploration.
Furthermore I think this has to do with 3.0 quarter 4 update; in that, they don't want everyone having a fleet carrier.
Honestly I think FDev's heart is in exploration and they won't let one branch be more profitable than exploration.
Furthermore I think this has to do with 3.0 quarter 4 update; in that, they don't want everyone having a fleet carrier.
Given the history of exploration in elite I find this one of the most amusing comments I've ever seen!
Ahh but A380 has 544 seats therefore $38 per mile (sorry no GBP sign on this keyboard) and that assumes all economy to fit the regional example
A320 has 150 therefore only $26 per mile.
Then we have longer distance = costs you more.
But that said price gouging airlines are possibly not the best example, I've paid $1,000 to fly Perth (WA) to Exmouth (WA) about 1200km just because it was peak time mid week, for another $200 I could have flown to the UK 14,000km.
So whilst it isn't linear by any stretch it is most definitely more expensive overall due to the scale needed.
Ask BA to fly you to Sydney in a A320 and they will give you a hell of a quote for the privilege, ask them to do a 1 hour hop in an A380 you'll get the same ridiculous quote.
However Passenger missions here aren't BA or Qantas on a scheduled route, this is passengers lining up outside the charter offices at the local dustbowl airstrip wanting a daytrip or a "fast jet anywhere as long as it leaves now" and these puppies will charge you both by the hour, distance, by the number of people being hauled and any "risk" involved. Believe me they will make your eyes water with the amount they may ask for this type of service. No place for short hands and deep pockets if you want to fly in a hurry or if it is a no questions asked trip.
So yeah in reality it is a linear cost both in terms of time , distance, numbers and risk.
Given the history of exploration in elite I find this one of the most amusing comments I've ever seen!
Agreed. Exploration is far from best. Time verses profit.
No it did not.
Good. (with a grumpy cat face)
But not soon enough. "Give free money" -buttons are never good for any game. Players get bored too soon and start complaining that there's no content (because they just skipped it all with the free money button).
Idea: Make the crazy paying passenger missions to require luxury cabins or whatever they were, and make them to require privacy = you can get only one set of passengers at a time.
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