Money after the nerf

[kinglemo2000]

When you're retired, you have a lot of spare time.

ED came along after I'd retired, so yes Iv put in an awful lot of game time. I don't play any other games.

As for the gametime clock, yes, you can set up the game & leave it on the menu screen & it ticks over as game time played, that's an issue for FD not me, That's the info on my stats.
But I can only say that I DO play this game for hours on end & don't leave it in the menu screen for days doing nothing.
Going to Beagle Point on last years DWE was typical of how much I play.

I agree it is easy to put in the hours, I retired in march last year (2016) and started playing then, by January 7th this year in a little over 10 month I had hit over 2000 hours in the game hitting my triple Elite so 6000 hour plus is easy to do if you have the time also as people are asking I have 12.5 billion in credits and 2 billion in assets, which is 26 ships including 2 Asps, 2 condas a cutter, FDL and Corvette plus a Python

 

[Vitamin Arrr]

See, the big problem is that people always seem to think that they're entitled to be able to do stuff in a short period of time and that there's something wrong if that isn't happening.

Engineering materials don't appear fast enough so I can keep stockpiling fancy plasma accelerators.
Missions don't pay enough so I can buy a new Anaconda every week.
Asteroids don't allow me to mine enough Painite so I can build a house out of the stuff.
RES's don't spawn enough ships so I can kill them all and earn a heap of credits.
Etc.

It'd probably be less stressful if people just lowered their expectations a bit, enjoyed flying the ships they actually have the money to buy and got components engineered as and when they located the materials to have the modifications done.

Everybody seems to be spending so much time chasing after stuff that they don't just enjoy playing the game.

Or, maybe FDev could look at what players tend to do, and they could say, "Hmm, some players like the game better when they are able to make more money and rank faster. Perhaps we should leave those methods in the game, and even add more methods like that, because clearly, it's what the players enjoy."

But no. Rather, they say, "Players are having too much fun over here doing this stuff; lets nerf the living crap out of that, so those kinds of players will be forced to play the game the way that WE want them to play, and not the way THEY want to play."

I dunno about you, but I think there's something very wrong about that approach. It's why I quit this game before: because they nerfed mining. You used to be able to easily stack up a bunch of mining missions, but after 2.1, you could no longer get nearly as many, which seriously reduced the ability to make a lot of money with painite etc.

Why did they nerf mining? Even with those missions getting stacked it was nowhere near the income level of stacking surface scans, or even just regular bounty hunting.

But to this date, every single really good way to make money or rank that players have found has been made terrible by an "upgrade" to the game. Meanwhile, there is still very little new to find in exploration. They are too busy nerfing everything and reblancing everything to think about adding new content, like an exploration-specific ship, or new kinds of planets to find, or the ability to land on earthlike planets, etc.

So, I quit. I'll check back in another few months and find out what latest moneymaker they are about to nerf so that only people willing to submit to the most mindless of grinds and fully worship at the feet of this game, sacrificing their whole real lives, will be playing it. How else are FD supposed to keep those average session length numbers up?

It's a shame too, because I think FD support is really great. I really want to like this game, but just like certain other devs these days, they believe in a type of addiction formula that spreads out rewards in the game, and spreads out the path to endgame, so far that only people who take advantage of exploits or devote their entire lives to the game can hope to attain the highest ranks and best ships, etc.

And I just can't do that kind of game anymore.

 

[Vitamin Arrr]

I agree it is easy to put in the hours, I retired in march last year (2016) and started playing then, by January 7th this year in a little over 10 month I had hit over 2000 hours in the game hitting my triple Elite so 6000 hour plus is easy to do if you have the time also as people are asking I have 12.5 billion in credits and 2 billion in assets, which is 26 ships including 2 Asps, 2 condas a cutter, FDL and Corvette plus a Python

I have nothing against it if players want to sink 2000 hours into the game. But surely you realize that, as with most MMOs that have the super-long grind to endgame, what they have done was to cater to the players who spend their whole lives in the game, at the expense of players who only have time to play a few hours a day.

It reminds me of what happened to Star Trek Online. For the first year or two of STO, you could hit endgame in a couple of months or 60-80 hours or so of gameplay. Once you were at endgame it became really fun, because then the game became matter of player skill, and not a matter of who grinded the longest to attain the perfect ship.

But later, the devs started adding dropboxes that yielded rare chance at super-expensive items. The top players all grinded forever to get those uber ships, so they were the only ones who had them. Over time this went on and on, to where only the players who had spent insane amounts of time in the game even had a chance to survive in the hardest missions and PVP, while the previously hard missions became a total joke.

I am not sure why developers think it's good for games to require so many hours from players. But I do think it ties into that idea that once they've got you hooked, they want to be your only game. They don't want to lose you to some other game. They don't want their game to die. All they care about are how many people are in their core group of players. In a way, it makes sense.

But what happens is they get into a weird feedback loop. The more grindy they make the game, the more the only people who stay are the true addicts who sacrifice everything for the grind. Then, those are the only players they hear feedback from, which warps their perception of what to do in order to improve the game. Over time, therefore, the game gets grindier and grindier and more and more normal players are alienated.

 

[Tarman]

I have nothing against it if players want to sink 2000 hours into the game. But surely you realize that, as with most MMOs that have the super-long grind to endgame, what they have done was to cater to the players who spend their whole lives in the game, at the expense of players who only have time to play a few hours a day.

It reminds me of what happened to Star Trek Online. For the first year or two of STO, you could hit endgame in a couple of months or 60-80 hours or so of gameplay. Once you were at endgame it became really fun, because then the game became matter of player skill, and not a matter of who grinded the longest to attain the perfect ship.

But later, the devs started adding dropboxes that yielded rare chance at super-expensive items. The top players all grinded forever to get those uber ships, so they were the only ones who had them. Over time this went on and on, to where only the players who had spent insane amounts of time in the game even had a chance to survive in the hardest missions and PVP, while the previously hard missions became a total joke.

I am not sure why developers think it's good for games to require so many hours from players. But I do think it ties into that idea that once they've got you hooked, they want to be your only game. They don't want to lose you to some other game. They don't want their game to die. All they care about are how many people are in their core group of players. In a way, it makes sense.

But what happens is they get into a weird feedback loop. The more grindy they make the game, the more the only people who stay are the true addicts who sacrifice everything for the grind. Then, those are the only players they hear feedback from, which warps their perception of what to do in order to improve the game. Over time, therefore, the game gets grindier and grindier and more and more normal players are alienated.

When I first played STO it was fast to progress levels but grindy if you wanted the coolest toys, and the PVP was dominated by paid ships. I was turned off by the speed because I wasn't a fan of the hard-tiered ships and how quickly you discard them outside their level range, though I did manage to keep a Galaxy afloat long past its expiry date. I would have purchased a replica 1701 from the store of that time if it had been useful for more than the first ten levels of the game, which was about three afternoons of gaming at most.

 

[LeoBartlet]

LOL so the fix for mode switching is just to shaft anybody regardless of whether they were mode switching to stack missions or not? Truly amazing.

You have no idea how much restraint it's taken for me to leave it at that. No idea.

Aware of the "exploit" since before the game went live.

Why don't they just say that they have no idea how to fix it so all they intend on doing is nerfing missions into insignificance.

 

[Devari]

Not disputing mode switching to refresh the board was an exploit at all, as you say it was clearly confrimed to be. Not sure I worded my earlier post particularly well; I couldn't care less about mode switching, if FDev want to stop it good luck to them. They haven't though, they've stopped people stacking more than three missions from what I was told earlier. Since you could stack more than three missions without mode swapping if you had any patience at all, the 'fix' only addresses mode switching indirectly by making it pointless, but equally screws people who weren't doing it to begin with.

The issue here is that FD has had ample opportunity to address the stacking of massacre missions and their solution in 2.3 was simply to limit the degree of stacking. They clearly could have make the missions non-stackable so that one ship kill would only count for one mission, but they didn't do this at all. All they did was limit the stacking to three missions maximum, which just means players will still mode switch and stack three of the 15-20 million Elite missions requiring around 100 ship kills, but you will still only have to kill 100 ships, not 300.

That basically tells you that FD does NOT consider the stackable nature of those missions an "exploit". They have left that feature in the game intact and only limited the number of missions that you can stack. They have not in any way "removed" or "corrected" the root cause of the issue.

The same reasoning holds for stacking planetary scan missions, or for that matter data delivery missions which all have the same destination. In fact data delivery missions are even more problematic because you can stack 20 of them and get credit for all of them in a single trip.

You might have argued that mode switching to refresh the mission boards instantly was an "exploit" but again, FD has done nothing to limit this either. So neither mission stacking, nor mode-switching, are considered exploits based on FD's design intentions as they are specifically NOT removing either behavior from the game.

 

[Crimson Kaim]

There will always be that niche where you can make billions of credits in a day or whatnot.

How FD wants it to work:

Time investment -> leads to credits/h + skill acts as a multiplier but hard caps at a certain point.

How it actually works:

Time investment (search for that gold mine) -> leads to exponential increasing numbers of players farming gold -> gold mine is exhausted -> repeat (and do not grind credits while there is no gold mine found yet).

 

[gooddoc]

The issue here is that FD has had ample opportunity to address the stacking of massacre missions and their solution in 2.3 was simply to limit the degree of stacking. They clearly could have make the missions non-stackable so that one ship kill would only count for one mission, but they didn't do this at all. All they did was limit the stacking to three missions maximum, which just means players will still mode switch and stack three of the 15-20 million Elite missions requiring around 100 ship kills, but you will still only have to kill 100 ships, not 300.

That basically tells you that FD does NOT consider the stackable nature of those missions an "exploit". They have left that feature in the game intact and only limited the number of missions that you can stack. They have not in any way "removed" or "corrected" the root cause of the issue.

The same reasoning holds for stacking planetary scan missions, or for that matter data delivery missions which all have the same destination. In fact data delivery missions are even more problematic because you can stack 20 of them and get credit for all of them in a single trip.

You might have argued that mode switching to refresh the mission boards instantly was an "exploit" but again, FD has done nothing to limit this either. So neither mission stacking, nor mode-switching, are considered exploits based on FD's design intentions as they are specifically NOT removing either behavior from the game.

Totally agree cmdr!

The action of a player is only an 'exploit' when FD state it is & then removes the result of that action from the game. Failure to do this means it's an 'unintended game mechanic' or accepted gameplay.

Player's will find ways around the game mechanic's should one exist.

Take the 'alien ruin's' site hunt, a long labourious search by the eye & trust to luck method seaching a whole planet in hope of finding a ruin site. Would timing the drop from orbital cruise to show that a longer time indicated that an alien site was in the area - Was this an 'exploit'? because FD eventually fixed it, letting us see ruins in the nav panel at 1000ls.

An exploit is an exploit in Elite when FD tells us it is, not because some cmdr wants to play judge & jury!

Added content...

Also staying with the 'alien ruins', is doing the mission in 'open play' & getting 'bleed' data & cmdrs having to re-log to alter the obelisk patterns & get all the 101 data scans - Is this an exploit?

Because FD have known that NO ONE has completed this 'bugged' mission without resorting to this method, yet maybe two months have elapsed & nothing has changed.

It's players thinking outside the box, that help keep this game interesting - well, some of us anyway!

 

[Kyokushin]

And another one thing.
Everyone knows a relogo is an exploit, but it was explainted as 'legit', but 'not in a game spirit'. But now FD admitted it is an exploit, so IF they are considering it as exploit then they are aware of it since the game release, because people used relogging since game release, for robigo mission stacking, ranks, and ANY other activity.

Over two years is a LOT of time to correct game code and develop a solution. FDev not did it.

It simply means FD can fix it, FD is albe to fix it, FD is aware they should fix it, but they do not want to fix it. It simply means FD want to allow player cheating, because using exploits is a cheating.

So i am asking, where is 'game spirit' now, when developer is aware of horrible exploit over two years and did nothing?
Is that fair to telling to players 'play with a spirit of the game (but you know, there is a shortcut)'?
It made community divided, it made people argue each other. Not people did it. FDev did it.

Why Fdev is allowing to cheating? Blizzard is fighting with cheaters and not sport behaviours, they even won in a court with bot making company, and FD is ruining a market by creating a community of cheaters.

 

[gooddoc]

And i have hope they will admit someday a PG with 30 CMDR's is also an exploit, an unintended usage of PG what was created by an option to play few friends together, not big crowd.

This example is the point that I am making - one player's view of an in-game 'exploit' is another player's thinking outside of the box.

The judge of what is an exploit is FD's & FD's alone.

It's also then up to them to remove that 'exploit' as soon as possible, but that's the main problem here. FD's blinkered vision atm seems to be '...more new stuff, more new stuff...' rather than spending more time in resolving current problems within the game.

That's the balance that may be a little off atm. With 2.3 launching next month* that'll introduce even more issues, bugs & 'unintended game mechanics', yet 2.1 & 2.2 version's issues haven't all been resolved yet.

Added:- *next week not next month

 

[Kyokushin]

This example is the point that I am making - one player's view of an in-game 'exploit' is another player's thinking outside of the box.

The judge of what is an exploit is FD's & FD's alone.

Not exactly.
If something is working like an exploit then even if they call it as legit, then is still an exploit. Fdev not made a definition of exploit and people who are aware of IT software architecture may call things as exploit independently of FD.
Alway, even to most absurdal software behaviour, as a software developer you can say 'works as intended'. However it does not mean it is properly designed or really works as intended.
In fact group/solo/pg modes are an mistake at design level and when i listened to KS PG mode description i though it is just an option to allow small group of friends to play togeter.

Personally i think, and that is only my opinion, they just forgot to push the limit to this PG mode or just do not excpect it will grow to that number. I think they not expect it will be used for larger groups than a dozen of people.
Now these groups are really big and they just do not know what to do with it, in fact game is working, so they don't care and they leaved it as it is.

 

[Morbad]

If I'm being honest, I would have to say that even without so-called exploits, making money in the game is a little too easy.

I agree.

The progression in 1.0-1.1 felt about right to me.

The fact that they don't, means that they are currently happy with what YOU would describe as an exploit, in THEIR mindset it isn't an exploit, if they thought it was then they would prevent it.
Don't get me wrong, I haven't done any of the things that YOU say is an exploit, but if others have, frankly I don't care. I let others play the game how they want WITHOUT be a self proclaimed judge of what is right or wrong.

I want FD to decide what is an exploit, not me, you or anyone else.

Not having a good solution to a problem is not the same as being happy with how things are. One only need to look at how the game has strayed from Frontier's vision to realize they aren't entirely happy with the current state of the game. The idea that because it's not immediately stomped out that it's not an exploit is an absurd tautology. If bugs or unintended features never existed, there couldn't be any exploits.

In general, if it's something that you couldn't do with the resources your CMDR has access to, if you were your CMDR and actually lived inside the Elite universe, Frontier is going to think it's an exploit.

If you can find a logical hole in it, it's probably an exploit. If you need an absurd justification that Frontier hasn't provided themselves, it's probably an exploit.

And... in what way does this affect your gameplay if others use it? Are you playing the BGS in any way? Because that would be the only legit complaint.

The BGS affects everyone and isn't the only legitimate complaint with issues of broken progression unless you never leave Solo.

LOL so the fix for mode switching is just to shaft anybody regardless of whether they were mode switching to stack missions or not? Truly amazing.

There are countless issues with the game where the only reason things work the way they do is because Frontier doesn't know how to, or doesn't have time to, make them work correctly.

Many of the fixes are placeholders and probably always will be.

Aware of the "exploit" since before the game went live.

Why don't they just say that they have no idea how to fix it so all they intend on doing is nerfing missions into insignificance.

They've already said as much.

That basically tells you that FD does NOT consider the stackable nature of those missions an "exploit".

They've been saying for over a year that they want to change how kills are awarded so it fills missions sequentially. Apparently there is a technical barrier to this.

Being able to multiply kills is the core of this exploit.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

The issue here is that FD has had ample opportunity to address the stacking of massacre missions and their solution in 2.3 was simply to limit the degree of stacking. They clearly could have make the missions non-stackable so that one ship kill would only count for one mission, but they didn't do this at all. All they did was limit the stacking to three missions maximum, which just means players will still mode switch and stack three of the 15-20 million Elite missions requiring around 100 ship kills, but you will still only have to kill 100 ships, not 300.

That basically tells you that FD does NOT consider the stackable nature of those missions an "exploit". They have left that feature in the game intact and only limited the number of missions that you can stack. They have not in any way "removed" or "corrected" the root cause of the issue.

The same reasoning holds for stacking planetary scan missions, or for that matter data delivery missions which all have the same destination. In fact data delivery missions are even more problematic because you can stack 20 of them and get credit for all of them in a single trip.

You might have argued that mode switching to refresh the mission boards instantly was an "exploit" but again, FD has done nothing to limit this either. So neither mission stacking, nor mode-switching, are considered exploits based on FD's design intentions as they are specifically NOT removing either behavior from the game.

As I recall, on the livestream with the mission guys, they said that fixing the stacking wasn't easy. Not sure why.... but for some reason they have problems with what i would consider to be a trivial fix from a code perspective... unless their code is horribly complex, non-modular, and spaghetti code.

Also when they admitted they had different templates for each mission type, including sub-types, i facepalmed hard. Sounded like mission templates have no concept of inheritance, overloading, or polymorphism.... in other words, they make a change that affects multiple missions, they have to manually edit each mission type, rather than the appropriate master template. Crazy.

But hey, i shouldn't really say that without seeing the code, and not at all when i haven't actually released my own online multiplayer game. Armchair devs are worst devs.

The whole thing with the mission board flipping though is another issue that has me scratching my head. FD are masters of PG, so not sure why they are not using PG for the mission generation system (unless they are but in a way which allows the exploit). Take the current time, the current system, faction, state, etc, use those to create a seed. Round the time to the nearest 15-30 minutes, so that would then naturally create a mission board refresh every 15-30 mins, but if someone reset their client or changed modes, or whatever, you would always get the same missions. All you then need to do is track the missions taken and taken/abandoned to make sure when they mission board is populated after a mode switch or reset that those missions don't get duped.

Ok, its a bit of an over simplification of how it would work, but i think it should work in general, and would stop the mode switching "exploit", and therefore no need for these other "fixes" such as limiting stacking.

 

[gooddoc]

Not exactly.
If something is working like an exploit then even if they call it as legit, then is still an exploit. Fdev not made a definition of exploit and people who are aware of IT software architecture may call things as exploit independently of FD.
Alway, even to most absurdal software behaviour, as a software developer you can say 'works as intended'. However it does not mean it is properly designed or really works as intended.
In fact group/solo/pg modes are an mistake at design level and when i listened to KS PG mode description i though it is just an option to allow small group of friends to play togeter.

Personally i think, and that is only my opinion, they just forgot to push the limit to this PG mode or just do not excpect it will grow to that number. I think they not expect it will be used for larger groups than a dozen of people.
Now these groups are really big and they just do not know what to do with it, in fact game is working, so they don't care and they leaved it as it is.

Not going to repeat myself here, just read my last dozen posts on this issue, you'll get where my stance is on exploits

 

[Farmboy]

I agree with much of what Agony_Aunt says. I really would prefer that mode switching didn't change the set of missions available to me - not least, I want the set of missions available to me to be the same before and after a crash/restart (providing the time frame is short enough).

I also think that the credit returns from some stacking missions is distorting what some people think of as acceptable cr/hr returns. While that doesn't affect my gameplay directly, it does so indirectly when they argue en masse and vociferously that the rewards for any new gameplay aren't of the same order of magnitude. This has a long term effect on the game. I haven't done, or even tried to do, any simple A-B trading for months because missions are now an order of magnitude more profitable, on top of being generally more interesting and varied. Given that trading is one of the core original features of Elite, I think this is a bit of a shame. I don't want to do it all the time, for sure, but these days I only bulk haul for 500k plus, or for CGs. And this is a direct consequence of payouts being gradually ramped up for other things.

A simple change so that killing an NPC, or scanning a point could only satisfy one mission (the first listed, or the one with least time to run) rather than all matching missions would make most of this problem go away. If that's not simple to fix, it suggests the missions architecture is driving the game system in an unhelpful way.

 

[BlueRaven]

Hi, I quite just started playing (a little more than a month ago) and initially I tried some grinding myself, too... but it took not much for it to become boring, so I quickly decided to swtich to playing the game the way I think it's meant to be played: explore all the various opportunities it gives you, enjoy them all - because in my opinion all are real fun - and find the place you deserve in the galaxy.
And can you guess what I found?
That in this way money comes in equally, but I am getting a lot more fun.
I completely agree with the ones saying the main problem is the general impatience for the "result" in these days... but isn't getting fun the result we all expect from a game? Or has someone engineered a "virtual credits to real money converting machinery" I am not aware of?
I think coming from a background of hardcore flight simulation helps, in fact... I can assure you that when you measured yourself with getting a deep knowledge of an F-16's avionics you get used to the idea that you must earn your success.