Newcomer / Intro My problems as a beginner with ED.

[Iskariot]

I remember times when I was earning 100k a week (!) You people have no idea how lucky you are, now.

Except, and I think you might agree, I don't think they are lucky at all.
The time I struggled in my tiny Sindewinder and Viper Mk3 was the most fun I had.
I was lucky enough to realize this early on and purposely stayed in those ships for a very long time, upgrading them to the max.

Credits need to get more meaning.
We need to have more stuff to spend it on, more money sinks. There need to be more costs in the game.

For example:
I don't get why we still don't have to pay a docking fee, like in the old games. It doesn't have to be a fortune, but docking should cost something.
Also fuel is too cheap at the moment. It used to be horridly expensive for big ships in the old days, but now one doesn't notice the expense at all anymore. They might just as well make it free.
I also think that buying exploration info in the starmap could cost a little bit more than it does now.
I also would like to be able to buy extra, more useful, trade information.
This would serve two purposes: a new, much needed, money sink, and it would enable better informed trading without the use of external websites.

 

[Deleted member 115407]

I would make the suggest that, as soon as you have the finances to do this, put together a small fleet with each ship geared for different purposes. Then, when an activity starts to get boring, hop into another ship and do something different. When Trading starts to get boring I go off exploring. When that no longer attracts me I head back in, switch to another vessel, and make use of that for a while. You can always change the loadouts of a ship, but I find building task dedicated vessels helps make switching much easier.

Yeah, you can't go wrong with a combat/multipurpose Cobra III and a T-6 for mining and hauling. Those two ships will do everything you need them to do.

 

[Chris Simon]

Except, and I think you might agree, I don't think they are lucky at all.
The time I struggled in my tiny Sindewinder and Viper Mk3 where the most fun I had.
I was lucky enough to realize this early on and purposely stayed in those ships for a very long time, upgrading them to the max.

Credits need to get more meaning.
We need to have more stuff to spend it on, more money sinks. There need to be more costs in the game.

For example:
I don't get why we still don't have to pay a docking fee, like in the old games. It doesn't have to be a fortune, but docking should cost something.
Also fuel is too cheap at the moment. It used to be horridly expensive for big ships in the old days, but now one doesn't notice the expense at all anymore. They might just as well make it free.
I also think that buying exploration info in the starmap could cost a little bit more than it does now.
I also would like to be able to buy extra, more useful, trade information.
This would serve two purposes: a new, much needed, money sink, and it would enable better informed trading without the use of external websites.

Yes, I agree, of course.

 

[MickyG1982]

I really want to like ED, and I have spent good amount of time on it. But I don't have hours and hours and hours to spend doing nothing. As I see it, there is very little value whatsoever to long travel.

Then don't do it, check the missions before you take them as the game requests you do.

​

Once you go from once system to another is the same thing again and again and again... extremely boring (There should be a option to automate this, or skip the trip).

Um no, no I win button & if you don't want to do a task that involves shuffling from A - B do something that doesn't involve doing that, also the autopilot is never coming & for the most part isn't wanted or required.

​

Also, you should be able to switch ships on the fly at a station (Why way for a ship to transfer from where it was previously stored... Just making players waste time for no reason).

This was voted on by the community & the vote was for the wait you are out of luck. We do want to see it changed from a pull to a push mechanic though.

​

There is way too much repetition...

Given that the game has a large portion of it devoted to trading & mission running I'm not sure how you can't expect at least some repetition to be in the game.

​

As a beginner you are extremely screwed, no way to make any money to do fun stuff. Every decent money making tactic has been nerfed... I have no idea why would they nerf this ways of making money, it is just a way to make the game less fun and have players just spend time doing tedious boring missions. Instead of saying, well if money was easy everybody would have an Anaconda (This is a short-sighted vision). There should be a ton more ships that each have their unique strengths.

You can literally get from the sidey to something slightly more capable (eagle, hauler or adder) in 1 to 2 jumps, To a medium ship in an hour or two, the larger ships take time, you aren't meant to have them handed to you on a silver platter. While I agree that there should be more ships, so do FD, in fact they have added quite a few since I started playing & there are more to come

​

The game should be very generous with money

No it shouldn't.

​

doing a 20 min mission for like 100K is just outright frustrating. It is totally the opposite, donation missions (only ok, if you have nice ship and can get money easy), paying for your ship when it gets destroyed, and very low paying missions.

The pay gets better, but you have to increase the rep with your chosen faction(s) first, again, you aren't going to have everything handed to you on a silver platter & nor should you.

​

Just some of my thoughts as a beginner with the game and as somebody that doesn't have hundreds of hours to play a game...

Fortunately, just like every other game in the Elite Series is designed to take weeks to get to the biggest ships, it's how we like it

You are also missing quite a bit of the point of ED, it gives you all the tools you need to have fun, sometimes you have to use your imagination to make that fun. Got bored of trading? Fighting? Exploring? Mining? Piracy? (& yes that is a valid career option). Take your ship down to a decent planet that you have seen & go canyon running, don't want to waste your good ship buy el cheapo eagle & take it down the canyon. Play about in the SRV, once you get used to controlling it you can have a lot of fun & set out a race course on a planet. Feeling bad, deliver force a lockdown or shutdown of a station by simply being a pirate or smuggling thargoid stuff, it's amazing how much salt you can mine from traders such as me when you nerf their favorite feeding grounds.

Experiment with ship setups - just A rating every module does not make you into a combat god, different play styles will require a different setup i.e. putting a cargo ship into a combat situation probably isn't going to work, just like trying to make a combat vessel into a trader (at least early in game) No one ship will be able to do everything well. Contrary to popular belief you do not need to engineer anything, while it is still something you should try (some fun can be had if you get a decent roll) it's only really necessary if you are planning on competitive PvP. Pirating Cargo ships doesn't need engineering.

Know what you are doing? Help out other newbies, wing up/multicrew up & take them bounty hunting (or again down the same canyon) or teach them the career path that you are now skilled in. Of course, if you are struggling you can also ask for help from the community at large & in game, there are more people in game that are going to help you out rather than harm you.

Elite Dangerous isn't about how many credits you make per hour, at least not entirely so rather than get bogged down by thinking about it, think what you can do to have fun, if you can't think of anything other than Money = Fun, you probably aren't playing the right game.

 

[Troy_McClure]

Yeah, it's probably not the right game for me. Just don't have much time to put into it. Too much stuff going on, it's a shame because it is/could be a really cool game. To me it seems like it should be way more fun. Like, why would anyone even need to grind at all? You need 500K to get a nice FSD, then do a harder mission with *any ship or easily attainable ship*. But the only option you have is to either, do same 2/3k missions for weeks or grind at some higher paying mission. Same goes for a better ship, need 100mil, grind it somehow and even when you get it you need to have like 5x ship cost to upgrade it. [noob][knocked out]

Stuff like travel, it would be a great usability feature for players to fast travel to a place (If they get interdicted, maybe they get pulled out of fast travel). If you know you are just going to a place far away, why make players go through the motions of doing the same thing over, and over again (having an option is the key here, if people just want to go from galaxy to galaxy, let them do it, that would be for users that want to experience that. If this were a racing game, it'd be like hey, drive for 2hrs to get to the race and then get stuck there or spend another 2hrs driving to another place.

Stuff like fights, got a Viper MKIII with just about the best I could buy. I am probably not very good** (trying really hard), but it took like two hits from some other ship to destroy me. First hit, shields off. Second hit, dead. How is this fair to new players? They just have to avoid "conflict zones" and any other fights because they can't do them.

Using stored ships, I just need to change to my other ship. Well, you gotta wait 1hr for it to get there! (too bad if you don't have an hour to spare) Why would anyone want to wait to use their other ship? It's a simple usability thing that would make the game more fun.

Well, just some thoughts as a newbie.

Two kinds of players here: (I) those who basically live in the game - who don't see the grind because they are immersed in a new reality & any logical perspective is but a distant, fading memory. These people will post to chastise anyone who dares to criticise any part of their alternate life (II) the rest of us with very limited time to play.

Consensus between the two groups is a very small Venn diagram intersection & as such, polarising arguments are the bread & butter of these forums as two ontological tectonic plates collide. Ergo, don't worry about some of the strange, insular fantasists here.

My advice is to stick with it, the game gets easier & ultimately becomes simplistic; acceptance of the more frustrating parts is the key to making the game a satisfying experience because Frontier are not going to radically change the basic mechanics after three years - as someone with a life outside of the Elite world, there is no real rush & one can partake in all of the great features at your leisure.

...unless you want to PvP, that is - in which case, just STOP NOW!! & leave this place forever!

There is a place for both types of players , of course...& for one group, that place is a high-security psychiatric hospital!

 

[Para Handy]

Two kinds of players here: (I) those who basically live in the game - who don't see the grind because they are immersed in a new reality & any logical perspective is but a distant, fading memory. These people will post to chastise anyone who dares to criticise any part of their alternate life (II) the rest of us with very limited time to play.

................

There is a place for both types of players , of course...& for one group, that place is a high-security psychiatric hospital!

It is a shame that you can only see anyone with a differing view to you as being worthy of such vile insults.

This is the newcomer's forum and as such I like to think people keep it quite friendly and light-hearted therefore I shall not tell you exactly what your words made me want to write.

There are a wide spectrum of attitudes to this game and anyone who looks for a "grind" can find one, conversely there are those who just potter about, enjoying the experience that the game provides. There are people who think that their approach is the only correct one and that others are sadly misguided, and those people can be found at all points across the spectrum of engagement and modes of play.

Happily Elite, for all it's faults, has a breadth of activities to (in the main) appeal to many different play-styles.

 

[SpaceGoblin]

Two kinds of players here: (I) those who basically live in the game - who don't see the grind because they are immersed in a new reality & any logical perspective is but a distant, fading memory...*imma just snip the sniping* (II) the rest of us with very limited time to play.

I'll just chime in to echo what CMDR Para Handy had to say. There's really no need for such bile.

I work for a living, I have other irl commitments, I'd really love to have vast swathes of time to commit to playing Elite. But I don't. I get to throw in a few hours here and there, maybe a little more at the weekend.

And I don't see a grind here.

Because I choose not to.

Oh, I could chase the Anacondas and the Cutters and the Corvettes, or dash to become a billionaire, or triple Elite or what have you.

But whats the need? Those things will come in time. Sure, more time for me than those that have 2,3 or 5x the available playtime I have. That doesn't have to be anyones fault. Its just the way it is.

The journey to those things can be fun, if you let it.

 

[Marcinguy]

I run into this problem all the time and have taken many breaks from the game over the years. The game gets a little stale for me after a while. The key is to have another game or two you can get into. I'm actually taking a break for about three weeks now and have played RE7 and now I'm into Assassin's Creed: Origins. Won't take me long to reach the end of AC there, and I'm already feeling the itch to jump into my Python to do a little trading, maybe some bounty hunting. That's the beauty of Elite, it's always there so you can jump right back in. No matter how many times i've decided to "quit", I've always eventually come back around to Elite.

Anyway, a good starting tip is to accrue some exploration data and then sell it to factions you prefer, most likely in the system you like to call home. You will become an ally immediately with the station's faction and then you can start making pretty good coin, especially cruise missions.

 

[trigun539]

After sticking with it for a bit longer, I was able to make enough money to get some other nicer ships and starting to have some fun with the game. I'm still baffled with the speed for traveling though, it takes soooooo long to navigate within a system. It makes like no sense, the closer you are the longer it takes to travel... 15 missions around surrounding systems takes like 1hr or more to do [knocked out]

 

[BirdWisdom]

I really want to like ED, and I have spent good amount of time on it. But I don't have hours and hours and hours to spend doing nothing. As I see it, there is very little value whatsoever to long travel. Once you go from once system to another is the same thing again and again and again... extremely boring (There should be a option to automate this, or skip the trip). Also, you should be able to switch ships on the fly at a station (Why way for a ship to transfer from where it was previously stored... Just making players waste time for no reason).

There is way too much repetition...

As a beginner you are extremely screwed, no way to make any money to do fun stuff. Every decent money making tactic has been nerfed... I have no idea why would they nerf this ways of making money, it is just a way to make the game less fun and have players just spend time doing tedious boring missions. Instead of saying, well if money was easy everybody would have an Anaconda (This is a short-sighted vision). There should be a ton more ships that each have their unique strengths.

The game should be very generous with money, doing a 20 min mission for like 100K is just outright frustrating. It is totally the opposite, donation missions (only ok, if you have nice ship and can get money easy), paying for your ship when it gets destroyed, and very low paying missions.

Just some of my thoughts as a beginner with the game and as somebody that doesn't have hundreds of hours to play a game...

Depends that you are after ---> cr money or rep ?

 

[aRJay]

After sticking with it for a bit longer, I was able to make enough money to get some other nicer ships and starting to have some fun with the game. I'm still baffled with the speed for traveling though, it takes soooooo long to navigate within a system. It makes like no sense, the closer you are the longer it takes to travel... 15 missions around surrounding systems takes like 1hr or more to do [knocked out]

Think of the old Einstein description of space(time) being like a sheet of thin rubber with any thing with mass such as stars or planets being represented by ball bearings dropped on the sheet each one makes a depression in the sheet, now our drives have to work less hard where the sheet is flat the nearer we get to a body with mass the steamer the slope of the depression so the harder the drives have to work.

 

[Para Handy]

After sticking with it for a bit longer, I was able to make enough money to get some other nicer ships and starting to have some fun with the game. I'm still baffled with the speed for traveling though, it takes soooooo long to navigate within a system. It makes like no sense, the closer you are the longer it takes to travel... 15 missions around surrounding systems takes like 1hr or more to do [knocked out]

Good that you have given it a bit more of a chance.

aRJay has explained why the speed varies, there is a trick to getting a good speed that doesn't produce issues with overshooting and that it to use 75% throttle at about the 0:07s time to go (ttg) mark, that way your speed is automatically controlled to keep the ttg at 0:06s. (You can set a binding, key or button, for 75% throttle.)

The other way to reduce the amount of time travelling in supercruise is to avoid going to locations very far from the arrival point - for example I very rarely take a mission which involves more than a couple of thousand Ls travel.

 

[Windscreen Smudge]

The game is already incredibly generous with money, to the point that it breaks the game.

100k in 20 minutes was cheater-tier income when I started playing.

Enjoy the ship you're in. Learn to fly it. Learn how to play the game. If I see you in a 'Vette with Mostly Harmless combat rank next week I'm going to dust you just on General Principles, and you'll be completely helpless to stop it, because you didn't take the time to learn before you tried to earn.

Some of the most fun ships to fly in the game can now be bought and A-fitted in less than 30 minutes. By skipping over those ships, you're just skipping the game.

 

[HurstLlama]

...

Some of the most fun ships to fly in the game can now be bought and A-fitted in less than 30 minutes. ...

Crikey, I must be doing something wrong or playing a different game. The best, well biggest, ship I have bought is a T7, which properly outfitted cost me the grand total of 30m CR. I suppose I could stretch myself and pick up one of Para Handy's beloved Pythons but I don't really feel the need.

Actually, when I come to think about it, I probably am playing a different game to many, if not most. I don't do combat, am not striving for more and bigger and am quite happy pottering about the place.

 

[NW3]

As a beginner you are extremely screwed, no way to make any money to do fun stuff. ​

The thing is, earning money, IS a large part of the "fun". If you don't enjoy that ED is probably not a good fit for you. Yes, you need money for the big ships, but you don't need the big ships to have fun. I rarely fly any big ships, because my AspX is more fun to fly.

Crikey, I must be doing something wrong or playing a different game. The best, well biggest, ship I have bought is a T7, which properly outfitted cost me the grand total of 30m CR. I suppose I could stretch myself and pick up one of Para Handy's beloved Pythons but I don't really feel the need.

Actually, when I come to think about it, I probably am playing a different game to many, if not most. I don't do combat, am not striving for more and bigger and am quite happy pottering about the place.

When I started playing, a couple of years ago, it took me many months to buy a Type-7. I've earned much of my credits doing exploration. I went on the Distant Stars Expedition, which was very lucrative for me. I haven't done any exploits, but I have (repeatedly) done the high-paying missions: Ancient Ruins and Collect Alien Artifacts. These are not exploits, they are intentional. Given the recent Thargoid attacks, I won't recommend the Alien Artifacts mission at this time.

Since you don't care for combat (neither do I) and are flying a T-7, you might want to try the Road to Riches: http://edtools.ddns.net/expl.php?a=v&f=deciat&t=maia&r=30

The Python is a good ship, but I haven't flown mine in over a year. I'd sell it, but it's full of highly-engineered modules. Personally, I didn't care much for the T-7, but I flew one to Colonia and back. It's a good cargo transporter and a good mining ship.

Try to fly all the ships which appeal to you, for long enough to get to know them. They are all unique. Chances are, you'll find a favorite.

 

[zarrazee]

As a beginner you are extremely screwed, no way to make any money to do fun stuff.

For me, struggling to make money at the start of the game is the fun stuff. Every 100K CR means something. By the time I hit Elite in a couple of ranks, and am making millions of credits per hour, boredom sets in; I wipe and start over. I'm on my 3rd play-through now.

 

[trigun539]

For me, struggling to make money at the start of the game is the fun stuff. Every 100K CR means something. By the time I hit Elite in a couple of ranks, and am making millions of credits per hour, boredom sets in; I wipe and start over. I'm on my 3rd play-through now.

Props to you, I just find that it is extremely time consuming and most of the time not actually fun. I like the concept for the game but it is unbearable sometimes, I play on VR and was getting really annoyed until I found http://www.hellov.io/ which lets you watch netflix inside VR when playing ED (Only game that I know, where people put youtube/netflix while playing the game! Pretty sure this is a bad thing for a game).

As of now, the only way to make decent money is by bounty hunting (by kind of hitting the other ship while security is also hitting them, otherwise you would just die instantly) / carrier - data moving missions, anybody that says that you don't need money to have fun, just try to do an assassination mission/skimmer mission/anything other than just going places with a sidewinder and see how it goes.

Bounty hunting is pretty decent, but other than that any other missions are either really hard or just absolutely boring. Right now, just hoping to get enough money to where I can take on more exciting missions and use better ships.

 

[Ashnak]

...
As of now, the only way to make decent money is by bounty hunting (by kind of hitting the other ship while security is also hitting them, otherwise you would just die instantly) / carrier - data moving missions, ....

Bounty hunting: what ship are you using (and what kind of money do you have)? Of course you'll have to choose your battles, but dying instantly, at least in PvE, usually isn't an issue.

Data carrier: yep, those are the lucrative, easy and boring missions. But they're good for gaining rep, since you can stack them indefinitely.

Other stuff:
If you can do enough data carrier missions to rep up at at least one station (better a few stations within close distance to each other), you can also get very lucrative short haul passenger transport missions, passenger sightseeing missions or planetary scan missions. For the latter, you might be required to do (slightly to not so slightly) illegal stuff, so it is somewhat advantageous to choose targets that aren't within the systems you cultivated your rep.

If you want to go independent, both exploration (scanning high value planets) and rare trading also have a high earning potential, although you'll need to spend a couple of million on a suitably outfitted ship.

 

[HurstLlama]

...

If you want to go independent, both exploration (scanning high value planets) and rare trading also have a high earning potential, although you'll need to spend a couple of million on a suitably outfitted ship.

Full respect, but I wouldn't recommend rare trading as a way of making good money. It was once a very good earner indeed but over time it seems to have fallen down the rankings of profitable activities. I tried the big rares' circuit, the one with about 30 stops, twice last summer. Once in a Cobra, the limited cargo capacity of which meant I had to choose which commodities to buy, and once in a T6, where I was able to buy every rare on offer. Yes, I made a few million on each occasion but for the time invested I would have made more with normal trading and much more running medicines into an outbreak system or food into a system suffering famine.

However, I suspect that for Cmdr Trigun539, trading of any sort would be too slow and, perhaps, require too much thought. Independent trading does require research, reconnaissance, planning and effort to identify the profitable routes and more work to make the actual dosh, as well as knowing when to give up on a route (usually because it has been discovered on EDDB) and start again elsewhere. It is not an activity to everyone's taste. For some us though, sad muppets that we may be, trading/trucking is what the game is about and has been since its first incarnation back in 1984. Each to their own.

 

[Varo210]

Props to you, I just find that it is extremely time consuming and most of the time not actually fun. I like the concept for the game but it is unbearable sometimes, I play on VR and was getting really annoyed until I found http://www.hellov.io/ which lets you watch netflix inside VR when playing ED (Only game that I know, where people put youtube/netflix while playing the game! Pretty sure this is a bad thing for a game).

As of now, the only way to make decent money is by bounty hunting (by kind of hitting the other ship while security is also hitting them, otherwise you would just die instantly) / carrier - data moving missions, anybody that says that you don't need money to have fun, just try to do an assassination mission/skimmer mission/anything other than just going places with a sidewinder and see how it goes.

Bounty hunting is pretty decent, but other than that any other missions are either really hard or just absolutely boring. Right now, just hoping to get enough money to where I can take on more exciting missions and use better ships.

Uhm.......... I do skimmer missions all the time. It doesn't matter what ship I use, as I'm doing the mission part in my SRV. I use the ship to help find POI's, but then it's into the Rover and off I go. The trick is, only shoot at "Wanted" skimmers, and don't go to the base to find them. I can make 7+ million for killing 12 skimmers, so its a good money maker.