Payouts should be linked to risk

[Jmanis]

Problem with the new payouts is they completely ignored the concept of risk within the combat profession, and just added a raw multiplier to an already unbalanced profession.

Firstly, it was entirely unnecessary to boost solo massacre mission payouts; if anything they should have been reduced except for cz massacres as they cannot be stacked. That, or they should have completely removed cross- faction stacking for massacres.

FD also screwed the pooch by keeping wing and solo assassination mission payouts equal. 4m +1m bounty for a single vanilla pirate Cutter is fine. 4m +1m for 3-5 fully engineered vultures,fdls and maybe an Anaconda is grossly inadequate... even if it's meant to be done as a wing (and if so, why aren't wing massacre targets engineered in that case?)

Which ties to the other problem is that bounties do not consider engineering. A vanilla, deadly FDL at a haz res pays out the same as a drastically more challenging engineered FDL at a threat 5/6 pirate activity site. Bounties on ships at these sites should be at least 4-5 times higher when ships are engineered, in context of other bounty payouts.

For a balance pass based around risk, there's a decided lack of consideration for risk being demonstrated.

Tl;dr combat pays better now, sure, but still completely ignores risk vs reward within the profession, giving the highest payouts to the weakest targets.

 

[fus roh potato]

Trade and mining should still be more profitable, because there wouldn't be a reason to do them otherwise.

That doesn't make any sense. Why would any game designer in their right mind try to pull their player base away from activities they favor? Are we even trying to think?

While its making things "fairer" (not that it really matters), this rebalancing is not improving the game, its just making alternative ways to get mega rich via easy mode.
Combat rewards were fine, mining should have just had another 0 taken off it.

It does matter. When your game has 100 guns but one is 10 times more powerful than the rest, your game only has one gun. Metaphorically, Elite's gun is mining. With reasonable balance in reward against risk, complexity, and achievement, it could have 100 guns.

Whether or not you like the quality of those guns is a bit of a different topic. Elite has massive room to grow in that department, but to see them spend a month bumping bounties by 4x and claim to require another month to address combat zones and AX? Yikes, what are you even allowed to expect anymore? Imagine how hard it's going to be for them to come back and finish getting Elite out of this messy beta state with all the problems, mistakes, and content voids Odyssey is going to present.

 

[aRJay]

Problem with the new payouts is they completely ignored the concept of risk within the combat profession, and just added a raw multiplier to an already unbalanced profession.

Firstly, it was entirely unnecessary to boost solo massacre mission payouts; if anything they should have been reduced except for cz massacres as they cannot be stacked. That, or they should have completely removed cross- faction stacking for massacres.

FD also screwed the pooch by keeping wing and solo assassination mission payouts equal. 4m +1m bounty for a single vanilla pirate Cutter is fine. 4m +1m for 3-5 fully engineered vultures,fdls and maybe an Anaconda is grossly inadequate... even if it's meant to be done as a wing (and if so, why aren't wing massacre targets engineered in that case?)

Which ties to the other problem is that bounties do not consider engineering. A vanilla, deadly FDL at a haz res pays out the same as a drastically more challenging engineered FDL at a threat 5/6 pirate activity site. Bounties on ships at these sites should be at least 4-5 times higher when ships are engineered, in context of other bounty payouts.

For a balance pass based around risk, there's a decided lack of consideration for risk being demonstrated.

Tl;dr combat pays better now, sure, but still completely ignores risk vs reward within the profession, giving the highest payouts to the weakest targets.

The thing is risk isn’t just down to the target it is down to the player as well, one of the ways you reduce the risk factor of something in the real world is training the hazard remains the same but the likelihood reduces the better you are trained.

If FDev did proper risk reward on combat we would all get very confused as nobody would get the same bounty for destroying the same ship as the risk would be different for all of us due to our experience differences alone.

 

[Helvellyn]

As much as I disagree with the general idea that greater risk should get greater payout (unless you get desperate) NPCs could do with a boost and there should be an incentive and corresponding greater risk to trading in low sec and anarchy systems.

 

[Jmanis]

The thing is risk isn’t just down to the target it is down to the player as well, one of the ways you reduce the risk factor of something in the real world is training the hazard remains the same but the likelihood reduces the better you are trained.

If FDev did proper risk reward on combat we would all get very confused as nobody would get the same bounty for destroying the same ship as the risk would be different for all of us due to our experience differences alone.

Actually, that's residual risk. If we want to use those terms, then lets start saying "Untreated risk vs reward" I guess? Ship, player skill are all treatments to that risk. Personally, I just use "risk" because all the cool kids use it. Personally, "Challenge Rating" is what I mean, but I don't expect everyone to know that term.

What Elite lacks is effective bracketing of it's challenge levels. In most game designs which want you to progress to harder challenges for better reward, an arbitrary challenge level (with the exception of the hardest and easiest challenge) has the following phases.

Unachievable/Pyhrric Achievement: The challenge is simply too difficult to be overcome, or is overcome with such great effort the payoff is not worth it.
Achievement: You complete the activity in a way commensurate with the equipment/personal skill needed to overcome the activity. This is the sweet-spot in terms of balance between player ability (both in terms of individual skill and in-game assets) and reward for effort.
Overachievement: You've gone in with an excess of personal skill or in-game assets, which means you walk all over this risk, and it's really not even a challenge, it's just NPC seal clubbing. Even though it's a minimum of effort to achieve this challenge, harder challenges would pay off better for the time and effort spent on this activity.

Elite is really bad for this. It rewards low-challenge gameplay higher than high-challenge gameplay, and that's dumb. It's like the old "pouring boiling water into an ant hill" adage in D&D.

 

[goemon]

there should be an incentive and corresponding greater risk to trading in low sec and anarchy systems.

there already is (since 4 years or so). but as nobody does bulktrading these days, nobody will recognize the profit buff down to system security. when i did trade elite pre horizon, those 10-15% additional profit selling at an anarchy system (with the right power play figures exploiting) was something to brag about