Please rebalance credits

[long]

FDEV,
I remember when Mr. Braben said he didn't want us pigeon holed into one activity... But here we are. I grinded the double overlap painite like all other good commanders, but now what? I use my fleet carrier to haul painite. Why would I do anything else with such an upkeep cost? I recently got back into the game, and have logged about 150-180 hours in the past 2 months. But I'm loosing motivation. I have to make enough to keep the carrier operational, which requires mining, or hours on hours of combat/trade missions.

If this isn't changed, I will find myself on squadrons more and more. Combat doesn't make much sense as a money making operation, so why spend money outfitting a combat ship when I have to mine for a couple hours to get it? Then mine a couple more hours to make sure I have the insurance to cover it? Why not make it so you could do COMBAT to earn a COMBAT ship.

Overall, I really love Elite, but I don't want it to be the mining simulator I left a year ago. What good is odyssey going to be ontop of a pigeon holed economy?

For reference, I have 650 hours played give or take, I'm Master rated in combat, started the game as a bounty hunter, and I still have made over 90% of my credits on painite and void opals alone. Hell I'm fine with mining still being the most lucrative activity, I just am sick of it being the ONLY lucrative activity.

I love you F dev, I really do. Please show us you listen.

Best,
CMDR GukkiLord

//END_TRANSMISSION//

 

[varonica]

I explore, for each 500ly jump I take my ship out and explore nearby systems until I have earned 10m in exploration credits, that covers maintenance, the jump cost and replacement Tritium when I get back to the bubble, so tell me how this is forcing me into one play style?

 

[long]

I explore, for each 500ly jump I take my ship out and explore nearby systems until I have earned 10m in exploration credits, that covers maintenance, the jump cost and replacement Tritium when I get back to the bubble, so tell me how this is forcing me into one play style?

How did you get your fleet carrier? How many hours do you have? I'm not addressing the fleet carrier costs specifically, rather the clearly optimal way to upkeep. I find mining less mundane than exploration, and I would like combat to be a realistic way to make money. 10m requires at least 20 ships from my experience, but more realistically 40+ ships to kill, and then you have the risk of blowing up, which in a large ship doesn't make it worth the reward.

 

[varonica]

Saved it up, like any sensible person would do.

 

[Caramel Clown]

You ever tried actually doing something you like to do in the game, instead of just watching credit counter go up?

 

[Jmanis]

You ever tried actually doing something you like to do in the game, instead of just watching credit counter go up?

Shouldn't be a problem to nerf mining income[1] to be more comparable to other activities then hey? Since all those people are doing it for enjoyment, not the credits.

[1] and it's other broken siblings.

 

[DemiserofD]

I don't think combat should ever be a primary credit earner. It should facilitate acquiring credits by other means.

For example, right now, winning a war doesn't really do anything. One faction takes over, but so what? Nobody cares.

Winning a war should put the attacking faction in a position to make huge profits on something. Otherwise, why bother attacking? Same goes for powerplay.

 

[Clarion-Z]

FDEV,
I remember when Mr. Braben said he didn't want us pigeon holed into one activity... But here we are. I grinded the double overlap painite like all other good commanders, but now what? I use my fleet carrier to haul painite. Why would I do anything else with such an upkeep cost? I recently got back into the game, and have logged about 150-180 hours in the past 2 months. But I'm loosing motivation. I have to make enough to keep the carrier operational, which requires mining, or hours on hours of combat/trade missions.

If this isn't changed, I will find myself on squadrons more and more. Combat doesn't make much sense as a money making operation, so why spend money outfitting a combat ship when I have to mine for a couple hours to get it? Then mine a couple more hours to make sure I have the insurance to cover it? Why not make it so you could do COMBAT to earn a COMBAT ship.

Overall, I really love Elite, but I don't want it to be the mining simulator I left a year ago. What good is odyssey going to be ontop of a pigeon holed economy?

For reference, I have 650 hours played give or take, I'm Master rated in combat, started the game as a bounty hunter, and I still have made over 90% of my credits on painite and void opals alone. Hell I'm fine with mining still being the most lucrative activity, I just am sick of it being the ONLY lucrative activity.

I love you F dev, I really do. Please show us you listen.

Best,
CMDR GukkiLord

//END_TRANSMISSION//

I know, right! That upkeep is so hard to earn without mining. Like, takes at least two 10 minute cargo missions to get 25million credits or 5 missions if you're unlucky and the best ones do not appear.
Or one hour of combat missions where you can get only up to 80-100million credits.
So unfair that we're forced to do mining only.
Imagine even if there was a way to lose anything in the game, like not being able to afford rebuys.

 

[Jmanis]

I don't think combat should ever be a primary credit earner. It should facilitate acquiring credits by other means.

For example, right now, winning a war doesn't really do anything. One faction takes over, but so what? Nobody cares.

Winning a war should put the attacking faction in a position to make huge profits on something. Otherwise, why bother attacking? Same goes for powerplay.

I disagree with some of your sentiment, but do agree generally with the assertion.

Civil Unrest + Boom or Investment (maybe mix in Pirate Attack or Terror Attack to boot), should see me getting paid hand-over-fist more than mining, or stacking massacre missions in some generic none-state.

I'd love to go out and deliberately cause low-security, high-economy scenarios to be able to reap the benefits of better-paying bounty hunting. Traders with disposable wealth should be chomping at the bit for security.

Or one hour of combat missions where you can get only up to 80-100million credits.

Also needs to be nerfed, coz it massively over-incentivises seal-clubbing NPCs.

Go try earning that exclusively through fighting in Threat 7 Pirate Attack sites. That's the problem here; the "best rewards" only incentivise base-game mechanics, not the more difficult and involved ones.

If harder activities earned more credits, then there'd be a sense of progression to the game and not this "oh credits are just a grindwall before you can start playing the game" attitude.

 

[Tifu]

Ditch the carrier and have fun again.

 

[Eliza]

Not the game forced you to have a carrier. You forced yourself to get one.
That's one of the million reasons why I don't intend to be an owner of a carrier.

Maybe that's dissapointing news for you, but Elite: Dangerous doesn't have a goal. Neither to be the richest smart-bottom in the galaxy nor to have the most metal floating around space.
Just enjoy the game. Do what you want to do (and please don't complain about it on the forums afterwards) and most important get rid of that giant pile of space-junk called a fleet-carrier.

I'm grabbing my .

 

[metatheurgist]

How did you get your fleet carrier? How many hours do you have? I'm not addressing the fleet carrier costs specifically, rather the clearly optimal way to upkeep. I find mining less mundane than exploration, and I would like combat to be a realistic way to make money. 10m requires at least 20 ships from my experience, but more realistically 40+ ships to kill, and then you have the risk of blowing up, which in a large ship doesn't make it worth the reward.

I'm making 300M a week as a side effect of maxing arx by bounty hunting right now. I could buy a carrier doing that, not as fast as mining but it's a dead cert. Now if I tried to optimise that instead of an extra on top of maxing arx I could probably do better.

I don't think combat should ever be a primary credit earner. It should facilitate acquiring credits by other means.

For example, right now, winning a war doesn't really do anything. One faction takes over, but so what? Nobody cares.

Winning a war should put the attacking faction in a position to make huge profits on something. Otherwise, why bother attacking? Same goes for powerplay.

Mercenaries and PMCs don't do what they do for craps and giggles.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I have to make enough to keep the carrier operational, which requires mining, or hours on hours of combat/trade missions.

Ah. The problem here appears to be that you don't know how to make large amounts of money (at least, "£25M/week" large, which is all you need to keep a fully-equipped carrier running) from non-mining activities, not that you can't do that.

Pretty much every non-mining activity in the game, including exploration, A-B trading, combat, trade missions, combat missions and passenger missions can make 25M credits in a single hour. Most of them can make twice that, a few of them can make 4x that.

I play really casually - picking up some trade goods here, fighting the pirates who come after me, running missions if I'm going that way anyway ... and I get 25M/week without trying - more if I actually do things like "remember to look for good missions at every stop". I can make the upkeep for a £10M/week carrier (i.e. don't have outfitting and shipyard for other people) in a single 5-minute mission.

The big "money making" guides all focus on mining because it's ... at the moment maybe twice as fast as the next best thing? Maybe four times as fast as most professions done well?
For people trying to raise the money for a Fleet Carrier from scratch in a day, then that difference matters. For absolutely anything else - buying a new ship, getting a bit of rebuy cushion, paying Carrier upkeep - it's generally better to spend time doing something you actually find fun for twice as long.

Just do a bit of research into high-end trading, combat, or mission money-making. Plenty of posts, videos, etc. about it out there.

Free one to get you started: if you're Allied with all the factions in an Extraction economy you'll get missions to haul 180t of Palladium for approximately 10 million credits each. These missions take about ten minutes to run. So that's sixty million an hour, which pays your carrier upkeep for over two weeks - and then there's any money you happen to earn doing other stuff during those two weeks.

 

[Maymo]

Several years back when I was trying to enjoy the end game content with all my Cutters and ‘Vette’s I signed up to do Powerplay for Li Yong Rui.

At rank 5 you can enjoy 200% profit on all exploration data handed in. So I’d do my Powerplay thing once every two weeks (to maintain rank 5) and spend the rest of my time exploring. 200% on exploration data these days must be massive...

The point I’m trying to make is don’t work hard, work smart. Then you can spend most of your time doing the things you enjoy.

If you enjoy combat you can go to work blowing ships up for one of the more murdery powers and get paid a minimum of 50mil per week for doing it.

Like others have pointed out though, 25mil is pretty easy to make, especially if you already have the assets for a carrier.

 

[Clarion-Z]

Also needs to be nerfed, coz it massively over-incentivises seal-clubbing NPCs.

Go try earning that exclusively through fighting in Threat 7 Pirate Attack sites. That's the problem here; the "best rewards" only incentivise base-game mechanics, not the more difficult and involved ones.

If harder activities earned more credits, then there'd be a sense of progression to the game and not this "oh credits are just a grindwall before you can start playing the game" attitude.

Sorry, my bad. Forgot that sarcasm doesn't really go through in text form.
I totally agree with with most activities paying insane amounts already. I used to be happy when I made up to 10million in an evening with smuggling. That was before Fdev decided to listen loudest part of the community (not the largest) and break the balance completely

 

[Jmanis]

Ah. The problem here appears to be that you don't know how to make large amounts of money (at least, "£25M/week" large, which is all you need to keep a fully-equipped carrier running) from non-mining activities, not that you can't do that.

Pretty much every non-mining activity in the game, including exploration, A-B trading, combat, trade missions, combat missions and passenger missions can make 25M credits in a single hour. Most of them can make twice that, a few of them can make 4x that.

I play really casually - picking up some trade goods here, fighting the pirates who come after me, running missions if I'm going that way anyway ... and I get 25M/week without trying - more if I actually do things like "remember to look for good missions at every stop". I can make the upkeep for a £10M/week carrier (i.e. don't have outfitting and shipyard for other people) in a single 5-minute mission.

The big "money making" guides all focus on mining because it's ... at the moment maybe twice as fast as the next best thing? Maybe four times as fast as most professions done well?
For people trying to raise the money for a Fleet Carrier from scratch in a day, then that difference matters. For absolutely anything else - buying a new ship, getting a bit of rebuy cushion, paying Carrier upkeep - it's generally better to spend time doing something you actually find fun for twice as long.

Just do a bit of research into high-end trading, combat, or mission money-making. Plenty of posts, videos, etc. about it out there.

Free one to get you started: if you're Allied with all the factions in an Extraction economy you'll get missions to haul 180t of Palladium for approximately 10 million credits each. These missions take about ten minutes to run. So that's sixty million an hour, which pays your carrier upkeep for over two weeks - and then there's any money you happen to earn doing other stuff during those two weeks.

100% this.

For me, the entire problem isn't earning credits, or even that all activities have a outlier like mining which spins a bunch of money.

It's that the big money spinners are all gamey piles of trash incentivising base, tutorial-level game activities.

- mining is arguably the easiest of them all, even making no sense within its own reward structure. Methane Clathrates are harder to find, higher demand, less supplied by players, yet they pay orders of magnitude less than diamonds. Either high end minerals need to be substantially harder to find, have way more price instability, or be worth less than water.

- massacre mission stacking; mission targets are basic, novice- level targets, paying out 150m for 30 kills when stacked properly (that's about 5m per kill of a novice viper, for example). Contrast against killing a fully engineered elite rank vulture in a threat 7 pirate attack which nabs you maybe 50k?

- other mission hotspot stacking (eg sothis/ceos or Robigo passenger runs); exploit static redundant cases in mission board rng, rather than following patterns in strong market activity.

- road to riches; make money following a well beaten path of not discovering anything new.

Meanwhile there's more complex, technical activities which require way more effort, and whose only outcome is credits. For example:

• hijacking loot from megaships (oh, and this is broken remember?)
• Smuggling (oh, this is broken too)
• tissue sampling alien lifeforms (that big lynchpin in Odyssey? I spent a day to trek my Cutter out over 2000Ly and fill it with tissue samples, to the tune of... less than 1m credits... oh and it's also broken)
• Remember when FD introduced rare courier spawns with "high value" cargo on board? Good to see there's so many guides on how to get rich from them, since the only benefit from them is selling the goods for credits >.>

... just to name a few.

Of course, those activities don't necessarily need credit only outcomes... that's the only thing they have going for them right now. And while FD very well could have a non monetary outcome, say like how engineering functions, and we'd quickly get back to where we are now; the thread over in GD where people are demanding to buy materials with credits, because there's no sense of balance to the economy or credits right now.

I could ignore broken credit streams when the most expensive thing was a 200m hull, which I'd gradually build up in 50-100m increments after that. If someone wanted to use a broken/unbalanced mechanic to get 50 billion credits, I didn't really care. But now we've got FCs, which are at a daft 5b thanks to mining, when they're really closer to about 1b in actual value, because they're nothing more than a convenience or "nice to have".

And because of that last bit, I'm happy to just sit here and go "yeah, no FC, but whatever"... but how long is that going to last? People are already asking for activities for FCs... pretty inevitable that FD cave to that crowd and suddenly we get stuff which requires an FC (meanwhile smuggling and tissue sampling will probably still be both broken and worthless).

If FD want to build on FCs, they need to fix credits.

 

[Jmanis]

Sorry, my bad. Forgot that sarcasm doesn't really go through in text form.
I totally agree with with most activities paying insane amounts already. I used to be happy when I made up to 10million in an evening with smuggling. That was before Fdev decided to listen loudest part of the community (not the largest) and break the balance completely

Oh all good, I got the sarcasm, I just tried to ride that wave, but clearly fell off instead XD We're on the same page

 

[Ian Doncaster]

It's that the big money spinners are all gamey piles of trash incentivising base, tutorial-level game activities.

I wonder how much of that is inevitable.

An activity which is intrinsically easy won't pay a lot done casually (and mining certainly doesn't!) but probably has lots of room for optimisation.
An activity which is intrinsically difficult might pay more done "as casually as you can and still be successful" but probably doesn't have much room for optimisation above that.

Obviously there's still room for extra rewards (not necessarily credit ones, of course) on the harder activities.

 

[GroG79]

Ok, just to add balance..
DO NOT REBALACE CREDITS
end of message

 

[Mizbehave]

I'd like to see an adjustment that's something like this:

Solid lines are how things feel currently, dotted lines are how I'd like them to feel.