Seems like frontier actually doesn't want everyone to have a carrier.. for technical reasons?

[Agony_Aunt]

I think this theory needs to be tested and it behooves us all to purchase a fleet carrier as soon as they go live.

Unless this is a double bluff, and FD actually want us all to have FCs so we are forced to keep playing every day to keep up with costs!

 

[tolm]

There might be one way for Frontier to ease the server load that comes with introducing fleet carriers to the game. They simply inform players of their intention to add smaller FC variants to the game with much reduced abilities - they can only jump once a week, different variants come with less pads, squeaky seating, no customisable services (different variants come with pre-defined services). That way, most players hold off on buying the largest, most powerful variant for something that is more in keeping with how they play the game, it has less load on the servers and still defines that financially elite set of cmdrs who have the time and credits to be able to run the Drake-class.

if they add smaller ones (and I hope they do) they should be able to jump more frequently, only support docking a certain number of the players own ships and NOT be permanent, cross mode / cross-instance assets ... they should be like a regular ship that can carry other ships and nothing more. Then players can choose between having a “car transporter” vs the current “car company” option.

 

[Alec Turner]

From everything that's happened so far.. the only possible reason for fleet carriers being the way they are is that due to technical issues, frontier actually don't want there to be too many fleet carriers around.

StuartGT (great spot, thanks) linked this very insightful clip over on reddit:

Steven B implies that they know the system will break if.. fleet carrier numbers push the system in some load condition.. but also that they aren't planning to (or cant?) fix the issues, because they're balancing it so it won't happen? Why would it not be realistic for everyone to have one? We're all going in with the exact opposite assumption.. that everyone will get one because carriers are for us. Or "the extreme edge cases" that they aren't going to handle actually are not edge cases...

The fact that on the exegious beta stream the system loaded up with carriers crashed provided the final evidence. Hmmm.. yeah. Sounds like world of pain for the next few months while players wrestle with frontier on gameplay vs what technical work is required to make it happen.

They should have just said something, i personally wouldn't have asked for carriers if they just admitted they're impossible to build for individuals.

Unfortunately my problem with their answer to my question was pretty much what I wrote elsewhere on the beta not being realistic.

Thing is - it won't be realistic. Firstly the number of people who participate in beta is a tiny percentage of the player base. Secondly, the proportion of players in beta with a fleet carrier is likely to be extremely high (i.e. those who can afford a FC may well want to try the beta to see what they're like (and people will liquidate their assets in beta to get one where they wouldn't in real game), whereas many potential beta players (like myself) who can't afford one probably won't bother with it). So you're going to end up with this really scewed distribution of FC owners in the beta. God help us if Frontier use that for any actual game balancing.

It does sound as if the pricing isn't explicitly focused on keeping numbers within performance limits tho, comments on the Lave Radio Q&A kinda back that up too. I think they're just trying to aim for a small minority of players being able to afford one because that's the realism they're aiming for. They also said something about only wanting experienced players to have a fleet carrier 'cos you need to know what you're doing if you're not going to end up stuck or bankrupt or both.

 

[Crank Larson]

From everything that's happened so far.. the only possible reason for fleet carriers being the way they are is that due to technical issues, frontier actually don't want there to be too many fleet carriers around.

I disagree, at least inasmuch as technical issues are the cause. While there may be some minor technical issues, they won't be insurmountable as an FC is basically just a player managed space station. I think the reasons are entirely none technical.

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

Another thing that's likely a performance limitation - the jump time. Propagating station changes across servers takes time (the few times they have changed a station outside the thursday tick or another shutdown, it's taken quite a while to show up for everyone) so there's probably a hard practical limit on how low it can go. (At the moment it looks like an hour's notice might not be enough)

So the spool times are hiding an operational reason? Thanks for the clue.

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

It does sound as if the pricing isn't explicitly focused on keeping numbers within performance limits tho, comments on the Lave Radio Q&A kinda back that up too. I think they're just trying to aim for a small minority of players being able to afford one because that's the realism they're aiming for. They also said something about only wanting experienced players to have a fleet carrier 'cos you need to know what you're doing if you're not going to end up stuck or bankrupt or both.

Just about to listen to the lave radio episode myself.. was wondering how that turned out with the full frontier party there. Looking forward to any evidence to the contrary... or either way.

Operating a carrier doesn't sound that hard. Its more project management skills than game savvy.

EDIT: Thinking about your point, that can't be valid. The numbers that frontier released at imply willful or negligent ignorance of what they have setup in their own game in terms of earning credits. There is no correlation between extreme upkeep cost set in the beta and any notion of "experienced players" actually playing, sorry. Hence the average feedback.

 

[NeilF]

Another thing that's likely a performance limitation - the jump time. Propagating station changes across servers takes time (the few times they have changed a station outside the thursday tick or another shutdown, it's taken quite a while to show up for everyone) so there's probably a hard practical limit on how low it can go. (At the moment it looks like an hour's notice might not be enough)

If they do have to have an hour spool up for some technical reason then, allow an exploration module/feature to be bought to upgrade your FC at huge expense to your storage space etc. This allows you to in effect plot a route as we do now with existing ships over say ten 250LY range jumps. So when you then (finally jump) you jump upto 2500LY (straight to the final location), which is a far more sensible amount of distance for an Exploration FC.

 

[Fishy]

Remember the "Not everybody needs an Anaconda, it's fine for it to be too expensive for some" days? FCs for all is a matter of when, not if.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Remember the "Not everybody needs an Anaconda, it's fine for it to be too expensive for some" days? FCs for all is a matter of when, not if.

Gigantism and overboarding grind leads to inflation as we can observe in practice with ED.

 

[Alec Turner]

EDIT: Thinking about your point, that can't be valid. The numbers that frontier released at imply willful or negligent ignorance of what they have setup in their own game in terms of earning credits. There is no correlation between extreme upkeep cost set in the beta and any notion of "experienced players" actually playing, sorry. Hence the average feedback.

Oh I agree entirely. I don't want to be that guy, whinging about "they're too expensive" 'cos I don't play Elite in a "normal" way (I spend months driving around planets and other months throwing ship after ship into the back of a station in pursuit of an improved Buckyball time so my earnings are relatively low for an "experienced" player). But ... I did spend the last week actually trying to make money (a rare thing for me). I had just under a billion to start with. I spent a few days doing LTD deep core mining and then, on community advice, switched to LTD laser mining at the Borann triple hotspot. Now, despite numerous claims elsewhere about how easy it is to "knock out another billion", from my week of fairly earnest experimentation I would still say that 150 million an hour is an optimistic earning potential for a lone wolf who's prepared to grind away at mind numbingly repetitive gameplay using one very specific location (which has now gone post-beta). I'm now sitting on 1.6 billion after a week which damn near killed my love of the game. Given I get around 1.5 hours a day, I estimate I'd have to spend another 30 days doing this ... just to buy a fleet carrier let alone maintain it. At the end of that I would NEVER EVER want to look at Elite again. I would hate both the game and myself. That CAN'T be the way FD intend and hope people will play their game? And yet ... somehow there are all these people with billions and billions. God alone knows what they do all day (although I suppose they have had 5 years to earn this while I've been "wasting my time having fun") but I am genuinely concerned that, if all FD have done is look at the numbers and gone "well look, 2000 people have over 20 billion so it must be OK, let's pitch the fleet carrier at them", that they've made a SERIOUS mistake in gauging the earning potential of even fairly experienced but non-grindaholic players. I would ask Frontier to go and earn a billion credits for themselves before setting these kind of purchase and upkeep costs.

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

Oh I agree entirely. I don't want to be that guy, whinging about "they're too expensive" 'cos I don't play Elite in a "normal" way (I spend months driving around planets and other months throwing ship after ship into the back of a station in pursuit of an improved Buckyball time so my earnings are relatively low for an "experienced" player). But ... I did spend the last week actually trying to make money (a rare thing for me). I had just under a billion to start with. I spent a few days doing LTD deep core mining and then, on community advice, switched to LTD laser mining at the Borann triple hotspot. Now, despite numerous claims elsewhere about how easy it is to "knock out another billion", from my week of fairly earnest experimentation I would still say that 150 million an hour is an optimistic earning potential for a lone wolf who's prepared to grind away at mind numbingly repetitive gameplay using one very specific location (which has now gone post-beta). I'm now sitting on 1.6 billion after a week which damn near killed my love of the game. Given I get around 1.5 hours a day, I estimate I'd have to spend another 30 days doing this ... just to buy a fleet carrier let alone maintain it. At the end of that I would NEVER EVER want to look at Elite again. I would hate both the game and myself. That CAN'T be the way FD intend and hope people will play their game? And yet ... somehow there are all these people with billions and billions. God alone knows what they do all day (although I suppose they have had 5 years to earn this while I've been "wasting my time having fun") but I am genuinely concerned that, if all FD have done is look at the numbers and gone "well look, 2000 people have over 20 billion so it must be OK, let's pitch the fleet carrier at them", that they've made a SERIOUS mistake in gauging the earning potential of even fairly experienced but non-grindaholic players. I would ask Frontier to go and earn a billion credits for themselves before setting these kind of purchase and upkeep costs.

Only problem is explorers out of the bubble are optimistically going to need up to 10's of billions of credits.. only earnable in the bubble before they go. Out of bubble exploration is not happening outside of exhibition. Its so impractical you could rationally call the use case dead.

I keep seeing pictures on reddit of drug taking accessories infront of computer screens. Thinking back to those days and the nature of how you earn credits in elite... nevermind.

 

[Bigmaec]

Oh I agree entirely. I don't want to be that guy, whinging about "they're too expensive" 'cos I don't play Elite in a "normal" way (I spend months driving around planets and other months throwing ship after ship into the back of a station in pursuit of an improved Buckyball time so my earnings are relatively low for an "experienced" player). But ... I did spend the last week actually trying to make money (a rare thing for me). I had just under a billion to start with. I spent a few days doing LTD deep core mining and then, on community advice, switched to LTD laser mining at the Borann triple hotspot. Now, despite numerous claims elsewhere about how easy it is to "knock out another billion", from my week of fairly earnest experimentation I would still say that 150 million an hour is an optimistic earning potential for a lone wolf who's prepared to grind away at mind numbingly repetitive gameplay using one very specific location (which has now gone post-beta). I'm now sitting on 1.6 billion after a week which damn near killed my love of the game. Given I get around 1.5 hours a day, I estimate I'd have to spend another 30 days doing this ... just to buy a fleet carrier let alone maintain it. At the end of that I would NEVER EVER want to look at Elite again. I would hate both the game and myself. That CAN'T be the way FD intend and hope people will play their game? And yet ... somehow there are all these people with billions and billions. God alone knows what they do all day (although I suppose they have had 5 years to earn this while I've been "wasting my time having fun") but I am genuinely concerned that, if all FD have done is look at the numbers and gone "well look, 2000 people have over 20 billion so it must be OK, let's pitch the fleet carrier at them", that they've made a SERIOUS mistake in gauging the earning potential of even fairly experienced but non-grindaholic players. I would ask Frontier to go and earn a billion credits for themselves before setting these kind of purchase and upkeep costs.

This. Right now you can have fun in game doing things, or earn money by mining.
Some people seem to like mining, so for them it's natural, but I suspect the majority only does it because it's the meta moneymaking.

 

[Ian Skippy]

Oh I agree entirely. I don't want to be that guy, whinging about "they're too expensive" 'cos I don't play Elite in a "normal" way (I spend months driving around planets and other months throwing ship after ship into the back of a station in pursuit of an improved Buckyball time so my earnings are relatively low for an "experienced" player). But ... I did spend the last week actually trying to make money (a rare thing for me). I had just under a billion to start with. I spent a few days doing LTD deep core mining and then, on community advice, switched to LTD laser mining at the Borann triple hotspot. Now, despite numerous claims elsewhere about how easy it is to "knock out another billion", from my week of fairly earnest experimentation I would still say that 150 million an hour is an optimistic earning potential for a lone wolf who's prepared to grind away at mind numbingly repetitive gameplay using one very specific location (which has now gone post-beta). I'm now sitting on 1.6 billion after a week which damn near killed my love of the game. Given I get around 1.5 hours a day, I estimate I'd have to spend another 30 days doing this ... just to buy a fleet carrier let alone maintain it. At the end of that I would NEVER EVER want to look at Elite again. I would hate both the game and myself. That CAN'T be the way FD intend and hope people will play their game? And yet ... somehow there are all these people with billions and billions. God alone knows what they do all day (although I suppose they have had 5 years to earn this while I've been "wasting my time having fun") but I am genuinely concerned that, if all FD have done is look at the numbers and gone "well look, 2000 people have over 20 billion so it must be OK, let's pitch the fleet carrier at them", that they've made a SERIOUS mistake in gauging the earning potential of even fairly experienced but non-grindaholic players. I would ask Frontier to go and earn a billion credits for themselves before setting these kind of purchase and upkeep costs.

There is a segment of the population that, among other things, can be really obsessively engaged with something very specific and, to others, incredibly repetitive and boring. There are people who can fly the same route between two neighbouring stations, 12 hours a day, every day. There are people who have literally spend the equivalent of half a year 24/7 watching the hyperspace jump. There is nothing inherently bad about doing this, but it certainly is not the norm. Most people would rather not play at all than endure such a pinnacle of repetition.

And yes, I am 99.909999% sure that not a single FD dev has earned enough in a legit way, without dev codes, to earn a carrier. So when they design based on stats, and they aim for the 'top percentage' owning the carriers, then inevitably only the extreme outliers described above qualify. The whole borann thing is stupid anyway; a cmdr playing on his own, without using social media, would never find that out. And when you do hear about it you'll find that in typical FD fashion the least engaging form of mining is the most rewarding.

As always, don't grind. If I cant get something without grinding I'll just ignore it exists. And if FD spends too much time designing stuff you can only obtain via grinding, I'll spend my money on other companies that focus on fun gameplay. For example, I haven't bought Planet Zoo yet. It seems like a fun game, but I am not going to give FD any money until they start adding enticing and engaging gameplay available to me.

 

[KillZoneGB]

Mini Carrier plz, with a bridge and crew doing their job, spice it up, and only show one carrier as your instance/wings instance.
Scrap the HUGE maintenance/upkeep, being king it should be paid by the taxes of your realm, Admiral the federation should foot the bill.

Keep it simple, Keep the shipyard (hanger) and outfitting module like stations, buy what you want then pay for the transportation.

I just think it`s been overthought in design.

Anyhoo, here's something for us poor people who can't allocate the time as others can.

The escort carrier or escort aircraft carrier (US hull classification symbol CVE), also called a "jeep carrier" or "baby flattop" in the United States Navy (USN) or "Woolworth Carrier" by the Royal Navy, was a small and slow type of aircraft carrier used by the Royal Navy, the United States Navy, the Imperial Japanese Navy and Imperial Japanese Army Air Force in World War II. They were typically half the length and a third the displacement of larger fleet carriers, slower, carried fewer planes, and more-lightly.

 

[Red Anders]

They should have just said something, i personally wouldn't have asked for carriers if they just admitted they're impossible to build for individuals.

What I can't get my head round is that they've significantly expanded the scope of them since the original announcement when you'd think the sensible thing would have been to scale them down.

It certainly explains why they decided to make them utterly worthless for any exploration gameplay though, that's a big chunk of players they can basically scratch of the potential owners list straight away.

Obviously they've probably scratched me and quite a few other explorers off the potential owners list for the end-of-year DLC too because why the hell would I bother after this? Hope the maths work out for them on that one.

 

[Faded Glory]

As always, don't grind. If I cant get something without grinding I'll just ignore it exists.

Yes indeed. Although I do have a lot of credits, I wouldn't consider that I've ever grinded for anything. Just played for a long time. Never mined, couldn't even do it enough to unlock Selene Jean, just not my thing, never been to Robigo, Sothis, only done a very few passenger missions. I think the main thing that has kept me going has been building a small fleet of ships (all small or medium) that are then outfitted for a particular type of gameplay or task, and I have a lot of fun trying out the same task but in different ships.

So I was hoping that the fleet carrier might bring something that I could use, to carry a bunch of my ships around, visit places that I otherwise wouldn't and have the tools (ships) available to engage in what gameplay there might be. Like the thread I linked to in another post, fleet carriers (lite), just something I could use as a mobile base of operations. Seems daft to have this unimaginably vast game world and not have a convenient way to explore and engage with it without the clunkiness of ship transfer.

It doesn't really surprise me that carriers have turned out the way they have, but it is yet another somewhat disappointing design decision IMO, and seems once again to be aimed at trying to get players to play together, to create and be the content. Great for some people, I'm sure, but I do kind of wish they'd come up with stuff that really did let us blaze our own trail.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Oh I agree entirely. I don't want to be that guy, whinging about "they're too expensive" 'cos I don't play Elite in a "normal" way (I spend months driving around planets and other months throwing ship after ship into the back of a station in pursuit of an improved Buckyball time so my earnings are relatively low for an "experienced" player). But ... I did spend the last week actually trying to make money (a rare thing for me). I had just under a billion to start with. I spent a few days doing LTD deep core mining and then, on community advice, switched to LTD laser mining at the Borann triple hotspot. Now, despite numerous claims elsewhere about how easy it is to "knock out another billion", from my week of fairly earnest experimentation I would still say that 150 million an hour is an optimistic earning potential for a lone wolf who's prepared to grind away at mind numbingly repetitive gameplay using one very specific location (which has now gone post-beta). I'm now sitting on 1.6 billion after a week which damn near killed my love of the game. Given I get around 1.5 hours a day, I estimate I'd have to spend another 30 days doing this ... just to buy a fleet carrier let alone maintain it. At the end of that I would NEVER EVER want to look at Elite again. I would hate both the game and myself. That CAN'T be the way FD intend and hope people will play their game? And yet ... somehow there are all these people with billions and billions. God alone knows what they do all day (although I suppose they have had 5 years to earn this while I've been "wasting my time having fun") but I am genuinely concerned that, if all FD have done is look at the numbers and gone "well look, 2000 people have over 20 billion so it must be OK, let's pitch the fleet carrier at them", that they've made a SERIOUS mistake in gauging the earning potential of even fairly experienced but non-grindaholic players. I would ask Frontier to go and earn a billion credits for themselves before setting these kind of purchase and upkeep costs.

Do me a favour and stick to the fun stuff. My fav activity was BGS and that didn't earn lots of cash neither. It still was better than racing for Anaconda.

 

[VR SenseiMatty]

Why release it then anyway? Instead of making something else? Like a couple of ships?

Like the Panther Clipper for example?
Or some new SRV's with some new fresh gameplay?

 

[VR SenseiMatty]

They also said something about only wanting experienced players to have a fleet carrier 'cos you need to know what you're doing if you're not going to end up stuck or bankrupt or both.

This I can understand, and I think I'm one of those experienced player. I know exactly what they were referring when they were talking about planning your destinations carefully, consider fuel and jump rate, you maybe not be able to come back from certain situations... and so on.
But experience in this case has nothing to do with credits sink.
Me, like a lot of players enjoyed this game for years without caring too much about credits and our play style reflects this. If you're an explorer you don't really care too much about credits because you don't even need to spend so much to enjoy the game as it is.

The barrier of the credits is an evidence of poor design decisions.

First of all, why develop a content when you already knows it will bring you technical limitations?
They wanted FC to be visible to all players in all instances, it was not a community request. I could live with the simple option to make it visible only to my friends and people in my instance. Probably many other people would also be fine with this because I don't see the reason (in this game) to have so many interactions with other players.

 

[VR SenseiMatty]

If they do have to have an hour spool up for some technical reason then, allow an exploration module/feature to be bought to upgrade your FC at huge expense to your storage space etc. This allows you to in effect plot a route as we do now with existing ships over say ten 250LY range jumps. So when you then (finally jump) you jump upto 2500LY (straight to the final location), which is a far more sensible amount of distance for an Exploration FC.

Fair enough. If they can't reduce the spool time than increase the range.