Should materials be buyable with cr

[Tono Kopec]

No.

As others have mentioned, nearly all the materials are easy enough to come by as it is, just by playing the game. If you could buy them, they'd be as worthless as Credits are.

 

[Thepirateorc]

No.

As others have mentioned, nearly all the materials are easy enough to come by as it is, just by playing the game. If you could buy them, they'd be as worthless as Credits are.

Easy or not, certainly the option wouldn't hurt.

 

[Jmanis]

Easy or not, certainly the option wouldn't hurt.

So, it's about 50 / 50 and since the collecters enjoy the collecting and find it 'so easy' and not a grind we may as well include a buy option for those who want to play the game their own way.

Human Sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria. (Ghostbusters - the good one).

Sigh. "Oh, it wouldn't hurt anything!"

OK. We've said it's going to be implemented.
1. What's your price point, because that matters tremendously to everything else that comes next.
2. How are you going to adjust missions? Their reward is tied directly to the value of materials
3. How are you going to rebalance mining? It rewards credits incredibly disproportionately to most other activities in the game, and are capped at rewards 50m.
4. How are you going to rebalance massacre mission stacking? It's another outlier earning excessive amounts of credits compared to other activities.
5. How are you going to rebalance ship prices? If a cobra is worth less than a single unit of an armour plate affixed to it, then there's some major congitive dissonance going on.
6. How are you going to rebalance Crystalline Shard site? That would almost certainly blow all other activities, even mining, out of the water in terms of value.

These are just the immediate issues which stick out like the proverbial to me, there are dozens more I could list. If your answer is "nothing" or "it doesn't matter", then your answer goes in the bin... where you say "it wouldn't hurt" you're really just saying "it wouldn't hurt my narrow little view of the universe which exists in ignorance of the rest of the game"

Which is how we arrived at this thread, ignorance of the rest of the game and some entirely reasonable ways to collect materials, and ignorance to credits being a completely broken commodity right now.

 

[Triptych]

Sigh. "Oh, it wouldn't hurt anything!"

OK. We've said it's going to be implemented.
1. What's your price point, because that matters tremendously to everything else that comes next.
2. How are you going to adjust missions? Their reward is tied directly to the value of materials
3. How are you going to rebalance mining? It rewards credits incredibly disproportionately to most other activities in the game, and are capped at rewards 50m.
4. How are you going to rebalance massacre mission stacking? It's another outlier earning excessive amounts of credits compared to other activities.
5. How are you going to rebalance ship prices? If a cobra is worth less than a single unit of an armour plate affixed to it, then there's some major congitive dissonance going on.
6. How are you going to rebalance Crystalline Shard site? That would almost certainly blow all other activities, even mining, out of the water in terms of value.

These are just the immediate issues which stick out like the proverbial to me, there are dozens more I could list. If your answer is "nothing" or "it doesn't matter", then your answer goes in the bin... where you say "it wouldn't hurt" you're really just saying "it wouldn't hurt my narrow little view of the universe which exists in ignorance of the rest of the game"

Which is how we arrived at this thread, ignorance of the rest of the game and some entirely reasonable ways to collect materials, and ignorance to credits being a completely broken commodity right now.

Goodness gracious. All this because somebody wants to be able to buy materials. You might almost imagine the end of civilisation will be brought about all on account of this change. It's really nothing more than the usual "It's impossible, and if it isn't it ought to be because it's evil.". It was ever thus. Some people hate change in all its forms and, when faced with the prospect, will set about demonstrating all the terrible things that'll happen as a consequence. It was like this when discussing player-owned bases. People put forward all kinds of reasons why they would never happen, could never happen, and should never happen, because end of civilisation etc. Well, we got them, and civilisation hasn't collapsed yet.

My answer is "it doesn't matter", or "it wouldn't hurt my narrow little view of the universe which exists in ignorance of the rest of the game" (ie. the game I've been playing since Alpha) or something like that. Feel free to bin it.........

 

[Jmanis]

Goodness gracious. All this because somebody wants to be able to buy materials. You might almost imagine the end of civilisation will be brought about all on account of this change. It's really nothing more than the usual "It's impossible, and if it isn't it ought to be because it's evil.". It was ever thus. Some people hate change in all its forms and, when faced with the prospect, will set about demonstrating all the terrible things that'll happen as a consequence. It was like this when discussing player-owned bases. People put forward all kinds of reasons why they would never happen, could never happen, and should never happen, because end of civilisation etc. Well, we got them, and civilisation hasn't collapsed yet.

My answer is "it doesn't matter", or "it wouldn't hurt my narrow little view of the universe which exists in ignorance of the rest of the game" (ie. the game I've been playing since Alpha) or something like that. Feel free to bin it.........

Yes. All that because someone wants to buy materials.

Didn't you realise that's all part of the game? No, I daresay supporters of this idea don't realise it is.


EDIT: I mean, let's be naive for a second. Let's say you can now buy G5 materials for 10m / unit. Let's look at missions and the impact material price has on them just for one moment.

• If we just leave missions as-is (i.e pre- and post-change mission rewards are identical), suddenly all other rewar options make no sense; an assassination will either pay out up to 2.5m, =~ 500k and +++++ Rep or Inf, 2.5m - <quantity of cargo * it's value>, or up to 50m worth of materials. Well duh, it's a no brainer what's going to be picked here
• If we adjust mission reward rates so that the reward reflects the new cost of materials, suddenly almost every mission rewards 50 million credits. Wow... I salvaged some black boxes in my noobwinder, and now I have enough to buy a python. Absurd.
• We just adjust material handouts for missions. Congratulations, you've just made missions even more useless compared to juggernauts like mining and massacre mission stacking (massacre mission stacking is about the only thing saved in this process with all the salvagable mats from the ships would be a wealth spinning titan at that point)

The last option here is a ground-up rework of the entire game economy. Something I'm not opposed to in the slightest, and what I allude to in my previous post.

This is absolutely not just a "simple addition" that "helps everyone". It would literally ruin all the current structures in the game.

 

[CMDR Redcrest]

I would spend CR on materials before going to another material trader.
First words I hear at the material 'trader' are "Stand and deliver!" and not becuase they're into Adam Ant (from the 80's and not, AFAIK a relative of Obsidian Ant).
I'd spent CR on materials long before I bought a Fleet Carrier!
Considering how much G5 matts cost (this can be calculated according to how much G5 matts knock off a mission reward) to fill the whole board would be quite a credit sink.
If Frontier are considering introducing yet another currency for the Odyssey expansion they could save time and effort by letting us sink credits into material buying before launch and just letting us use CR for buying whatever it is we'll be buying with currency 3.
Even if once a year FD let us stock up on materials for CR I would be very happy!

 

[CMDR Redcrest]

Nope. The people who think they need to jump straight into an A-rated G5'd murder boat and get there by grinding don't hang around. They burn out and blame the game instead of their approach.

Yeah I've done a load of grinding in the original version of engineers and the latter version. Just once I'd like to spend some CR not having to do it again.
I've been playing for 6 years.

 

[Franc Kaos]

1. What's your price point, because that matters tremendously to everything else that comes next.
2. How are you going to adjust missions? Their reward is tied directly to the value of materials
3. How are you going to rebalance mining? It rewards credits incredibly disproportionately to most other activities in the game, and are capped at rewards 50m.
4. How are you going to rebalance massacre mission stacking? It's another outlier earning excessive amounts of credits compared to other activities.
5. How are you going to rebalance ship prices? If a cobra is worth less than a single unit of an armour plate affixed to it, then there's some major congitive dissonance going on.
6. How are you going to rebalance Crystalline Shard site? That would almost certainly blow all other activities, even mining, out of the water in terms of value.

1) As someone already said, materials already have a price point on missions.
2) No need.
3) Nerf it to Helen Back.
4) They had the same issue with scanning stations on planets<?> or something, they simply stopped allowing the missions to stack.
5) Ship prices are kind'a cheap, I'm guessing the pilots federation subsidise the cost somehow - same with buying fuel. I would be quite happy if prices were bumped up a bit, esp considering how quickly you can go from the Sidewinder to an ASP as a beginning player - even without cheating by mining.
6) Can't really answer this, they're a new thing for me (just came back after a sabbatical), but if they're the things near Maia they just seem to drop mats like other geographicals on planets.

How do you explain things like Hadleys Hope and Jamisons crashed ship etc that allow you to gather ad infinitum mats simply by relogging - almost like Fdev knows that collecting these things suck and gives players a <hidden> out.

 

[Jmanis]

1) As someone already said, materials already have a price point on missions.
2) No need.
3) Nerf it to Helen Back.
4) They had the same issue with scanning stations on planets<?> or something, they simply stopped allowing the missions to stack.
5) Ship prices are kind'a cheap, I'm guessing the pilots federation subsidise the cost somehow - same with buying fuel. I would be quite happy if prices were bumped up a bit, esp considering how quickly you can go from the Sidewinder to an ASP as a beginning player - even without cheating by mining.
6) Can't really answer this, they're a new thing for me (just came back after a sabbatical), but if they're the things near Maia they just seem to drop mats like other geographicals on planets.

How do you explain things like Hadleys Hope and Jamisons crashed ship etc that allow you to gather ad infinitum mats simply by relogging - almost like Fdev knows that collecting these things suck and gives players a <hidden> out.

Based on your responses, we're actually kinda on the same page. It's worth noting it was probably me who said materials already have that price point on missions, that price is 400k, so 40m would would be a full bucket of G5s... which is just one or two massacre missions, which is kinda OP compared to all the other material gathering methods... so everything gets trivialised down to credits again (who would go HGSS hunting when they can just do a 180t single palladium mission). Sticking with 400k just breaks any balance in actually collecting these goods.

RE: 6, they're a geo site, closest one is (iirc?) 10k LY from Sol... basically a single instance has dozens of nodes which only drop G5s. My opinions are kinda mixed here on this.

Just re: your last point, I see things like Hadley's Hope and Jamison's wreck as being the sort of activity done as "babies first material collection".... basically a "charity" offering by FD for those so inept they can't work out any better way to get mats.

 

[Franc Kaos]

RE: 6, they're a geo site, closest one is (iirc?) 10k LY from Sol... basically a single instance has dozens of nodes which only drop G5s. My opinions are kinda mixed here on this.

Ooh, I know where I'm off to next

 

[Jmanis]

Ooh, I know where I'm off to next

Yeah, it's the only time I've ever "done the grind", because I tried hitting up high-yield material asteroids and their raw yields are..... weak.... and scanner chasing in an SRV is average... while relogging can just die in a fire, I can uppercut myself just fine without that.

Barnacles were an alright compromise, particularly old doubles/triples... but it was the human tech brokers needing over 100 technetium combined with a "yeah, I want to get one of them ticked off in my explorer book" that sent me there. Since they are so rare and out of the way, it's about the only exploration item that has anything remotely considered "rewarding" so I've got mixed feelings about them.

But data and manufactured, forever filling my bins and having to trade down G5/4's into 1/2/3's just from my usual game loops of "Whatever the mission board is offering up today/what BGS effect am I trying to achieve.".