Surely they dont need to nerf everything existing to promote the new stuff?

[Aashenfox]

100% agree mate. I also want to see all missions shareable. Basically all missions should be wing missions if you wish them to be and have the reward shared instead of duplicated (duplicated makes no logical sense), then add time based bonuses to encourage wing play to get them done faster. Then it would be easier to scale the rewards too instead of the current mismatch between normal missions and wing missions. Trade missions shouldn't pay you massively more then normal trade, but enough to make trade missions worth doing and then add time bonuses on top.

Mission wrinkles should be for other more interesting stuff. For instance they have asked you to take some cargo to a station, then en-route you get a message asking you to look for a ship of theirs that has gone missing in the vacinity for bonus credits. They send you the co-ordinates of where it was last at and the ships transponder signal. You head over to there and pick up the signal. You drop down to find destroyed remains of the ship. They ask you to pick up the black box and return it to them when convient. Then that can lead to a follow-on mission.

It would make it far more interesting if mission wrinkles were like missions themselves instead of little tacked on extras. If there was an escape pod you could pick that up and that gives you a mission to get revenge.

I would like to see where missions are received chopped up. All bounty hunting missions/contracts should go through the security contact. All smuggling of goods/people should go through the black market contact (there should be a black market in virtually ever system that has some kind of security system in place). Black markets could have their own illegal factions each specialising in different black market items with a rep system. An annonymous dodgy contact for wetwork with a rep system in place, the more successful the more likely they will want to work with you and offer you better credits.

And most of the others through the relevant faction contact.

Combat missions should be scaled on difficulty.

Agree on all points.

 

[Vedmo]

I'm not so sure that it's the game's fault. Once you are a multi billionaire there is little reason to do anything for less than beyond-ridiculous payouts, so everything with normal rewards appears worthless.

It worked the opposite way for me. It wasn't until I had a few billion in assets that I finally stopped running everything through a credit per hour calculation and just did what I felt like doing regardless. I have a few spots I can hit when in boom and reliably make 40-50 mil an hour if I stayed focused, but I always end up doing a run or two then getting totally sidetracked. It isn't because the pay is low (best pay I've ever had), it's because credits become pretty worthless at a certain point (different points for different people).

 

[Aashenfox]

It worked the opposite way for me. It wasn't until I had a few billion in assets that I finally stopped running everything through a credit per hour calculation and just did what I felt like doing regardless. I have a few spots I can hit when in boom and reliably make 40-50 mil an hour if I stayed focused, but I always end up doing a run or two then getting totally sidetracked. It isn't because the pay is low (best pay I've ever had), it's because credits become pretty worthless at a certain point (different points for different people).

Well said, I feel that's how it would work for me. I still feel I have to maximise my fun per credit, as well as credit per fun, if you get what I mean. If I didn't feel a need to so that, I would do whatever, all kinds of missions. I didn't think to put it like that, good point. I've never felt rich in this game, just enough to own the good ships, and no more, and there's always more ships and more bulkheads to buy.

 

[VR Jay Le Chardon]

Another example was professor pailins missions out of obsidian orbital to gather alien stuff, which were paying 7 to 20 million, are now paying a million, that is less than the value of the cargo hes requesting on the black market. That adjustment hit at the same time as wing missions went live. When passengers became a thing, they were paying more money than trading, and Im not talking about quince or that 1.8M Ls AFK grind slog that was popular amongst youtubers, just straight up legit passenger missions. So now they have launched wing missions, and true to form the payment for them is OverPowered, and thats before you do all do your missions in solo then wing up and hand in missions exploit.

The whole economy needs a balance pass, staring with deciding what is a reasonable income, then adjust mission rewards to match that based on realistic times taken to perform them.

They cannot keep going at this overszied-nerf-hammer-whack-a-mole to make new shiny things look great. Set the rewards to be in line with what is the target cr per hour of a commander, then let the new features stand on their own two feet and grow or dwindle organically. If they are dwindling but their rewards are on par, then they obviously aren't fun enough and the new gameplay needs tweaking, not ridiculous nerfing of everything else and buffing the heck out of the new thing to herd players into engaging with it.

 

[VR Jay Le Chardon]

I'm sorry to reply to my own reply, but I forgot to say that regarding mission reward vs ship value, I'd like to point out that ships aren't consumed by the mission unless the pilot fails. If the pilot fails a mission in a very expensive ship they need to look for a problem between the seat and the controller, rather than a problem with the mission rewards. Sure ships pick up repair bills and burn fuel and ammo. However, with diligence a pilot can almost entirely avoid expensive repairs (which would only really come from shields down damage) and fuel can be scooped leaving only ammo as a running cost. And if you are doing a lot of shooting, you're going to be either bounty hunting or Conflict Zone's which a couple of combat bonds will rearm/restock virtually any ship you can think of.

Just because your ships worth a decent fraction of a billion credits, doesnt mean its worth any more for the customers to use it. If you look at IRL shipping, the biggest and most expensive ships are the super tankers and mega container ships such as the maersk emma, which cost USD 5.7 billion But instead of inflating the cost of shipping the abundance of shipping capacity caused by such a class of vessels has actually decreased the price of shipping containers across the world.

I feel the sweet-spot for balance would need to be looked at in two seperate categories. Combat rewards balance would come from average combat bonds / bounties earned per hour per average class of ship. I went from sidewinder to vulture in two months in 2.0 by constantly fighting in CZ's back in 2.0, by the time I had the battle-conda I could earn that 20M in a weekend, and I wasn't a good pilot in those days. but given I'm looking at a 30-40M rebuy on the conda the risk reward is about right. If I could make 20M per hour czing in a sidey it'd be seriously overpowered.

Missions, hauling cargo or passengers, should be based on a tariff of distance required to be travelled (as that equates to time taken) with an increased rate for added dangers such as valuable cargo or wanted passengers. That way it wouldnt matter if you hauled 64 tonnes in an asp or 720 in a cutter, you'd still be earning the same rate per unit of [cargo/distance], but the rewards for the cutter would be bigger and thus fair. Nobody would build big ships unless they were going to make big money out of them. playing on coriolis I get a trader cutter and a trader asp explorer built with about 9 times the cargo for about 13 times the rebuy which strikes me as "fair" diminishing returns, ie: when you own a cutter other than outfitting there isnt a lot left to spend money on so the more you have the less you need to earn it, but equally so it needn't be a kick in the genitals when you look at the mission rewards.

Edit to say that after playing with coriolis more I put together a type 9 build which works out as about ten times the rebuy for about the same increase in cargo capacity over the asp explorer trader build I mentioned earlier.

 

[Brrokk]

I think most of the so-called nerfs have been to reduce excessive profits gained from board flipping and stacking missions. FD should just fix board flipping instead, by making the same missions appear in every mode.

 

[Aashenfox]

I think most of the so-called nerfs have been to reduce excessive profits gained from board flipping and stacking missions. FD should just fix board flipping instead, by making the same missions appear in every mode.

I'd be fine with that if they increased the numbers of available missions by more than double.

 

[verminstar]

I believe you mean Pirate mission, Yeah, I see that also. Makes them worthless IMO. I also see a wing of 3 ships from the target faction but only 1 will register as mission target.

Combat, Pirate, base attack, Assassination missions all need a thorough reworking! They don't make sense and they are just SO arcade like. This is obviously very deeply rooted in the game code so it would be a lot of work I suppose.

Heres a funny way of looking at how things are going. Its the mission that takes forever to complete but was never ¨fixed¨ or ¨readjusted¨...so basically working as intended then which, ironically enough, seem to fit nicely into the general theme where everything takes longer. ¨Within the spirit of the game¨...seen that line fairly often lately when people argue about why relogging is wrong, so obviously then the right way is to intentionally waste yer own time...uh huh and hows that panning out?

They not only value our time apparently, but lets not forget they also farm salt from the community fer use later.

This was first reported nearly two months ago...perspective ^

 

[lecorsobreton]

Don't nerf the good payouts, buff the ones that suck!!!! FD, vary you mat rewards, give mats to ease the grind to unlock the new stuff (the ones developed by humans obviously).

Honestly, I feel like they're shooting themselves in the foot with 12 gauge shotgun It's sad really.

 

[VR Jay Le Chardon]

A long time ago I put forth a suggestion about making one pan-mode/instance mission board to negate board flipping, but to make it viable mission boards would have to be more dynamic. I'd suggested one way of achieving that would be giving missions a randomly selected shelf life varying from 2 to 10 minutes, if the player hadnt accepted the mission before its shelf life it would disappear, appearing to have been taken by an NPC. New missions could spawn in at random intervals between one and ten minutes. (might need to put a max and minimum number of missions into the spawn/delete algorythm to prevent edgecases of 100+ or 0 missions being on the board) But if they were to put those three changes in as a package it would kill half of the exploits/grind* (boardhopping/mode switching is very subjective) and make the galaxy feel so so so much more alive and dynamic.

 

[bicarbon8]

A long time ago I put forth a suggestion about making one pan-mode/instance mission board to negate board flipping, but to make it viable mission boards would have to be more dynamic. I'd suggested one way of achieving that would be giving missions a randomly selected shelf life varying from 2 to 10 minutes, if the player hadnt accepted the mission before its shelf life it would disappear, appearing to have been taken by an NPC. New missions could spawn in at random intervals between one and ten minutes. (might need to put a max and minimum number of missions into the spawn/delete algorythm to prevent edgecases of 100+ or 0 missions being on the board) But if they were to put those three changes in as a package it would kill half of the exploits/grind* (boardhopping/mode switching is very subjective) and make the galaxy feel so so so much more alive and dynamic.

while I haven't verified this for myself, I did read that the boards do update every 12 minutes or so... sounds similar to your suggestion.

 

[operant]

I want more choice, more chance of finding something I fancy doing, so more missions.
Board flipping is therefore very helpful. Particularly given the number of wing missions taking up slots.

 

[777Driver]

while I haven't verified this for myself, I did read that the boards do update every 12 minutes or so... sounds similar to your suggestion.

Way back it used to be five minutes, now I think it is up to 20mins. Never actually sat with a stopwatch ;-) I always thought it was 10-12 mins.

 

[Aashenfox]

I always believed (based on hearsay I expect) that it's every 15 minutes by the hour, so 1200, 1215, 1230, 1245, 1300, etc.