Look, I never grind in a game. I play computer games for entertainment in my limited leisure time. You are using a definition of grind which I don't agree with, apparently with the intention of defining everything in ED as grind. That's silly.
tested nerfed mining, its not harder, it now just takes longer, its not more fun, it just takes longer to make the same amount of credits.
- Thread starter valbarr
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My definition applies to all games equally well. It doesn't depend on subjectivity. Grind is objectively defined in simple terms.
I can put it in terms such as this too if it's too hard to follow the point here.
Mining is fun and engaging gathering 10-30 tons ...then you go do something with that. The mechanic makes sense within that use case since it's just the same basic things repeated over and over. (edit: and this is still grind too.. it's just the intended place grind is supposed to be engaged in)
It becomes much more of a bad mechanic to do it filling up 100 or even up to 500+ tons between doing anything else. (with the current way mining is) There's no gameplay variation at all between the first ton and the 500th. That's grind. It becomes bad game design when there's no alternative way to do it.
The fact that income rates are the highest doing such a thing is just palm to the face level poor design.
You can repeat that for trading. You can repeat that for bounty hunting. You can repeat that for exploration. You can repeat that for basically everything in the game.
The things you do in the game to make the most money in any role doesn't change from the things you did in them when you first started and they dont get any harder or more risky or require more skill. The overall difference between starting out and ending is just how long you can do the activity before having to return to base to unload/repair and reload.
Unfortunately, your definition of grind is wrong, and is much more personalized to fit your own beliefs than mine is.
I can put it in terms such as this too if it's too hard to follow the point here.
Mining is fun and engaging gathering 10-30 tons ...then you go do something with that. The mechanic makes sense within that use case since it's just the same basic things repeated over and over. (edit: and this is still grind too.. it's just the intended place grind is supposed to be engaged in)
It becomes much more of a bad mechanic to do it filling up 100 or even up to 500+ tons between doing anything else. (with the current way mining is) There's no gameplay variation at all between the first ton and the 500th. That's grind. It becomes bad game design when there's no alternative way to do it.
The fact that income rates are the highest doing such a thing is just palm to the face level poor design.
You can repeat that for trading. You can repeat that for bounty hunting. You can repeat that for exploration. You can repeat that for basically everything in the game.
The things you do in the game to make the most money in any role doesn't change from the things you did in them when you first started and they dont get any harder or more risky or require more skill. The overall difference between starting out and ending is just how long you can do the activity before having to return to base to unload/repair and reload.
Unfortunately, your definition of grind is wrong, and is much more personalized to fit your own beliefs than mine is.
You're arguing the semantics of a word that isn't even defined as such in any dictionary. This is ridiculous. Neither of you has any basis for your definition of the word. If you have specific suggestions to improve the various activities in the game, suggest them. Otherwise you're just whining that things aren't easy enough.
You'd pretty much need exponential rewards tiers to get that to work - easy pays 1, medium pays 10, difficult pays 100, etc. - with corresponding ship costs at each tier and virtually no possibility of using an off-tier ship for a job (too low is almost impossible, too high doesn't cover basic operating costs). Could be done, but definitely doesn't resemble Elite at all.
Well, but what would be the point in Frontier doing this new start from scratch game? They already have a highly successful space MMO, no point in them making another one to compete with it. (Sure, it might be even more popular, but taking five years to find that out is a pretty big risk)
Sure, another company wouldn't be able to include the Cobra III, but on the other hand I think the existence of ships as successfully multirole as the Cobra III is part of what makes Elite impossible to get that sort of balance on.
Why wouldn't it look like elite? It's not like you would require a mission giver to have scaled rewards based on risks. You would have that option sure, but there could be ad-hoc type activities similar to how grind activities exist now but be far more rare, more risky to do and thus more rewarding based on that risk. As a player you have a choice to engage in the level of risk you're wiling to take and thus the level of reward.
I'm thinking specific types of commodities available in these high risk places, not varying levels of payment for the same thing. Missions could be varying amounts of things based on risk.
The point would be that they want to produce a game that more closely matches their vision and isn't a cesspool of incompleted systems and half thought out mechanics. To get a game that takes what they've learned and have the ability to implement it ...which they can't do in the current game. A rewarding experience for those developing it rather than a constant cycle of unending complaining and their hands being tied at really fixing the source of problems because doing so would basically need a reset.
It doesn't matter if they make a game that competes with itself, they make the money either way. It's not like the cost and overhead would be double. Most of the R&D and backend costs would done already, paid by elite dangerous. And elite isn't subscription based. So those who have paid it have already given their money. Fdev could re-use the same assets in the store across both games. So no loss there. Version 2.0's get released all the time while version 1.0 still gets played by people. This would be no different.
One of the few consistent things about the Elite series to date is that any ship can basically do any task.
Elite (1): you just had the Cobra III, so it was of course very good at combat and trading or you wouldn't have been able to play the game.
FE2/FFE: the purely volume-based outfitting model meant that a Panther was basically just a big Eagle with more shields, bigger guns, more cargo, and less agility.
Elite Dangerous: trying to exploring in a Gunship or fighting in a T-7 is a little more difficult but (especially with engineering, etc.) still fairly practical. While the outfitting is a bit more complicated, every medium and large ship is still basically a big Sidewinder with more guns and less agility.
In terms of DPS the Anaconda has only 8 times the firepower of the Sidewinder (and relative to its weapons' power requirements, actually a worse distributor) and - without piling on stacked engineered defence - only about ten times the resilience (plus the extra hull hardness, but that won't matter if the Sidewinders use railguns). That doesn't make the challenges they can face qualitatively different - sure, the Anaconda will go a bit faster and need less skill to keep alive, but pretty much anything combat-wise an average player can do in an Anaconda a really good player can do in a Sidewinder (there's video proof of this). The Anaconda costs 1000x the Sidewinder, though.
So the average player goes to face a task that needs an Anaconda and has medium risk. If they win, decent payout. If they lose, serious cost.
The really good player does the same thing in a Sidewinder with about the same risk level. If they win, incredible payout by the standards of what most Sidewinder pilots are earning. If they lose, virtually cost-free.
Throw in multiplayer and a wing of 4 decent Sidewinder pilots can probably do the same with only medium risk. Even split 4 ways the payout is still huge.
You can't make any sensible balancing of risk, income, costs, etc. in that sort of environment.
To stop that the ship tiers need to be made both qualitatively different and more significantly quantitatively different - an Anaconda not just a big Sidewinder. That's never been done in Elite (witness the culture shock recently from a Fleet Carrier not just being a really big Sidewinder) and would require substantial rethinks of ship design, outfitting, and everything else ... and at that point, is it really still a Cobra III? Make a clean break on ship design and a lot of this gets easier.
If after six years of releases they've managed to make a game this far from their vision I think there's only two possibilities.
1) You've misunderstood what their vision is.
2) They're so incompetent at going from vision to design to implementation that the odds their second attempt goes any better is probably not good.
I'm not saying your vision for a space MMO is unappealing - I'd probably give it a go if someone made one - but Elite V isn't going to be it.
A really good player reaps the rewards of mastering the game but they do so by exerting that skill. If they do it in a sidewinder to risk less, they do so by having to put that skill to test a lot more than if they did so in a conda and risked more assets. They have a higher chance of failing in the sidewinder, so the game's incentive is to pick a safer but more expensive ship. but perhaps that ship makes it a bigger target, so while it wont be one-shot-killed like a sidewinder, it may be more likely to be hit or take damage than the sidewinder if the sidewinder is piloted by a skilled pilot.
There are easily many strategies that can be used between ship selection a good pilot can make and consider given a high risk situation. The risk is not dependent on the skill level of the pilot in adhoc situations though. The risk and reward is solely dependent on the difficulty level of the hazard in a fixed sense.
A min-maxer would still have to deal with actual personal skill when deciding what that min-maxing means for them. Obviously the ideal would be doing things in a sidewinder so your risk of loss is less. but maybe they're not good enough. Maybe the haul is larger than what a sidewinder has so if you take a sidewinder you leave money on the table.
I dont think skill based risky and hazardous environments and activities fundamentally alter elite. You still have different ships to do the same things with, you just have to start thinking about the ship that best suits your skill and the task at hand instead of just whatever you feel like using. That's not a big deal so long as it doesn't limit absolutely to a single ship.
The game couldn't hurt from a total rebalance of ships now that there are ship launched fighters. Big ships should be balanced as such and behave as such and small ships should be treated as such. Dogfighting should be the realm of small ships. Battleship type battles should be the realm of large ships.
Now that may be more of a fundamental change from elite of yesteryear, but progress is progress.
3. The game was developed incrementally and decisions had to be compromised at the time to get certain things usable in the game without other things that those features would otherwise need or rely upon existing. Repeat that a few dozen times over 5 years and the game you currently have is way way way different from the game you envisioned when you started out. Far from the ideal if the game could have been fully developed before anyone started having to play it.
So...you want to rebalance every ship in the game, every activity in the game, and every reward in the game?
That sounds a lot like you just want a different game, tbh...
That sounds a lot like you just want a different game, tbh...
I can't help but feel there is a workable middle ground where any ship can do all types of activities while leaving room for income scaling because every ships can't do every tier of a given activity. But that's just me.
Anyway... tonight I have mined in a double VO hotspot. I have got basically nothing, not even tritium. Moved to single LTD hotspot, bum. Filled up the 150t I had left in ~1h. I start to think that tritium is far more common in some hotspots than in others.
Then went for exploration, the third system I explored had 75 planets, 10 of them with rings, found one with two double LTD, one tritium and some more stuff. I'm going to sit here a bit, enjoy some easy mining (mining is repetitive? what about scanning 10 rings, where the last 4 were 150kls apart? that is also awful repetitive) and then move on.
Then went for exploration, the third system I explored had 75 planets, 10 of them with rings, found one with two double LTD, one tritium and some more stuff. I'm going to sit here a bit, enjoy some easy mining (mining is repetitive? what about scanning 10 rings, where the last 4 were 150kls apart? that is also awful repetitive) and then move on.
This reminds me then the devlopers nerfed the Painite in the past, but they just halved the market price for it
They can't fix spaghetti code, but they sure as heck can nuke anything that makes money in-game.This reminds me then the devlopers nerfed the Painite in the past, but they just halved the market price for it
They can't fix spaghetti code, but they sure as heck can nuke anything that makes money in-game.
Thats calls balance in devlopers minds, but they have forgotten when it comes to battle balance unfortunately
cambridge english dictionary
Meaning of grind in English
grind
verb [ T ]
UK
/ɡraɪnd/ US
/ɡraɪnd/
ground | ground
grind verb [T] (MAKE SMALLER)
to make something into small pieces or a powder by pressing between hard surfaces:
to grind coffee
Shall I grind a little black pepper over your salad?
They grind the grain into flour (= make flour by crushing grain) between two large stones.
Thesaurus: synonyms and related words
Squeezing and grinding
- compact
- compression
- concertina
- constrict
- constriction
- crush
- depress
- gnash your teeth idiom
- ground
- mash
- mill
- pinch
- pound
- presser
- pulp
- pulverization
- scrunch
- snap
- squish
- tamp
Want to learn more?
Improve your vocabulary with English Vocabulary in Use from Cambridge.
Learn the words you need to communicate with confidence.
grind verb [T] (RUB)
to rub something against a hard surface, in order to make it sharper or smoother:
She has a set of chef's knives that she grinds every week.
He ground down the sharp metal edges to make them smooth.
The car engine was making a strange grinding noise.
See also
grindstone
grind your teeth
to make a noise by rubbing your teeth together:
She grinds her teeth in her sleep.
Thesaurus: synonyms and related words
Idioms
grind the faces of the poor
grind to a halt/standstill
Phrasal verbs
grind sb down
grind sth into sth
grind sth out
grind
noun
UK
/ɡraɪnd/ US
/ɡraɪnd/
grind noun (POWDER)
[ C ]
the size of grains in a substance that has been ground, especially coffee:
Use the correct grind for your coffee brewer.
Cook time will vary from 5–10 minutes for instant grits to around 45 minutes for the coarser grinds.
[ C ]
an action of grinding a substance into a powder:
Season with a few grinds of black pepper.
Thesaurus: synonyms and related words
grind noun (WORK)
[ S ]informal
a difficult or boring activity that needs a lot of effort:
Having to type up my handwritten work was a real grind.
The daily grind of taking care of three children was wearing her down.
At least you provided a piece of the dictionary for someone...
My brain just started to melt but I really started this ?
As long as threads like this exist, LTDs will never be balanced:
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteMiners/comments/hazc6y/definitive_guide_to_finding_and_relogging_4x_ssd/
Don't hold yourself responsible, it just happens to be the zeitgeist right now.
Back in the old days it was the faoff vipers, then SCB spam, then the absurd hauling missions...
Usually frontier fix the issue and it turns out that the group who used that aspect of the game do not infact get all their enjoyment completely and permamently destroyed. But the fundamental problems in how economy, NPC's and player interaction works are never solved and soon there is a new issue after some updates breaks something
that what i feared , mapped SSD mining. sad :/ but they could just make SSD respawn in some .... hours basis ? i think core reset each week no ?
I hope this will trigger hotfix tbh.
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Yeah, cores are fine. But if people keep taking the proverbial with things like this and screaming it out to tell everyone else how to do it, the devs will just kill the sale price. They'll have to. There's no other option left for them. This is nothing less than an exploit, and it's being pushed around as the new meta method of obtaining the most valuable commodity in the game. If people keep this up, it's going to get slapped down to the point that LTD cores are going to end up becoming the new bromellite.
And of course people will scream nerf just like this thread, and when they do, all I have to do is point at reloggers there and say "all you had to do was not go over the top."
It's like people never read the story about the golden goose.