The ED food chain

[MonsieurLam]

With the incoming changes to mining in ED, I feel like the game food chain is falling into place.

This food chain is built on a certain hierarchy and a risk/reward/fun factor.

Edit : no more fun criteria

1. MINERS
High risk / Highest Reward /
First, miners should make a lot of money, through scalability. A large T9 / Anaconda with multiple drones should make loads of credits per hour. But getting in the most coveted RES will be risky and they'll to wing with Bounty Hunters. In a word, Miners should be the wealthiest job in ED, but also the most dependant and less fun.

2. TRADERS
Med risk / Med reward /
Second, traders will haul as they do haul since day one. Nothing much to change, maybe more valuable commodities to add new routes and more offer/demand scenarios. Metals would still generate high margins, but their stock and prices would also depend on what miners brings.

3. PIRATES
High risk / Low Reward /
With more human miners and low RES, pirates should have more fun than before, when they were just having most of their action in Supercruise.

4.BOUNTY HUNTERS
Med-High risk / Med reward /
Pew pew pew. Maybe a more developed profit share with miners ? i.e 5% from profit and extra cash for shooting a ship who attacked your wing miner.

5. EXPLORERS
Low risk / Med reward /
Explorers are a bit off this food chain, so it'd be nice to have them scout new highly profitable RES and get some nice rewards from it, thus closing our ED food chain.

Building an MMO eco system is hard, but I feel like we getting closer to a solid frame, where every player and wings can have fun, whatever the path they choose.

 

[DoppelShifter]

About trading being "not fun", I'll have to disagree with that.

Even though I'm not a personal fan of trading, EVE Online is there to prove that people can have boatloads of fun with space spreadsheets, and Eurotruck Simulator proves that there are some people who like to haul during lots of time, possibly listening to podcasts.

So that's kinda blurry to me. Also, keen and well-equipped traders make ANACONDALOADS of money. There's a lot of people in my Group who trade not because they like to, but because it made them jump from Viper to Anaconda with surprisingly little effort and time.

One thing that would be nice to see is organized or at least "officialized" player-based police forces, with a faction alignment and a faction bonus given on kill for opposing factions. This could lead to new roles, such as Insurgent, Special Agent, Shock Troop, Serial Killer...

Oh that would be sweet... Or not. Specially if the Force doesn't balance itself in the process.

 

[Steve50]

Pirates highest fun? Mining low fun?

I'd disagree, I'm no fan of combat and enjoy mining a lot so for me it's the reverse.

 

[MonsieurLam]

I agree with you. I do trade a lot too and I kinda like it. But the "fun" factor isn't as high as for the other jobs. Subjective, of course.

Edit : ok, everyone has its taste, I'll erase the "fun" criteria.

 

[xDreadnoughtx]

Yes brilliant. Let's design things not to be fun.

Or.....try to make everything as fun as possible.

I know which design philosophy I subscribe to.

Forget the credits per hour stuff. Not necessarily = fun.

 

[DoppelShifter]

Even if you try to measure it not by "fun" (which is VERY subjective) and instead try to use a metric like "awesome per second" (like Extra Credits suggested in this video), that's still fuzzy, because "awesome" is still relative (I'm easily amazed by beautiful blue-shine stars or exotic planets; mind you that I'm a bounty hunter / explorer; but some people hate that and love PvP -- and I hate PvP).

So... Fun is kinda out of the equation by lack of a proper way to measure it.

 

[Sandmann]

So the degree of "fun" has a direct correlation with the amount of pewpew? Wow, biased & offensive much?

 

[bamber]

Slave Smuggling is a valid career as well - 28000CR profit per mission however massive risk if you are carrying 40T of them (336000Cr in 30 mins in a cobra - admittedly after spending a week collecting)

 

[MonsieurLam]

Every path can have risky options. Trading doesn't put you at risk as much as other paths

 

[Kayweg]

The flaw that breaks the entire OP is, you universally define what is "fun".

It doesn't work that way, and i'm sure you know that.

What you state is your opinion, and that's ok, that's what the forum is for....but in the end it IS just opinion, nothing more.

I'm also not sure if "food chain" is the term you were looking for, but that's just semantics, can't come up with a better word either.

I largely agree with your risk assessments, how you arrived at traders=med reward puzzles me.

 

[RuleV]

So the degree of "fun" has a direct correlation with the amount of pewpew? Wow, biased & offensive much?

Are you really offended by that?

Truly?

I'm not saying the correlation is right, I happen to agree with you there, I'm just skeptical that anyone could really be offended by it.

I could be wrong, and I hope my asking the question isn't offensive.

 

[Scrye]

Shockingly, different people find different things fun.

I quite enjoy trading, and I'm sure I would find mining fun too.

 

[CMDR Aden Majes]

When I see people define fun by the amount of shooting they do I'm already inclined not to trust them.

Combat is an unfortunate and sometimes unavoidable part of life in the galaxy, in my opinion. Necessary though, pirates and criminals force the hands of us bounty hunters.

(but an arena/sim battle mode would be fun for people that really enjoy the pvp. Not necessarily profitable because we still need pirates to keep things interesting, but a fun thing on the side.)

 

[WiseDuck]

How can you have a food chain when the prey can just vanish to a parallel universe where you can't get em ?

 

[Slippery Jim DiGriz]

5. EXPLORERS
Low risk / Med reward /

For 99.5% of the time that's true but for the final bit when carrying the data back to sell the risk is the highest possible, an explorer may have been away for weeks if not months and has to risk losing the fruits of that labour to an interdiction when returning as well the credits that could run to over 100 million so the potential for loss for explorers is by a large margin the highest.

 

[TruthofOne]

I would like to add that there should be one more rank in the food chain

Scavenger
(Low Risk / Med Reward)

Find Weak Source Signal
Gather Cargo from Wreakage
Sell on Black Market
Profit

 

[MonsieurLam]

I'd love to see scavenging / treasure hunting as a possible path !

 

[Ghostickles]

Whatever happens Im ready for another slice of vertical pie.

 

[Robert Maynard]

How can you have a food chain when the prey can just vanish to a parallel universe where you can't get em ?

Given that any player can adopt any role, it is possible (however unlikely) that players will simply not choose to play as prey. That, however, does not mean that there is no prey for roles that rely on it, just no live prey.

 

[Troa Barton]

You're forgetting two very important parts of a space simulator and huge factor in any realistic food chain.

The salvager
recycling in a closed ecosystem such as a starport would be likely one of the most important aspects to a space faring society. As fas as gameplay mechanics go finding treasure in USS's collecting ship debris, stripping components out of wrecks and selling them on the market legally. The loot system of other online games in firefly fashion.
low risk / medium - high reward.

The smuggler
who doesn't want to be Han solo in a space simulation? Half of you wouldn't have even bought this game if star wars had not been a thing. This would require a complete revamp of the black market to be a buyers and sellers market. Super high buy in, commodities would be extremely expensive and a prime target for pirates think 6-8 million to fill up a type 6 with medium range goods. This would solve the reward factor for pirates and create a greater fun factor for traders. Not only that but the risks would be immense, along with the reward. Navigate around patrols, security, Pirates, and find yourself significantly wealthier than you started. Get caught by anyone and lose your shirt, cargo confiscation, fines, possible bounties, ship destruction, and robbery are the threats you face. A way to make trading fun and make those hugely expensive ships and modules look as though they are in sight, with a built in money sink putting the largest bullseye on your hull. this would truly round out and incorporate all of the professions.
highest risk / possibly the highest reward or loss