The Smeaton run in 3.0.3

[Dagwit]

In the patch notes for 3.0.3 it said:

"Increased the payouts for bulk passenger Missions"

I did two bulk passenger Smeaton runs (in a 160-passenger Anaconda) on the day 3.0 was released, and found them to pay Cr 11.6m and Cr 9.2m respectively for a ca. 50 min loop, quite a step down from the payments pre the 2.4 nerf, when the Smeaton run could net an Anaconda driver Cr200m/hr.

Based on my experiences in the beta, when my usual and shorter Barr Survey/Searfoss Enterprise loop had earned me Cr 22m/hr rather than the previous Cr 70m/hr, I'd been expecting the Smeaton run to come in anywhere from Cr 27m/hr up to the Cr 68m/hr that would have been expected if the Barr/Searfoss beta payouts had scaled linearly to the greater distance to Smeaton Enterprise.

So naturally I was surprised by the payouts in 3.0 and not at all surprised by the pre-patch announcement that the payouts would be changed for 3.0.3.
When the patch dropped today I did three more Smeaton runs to see if the payouts had indeed changed. And yes, they have.

My Anaconda has 162 economy passenger places. The runs went as follows.

Run 1:
Checked 5 boards and stopped with 147/162 passengers.
Payout taking cash rewards: Cr 11.5 million

Run 2:
Checked 15 boards and stopped with 161/162 passengers
Payout taking cash rewards: Cr 12,8 million

Run 3:
Checked 26 boards and stopped when I couldn't stand it any more, and left with 147/162 passengers. Getting to 147 took 12 boards.
Payout taking cash rewards: Cr 12.6 million


Now clearly two and three runs respectively are not even close to generating precise statistics, but they do allow some ballpark observations:

The larger passenger missions in the beta and 3.0 are still there. They make it easy to get a large number of passengers quickly (within five boards on two out of the three occasions) but very hard to get that last fill-up mission. They do exist - I did get one mission for 12 passengers - but hen's teeth are abundant by comparison.

The payout increase is very roughly on the order of 20%.

The 3.0 payouts were chickenfeed compared even to the payouts in the beta.

For the 3.0.3 increase all FDev have done is feed a slightly bigger chicken.

It's hard to see the point in a more or less 20% increase, unless perhaps it pushes the missions over some material reward threshold.

Nobody who stopped running bulk passenger missions in 3.0 is going to start again now.

The good news is that named passenger missions were paying pretty generously in 3.0 - about Cr 54 million a run in my Beluga. While I haven't run any such missions in 3.0.3, I have looked at the Passenger Lounge boards and the payouts show no significant changes.

 

[SkyB]

You must switch to first class bulk passengers to get good payouts.
At Xi Wangda I did this at 3.0.0 and the payout is still very good.

 

[Dagwit]

Interesting, SkyB: I've just found and read your thread on the subject. Clearly my Anaconda is no longer going to be serving any useful purpose at Allen Hub so when I've finished building up my enormous dirty great pyramid of engineering materials I may fit it out with first class cabins and go take a look.

 

[GunnerBill]

You must switch to first class bulk passengers to get good payouts.
At Xi Wangda I did this at 3.0.0 and the payout is still very good.

First class bulk? I thought all 1st class customers wanted their own cabins, making it difficult to ship many of them.

 

[IndigoWyrd]

1. It's hard to see the point in a more or less 20% increase, unless perhaps it pushes the missions over some material reward threshold.

2. Nobody who stopped running bulk passenger missions in 3.0 is going to start again now.

3. The good news is that named passenger missions were paying pretty generously in 3.0 - about Cr 54 million a run in my Beluga. While I haven't run any such missions in 3.0.3, I have looked at the Passenger Lounge boards and the payouts show no significant changes.

1. The point is that you're not meant to become weekend millionaires flying back and forth between two places.

2. Good, that's what they want.

3. Which is also how it should be. How many multi-millionaire bus drivers have you ever seen? What about yacht captains? See the difference?

 

[SpaceScania]

First class bulk? I thought all 1st class customers wanted their own cabins, making it difficult to ship many of them.

IIRC only VIP passengers require their own cabins. Hey, if Frontier actually made 1st class cabins more useful and lucrative that’s a step in the right direction in my books.

Making Luxury cabins useful would be even better because then the Beluga would have a reason to exist other than just plugging the mail slot!

 

[IndigoWyrd]

First class bulk? I thought all 1st class customers wanted their own cabins, making it difficult to ship many of them.

Those would be VIP passengers (the ones with the little crowns). Bulk passengers also come in Low Class (Economy), Professional (Business), and High Class (First).

Luxury VIP's have always had pretty decent payouts, they can just much harder to fill a ship's capacity with, as they tend to be the least common.

---

All in all, the whole passenger system could use a good reworking. The way it is right now...

So here you are, all ready for a nice romantic getaway with your special someone, you've booked a trip to see Grand Bahama Island, you board the ship, stow your luggage, pull away from the harbor, and as soon as you hit open water, the captain opens the ship up full throttle, you rocket to 100 knots, the captain makes a close, tight turn around the island, and has you back at the harbor in time for lunch. And you paid $7000 for that trip! Wasn't it great?

That's our passenger missions - race to a visitor beacon, scan and charge FSD so you're jumping out as you're receiving your mission update, and it's off to the next beacon. Maybe you'll read the messages later, maybe you won't.

Now I don't think we should spend a weekend floating around some beacon - but at least an orbit of the planet for planetary beacons, a couple minutes for free-floating or planetary beacons - at least give your guests time to take a picture out their cabin window! All the mechanics and systems are in place for a short stay - we have mission wrinkles that ask us to go sit in CZ's for a few minutes to allow passengers to observe.

Just one of many, many improvements that could be made. A hyperdiction-styled "cut scene" to show off some particularly interesting highlight of the destination would be nice - anything more than what we have.

---

Bulk Passengers:

[video=youtube;o9Xg7ui5mLA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9Xg7ui5mLA[/video]

Efficient? Sure. Comfortable? Not even close. Queue the Tetris theme.

 

[Dagwit]

First class bulk? I thought all 1st class customers wanted their own cabins, making it difficult to ship many of them.

I've just fired up ED and I'm looking at a passenger mission '25 tourists seeking transport: minimum cabin class First'; so they do exist.

 

[SkyB]

Xi Wangda (Cartier City) <---> Donglavs (Cartan Installation)

1st class bulk, on the way back try to find some missions, too. There sometimes are a few paying 3 to 5 mil to Cartier.
Usually 10 to 15 mil to Cartan and 3 to 5 mil back to Cartier + tons of imperial rank.
Mostly tourists, businessmen and scientists - NO VIP.
There are 2 more profitable systems around you get missions to at Cartier City.

Three to four loops/ h = around 50 mil on average, almost no board hopping

However, the best thing is its name:

The WangDong Run

I've made a little guide indeed you can find on the forum but that's the summary.

 

[the source 0179]

In the patch notes for 3.0.3 it said:

"Increased the payouts for bulk passenger Missions"

I did two bulk passenger Smeaton runs (in a 160-passenger Anaconda) on the day 3.0 was released, and found them to pay Cr 11.6m and Cr 9.2m respectively for a ca. 50 min loop, quite a step down from the payments pre the 2.4 nerf, when the Smeaton run could net an Anaconda driver Cr200m/hr.

Based on my experiences in the beta, when my usual and shorter Barr Survey/Searfoss Enterprise loop had earned me Cr 22m/hr rather than the previous Cr 70m/hr, I'd been expecting the Smeaton run to come in anywhere from Cr 27m/hr up to the Cr 68m/hr that would have been expected if the Barr/Searfoss beta payouts had scaled linearly to the greater distance to Smeaton Enterprise.

So naturally I was surprised by the payouts in 3.0 and not at all surprised by the pre-patch announcement that the payouts would be changed for 3.0.3.
When the patch dropped today I did three more Smeaton runs to see if the payouts had indeed changed. And yes, they have.

My Anaconda has 162 economy passenger places. The runs went as follows.

Run 1:
Checked 5 boards and stopped with 147/162 passengers.
Payout taking cash rewards: Cr 11.5 million

Run 2:
Checked 15 boards and stopped with 161/162 passengers
Payout taking cash rewards: Cr 12,8 million

Run 3:
Checked 26 boards and stopped when I couldn't stand it any more, and left with 147/162 passengers. Getting to 147 took 12 boards.
Payout taking cash rewards: Cr 12.6 million


Now clearly two and three runs respectively are not even close to generating precise statistics, but they do allow some ballpark observations:

The larger passenger missions in the beta and 3.0 are still there. They make it easy to get a large number of passengers quickly (within five boards on two out of the three occasions) but very hard to get that last fill-up mission. They do exist - I did get one mission for 12 passengers - but hen's teeth are abundant by comparison.

The payout increase is very roughly on the order of 20%.

The 3.0 payouts were chickenfeed compared even to the payouts in the beta.

For the 3.0.3 increase all FDev have done is feed a slightly bigger chicken.

It's hard to see the point in a more or less 20% increase, unless perhaps it pushes the missions over some material reward threshold.

Nobody who stopped running bulk passenger missions in 3.0 is going to start again now.

The good news is that named passenger missions were paying pretty generously in 3.0 - about Cr 54 million a run in my Beluga. While I haven't run any such missions in 3.0.3, I have looked at the Passenger Lounge boards and the payouts show no significant changes.

Thats pathetic I guess no refugees will be going to smeaton in my ship then lol

 

[Susanna]

Xi Wangda (Cartier City) <---> Donglavs (Cartan Installation)

1st class bulk, on the way back try to find some missions, too. There sometimes are a few paying 3 to 5 mil to Cartier.
Usually 10 to 15 mil to Cartan and 3 to 5 mil back to Cartier + tons of imperial rank.
Mostly tourists, businessmen and scientists - NO VIP.
There are 2 more profitable systems around you get missions to at Cartier City.

Three to four loops/ h = around 50 mil on average, almost no board hopping

However, the best thing is its name:

The WangDong Run

I've made a little guide indeed you can find on the forum but that's the summary.

SkyB, I looked for it but couldn't find it in your forum posts list.

Could you provide a link please?

 

[Schmack]

1. The point is that you're not meant to become weekend millionaires flying back and forth between two places.

2. Good, that's what they want.

3. Which is also how it should be. How many multi-millionaire bus drivers have you ever seen? What about yacht captains? See the difference?

The barn door was left open and the horses escaped long ago. The game is full of billionaire bus drivers now.

 

[Schmack]

OP, did you find any data missions to Smeaton or Gregory? They were going for up to a couple million each, so if you could stack 10 of them you'd be beating your passenger haul. I doubt they pay that well now. I am sure the Blackbird Consortium are happy about the more manageable state of affairs.

 

[Ted Striker]

Why are they so adamant at keeping these awful grinds in game? Every time a good way to reduce the credits or reputation grind is found they nerf it. Why is this entire game one large grind?

I found Smeaton by myself before it was posted anywhere, and was quite pleased. I made billions. No need for me to do it again. But come on, it was a great way to reduce that credit grind, and reducing grinds is a good thing. I don't care that the recent reputation reward changes gave people admiral and prince in a matter of hours when it took me literally weeks to grind it a year ago, because that's a grind reduction the game desperately needs. I don't fly my corvette to be a special snowflake and nobody else can have one unless they did the same grind I did, but I hear people complaining about just that. Same with credits.

Grinds need to be reduced. The game may as well be called Elite: Grind.

 

[Schmack]

Why are they so adamant at keeping these awful grinds in game? Every time a good way to reduce the credits or reputation grind is found they nerf it. Why is this entire game one large grind?

I found Smeaton by myself before it was posted anywhere, and was quite pleased. I made billions. No need for me to do it again. But come on, it was a great way to reduce that credit grind, and reducing grinds is a good thing. I don't care that the recent reputation reward changes gave people admiral and prince in a matter of hours when it took me literally weeks to grind it a year ago, because that's a grind reduction the game desperately needs. I don't fly my corvette to be a special snowflake and nobody else can have one unless they did the same grind I did, but I hear people complaining about just that. Same with credits.

Grinds need to be reduced. The game may as well be called Elite: Grind.

It's not the grind that bothers me. I used to have fun in the res sites bounty hunting, but suddenly the big ships were taken out of the sites, then they were put back in but only after I'd lost interest in it and my wingmates had already found other games to play. I poked around a bit with missions and the CGs but it never was the same for me. Then I started finding these unicorn scenarios we all hope for. I'd run those for a while until they'd be nerfed. I had several that I never mentioned that stuck around for a long time, but even they were nerfed (it wasn't the BGS).

Rest assured, if you're in a system at a station where the payouts are phenomenal, one day you're going to open that mission screen and find they all vanished, now you just have to go hunt pirate X, go to that system and be told he's in another system, probably the one you started in. If you drop into a res site, you'll have some action for a little while but unless you're in a haz res, the feds are so overbearing and ever present that the challenge has become getting any kills at all without shooting the feds. You could try exploring but those have never paid anything worthwhile and I don't care for the "highway to riches" preplanned route of the high paying worlds.

There's something alluring about that trip to that system where you believe a virtual gold mine exists. When it's nerfed, you begin to get the idea that FDev wants players doing the vanilla missions. 99% of the systems are worthless to 99% of the players. Maybe FDev wants to change that by lowering the worth of the other 1% so they are all equally worthless.

 

[the source 0179]

Why are they so adamant at keeping these awful grinds in game? Every time a good way to reduce the credits or reputation grind is found they nerf it. Why is this entire game one large grind?

I found Smeaton by myself before it was posted anywhere, and was quite pleased. I made billions. No need for me to do it again. But come on, it was a great way to reduce that credit grind, and reducing grinds is a good thing. I don't care that the recent reputation reward changes gave people admiral and prince in a matter of hours when it took me literally weeks to grind it a year ago, because that's a grind reduction the game desperately needs. I don't fly my corvette to be a special snowflake and nobody else can have one unless they did the same grind I did, but I hear people complaining about just that. Same with credits.

Grinds need to be reduced. The game may as well be called Elite: Grind.

Agreed

 

[ZeroAi]

1. The point is that you're not meant to become weekend millionaires flying back and forth between two places... How many multi-millionaire bus drivers have you ever seen? What about yacht captains? See the difference?

You're missing the point - we're not "bus drivers," we're "business owners."

A bus driver shows up with nothing but the ability to drive, and gets paid a small hourly rate. A business owner invests money to make money.

So, what sane business man would invest 250,000,000 to 500,000,000 into a "vehicle" like an Anaconda if they couldn't make their initial investment back in a reasonable time?

It takes A LOT of time to make enough credits to buy and outfit a large ship, and once you do you should be able to make more than you were when you flew a medium ship.

If not, there's no reason for large ships (which cost 250,000,00 or more to outfit) to even exist if you can't make millions per trip.

Which is in fact a problem for us cargo haulers - I own ever ship in the game but make more money flying cargo in my Python than I do in larger ships :-( Sad, really.

 

[SkyB]

SkyB, I looked for it but couldn't find it in your forum posts list.

Could you provide a link please?

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...money-material-rank?highlight=Small+passenger

 

[Dagwit]

OP, did you find any data missions to Smeaton or Gregory? They were going for up to a couple million each, so if you could stack 10 of them you'd be beating your passenger haul. I doubt they pay that well now. I am sure the Blackbird Consortium are happy about the more manageable state of affairs.

Never looked for data missions. It was a time thing - I was spending a painful amount of time board-hopping in the passenger lounge as it was.

Next time I do the Smeaton run - VIP passenger missions are still very tasty - l'll have a look at the mission board.

 

[IndigoWyrd]

You're missing the point - we're not "bus drivers," we're "business owners."

A bus driver shows up with nothing but the ability to drive, and gets paid a small hourly rate. A business owner invests money to make money.

So, what sane business man would invest 250,000,000 to 500,000,000 into a "vehicle" like an Anaconda if they couldn't make their initial investment back in a reasonable time?

So simply because we invest our funds into a business venture, we are entitled to automatic success? No business venture should ever fail?

Counter-point: What sane business man would invest any amount of money into a venture where the market is already saturated with identical ventures?

And lastly, and more comparably - I own a very nice cruising ship, and put a very solid six-digits into purchasing it, renovating it, and maintaining it annually. While most of my usage is personal, I do take charter passengers on cruises as well. Have I made back my initial investment? No, and I likely won't for quite some time to come. Charters are not my primary occupation, and even if they were, the areas I operate in are likewise saturated with other charter ships. It's something of a long-term investment.
Would I like to become an over-night multi-millionaire? Perhaps pick up a celebrity with way more money than brains? Sure I would, but realistically? If it pays for itself by the time I retire I'll be impressed.

Most businesses, especially new businesses, don't even turn profit for their first 3-5 years.

It takes A LOT of time to make enough credits to buy and outfit a large ship, and once you do you should be able to make more than you were when you flew a medium ship.

If not, there's no reason for large ships (which cost 250,000,00 or more to outfit) to even exist if you can't make millions per trip.

Which is in fact a problem for us cargo haulers - I own ever ship in the game but make more money flying cargo in my Python than I do in larger ships :-( Sad, really.

How long? Define "A LOT" of time. I can, with minimal effort, make 100m credits in 35 hours. With some effort I can make this same amount in a day.

I own several large ships, including 2 Anaconda, a Corvette and a Cutter, all fully outfitted the way I want, and fully G5 engineered (Legacy).

Making millions per outing? Absolutely. A single passenger taking a vacation tour will pay this much or more.

Buying a new Anaconda every trip? Shouldn't happen.