...or just balance the professions so truckers don't make the lions share??
[video=youtube;Sd5ZLJWQmss]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sd5ZLJWQmss[/video]
[video=youtube;Sd5ZLJWQmss]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sd5ZLJWQmss[/video]
The State of money making in this game.
- Thread starter Urzorn
- Start date
you cant get elite in combat or exploration by trading. ergo its not the only way to progress. Sure its the simplest method, the easiest, the one requiring the least imagination, but I haven't traded much at all yet and am progressing just fine 
I never touched rares and are now at about 400 millions.
Great, imagine things, awesome.you cant get elite in combat or exploration by trading. ergo its not the only way to progress. Sure its the simplest method, the easiest, the one requiring the least imagination, but I haven't traded much at all yet and am progressing just fine
I'm happy for you.
We were talking about pay, did you hear how much a trucker makes in this game, for what is basically take-off and landings?
Did you compare it to any other profession?
Have you even lost a fully kitted Cobra and compared cost/rewards?
I keep many Millions in reserve just so I can fly a Viper with impunity and not have to trade TO HAVE A NICE SHIP.
So for what its worth, this is my experience with income rates so far, from a fairly casual player (have a wife, kids, and a career as a software engineer, so not a lot of time, but I use it well).
I went through the ship "progression" through Bounty Hunting at first, ultimately hitting a wall a while after a fully "A-kitted" Cobra. The wall was grinding Assassination missions and trying not to fall asleep while killing Anacondas. Don't get me wrong, Bounty Hunting was fun at first and it pays well once you get a good routine, but like all things the repetition gets boring eventually. On a good night, I made around 1 million credits an hour doing missions, but just hunting a a NAV or RES would bring in around 500k an hour (which was more fun, imo).
So I tried mining, and I actually enjoyed finding good rocks, but the scooping system is horrible and I understand why it turns so many people off from mining. I went specifically for pristine metallic planetary rings and I would supercruise right into the closest rings to the planet. I found that this would yield the highest chance of Platinum, Palladium, and Gold, which were the only metals that I would bother collecting. It would take around an hour to fill my cargo hold, which would fetch between 300-500k.
Next up was trading, which I did in a Cobra as that was all I had at the time. Doing trade runs between Industrial and High Tech systems was making me around 500k an hour at first.
Ok so at this point all three of those "professions" felt fairly balanced.
I thought to myself:
- Lower level assassination missions would be nice.
- The "patrol" missions need to be completely redesigned.
- Mid to High level cargo missions would be nice.
So of all the professions so far, Trading interested me the most. I enjoyed the strategy of having to find a trade route, the risk involved, and how it felt like running a business in space.
I progressed through the bigger ships, and made an absurd amount of credits. Now I am in a Python just doing a little bit of everything and mostly exploring just for fun to see all the cool stuff in the galaxy while also dabbling in the military stuff.
Thing is, as I went to bigger and bigger ship, the cost of running them, replacing them, insuring them, and filling up their cargo holds, got exponentially higher as I progressed. That isn't as prevalent for the other professions simply because all of the other professions are doable quite well in ships that cost very little in comparison.
Risk = Costs (or potential losses), in this case...
So with Trading, there is the *potential* for very high risk, very high reward (very high risk in Open, at least) - yet any of the other professions are possible with only low risk.
Sure you can bounty hunt/pirate in an Asp/Python/Anaconda, but it is easily done in a Viper or Cobra, which is low risk and more challenging.
With trading, in order to make multi-million credits an hour, you have to upgrade to ships that become higher risk. None of the other professions really require you to upgrade to higher risk ships in order to be successful. I recently parked my Python and got a Viper to do Assassination missions and Bounty Hunting in just because it is so much more challenging and fun, while the risk is very low.
The problem, as I see it, is that currently Bounty Hunting, Pirating, Mining, and Exploring do not have the same amount of *opportunity* as Trading in regards to earning credits. Also, those professions do not really have a line of ships to progress through that really match the profession.
How to fix it:
- Bounty Hunters and Pirates should have the opportunity to go to "higher risk" areas that provide bigger, more juicy, more challenging targets that give bigger bounties or carry higher priced goods. However, as with trading, these areas need to actually increase the risk involved.
- Exploration data needs to sell for a lot more, and it would be cool if there were very rare objects out there that even advanced discovery scanners can't find, which require a player to actually fly around and find it.
- A line of Mining ships and specific equipment that makes it more tolerable/efficient/profitable.
That's all I got for now, getting sleepy.
I went through the ship "progression" through Bounty Hunting at first, ultimately hitting a wall a while after a fully "A-kitted" Cobra. The wall was grinding Assassination missions and trying not to fall asleep while killing Anacondas. Don't get me wrong, Bounty Hunting was fun at first and it pays well once you get a good routine, but like all things the repetition gets boring eventually. On a good night, I made around 1 million credits an hour doing missions, but just hunting a a NAV or RES would bring in around 500k an hour (which was more fun, imo).
So I tried mining, and I actually enjoyed finding good rocks, but the scooping system is horrible and I understand why it turns so many people off from mining. I went specifically for pristine metallic planetary rings and I would supercruise right into the closest rings to the planet. I found that this would yield the highest chance of Platinum, Palladium, and Gold, which were the only metals that I would bother collecting. It would take around an hour to fill my cargo hold, which would fetch between 300-500k.
Next up was trading, which I did in a Cobra as that was all I had at the time. Doing trade runs between Industrial and High Tech systems was making me around 500k an hour at first.
Ok so at this point all three of those "professions" felt fairly balanced.
I thought to myself:
- Lower level assassination missions would be nice.
- The "patrol" missions need to be completely redesigned.
- Mid to High level cargo missions would be nice.
So of all the professions so far, Trading interested me the most. I enjoyed the strategy of having to find a trade route, the risk involved, and how it felt like running a business in space.
I progressed through the bigger ships, and made an absurd amount of credits. Now I am in a Python just doing a little bit of everything and mostly exploring just for fun to see all the cool stuff in the galaxy while also dabbling in the military stuff.
Thing is, as I went to bigger and bigger ship, the cost of running them, replacing them, insuring them, and filling up their cargo holds, got exponentially higher as I progressed. That isn't as prevalent for the other professions simply because all of the other professions are doable quite well in ships that cost very little in comparison.
Risk = Costs (or potential losses), in this case...
So with Trading, there is the *potential* for very high risk, very high reward (very high risk in Open, at least) - yet any of the other professions are possible with only low risk.
Sure you can bounty hunt/pirate in an Asp/Python/Anaconda, but it is easily done in a Viper or Cobra, which is low risk and more challenging.
With trading, in order to make multi-million credits an hour, you have to upgrade to ships that become higher risk. None of the other professions really require you to upgrade to higher risk ships in order to be successful. I recently parked my Python and got a Viper to do Assassination missions and Bounty Hunting in just because it is so much more challenging and fun, while the risk is very low.
The problem, as I see it, is that currently Bounty Hunting, Pirating, Mining, and Exploring do not have the same amount of *opportunity* as Trading in regards to earning credits. Also, those professions do not really have a line of ships to progress through that really match the profession.
How to fix it:
- Bounty Hunters and Pirates should have the opportunity to go to "higher risk" areas that provide bigger, more juicy, more challenging targets that give bigger bounties or carry higher priced goods. However, as with trading, these areas need to actually increase the risk involved.
- Exploration data needs to sell for a lot more, and it would be cool if there were very rare objects out there that even advanced discovery scanners can't find, which require a player to actually fly around and find it.
- A line of Mining ships and specific equipment that makes it more tolerable/efficient/profitable.
That's all I got for now, getting sleepy.
well the amount of money you make flying a space truck is actually the most reasonable in space. although even that becomes a joke if you want to eventually have an upgraded anaconda. The upkeep alone for that is quite a bit and there is no way to actually sustain it other than trucking which is a shame.
anyway like many people have pointed out we need the other jobs out there to scale better into the mid to late game.
One of my ideas for example is to increase the profits you make, by your rank:
Harmless x 1
Mostly Harmless x 2
and so on untill
Elite: x 9 (or even make it times 10 as a bonus for actually reaching elite)
but even that considering the average bounty and how long you take to reach elite isn't as much of an increase as it seems. most ships give between 5k and 20k bounties. at a combat rank of "expert" this would transform into 25k - 100k bounties. Still a laughable small amount considering how high the prices get in end-game ships.
The "big score" of course would be the occasional anaconda. most anacondas I've seen had around 60k to 80k bounties. They would now at Expert rank net you 300k to 400k. and so would make it well worth it to actually put in the effort of taking down the biggest ship there is.
Plus the system would give you another reason to work towards your "Elite" ranking.
The fact that you said trading had any risk whatsoever makes your opinion null and void. If you got blown up trading, you were bad. Like, REAL bad. Please go back and imagine more NPC's chasing you only to get away by the skin of your teeth everytime as some sort of victory when we all know its just submit, boost, FSD in that order.
I was doing some boom hunting today and found a unicorn: maximum supply, i.e. 6183 to buy, and then 10Mm to Seeking Luxuries. 4.5min roundtrip in a 500t Type-9 makes it 18.160 cr/t/h, or 9.1M cr/h. Give or take. Wow.
It's all just trucking, its extremely rare to find a player who owns anything decent without trading.
This is one of the games biggest inherent flaws, yet the 'I quit' 'Im bored' threads garner more responses.
Devs have the occupation with the lowest risk making the most profit.
Vets probably don't want this to change because of the sheer volume of hours they have spent trading, and they feel as you should have to do the same to get 'to their level', which is selfish and does not lend to the games success.
This last part I base on forum user feedback.
Can we get some job equality or what?
This is one of the games biggest inherent flaws, yet the 'I quit' 'Im bored' threads garner more responses.
Devs have the occupation with the lowest risk making the most profit.
Vets probably don't want this to change because of the sheer volume of hours they have spent trading, and they feel as you should have to do the same to get 'to their level', which is selfish and does not lend to the games success.
This last part I base on forum user feedback.
Can we get some job equality or what?
