![[VR] Mad Mike](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/27/27910.jpg?1553527108){kind=avatar}
Indeed and I am not having a go at anyone either opinions are all valid
Void Opal Mining - Broken?
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We all know that ED is just a game, we play it for entertainment and enjoyment but if that enjoyment is partly derrived from the satisfaction (even if its just a game) of doing a thing right and earning your way towards a game goal and that game goal having some value within a community if not just for yourself then diluting that challange and value out makes that game less enjoyable to some players.
It does not reflect poorly on you for deriving value from a virtual achievement in a game, if you didnt i'd figure that you are missing out on some of the enjoyment to be had. its not central but it is part of the DNA of the Elite game franchise.
If ranks, wealth, ships, stats, etc meant nothing in ED then why do people constantly bang on about these things. Diluting the value of status within ED is a mistake i feel.
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DNA-Decay in Post#9 in this thread has posted a video link for tips to getting it right here. It can be frustrating to find the very bright ones, hope it helps you.
Lestat
Banned
I feel it dumb downs the game. When people look at Elite trading Less than day players will look at other aspects of the game and ask them self this question. Will Elite Combat or Exploration also require less than a day to complete and then say Well if this game takes less than 3 days then why to put any effort into the game.
So is losing people ok with you. Just by looking at one aspect of the game and believing the whole game could be the same.
I disagree with those that think we should go back to the way it was before void opals. Money was too hard to come by before, I agree with @Obsidian Ant on that point. Making Elite more friendly to a wider swath of people is good in my opinion. However yeah getting Elite in trading rank in a day is pretty silly. There has to be a happy medium somewhere but I am skeptical we will see it before 2020 if at all.
Still, these gold rushes should vary more and involve different activities in the game for sure. The void opal rush needed to be replaced with something else months ago.
Still, these gold rushes should vary more and involve different activities in the game for sure. The void opal rush needed to be replaced with something else months ago.
Get a fast miner (I prefer a g5 DD Orca), and smash that pulsewave scanner continuously while boosting at 600 m/s in a pristine ice ring that you have probed and have found a void opal hotspot. I usually find one core about every 3-5 minutes (not always void opals). Don't drop in right on top of the marker, go about a MM or more out.
DDastardly00
D
I'm so this right now^
I spend more time grinding for mats than anything else in this game, which sucks, For example, 85% of my ED time last night was spent gathering mats, looking for HG Signal Sources - grade 4-5 mats, did I find Pharmaceutical Isolators? Nope. Did I find Improvised components? Nope.
After that seemingly unending joyless activity, I moved on to gathering raw mats at geological sites. Which worked great, thankfully but still pretty joyless. The last 15% of my night was spent actually doing something fun, I was in a wing hunting bugs at an AX zone.
Now, does that sound like a balanced, fun night of game play to you? No, of course it doesn't, and that's because it's not.
But hey, let's complain about mining void opals, something that is actually fun and brings me great joy, rather than the elephant in the room, the boring process of gathering mats and borked High Grade Signal sources since the 3.3 update. Can we fix that please?
The problem is/was that most of the methods of making money were boring and extremely repetitive. Additionally, many people enjoy the aspects of Elite that do not pay well and you need the money to have the equipment/ships/re-buys to do these activities. If Frontier had done a better job making earning money enjoyable I might be able to agree with you but that is just not the reality. What was happening before were people were using quasi-exploits like board flipping to earn their coin so they could get on with the parts of the game that they liked to play.
Lestat
Banned
Here the thing AtomicMegaNerd. It took me 5 trips to make a Billion credits. Two with a Cobra and 3 in a Python and a little combat. To me, this is Easy mode for Nerds. This will be the downfall of Elite Dangerous.
This was the topic I started in March. An Elite Trader way too fast?
This was the topic I started in March. An Elite Trader way too fast?
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True... but Frontier is working hard on the largest update todate, and i hope that they read this thread. Elite has always been a work in progress, and ballance/fun is something they really need to put on their todo list for season 4.
Because Let them eat cake is not a solution.
See, this is what I've been saying for years.
With what we now know about how the BGS has changed, surely it wouldn't have been that difficult to create some kind of "super-boom" state for each type of economy (when a variety of different conditions - which players could invoke with their actions - were met) which created it's own "gold rushes" for a limited period?
Tourist systems could provide the old-style megabucks passenger missions, systems that rely on commodities could provide spendy cargo missions, anarchies could provide lucrative BHing opportunities, sytems in war could provide well-paid massacre and data-gathering missions and systems in crisis could provide lucrative opportunities for delivering food and first aid etc... in addition to mining systems paying well for the fancy rocks.
All that stuff might last a week or so and it'd be up to players to keep track of where the best opportunities were (or even provoke them to manifest) and have suitable ships ready to go when the situation required them.
Instead, we just got rings which might as well have a giant ATM in the middle of them.
![[VR] Enexemander](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/119/119036.jpg?1621636716){kind=avatar}
Thanks Lightspeed. I've seen that video previously, and I actually watched it again today wondering if I was doing something wrong. Just supremely unlucky I guess.
Here's the thing- I'm already Triple Elite. Without using exploits, I'm fairly rich (~1.5 billion in assets, last I checked a long time ago). Not much to some, but more than enough to do what I want). How MUCH something pays out means very, very little to me. The experience of doing it is the most important thing.
I've spent hours and hours in science installations just practicing flying around my various ships and testing engineering drives, etc. All for zero payout. The joy of flying and improving was my only reward.
This core mining business is like the polar opposite. It's egregiously boring. From my (unlucky AF) perspective, it's probably the worst thing I've ever seen in this game in a design standpoint.
jumps off the soapbox
That said, what are we arguing for, here? Raising the money necessary to earn Elite for the arbitrary ranking system?
Why does that matter?
Yeah I get it. I don't know what the answer is, but going back to the way it was before was also terrible. It was too hard to make good money even in a maxed out Cutter with Elite rank. At least I can ignore the horribly broken and terrible missions system when I need to make some money and I can just go earn my credits and then get on with the game. I will ackowledge that a huge problem with the void opals rush is that you can do it in almost any ship and do it too early in the game. It makes the endgame ships pointless in many ways.
What I do know for sure is that there is no reason we should have to wait until 2020 to get some balance fixes on the economy of the game.
Agreed! This sounds like a good starting point. Anyone remember the Professor Palin mission as well? Find the Thargoid artifacts and return them for good profit? That was a nice change of pace too! More of that kind of thing would also be awesome.
How about lucrative search and rescue missions? Rescuing VIP's in escape pods after a Thargoid attack? Or a special campaign to repair a key station with great payouts? There is so much low hanging fruit and so much that could be done here.
I can't speak for wing bounty missions, but doing trading or passenger missions I generally get in the 30 to 50 million per hour range, after the initial setup of getting reputation high enough to be able to stack lucrative missions for whatever station(s) I'm working out of.
You can push that higher though by being more targeted in where you are working than I normally am. ~100 million per hour at Robigo for passenger missions, for example. I had a system I was working trade missions out of a few weeks back where I was doing about 100 million an hour as well. I also imagine doing wing trading missions could be higher profit as well as many of those missions tend to have much higher payouts.
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The photo in the Spoiler below shows me zeroing on what looks like the correct shape of 'roid which is glowing nicely. Clearly, it wasn't the right one, and I should have been looking at the even brighter one immediately to the left and a little further away. (Ignore what the limpet is saying, it's referring to something behind me.)
The void opal rocks frequently seem to hide behind others, whether by design or chance I can't work out.
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Maybe it is my fault for not making my point clear, as I concentrated on the money side of stuff.
I couldn't care less if void opals make you 200 or 800 Million Credits/hour, good for you.
I meant the ranks are a joke now, where as they used to mean a decent achievement before.
The reason I don't care about earning too fast is because of all the past exploits making credits meaningless in this game.
Long live on the only meaningful rank left in this game, Combat elite, as it still needs many kills and lots of hours the get
(I still haven't got it)
I couldn't care less if void opals make you 200 or 800 Million Credits/hour, good for you.
I meant the ranks are a joke now, where as they used to mean a decent achievement before.
The reason I don't care about earning too fast is because of all the past exploits making credits meaningless in this game.
Long live on the only meaningful rank left in this game, Combat elite, as it still needs many kills and lots of hours the get
(I still haven't got it)
Maybe it is my fault for not making my point clear, as I concentrated on the money side of stuff.
I couldn't care less if void opals make you 200 or 800 Million Credits/hour, good for you.
I meant the ranks are a joke now, where as they used to mean a decent achievement before.
The reason I don't care about earning too fast is because of all the past exploits making credits meaningless in this game.
Long live on the only meaningful rank left in this game, Combat elite, as it still needs many kills and lots of hours the get
(I still haven't got it)
This is just a game...nothing is actually "meaningful" beyond what you, personally, get out of it. The amount of time it takes you to get that rank is not what makes it meaningful, your perception of the achievement is. i.e. whether something is meaningful or not is completely subjective. What you consider an appropriate time commitment for a rank to make it "meaningful" someone else will consider an unacceptable amount of grind, and possibly quit the game because it's too much bother.
That being said, I agree with you that trade-elite is too easy. Combat-Elite, on the other hand, I think is a little too extreme. Just my subjective opinion though; I'm sure there's other people who disagree with both of us and they are no more right or wrong than we are.
Lestat
Banned
Well I have a different take on this. We have different types of players. The ones that Like to play the game. While we have a group that wants the End game and then switch to a new game never to look back.
DDastardly00
D
I got Elite in trade a very long time ago just running trade routes with an Anaconda. I don't recall it taking very long either, If anything needs a buff it's trade rank only, the money is fine considering the 100 million per hour trade benchmark isn't that far off from VO mining.
Trade Rank has always been too easy. Long before Void opals, it was too easy. If they want to buff the trade ranks then that's fine by me, make it harder to get to Elite, balance against Exploration and Combat for all I care.
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