What is everyones ideal credits per hour rate?

[zarrazee]

Imagine being a new player and seeing a mountain that steep to climb for end game content.

What some see as an obstacle, others see as a challenge. It's just down to personality, knowledge, influences and upbringing.

Elite has been far too casual and dumbed down for my liking over the years. I preferred the earnings potential how it was in 2014. Fitting out an A rated Viper felt like an achievement, now it's just a joke.

 

[Winterwalker]

For mine, credits per hour is irrelevant. All that matters is that I'm enjoying what I'm doing in the moment.

True .. but carrier upkeep does mean there is a floor or you're running at a loss and eventually your funds will drain.

I'm not saying that's a bad thing because it's different from running a normal ship, where you don't get charged any docking or storage fees by stations, so in fact I think it's a good thing because it's a new game.

To this end I have sufficiently proven for you below, a minimum credits per hour floor, as required to maintain a static caravan offering all services, at approximately 148,810 credits per hour. You're welcome

 

[CMDR Xerix]

What some see as an obstacle, others see as a challenge. It's just down to personality, knowledge, influences and upbringing.

Elite has been far too casual and dumbed down for my liking over the years. I preferred the earnings potential how it was in 2014. Fitting out an A rated Viper felt like an achievement, now it's just a joke.

I mean personally, I would consider solo thargoid killing being a challenge. If you consider 100 hours of grinding space rocks as a challenge rather than unnecessary game design then ok. There needs to be balance, whether that is rewards being scaled with ranks or some other system, but a top end of 80m/h just won't cut the mustard when considering both current and aspiring fleet carrier owners.

 

[goemon]

... but a top end of 80m/h just won't cut the mustard when considering both current ... fleet carrier owners.

why? i mean, an FC upkeep is at 25 mio per week max - and somewhere like 20 mio with tritium and maintenance more likely for a solo commander.

80 mio means you can earn a MONTH of running costs in 1 hour.

as for aspiring fleet carrier owners - that's why i think the purchase cost is too high in the first place.

 

[Crook]

this is already the case (since a long time) see here:
the problem being, that everyone having done a few mining ranks is trade elite ofc.

No it isn't. 1 tonne of mined platinum is sold for the same price regardless. 1 tonne of platinum when at the first rank should pay next to nothing. Only at Elite should you get top price for it (in lore, maybe you can go for the idea that inexperienced miners produce inferior product so get offered less as a price or something). A few hours mining when a new player can get you from sidewinder to anaconda very quickly. Imagine if the best payout was peanuts, for every career. Then with increase in rank comes better pay. Exploration, mining and combat. Always feel like the game is accelerating, and no newbies skip the fun of scaping for the next ship.

 

[goemon]

No it isn't. 1 tonne of mined platinum is sold for the same price regardless. 1 tonne of platinum when at the first rank should pay next to nothing. Only at Elite should you get top price for it (in lore, maybe you can go for the idea that inexperienced miners produce inferior product so get offered less as a price or something). A few hours mining when a new player can get you from sidewinder to anaconda very quickly. Imagine if the best payout was peanuts, for every career. Then with increase in rank comes better pay. Exploration, mining and combat. Always feel like the game is accelerating, and no newbies skip the fun of scaping for the next ship.

i thought you were referring to missions, as you wrote:

not be the same per mission per player

missions pay already according to rank.

true - everything else doesn't really (shipspawn and rank of spawn depends on ship you fly and combat rank, therefore there is an effect on bounty hunting. and trade profit increases with cargho load).

It would hit my immersion hard if a ton of gold is more or less worth depending on rank, but it would surely tackle the problem somehow.

 

[metatheurgist]

why? i mean, an FC upkeep is at 25 mio per week max - and somewhere like 20 mio with tritium and maintenance more likely for a solo commander.

80 mio means you can earn a MONTH of running costs in 1 hour.

as for aspiring fleet carrier owners - that's why i think the purchase cost is too high in the first place.

Yep, the initial running and purchase cost of FCs was based on people making 400M/hr and it shows. They overreacted when reducing the running costs. They can always reduce the cost of FCs.

 

[Eraden]

No it isn't. 1 tonne of mined platinum is sold for the same price regardless. 1 tonne of platinum when at the first rank should pay next to nothing. Only at Elite should you get top price for it (in lore, maybe you can go for the idea that inexperienced miners produce inferior product so get offered less as a price or something). A few hours mining when a new player can get you from sidewinder to anaconda very quickly. Imagine if the best payout was peanuts, for every career. Then with increase in rank comes better pay. Exploration, mining and combat. Always feel like the game is accelerating, and no newbies skip the fun of scaping for the next ship.

I honestly don't think that miners should be penalized for selling their goods, based on their rank. One of the most exciting things that can happen to a miner is finding one of those special rocks containing a high value ore. When it happened to me, back when I first started mining, I felt like a California gold miner striking it rich. I was so giddy. "WOOOOOO, I can buy a shiny new Cobra now! A COBRA! I can finally play with the big boys!" I don't want to take that feeling away from new miners. And honestly, a few tons of valuable ore is not going to suddenly shoot a miner all the way from a Sidewinder to an Anaconda. Even with lucky finds, it still takes a long time to work your way up.....provided of course that the days of LTD and Painite bonanzas are finally behind us.

 

[photomankc]

My idea for mining was always that trying to sell at market would be low reward. Imagine the lunacy of driving a truck around filled with "Bob's Copper Stock" looking for buyers. You might sell some for good money but most would laugh at you or offer little. The way to earn money for the goods would be picking up mining missions. You get a contract to go get and bring back the goods (allow partial delivery too). Common metal + long duration + low rank = X% boost to market price while rare metal + short duration + high rank = 8X boost to market price. Partial completion gives X/2% Something along those lines. Every metal is eligible but each system would have a subset of metals/minerals they produce missions to get.

This means your 8T of Void Opals are going to be up to you to find a good price on open market (you should need to be allied to get best price too) which should be rare. But take a mission to get some and return and you are getting a nice price. Tie those missions to BGS so they are not pumped out 24/7.

 

[Tikanderoga]

Upkeep is 20+m per week with all of the services, I pay around about 13m per week as I suspend the Shipyard and Outfitting. Fleet Carriers were complained about enough for it's upkeep. I largely disagreed with the people complaining about upkeep as I would say that an hour mining could pay for like 10 weeks of upkeep on a fully kitted out carrier. But having figures of cr/h at what you were saying would essentially kill carriers.

Imagine being a new player and seeing a mountain that steep to climb for end game content. Not really fair that the veteran players have reaped the rewards of consistent 200m/h+ over years when new players would be subject to a measly 40-80m/h for the same activity.

That isn't balance that's just straight up nerfing income streams.

Base is 5m, anything beyond that obviously adds up. I don't have outfitting or a shipyard on mine or any fancy extra and it racks up 10m per week plus jumps.

How would my numbers kill carriers?
Let's say you are miner, and you can make a cozy 50m in an hour, no risk involved. Your carrier is now funded for 2.5 weeks, mine for 5 weeks. 1 hour, minimal risk of some NPC pirates.

Sure it would make FCs a long term goal for new comers, but FCs aren't something one is supposed to obtain within 48 hours of playing.

Yes, the veterans here who raked in the dough during the various gold rushes won't worry about credits ever again. But that's the way in every MMO. If you are there when the floodgates open, you can rake it in. Consider it a reward for being a long term player.

And the income streams need to be nerfed (mainly mining). In the last 2 years, credits have been handed out in abundance, to a point where they were meaningless. As you said: 1 hour of mining paid for 10 weeks of a FC upkeep.
Things do need to be balanced.
You could drop 10t of LTDs to a new player and they'd be flying an A rated conda 2 hours later.
Without the balancing of income streams, new players rush fly through the progress ED has to offer so far, the game will get left aside in no time, since they have already achieved and obtained everything. The rank grind for the Vette and the cutter are merely a slow down, but in terms of CR, everyone in the old rewards could afford multiples of them in no time.

 

[Eraden]

Base is 5m, anything beyond that obviously adds up. I don't have outfitting or a shipyard on mine or any fancy extra and it racks up 10m per week plus jumps.

How would my numbers kill carriers?
Let's say you are miner, and you can make a cozy 50m in an hour, no risk involved. Your carrier is now funded for 2.5 weeks, mine for 5 weeks. 1 hour, minimal risk of some NPC pirates.

Sure it would make FCs a long term goal for new comers, but FCs aren't something one is supposed to obtain within 48 hours of playing.

Yes, the veterans here who raked in the dough during the various gold rushes won't worry about credits ever again. But that's the way in every MMO. If you are there when the floodgates open, you can rake it in. Consider it a reward for being a long term player.

And the income streams need to be nerfed (mainly mining). In the last 2 years, credits have been handed out in abundance, to a point where they were meaningless. As you said: 1 hour of mining paid for 10 weeks of a FC upkeep.
Things do need to be balanced.
You could drop 10t of LTDs to a new player and they'd be flying an A rated conda 2 hours later.
Without the balancing of income streams, new players rush fly through the progress ED has to offer so far, the game will get left aside in no time, since they have already achieved and obtained everything. The rank grind for the Vette and the cutter are merely a slow down, but in terms of CR, everyone in the old rewards could afford multiples of them in no time.

WHOA there! 10 tons of LTDs, even at the obscene value of 1.6 million, is only 16 million credits. That is a mere pittance compared to the 1 BILLION+ that is required for a fully A-rated Anaconda. Any new player handed 10 tons of LTDs is at BEST, going to be able to move up to maybe an A-rated Cobra, or a slightly paired down ASP X. I'm all for a bit of balancing but please don't throw out false statements like this.

 

[CreepyB4by]

I think they should let people make money. I see a lot of posts here saying stuff like "You should uninstall the game if you're grinding and it's not fun". That's not constructive or a legitimate answer. This game is supposed to be about making your own choices and playing how you want to play. If I want to grind like crazy so I can make a lot of money I should be able to do that. People who don't like it can go 'have fun' for free and not worry about how many credit per hour I'm making core mining or running wing missions, etc.

I worked hard to put myself in big, expensive ships. I should be able to use those big, expensive ships to make obscene amounts of credits. I'm tired of getting kicked in the balls by Fdev every time there's a decent way to make money in this game. I understand some people are like "It took me like 8 months to get into an anaconda and everyone should have to do what I did." At the same time, that thought process is kind of dumb and if people want to make good money in this game they should be able to whether older players had a less lucrative grind or not.

I mean, I see multiple ppl saying that pilots should make $50 million a week and no more. However, I don't know if those people realize that at $50 million a week it would take 2 years to afford a fleet carrier. Not even outfitting, just to buy the ship. That's insane to me and I can't think of one reason why a person would say something like that unless they already had a fleet carrier and billions in the bank or unless they're sitting in a python right now. Moreover, if those ppl want to make $50 million a week and no more, they're free to do that without nerfing my ability to make more.

 

[Sylveria]

IMO contracts where a player is "active" should pay more than "passive" ones. Ideally, more effort should always pay better than less effort.

Problem is, in reality that's simply not the case, and that's why most will provide minimum effort for maximum reward.

But then again, think about it like this... if one is intelligent enough to work smarter and not harder, should that not be rewarded as well?

 

[Awesumnus Maximus]

I have 4 accounts (not Epic). I fly small-ish ships where it's practical, and I have no interest in a fleet carrier.
I like dogfighting.
If I needed money I used to go mining. Now I don't need to, because bounty hunting is suddenly earning half-decent money. I think I earned about 15m just now in about an hour of bounty hunting in Coriccha. I could buy an A-Rated DBX with that.
I'm more than happy with that kind of money.

Further to my last, today I made ~450MCr through about 90 bounties and a shedfull of missions from the boom extraction factions I became allied with (was a fairly big day). Came for the bounties, stayed for the stupid profits carting gold 120 tons at a time in the rustbucket python.
Definitely happy with that kind of money. (Bought a Mamba to make use of those awesome Pacifiers I had on the vulture.)

 

[Jmanis]

[2] Given that Elite, FE2 and FFE all had basically the same problem, and if anything it was even easier in those to rush to "more money than you can possibly spend" if you knew how to do it, probably 1984 was the time this could have been changed?

Hey, i remember getting game over in FE2 thanks to docking without the 4cr docking fee available, and trying to undock without paying the fine. #creditbalanceperfection

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

I really don't care about credits per hour. I just want to have fun. If I make 200 credits that hour, so what.

 

[Jmanis]

Yes, I think it's rather ironic when people argue "life was hard in the old days"...

It was a long time ago, but I do recall in FE2, shipping food from an agricultural world to an industrial one and shipping computers back. Food was cheap but gave a big percentage (sold for about 4 times the buying price), computers were good for profit-per-ton. That combination rapidly inflated my income, the size of my cargo hold was soon the only limiting factor, and I could upgrade to a bigger ship every few trips. Not difficult at all.

For me, it was a route between Sol and Lalande 21185... wine and luxury goods from sol to 21185, return with a hold full of narcotics, nerve gas, computers and robotics.

 

[Cmdr Jim S Walter]

So it seems that a recent post guessing at a more classical figure was a bit naive. It might be interesting to provide frontier with some feedback on what the credits per hour value honestly makes people happy. Avoid right or wrong but just be honest.

Stuff to think about:

• Current saves and balances don't matter, this is only for new players and new saves. Anyone who has tried to make credits is more rich than they have uses for now. Couldn't even give the stuff away.
• Reference your best experiences whatever they may be, and also what you would personally like.

More radically:

• Should credits just be removed?
• If engineering didn't exist, would you be okay with progressing on ships rather than power? Just not both.
• Are people just concerned with credits because of gold rush dope, ie, playing a game because the community is excited about a new way to earn money surf the wave of hype, and because there is zero real world need for credits, the game itself becomes chasing credits, and there always needs to be an ever increasing rush, because its only about the rush.

Speaking of ships:

• Would you happy if you just got one of every ship and free rebuy on every save? Unlimited ships.
• Is doing something token still interesting, maybe story based to experience getting it instead? Sounds okay to me.
• For anyone who doesn't want them for free, how much time do you think its fair to earn each ship?
• Many issues raised often reference a specific ship, the Anaconda. If the anaconda was bulk produced on a special pilots federation grant for 1 million each, does this change the dynamic of the problem? Maybe it would.....

So what's everyones favourite credits per hour? Example options.

• 20 million per hour.
• 60 million per hour.
• 100-150 million per hour.
• 200-250 million per hour.
• 300-500 million per hour or more?

Me? I think its one or the other.. either mandatory ship progression both horizontally and vertically throughout the tiers is reinstalled (20 million per hour). From playing this for 6 months plus, maybe longer, the progression experience was great. I think i had bought horizons even, but decided i wasn't ready for it and didn't bother engineering anything apart from the fsd. Only started engineering properly when i was ready, and yeah i still love elite.

If that is not possible, then yeh the sky is the limit. Might as well play credit rush, as obviously they're not needed by anyone for gameplay.

While grinding for my second character, after staring at the mission board for too long i think it seemed like sanity just to chop off the the last 6 digits of the numbers and round the minimum mission payments up to 1. Real world countries where the currency has inflated like that typically have negative associations.

I like 15mill or 20 enough to pay the carrier bill for the month and some change

 

[goemon]

People who don't like it can go 'have fun' for free and not worry about how many credit per hour I'm making core mining or running wing missions, etc.

problem being, that with current base income, no one can have the fun of playing being poor. so as much as i'm not worried about how much you make (i couldn't care less), i'm worried about my experience of the game.

as said before in this thread - i tried it with my third account. i did not go mining, i did not take missions, i went salvage and some survey-scanning and unlocking engineers and for guardian modules - and had a maxed out fleet of sidey, cobra, t6 and dbs before being ready to move that account to colonia.

i think it is crazy that you can refinance ships with single runs of some activity at all. that not only goes for mining - after the bhing buff i took a sidey to a high res ... came back with 8 mio. that is crazy. i also think, some of your problems would be lesser if the purchase price of a FC wouldn't be THAT steep.

anyway - what's your take on hours how long it should take to
a) own a conda in cr maxed playstyle
b) own a conda in cr aware playstyle
c) own a FC in CR maxed playstyle
d) own a FC in cr aware playstyle
?
and how would you tackle the problem, thatnow you can refinance a mining conda in a single mining run?

 

[Morbad]

Without credits you have nothing to work for, no reason to do anything other than battling

Credits have been essentially irrelevant for my CMDR since early 2016 and he doesn't even have many compared to most other CMDRs that have been around a while.

Beyond the very early game, they've essentially never been something worth working for, until very recently if you really wanted a FC...and if you wanted one, you could get one without a huge amount of effort and credits went back to being meaningless.

1 tonne of platinum when at the first rank should pay next to nothing. Only at Elite should you get top price for it (in lore, maybe you can go for the idea that inexperienced miners produce inferior product so get offered less as a price or something).

This makes no sense, at all.

Your refinery produces pure platinum, and if it didn't, it would still be mostly pure platinum that could be refined again at trivial cost.

Commodities are fungible. There is no rational reason for a higher rank CMDR to make more money doing the same things as a lower rank one.