What is the value of a credit?
- Thread starter trauts1
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That's the ship I took to Sgr A back in 3301... [downcast]
It felt like I spent 75% of my time fuel scooping. Would have killed for my Vulture back then, but ironically I made enough during that trip to get and outfit it.
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I think there are a lot of things that would make this game better. I don't expect that FD can realistically reduce the currently inflated credit rewards, but I think the game was better when they were lower, which required players to consider what upgrades they could afford. The slower pace made for a more thoughtful game.
What really irks me is the endless whining for higher credit payouts. It seems as if many of the new players won't be happy unless they are given an Anaconda at the very start, before they've even tried some of the truly good ships. That's just sad. It is also changing ED in ways that make it less appealing to me.
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A credit is worth a quarter of an average beer. I may be slightly off in the quantity of beer, but average beer should be the galactic monetary unit.
You didn't ask me, but I'll respond to the bolded part.
Think about how this game would look, feel, and play, if the payouts had never been increased, and no one ever found any of the mega-credit earning activities that have popped up throughout the last 1.5 years or so.
1) The Big 3 would be rare, even still today. Not because people wouldn't have been able to save up and afford to buy and outfit them, but because the risk of flying them (even in Solo) would be substantially higher. I think it's reasonable to assume that most pilots would not, in fact, be flying them often. I think it's a shame that there are a large number of people who don't have to give a hoot if they crash their Cutter 50 times in a row, but that's just my opinion.
2) It's likely that you would see more T6, T7, and T9's being flown on a regular basis, with the Python perhaps being the pinnacle ship for most pilots, due to the aforementioned risk. It's also likely that you would see a lot more small ships being flown regularly for various types of activities that they probably aren't used for today.
3) There would be far fewer discussions about which ships are viable for various activities, and which are not.
4) PvP would be a different animal entirely - only the most skilled, or most confident, would likely be flying any of the Big 3 for PvP on any kind of a regular basis. It's also reasonable to assume that they would not be flying them alone.
5) In the opinion of many, Exploration is Anaconda, DBX, AspX, or don't bother. Jump range, scoop speed, and light years per hour, in other words. Engineering has opened more ships to more palates, but going out into the black in an Anaconda is a much different proposition when incomes are low. Some would still do it (and did, I am sure), but when incomes are lower, that Cobra or T6 doesn't look so comparatively bad anymore.
More choice that is considered viable to most (unlike now) for most activities in the game, and more consequence to go with those choices, in other words.
Now, is this better, and would it be better for player retention?
I would say absolutely yes to the first, and yes to the second in terms of increased average tenure, but that's just my opinion, and not everyone shares it.
Frontier isn't going to take it back there though, so I just have to accept it, and continue to play the game in the way(s) that I enjoy playing it.
Riôt
Appreciate the earnest response.
To be honest though my experience with the game was quite different. Even with the act of making millions per hour at one point there were priorities for me. Ships that enabled my preferred play came before those that didn't. Strategically upgrading them was still a significant undertaking due to sourcing the mods and the fact that at a point those upgrades are still going to take time, though several orders of magnitude less time. But that's just how I play games in general that are open ended. The joy comes from setting a goal and seeing tangible progress, an upgraded module here ant there, occasionally a new ship. That methodology had me playing EvE-O for years before completing a fleet of ships I was interested in. And the economy there was much more open than here meaning the options for working through that were anything you could get away with. I tend to view that as an aspiration rather than stretching timeframes. If the journey and the tools are enjoyable, there isn't any need to be optimal, but some will anyways and moreso if their options are limited.
The question was open and the answer welcome.
To your points:
1) The game isn't exactly overflowing with different ships. I'm not sure restricting the number of viable alternatives does the game benefit long term. Yes, there is a point well beyond that which is pure excess, but arguably I'd guess most of us aren't there.
2) That's an issue where those ships aren't incentivized for reasons other than subjective ones. Cargo focused ships are nothing more than cheap, inferior multipurposes as currently implemented. Give people good reasons to use ships and the will be used. That seems preferable to again limiting options to force players into obviously weaker vessels.
3) No, there probably wouldn't. When you have credits to spare you have credits to experiment with. When you don't you'll find more meta chasers as the less than optimal alternatives become that much more daunting just to own.
4) That logic would quite possibly backfire, it would likely be rare to see larger ships go against each other, but more common to see them preying upon the more numerous weaker vessels. I've never seen a game where a massive power disparity wasn't abused in PvP, and the greater the timesink, the larger the power desparity.
5) My response here is basically just a reiteration of 1) and 3); Limited options probably hurt more than they help long term and those who do go for dedicated ships will be more likely to min/max as alternate setups are far more prohibitive.
Trying to force people down the ladder doesn't create more choice, it removes the choice to use certain tools in favor of those which are decidedly cheaper. There is no compulsion to use the best one has when one can obtain options with relative ease, whereas being forced into a smaller subset of choices over the same time incentivises maximizing the efficiency of those choices. I certainly don't agree on the idea of it being universally better save to a specific subset of players, and among them I agree there would likely be greater tenure, but I'd bet the numbers who left wouldn't have stayed under such a system and with it a number more would have dropped. Maybe they did. Perhaps that's why we've seen income potential rise over time.
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Interesting. I've only speed-read the PDF (waiting for my dead tree copy) so I didn't notice that. I'm kind of disappointed that they went there to be honest. I suppose it gives players a rough appreciation of relative value, but I'm not sure that exchange rate will keep pace with changes to the videogame, let alone the real-world economy.
PVP is, to a large extent, what wrecked the credit balance in this game. (As a PVE player I nearly avoided this topic because it would have been inviting a spat, but I see some PVP-oriented players have already raised it). Those players with lots of free time were able to obtain the biggest ships with the largest weapons (Anaconda wings for PVP were a popular thing once) while others were unable to keep up. FD tried to close this gap by reducing ship and module costs and increasing the Cr/hr rate for many activities, and while it worked to a certain extent it also wrecked the already thin fabric of what passes for the economy in ED. They then tried to reduce the relationship between credits and ship performance by introducing the Engineers. And we all know how well that went...
I'm not sure there's an answer to this. Ideally progression in a competitive game should be based on the players' skill, with more "wins" enabling faster progression. But the cash rewards for combat in ED range from the virtually skill-free (NPC RES farming) to the effectively non-existent (PVP bounty hunting). Instead the easiest ways to earn credits are those completely divorced from combat e.g. trading or, more recently, exploration.
ED plays as though someone has mashed up Gran Turismo and Euro Truck Simulator. Instead of competing in races to steadily increase their skills and upgrade their cars over time, players get to go off and haul cargo for a couple of weeks so they can come back and buy a McLaren.
I'm not sure there's an answer to this. It's in the nature of the design. Player-driven economies are often touted as the panacea but, much as I admire FD's technical chops, I don't think they have the experience to pull that off without leaving loopholes that would be instantly exploited by players. We'd end up with massive imbalances resulting in the need for resets and wipes, and the community would explode as a result.
FD please bring in believable economy. And... have the occasional high paying, challenging, missions, to get progress towards better ships, equipment. The original Elite novel described how the cost of firing 1 missile could wipe out the profit of a trade run. Less money also means a gameplay option of scavenging parts for your beat-up ship.
Yeah, no.
Replace Anaconda with T9 keep the prices and you're good.
A military ship of the corvette class can go up to 350mill $ (not credits of course) without any ready to use armaments.
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There is a solution (actually 3), but it involves more than credits. PvP doesn't work well under the current system. That's not just my opinion; look at all the complaints on this forum. To fix PvP, it needs to be more like Overwatch and other PvP games that do it well. Unfortunately, the odds of FD implementing any of these potential solutions is slim:
- Rework CQC until it's so appealing that the vast majority of PvP players use it. *
- Split Open into PvP and PvE. In PvE, you cannot ever kill another player.
- Change the rules for PvP: If another player (not an NPC) kills you, you respawn in the same place as where you entered the system, with a free rebuy and all your cargo intact. We also need tools for piracy: A pirate cannot kill another ship; instead he must disable it and collect some cargo.
* Solution 1 should probably be implemented in conjunction with solution 2 or 3.
To encourage PvP mode, players should be given 100,000 million cr and a good fighting ship at the start (and anytime they face a rebuy), but a player's PvP fleet is completely independent of their PvE fleet.
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It is difficult to discern what is driving the value of a credit, and I would he curious to know how (what process or strategy) FDev sets prices and fees.
Is it a subjective thing where fixed prices are set with BGS having ability to impact these by +/- some % , separate forumals for missions & commodities, or a single formula for everything? I can't assume that something isn't inplace or not, mainly because of the variables involved, particularly around the cost of services and lack of any scarce materials.
I'm not sure that any physical thing could be used as the basis for the value of a CR, because there is really no limit to the availability of any natural resource. On Earth, Gold is usually a pretty good candidate because it has many uses in a diverse range of applications, and availability is in a sweet spot between being scare and wildly abundant.
Manufactured commodities would be the first thing on the list that would not be effectively infinite, but since the availability or ultimate quantity is not static, these things can't serve as the basis for CR either.
It seems that maybe economies would have to be purely or heavily regional, where the underlying value of a CR would be unique to a particular region. So in system A it may be gold, but system B it may be nickel. It would have to be something that has many uses and is relatively scarce. The problem with this is that nothing is scarce. There may be a fixed amount of gold within 20ly of a system, but all that means is that it takes 2 minutes to transport it from the gold rich system that is 30 ly away.
So it seems to me that the best candidate for the value of a credit is some function of mass & distance, maybe a LyTon. The big need and foundation of economic activity and growth is moving things across space. There is not an unlimited supply for transport services, and the service impacts many, many, aspects of human activity, production, and services throughout the bubble.
If FDev started using one of two simple inventory management rules govern average prices for commodities and services (LIFO - Last In First Out or FIFO - First In First Out) combined with a modifier to allow prices to rise and fall based on transaction frequencies (how often people are moving commodites or accepting missions) I think we would see that prices would be different in different areas, but there would be a common unit of value driving those prices.
Its not perfect, nor am I saying it should be this way. Just that it is the best concept that I've been able to come up with that seems to have a chance of meeting the criteria to be the driving factor behind the value of a credit.
Is it a subjective thing where fixed prices are set with BGS having ability to impact these by +/- some % , separate forumals for missions & commodities, or a single formula for everything? I can't assume that something isn't inplace or not, mainly because of the variables involved, particularly around the cost of services and lack of any scarce materials.
I'm not sure that any physical thing could be used as the basis for the value of a CR, because there is really no limit to the availability of any natural resource. On Earth, Gold is usually a pretty good candidate because it has many uses in a diverse range of applications, and availability is in a sweet spot between being scare and wildly abundant.
Manufactured commodities would be the first thing on the list that would not be effectively infinite, but since the availability or ultimate quantity is not static, these things can't serve as the basis for CR either.
It seems that maybe economies would have to be purely or heavily regional, where the underlying value of a CR would be unique to a particular region. So in system A it may be gold, but system B it may be nickel. It would have to be something that has many uses and is relatively scarce. The problem with this is that nothing is scarce. There may be a fixed amount of gold within 20ly of a system, but all that means is that it takes 2 minutes to transport it from the gold rich system that is 30 ly away.
So it seems to me that the best candidate for the value of a credit is some function of mass & distance, maybe a LyTon. The big need and foundation of economic activity and growth is moving things across space. There is not an unlimited supply for transport services, and the service impacts many, many, aspects of human activity, production, and services throughout the bubble.
If FDev started using one of two simple inventory management rules govern average prices for commodities and services (LIFO - Last In First Out or FIFO - First In First Out) combined with a modifier to allow prices to rise and fall based on transaction frequencies (how often people are moving commodites or accepting missions) I think we would see that prices would be different in different areas, but there would be a common unit of value driving those prices.
Its not perfect, nor am I saying it should be this way. Just that it is the best concept that I've been able to come up with that seems to have a chance of meeting the criteria to be the driving factor behind the value of a credit.
I'm going to try to drag this conversation back to the OP's question.
It is always difficult to try to quantify currency equivalences when the two civilizations being compared are so far apart, geographically and technologically. For example, try to find an equivalence between the early Imperial Roman denarius and the early 21st century US dollar. What do you use as a basis for measuring value? If you use "a day's pay for an unskilled labourer", you get a value of a denarius between $40 and $100, depending on what you consider to be "a fair day's pay" these days. But if you use the price of bread, then the value become something like 1 denarius equals about 10 dollars, because they'd buy roughly the same amount of bread. But 20th century bread production is vastly different to 1st century bread production, so that probably wouldn't be a fair comparison.
The ED universe of the 33rd century is even more technologically removed from us than we are from the Romans. Gold is a useless measure of value, because it can be mined so readily; gold is rare and valuable here on Earth because it's so hard to get. Beer, on the other hand, is relatively easy to get here on Earth, because the stuff you need to make it (fresh air, clean water, sunshine, and access to certain crops) is either cheap or free; for most inhabited places in the ED universe, those things are not free. In the ED universe, beer is a luxury commodity, produced on agricultural planets the old-fashioned way. Most people, living in space stations or underground cities on barren industrial rocks, have to make do with whatever pseudo-beer-flavoured swill comes out of the local waste recycling facility; they only drink beer on special occasions, or for ritual reasons that require it.
We ran the maths in this thread and removed the currency units from the equation, just using direct commodity exchange. In the ED universe, 1 tonne of gold will buy you 50 tonnes of beer. Here on 21st century Earth, 1 tonne of gold will buy you 7780 tonnes of beer. Thus in the ED universe, gold is cheap, and beer is expensive. One pint of beer in ED costs you 0.3 credits.
In another earlier thread on this topic, I proposed a good unit of measure for the "equivalent value of a credit" between our two civilizations might be handguns, since they'd require about the same level of manufacturing skill in the future as they do now, even if future handguns were high-tech lasers rather than explosive-propelled-projectile based. Comparing the costs of obtaining a personal weapon in the two eras, 1 credit equals about US$270.
It is always difficult to try to quantify currency equivalences when the two civilizations being compared are so far apart, geographically and technologically. For example, try to find an equivalence between the early Imperial Roman denarius and the early 21st century US dollar. What do you use as a basis for measuring value? If you use "a day's pay for an unskilled labourer", you get a value of a denarius between $40 and $100, depending on what you consider to be "a fair day's pay" these days. But if you use the price of bread, then the value become something like 1 denarius equals about 10 dollars, because they'd buy roughly the same amount of bread. But 20th century bread production is vastly different to 1st century bread production, so that probably wouldn't be a fair comparison.
The ED universe of the 33rd century is even more technologically removed from us than we are from the Romans. Gold is a useless measure of value, because it can be mined so readily; gold is rare and valuable here on Earth because it's so hard to get. Beer, on the other hand, is relatively easy to get here on Earth, because the stuff you need to make it (fresh air, clean water, sunshine, and access to certain crops) is either cheap or free; for most inhabited places in the ED universe, those things are not free. In the ED universe, beer is a luxury commodity, produced on agricultural planets the old-fashioned way. Most people, living in space stations or underground cities on barren industrial rocks, have to make do with whatever pseudo-beer-flavoured swill comes out of the local waste recycling facility; they only drink beer on special occasions, or for ritual reasons that require it.
We ran the maths in this thread and removed the currency units from the equation, just using direct commodity exchange. In the ED universe, 1 tonne of gold will buy you 50 tonnes of beer. Here on 21st century Earth, 1 tonne of gold will buy you 7780 tonnes of beer. Thus in the ED universe, gold is cheap, and beer is expensive. One pint of beer in ED costs you 0.3 credits.
In another earlier thread on this topic, I proposed a good unit of measure for the "equivalent value of a credit" between our two civilizations might be handguns, since they'd require about the same level of manufacturing skill in the future as they do now, even if future handguns were high-tech lasers rather than explosive-propelled-projectile based. Comparing the costs of obtaining a personal weapon in the two eras, 1 credit equals about US$270.
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