Ten hours of planning and executing an ambush on a CMDR Cutter, podding that CMDR, and hawking the parts of their ship across several black markets for a billion CR.
What should 100m an hour look like?
- Thread starter Jmanis
- Start date
Ten hours of planning and executing an ambush on a CMDR Cutter, podding that CMDR, and hawking the parts of their ship across several black markets for a billion CR.
Osmium got a pretty decent price buff in 3.3 - from 16,000 on a good day to 36,000, so not far off what Platinum originally sold for - but yes, I suspect it's only really mined for Marsha Hicks.
But then, even before 3.3 there wasn't a lot of point in mining anything except Palladium, Platinum and Painite, if you wanted money. Samarium and Osmium got a brief spell of being useful between 2.1 and whenever they removed engineering commodity requirements, and then back to doing nothing again.
Inflating costs also draws a clear line between "haves" and "have nots" - it just draws it in a different and more arbitrary place based on cash/asset balances.
Before:
Person A has A-rated Cutter + 1 billion credits
Person B has 2 billion credits
Person C made full use of every fast earner going and has 100 billion credits and a full A-rated fleet
Person D has played for the same time as C, but ignored the fast earners and has 300 million credits and 10 A-rated medium and small ships
After 10x price rise:
Person A still has an A-rated Cutter -- Person B now can't buy one and would have to spend over half their cash just to get an A-rated Clipper.
Person C still has a full fleet, and the equivalent of 10 billion in current cash to buy more -- Person D has basically no cash and relatively weak ships, so can't even earn future money at the same rate as Person C.
The moral: make full use of every high-earning opportunity (and then store your wealth in assets, use Cutters as bookmarks, etc) because you'll be much better off when the next round of hyperinflation comes.
If you want to reduce the wealth of people who earned too much due to exploits, then taxation is the way to do it - a tax on total assets, levied periodically based on time played, which applies at a higher percentage the richer a player is - so e.g. first billion in assets is untaxed, second billion taxed at 1%, third billion at 2%, and so on. Doesn't affect new players with small amounts of cash and a few medium ships ... cuts down the wealth of the very rich very quickly. Can't be evaded by switching between cash and assets - you either need to use those assets to earn, or sell them. (It's still a terrible idea that doesn't really address the underlying issues, but it's fairer than inflation)
I don't think bounty hunt/ assassination missions need to change. They need only adjust the pay scale and offer more of various mission types. As it is the mission boards are a mixed bag of whatever spawns and that is bad news for people wanting to be a gun for hire/ bounty hunter. The pay out simply needs to be comparable across the board. Mining should always pay out more, since what you're mining tends to be precious, but not so much that you're doing 100+ million an hour, while the next mission type to rival it is one specific passenger run, done soecifically in a Python. I certainly should get paid significantly more for running a Cutter full of passengers to Colonia, which I have recently done. Same with data delivery missions.
We really need a revamped mission board, by introducing categories; Bounty/ Assassination missions, Passenger missions, Cargo/ smuggling, surface missions etc. Perhaps, when space legs are here, we can walk to a bar, where an NPC whistles you over and hands you bounty or assassination missions, but for now we need to know where to go to find them, to play to our strengths, interests and professions.
Also we need separate super power mission board, too. A little more roleplay for us wanting to be patriotic. Missions that actually help in expansion etc. I guess a better PP system.
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Part of the issue regarding switching between assets and credits to avoid inflation can be avoided by making sell prices based on their purchase price, not their current price (although maintenance would still be inflated, otherwise legacy stuff remains near-free to operate). If the change were to be implemented without warning, it would also prevent the last-minute panic buying.
Player A might have his A-rated Cutter, but he wouldn't be able to afford any new high-end ships. Boa gets released? Can't afford it. Imperial medium ship gets released? Goodbye bank account. It might let them keep their existing stuff, but new content still hits their wallet pretty hard and that's the point - credits will once again have meaning for them the moment there is something new they want or the moment they get careless with their ships (those 10x rebuy costs add up pretty quickly in expensive ships)
Player B can still afford a decent enough midrange ship, and an A-rated Cutter at 10x the price is less than 20 hours gameplay away even if they earn a sedate 50 million an hour. Or even, heaven forbid, they actually use something other than A-rated!
Player C might have huge reserves, but at 10x the price they won't last forever. Plus, even with today's ridiculous earnings, 100 billion is a fair amount (at 200 million an hour, that's still 500 hours), so they have probably earned a bit of a reprieve from financial worry over the next several releases unless they are extremely careless and continually lose valuable ships or constantly pay to transport entire fleet around. Over the long term, inflation would put them into a similar situation to player A, just with greater reserves to fall back on (which would be 1/10th the value they used to be, so it would actually narrow the gap significantly).
Player D still has some pretty workable medium ships capable of earning a tidy profit. Like player B, they could quite easily get whatever ship they want within a good weekend of playing.
Or to look at it another way: for the have-nots, it will simply be a return to older times where more than 20 million an hour was considered overpowered and in serious need of a nerf bat; only difference is that all credit values, both income and expenses, have an extra zero tacked onto them. They keep everything they have, just that the next steps require greater investment - and that applies to everyone and not just newbies. If they wanted to make it even more fitting, they could even increase starting funds by 10x, so that new players have effectively the same value of money at the beginning that they used to.
The only people that will be really hit hard will be those that have stockpiled vast sums of credits but not bothered spending them. That being said, if they actually wanted stuff in the game, they would have probably bought it by now rather than sitting on billions of credits, so this group probably won't much care either way as they don't bother buying things and are happy with what they have got already.
Yes - though implementing it without warning would still set the precedent that based on the C/D thing the next time a way to earn money faster than the approved rate came up, the correct thing to do would be to do it as much as possible (and ideally spend it on modules and ships you have a potential use for) because you'd still be better off afterwards when the next surprise inflation got applied.
Well, except that you said 100m/hour would be reserved for highly-specialised ships doing difficult top end gameplay. I took this to mean "not the sort of thing you can do in a C-rated Vulture or a multirole Asp" and not necessarily the sort of thing you'd want to do or be able to maintain focus to do for hours on end even with the right ship, either
Someone starting out with just a mid-range medium ship won't be able to earn that much. And for balance, presumably, the cost of a ship and its earning potential should be somewhat correlated (not necessarily linearly, and assuming that it's equipped correctly for its chosen profession) and near-equal across all professions at each ship price band (since this would require a complete rewrite of outfitting and engineering, just outright repricing certain modules would be sensible)
So A and C, with their high end ships and enough cash reserves to at least re-equip them, can earn 100M/hour (10M/hour in today's money) in the new world.
Meanwhile B and D with just medium ships, can maybe earn at most half of that, or perhaps less than that depending on how it's balanced.
So A and C can now earn faster than B and D in the post-inflation world, despite A just having got lucky by buying their Cutter a day earlier than B did, and despite C being the one whose behaviour has been used to justify the inflation, and D being the one to whom money already mattered somewhat anyway.
Rebalancing to make earnings sensible etc. would probably have to involve repricing all ships and modules so that the price-performance curve was much closer to linear, though.
At the moment C-rated gives you most of the performance of A-rated, but for about a tenth of the price. I flew around Colonia for quite a while in a B/C-rated Krait with mostly G3 engineering ... it's A-rated and mostly G5 now, because I can, but I really don't notice the difference. If the point is to make money matter, then as above outfitting and engineering would need a complete rewrite anyway.
Achieving any sort of financial "balance" would need the whole game rewriting - every earning mechanic from the ground up, outfitting, engineering, pricing, etc. By that point it's basically Elite V anyway (or some non-Elite game in the same genre) - I don't think there's any practical way to get there from Elite Dangerous.
Looks like:
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm / hour
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm / hour
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Ideally, there would never be a situation where there's another money exploit, or at least none that last more than 48 hours after being discovered. A responsible balance team (does FD even have a dedicated balance team?) would release content erring on the side of underpowered then gradually tweak it upwards to a point of balance. Having a single underpowered thing in an otherwise balanced world results in all but one activity being financially viable to perform, while having a single overpowered thing in an otherwise balanced world results in only a single activity being financially viable to perform. If they manage to avoid ever increasing earnings in the future for like-for-like comparisons then they should never need to inflate the costs again, the only reason why they need to do it now is because they dropped the income balance ball early in horizons and have spent the last few years kicking it further down the hillside.
Even if a more reasonable earning is 20ish million credits for a medium ship with a moderately competent pilot is still enough to get a fair rate of progression. That's only half an hour to be able to afford to upgrade from a 6E power plant up to a 6C, even with 10x increases to costs. Someone could see real improvements to a ship over the course of a few hours of play, going from an initial E-rated stock ship up to a reliable C/D rated ships with a B-rated module or two. A-rated modules aren't really meant to be cost efficient - they are the best money can buy and you should always expect a premium for that kind of performance; ideally the costs should be high enough that players only use A-rated stuff for vanity purposes or to attempt ultra-high difficulty content.
I also get the impression you are thinking quite short term. Yes, some players will take a bit of a hit compared to others, but how will it improve the game over the next 5 or 10 years? After a player in a medium ship has spent another 200 hours in the game of the course of the next year, any devaluing of currency in the past will be largely irrelevant. It's not just about increasing costs of content now, but also about keeping costs relevant for all new content in the future.
In terms of price-performance curve, it is currently all over the place I quite agree. However, when I tried to make some sense of trading effectiveness by looking at jump ranges and cargo capacities for a minimally outfitted trader (mostly d-rated except for FSD) I roughly got the formula:
Trade potential = Constant x Cost^0.42
Which means roughly that a doubling of cost results in a 33% increase in earning potential. The core multiroles (Sidewinder, CobraIII, Python and Anaconda) all roughly follow this formula, while the T6/7/9 follow a similar pattern albeit with a higher constant.
So yes, they would have to look into trying to add much more aggressive scaling to other activities to bring them into roughly the n^0.42 scaling (probably anywhere between 0.4 and 0.45 will be close enough to be within error from personal preferences and local conditions). This would require some work in terms of both repricing some ships, as well as fixing the scaling on most modules to make them exponential rather than linear. It might also require adding in extra module classes, extra functions for our crew or even entirely new module types to allow non-scaling activities to scale beyond sidewinder stages.
They would also need to figure out how to add useful engineer mods to other activities. At the moment, other than FSD and the odd lightweight mod, engineering is only really relevant for combat pilots. Of course, that's without even going into the full-on balance catastrophe that is our current engineering balance even just for combat. They would also need to figure out just how much difference engineering should make to a ship's performance. 1.5x? 2x? Whatever number they choose, they would then need to figure out how to make all these different activities benefit similarly from engineering. And that's all without going into the potential bonuses from tech broker and powerplay modules, that should also provide subtle bonuses in the right combinations for engineered ships, or to provide an accessible but lower performing alternative for non-engineered ships.
Though it still only takes one person (out of the millions who would be presumably attracted to "Elite: Finely Balanced Economy"?) to figure out something they missed. Especially if the new balanced features have depth and detail and variety (rather than the much easier to balance "there's one trade good and you get 100 credits per tonne for hauling it") so that it's not immediately obvious exactly what you need to do to make top money with them.
A sensible person would wait until Frontier were confident that no-one was going to find anything, had raised the income to the balance point, and then start actually using the loophole they found a few days in, too.
And, you know, it's supposed to be a big complex open-ended universe. Using your brain and figuring out a way to make lots of money should be part of the fun, not strongly discouraged. Whoever figured out that you could map planetary rings and substantially boost mining income deserved every credit they got from it.
Okay, so average earning rates in today's values of 2 million/hour, for a game where a reasonably diverse fleet might set you back 1-2 billion.
I mean, it wouldn't affect me since my average earning rate is about 0.5 million/hour, but I think most people might find 1000 hours just to get to the point of owning a suitable fleet rather slow? I doubt most players have 1000 hours total. Calibrating things so that they're still interesting for the tiny minority of veterans with multi-1000-hour playtimes will just break the game entirely for everyone else.
It won't improve the game at all over the next 5 years, because a complete rewrite of professions, outfitting, engineering, costs, balancing, etc. will take about that long to do, and most of it can't be rolled out piecemeal.
And then after that, every time Frontier introduce any new ship, equipment item, game mechanic, etc. they have to spend a substantial amount of time very carefully assessing whether there's any possible way that it could be more effective than what already exists and either rebalancing things or redesigning the feature so it can't, if so. So on the 10 year scale it also doesn't improve the game as much as 10 years of additional features might, unless your sole priority is that no-one can possibly earn more than (in today's money) 10 million/hour and most people earn far less.
Let's say, hypothetically, they'd done this from the start and got everything that was released in 1.0 to be perfectly balanced in 1.0.
1.1 rolls out Community Goals which intentionally give more money for doing certain trade/combat/exploration activities, so they multiply all earnings by 0.9 or whatever so that you have to be doing the activity in a CG to make the maximum allowed rate.
1.2 rolls out Wings, which provide various ways (wing beacons especially) to make money quicker. So earnings all get a 0.2 multiplier on them so that the maximum earnings stay the same, to make sure that people making maximum use of the benefits of wing beacons can't earn over the limit.
1.3 adds Powerplay, and various bonuses for being aligned to a particular power, or for being in systems aligned to particular powers. Trade earnings take a 30% hit on release day to account for it now being possible to have a Power A Agricultural system near a Power B Industrial system, even though there aren't any yet. Combat earnings get adjusted to account for the case where someone is earning Powerplay merits and doing a pirate massacre mission in the same system, and can therefore get kills for both quicker by not needing to fly as far between targets.
People who aren't doing a trade CG in a wing on a favourable Powerplay route are now earning about 10% what they would have in 1.0 - despite doing exactly the same thing with exactly the same costs - because Frontier's hypothetical obsession with maximum possible earning rates says that someone could do that, so everything else must be balanced to it.
Alternatively, to avoid that, the balancing team carefully vetoes all features of Wings that can be used to make more money - no wing beacons, no sharing target or exploration data - carefully makes sure that Community Goals have payouts set so that the CG bonus can't exceed the losses from the CG activities being suboptimal to start with - restricts Powerplay bonuses and equipment only to things like the Mahon Cooking Laser which can't possibly be used for profit. But financial balance is preserved, and that's the important thing.
To me, long term, that sounds like a terrible idea.
Killing thargoids should be the most profitable activity in the game. Bar none. It requires fully engineered, outfitted ships and the unlocking of guardian weapons. There’s significant risk, learning curve of the fights, as well as inherent repair costs.
if anything deserves top money spot, it’s that.
if anything deserves top money spot, it’s that.
I like the new mining mechanics. I can earn quickly enough that trying out new ship types is fun and within reach. I flew a MKIII Cobra forever before the mining update and now have a small fleet going. Still have to equip, mod and engineer those ships so plenty to do beside just mining. I agree other activities “more difficult“ than mining should probably have better payouts but I enjoy the break between mission running and other things. 100m for an hour of cracking rocks doesn’t seem so bad to me in a game I’m playing for entertainment - YMMV.
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