Glad to see I am not the only one not having sleepless nights over these Fleet Carriers. To be honest I am expected a lot of disappointed little vegemite's when they do finally appear and they aren't the 'I WIN' ship some are expecting ...
When is VOID OPAL nerf coming?
- Thread starter nafeasonto
- Start date
Yeap, and everything I've seen of them (happy to corner this into speculation too) they'll be worth no more than 500mil, maybe 1 bil at most, which would also be an entirely reasonable price point (since, being a personal item designed to transport around a small fleet of assets, you'd probably have a billion in ships by the time one becomes relevant to you).
To chime in here, an E-rated Cutter Costs 200 million, but is by no means a desirable ship.
A-Rating just the shield and core modules (even excluding sensors and life support) brings that up to 750 million.
Adding a moderate sized fuel Scoop, c8 prismatic Shield and SCB, and a reactive armor to make it a PvP Cutter,
the price goes up to 1.35 BILLION. Nearly 3 times the amount of cash @Red Anders mined in two and a half hour.
And this is completely without engineering.
Locking one of the more desireable ships behind several grind walls isn't the way to go imho.
I for one am glad the vopal/painite changes made gaining money for rebuys that easy.
Ever since the changes my way of playing completely centers around things I WANT to do,
with an odd mining session every month or so to cover my PvP expenses.
I love that.
A-Rating just the shield and core modules (even excluding sensors and life support) brings that up to 750 million.
Adding a moderate sized fuel Scoop, c8 prismatic Shield and SCB, and a reactive armor to make it a PvP Cutter,
the price goes up to 1.35 BILLION. Nearly 3 times the amount of cash @Red Anders mined in two and a half hour.
And this is completely without engineering.
Locking one of the more desireable ships behind several grind walls isn't the way to go imho.
I for one am glad the vopal/painite changes made gaining money for rebuys that easy.
Ever since the changes my way of playing completely centers around things I WANT to do,
with an odd mining session every month or so to cover my PvP expenses.
I love that.
Craith
Volunteer Moderator
I still groan when I see a novice player in a "combat fitted" Anaconda. Not because I don't like them having it, but because of all the things they missed in the game. Small ships are not just stepping stones, but most people don't ever set foot in an Eagle anymore, or find out what a great small explorer the Type-6 is. It is like the people following online solutions for the guardian unlocks and then lamenting there is no content.
I miss the time when I had to save my money for an upgrade, and it felt like an improvement. When you bought your ship and then upgraded it, when you were happy because you could replace that E-rated thrusters with D-rated. When people flew through half the bubble for a discount.
Now you just go, put down the money, buy the ship, A-rate it, lament because you have to jump to another system for that one part this station doesn't sell, and move on to engineering. All pinned, so apart from special effects you get your finished ship in an hour.
Losing a ship? Minor nuisance, bring the next one. Nice arcade feeling. For some. Not for me though.
I miss the time when I had to save my money for an upgrade, and it felt like an improvement. When you bought your ship and then upgraded it, when you were happy because you could replace that E-rated thrusters with D-rated. When people flew through half the bubble for a discount.
Now you just go, put down the money, buy the ship, A-rate it, lament because you have to jump to another system for that one part this station doesn't sell, and move on to engineering. All pinned, so apart from special effects you get your finished ship in an hour.
Losing a ship? Minor nuisance, bring the next one. Nice arcade feeling. For some. Not for me though.
Craith
Volunteer Moderator
My understanding is that with the coming patch on the 14th of January demand will not be kept artificially high for mined goods, so prices should fluctuate more. I don't know if this means the max price will not be reached any more at all or people will have to travel more for it.
PythonWhat ship are you talking about?
I've just found that core mining is definitely no fun in a Conda (that would easily do the trick though, even without Guardian Booster).
Cmk4 is where the fun is to me, though on paper the ASPX should even be slightly better. But also a little bigger, lean shape is fun for the abrasion tango.
But I guess, once demand comes into play, I would have a hard time to find a place like where I'm mining right now:
1.6 Mio in the same system with 2 Void Opal spots just 0.5 ls from the station, feels almost like I could mine in a skiff there. Paradise!
How about learning to play the game?
Just one page ago we had someone mining in a ship with 5ly jumprange. He (probably) already made billions but never saw the outfitting screen. You aren't doing people a favour when you allow them to skip 99% of the game, it's bad game design and should get fixed in my opinion.
Is this really achieved by hours upon hours of mindless (money+engineering) grind though?
I'd rather have better tutorials, part of which is managed by the engineer requirements, then making players waste their time for money-grinds to reach their "dream-ships".
![[VR] Mad Mike](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/27/27910.jpg?1553527108){kind=avatar}
for me the right to earn the cutter is to be able to afford it and have the rank, it is that simple. what ship another player flies is non of my business and does not effect me.
what is harder however is what should the earning potential in the game be....
See, in principle i dont care what another player has, everyone other player could have a cutter for all i care..
What I DO care about and what absolutely affects my motivation to play, is to have some feeling of verisimilitude and to have long term goals to save up for stuff,
on 1 hand it is a fighting battle, I WANT to try my best to maximise my earnings and to feel that buzz when i manage to make a really good profit on a run
on the other hand i also WANT the game to push back and make it difficult for me to get that profit on that really good run.
I dont want the game to throw sacks of cash at me because 1) its just not plausible, and 2) it totally undermines any progression or long term goals in the game.....
hypothetically after the short term buzz of getting that cutter after maybe only a few 100 hrs in the game, it would become very stale for me, and at this point i would be elite in exploration and trade (due to the amounts needed to get to elite in those 2 things have not been tweaked at the same rate of the earnings inflation, and for some reason mining is linked to trade rank)
Look at it this way, imagine the real world was like ED, where there was unlimited ore in the galaxy, and the equipment was super easy to get... in such a universe why would anyone do anything other than be a miner..... why would someone choose to have a higher risk career as a bounty hunter or why bother being a smuggler or a pirate, or why would anyone haul heavy goods, instead everyone would just mine.... the imbalance pulls the rug from the rest of the game.
in ED, unlike real life i dont want to be able to be a multi billionaire after just a few 100 hrs work.... the difficulty is others do... which isnt wrong, but it effects all of us.
when ED launched i thought the economy worked perfectly....... upuntil you got to the asp level of ships then things hit a brick wall. (i was about 24hrs in a sidewinder, similar in an eagle and an adder... it was a good 100 hrs before i had enough for a cobra - made longer because i never sell or strip a ship down)...... saving up for a burst laser or a new FSD for my sidewinder was amazing.....
What FD need to do, and it is not an easy ask, is rather than just blanket increase profits is to better improve progression of earnings..... a player in a 100 million ship should likley be capable of doing more lucrative missions that those in a 1 million ship cannot........
right now the top end ships really dont all have a niche, generally a cheaper alternate can do just as good a job.
it is a big ask but the 1st step imo should likely be reducing the costs of the top tier ships and equipement a bit, massively reducing earnings over all however, and also adding in credit sinks such as docking fees which increase for larger ships, and give us running costs which mean something for the top end ships (but again combined with only top end ships having something which gives them unique opportunities.
Some people want ED to be a proper sandbox where you get easy access to all the toys and it is just about what you do with them.... Others want it to be more of a role playing game with progression and long term goals. For me Elite has always been the latter ever since 1984..... and it all gets a bit dull imo once you have your fully pimped ship
probably why i have never been elite in any of the games on any format.... I have been Deadly many many times however.
BTW i am not just asking for moar grind..... it is just that credits should be the hardest thing to earn... i actually think engineering stuff should likely be easier to get..... since when was iron hard to find? and most engineering stuff should be buyable with credits... with rare exceptions perhaps such as the thargoid and guardian stuff which could feasibly be considered to be invaluable.
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If you go to the announcement thread the storm is getting itself warmed up already.
sadly for you to be able to use mega million credit ships as throw away items for PvP, it has meant throwing PvE under the bus and has given any notion of stuff having value moot
. It is a fair price if you are interested in PvP. Sucks for those who dont however.
Sure, and similar for me - it took me a couple of weeks to get out of the Sidewinder to an Adder, a few more to get to a Cobra III, and then a couple of months later I sold a bunch of exploration data to an early CG and used the few million in CG bonus to get to the stage of buying an Asp.
Money was hard to come by in those days, right ... except that before I'd even started playing, the first Triple Elite - requiring at least 1.2 billion of earnings to get Trade + Exploration, and probably a bit more in combat bonds for the Combat rank - had been done in just under a month.
Sure, it wouldn't take a month nowadays - someone who knew what they were doing can do it in under a week. But balancing the game around the top-end performance of speed-runners is a terrible idea.
The majority of players - as opposed to forum participants! - earn far less than that even now.
I suspect people will generally be surprised that Fleet Carriers are cheaper than they expected. Likewise personal bases, if we get those.
If you look at what new purchasable things Frontier have added recently it's mainly been Medium ships (Kraits, Alliance series, Mamba) with just one large (T-10) that was still cheaper than the existing "big 3". Mostly things which can be fully A-rated for just a few hundred million and got to a usable C-rated fit for under a hundred million.
The PC trade squadron leaderboard has total earnings of about 10 trillion credits every 8 weeks ... let's call it a trillion credits a week for round numbers. But that's split between (very roughly) 100,000 players, so the mean active squadron player [1] is earning about 10 million credits a week from trade, mining and trade-class missions.
In half a year they will have enough to buy and A-rate their very own Krait Phantom. Likely a bit quicker with exploration and combat earnings too, of course.
Even in a top-10 squadron, the earnings are about 100 billion credits per season, call it 10 billion credits a week ... split between 200+ squadron members for most of the top trade squadrons. Even for those big squadrons aiming for trade trophies and likely with a lot of internal encouragement and help to be a top miner ... the average earnings are only 50 million trade credits a week, and it only takes one dedicated miner making a billion a week to support 20 other squadron members making no trade earnings at all.
I would expect on this basis the base price of a Carrier (without a support ship, etc.) to be under a billion credits ... or they'll be so rarely used that it will have been a waste of Frontier's time to develop them and solve all the technical problems.
[1] The earnings curve is very top heavy, so the median income will be considerably less than even this - and remember, this is for at least somewhat active players.
One of the thresholds is learn the cardinal rule(s) before they cost more than a million credits.
To be honest I have very little problem with people grinding and fast tracking their way past all the fun in a rush to reach a point I can reach without grinding long before the game ends. But I do try to accept that they find grinding fun.
I'm ok with them choosing to grind their way past the content, but they seldom seem to find it fun. It does get a bit much when they complain there is no content .. because they bypassed the game to grind their way towards .... I have no clue
Neither of my 2 accounts have billions (main did until I shipped my fleet out to Carcosa, but I'd deliberately earned a 'big pot' to make this possible) as I really don't want to just do mining for credits I don't really need. When FC's come out, and we know how much and how capable, my alt account will probably buy one, the main unlikely.
I like doing missions, BH'ing and playing around in CZ's - not particularly big earnings to be made but a lot of actual enjoyment in doing them. Assuming, of course, that the call of exploring doesn't win...
I don't have any issue with other players having billions, or getting 'top tier' ships early in their game, the only thing important to me, very selfishly, is my enjoying playing the game.
I like doing missions, BH'ing and playing around in CZ's - not particularly big earnings to be made but a lot of actual enjoyment in doing them. Assuming, of course, that the call of exploring doesn't win...
I don't have any issue with other players having billions, or getting 'top tier' ships early in their game, the only thing important to me, very selfishly, is my enjoying playing the game.
I missed this, sorry.
No connotation at all intended, I just observed that my game centered a lot around making money for rebuys (which never happened by numbers by the way, because I barely got killed) and mining void opals made that a lot easier. Especially in my mind, because as said, I mostly fly mediums anyway and the loss is at worst 10 million rebuy a pop.
I don't even need the money, because I fly mediums, and the medium I pop the most is a Federal Dropbrick with a 4 million rebuy, which is even with before-vopal earnings a joke to lose. The only thing I do now that it is 7 vopals is I let my FdL explode in friendlies if I'm so inclined.sadly for you to be able to use mega million credit ships as throw away items for PvP, it has meant throwing PvE under the bus and has given any notion of stuff having value moot
And as said, I've never felt so free to do stuff in game.
I respect that some like the feeling of having "earned" things.
My viewpoint is a different one though.
Altruism .... water is needed for life........ o7 (unless it's those nasty Thargoids, then it's Ammonia)
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"I'm a new player, I've only played this game long enough to unlock both the Cutter and the Corvette".
So you're not a new player.