When You Say Missions Don't Pay Enough...

[Wasp0]

Ah them were't days! I used to remember we were so poor , our mum and dad used to make us lik road clean wit Tongue, we used to live in a hole in the ground, hole in the ground, you were lucky we used to live in a cardboard box....Aye Lad them were't days! you try telling the young people of today that................!

(Ref: Monty Python's 4 yorkshiremen)

 

[Gaxel]

Since I have two accounts and since with an Anaconda a Python and many many credits I was bored, I've just started a new career where my goal will be to own all the ships.
Well, it's easy (10-20 hours) to get Adder, Hauler, Eagle, Imperial Eagle, Cobra Mk III and outfit them, but starting with Viper and Cobra Mk IV things become a little less easy and you need a few hours to make enough credits to outfit them.

It takes 50 to 100 hours of missions to go from the Sidewinder to the Python, and you still have to bought an Anaconda or a Corvett or a Cutter.

I think missions rewards are ok right now.

 

[Rev. Jell]

sightseeing adventures(600ly of travel) I've seen around the 4mill mark. All you need is a size 5 or 6 first class passenger cabin and a long range ship. It's my go to. imo it beats out the cargo missions.

 

[Cmdr Hobgoblin]

sightseeing adventures(600ly of travel) I've seen around the 4mill mark. All you need is a size 5 or 6 first class passenger cabin and a long range ship. It's my go to. imo it beats out the cargo missions.

I rather do Wars instead. I did a 3000 LY Passenger mission once. Got me 12 Million, including exploration data. Mission itself got me 4 Million and it took me 5 days.
2 Days ago I earned 50 Million in a few hours of doing CZ. Since the massacre missions are spawning again, that activity is a good earner again.

 

[Frenotx]

Mission payouts now are not so much low as they are unreliable. There are certainly ones that adequately compensate you for your efforts. Hell, there are some that honestly grossly over-compensate you. However, both of those are in the minority. In my experience, the mission board is still mostly filled with mission that pay insultingly low amounts, with the occasional gem thrown in. This could possibly be ok if there were a lot of missions to choose from, but usually the mission boards have 0-6 missions per faction. This ultimately means the majority of available missions are just useless fluff.

 

[Dbrn47]

Missions are still borked and pay too much.

I just got 6 missions in a row, each paying 200-300KCr, for sourcing stuff that could be bought in the same station for a few hundred Cr. Lame.
PAX missions pay 5-10MCr for essentially a delivery over a couple of jumps. Lame.

Borked and pay too much? That's the point of view I don't understand... The positioning of the missions you are talking about could use an adjustment, since you probably shouldn't be tasked to buy things from the station to turn an immediate profit, but the payment is fine. The risk and the range may need some work yet, but I don't get this idea that you should make the absolute minimum for everything you do in the game.

 

[[DOOK] Droogie]

Borked and pay too much? That's the point of view I don't understand... The positioning of the missions you are talking about could use an adjustment, since you probably shouldn't be tasked to buy things from the station to turn an immediate profit, but the payment is fine. The risk and the range may need some work yet, but I don't get this idea that you should make the absolute minimum for everything you do in the game.

Because a 500 billion credit Cutter should barely make enough per mission to cover fuel and mainten costs. According to some, anyway.

I'd bring up the eye poker again, but, meh.

 

[Jmanis]

Yeah, since the last patch mission rewards have been "about right" in my opinion. Those days back in 2015 were baaaad...

What keeps happening though is that, because of edge cases like Robigo or the latest stacking craze, everyone starts screaming "nerf it nerf it", and the collateral becomes the everyday mission payouts.

So yeah. Can we leave things alone this time round?

 

[Morbad]

Missions used to pay five figures at the high-end, maybe low six figures if it was the assassination of an elite Anaconda.

Conflict zones used to give a flat 350cr per kill.

Bounties were about one tenth what they are now.

Mundane cargo used to have significant relative value, and a hold full of rares could easily be a significant fraction of one's net worth. This made piracy vastly more plausible and while I never partook, I understood that there were legitimate reasons for it that went beyond virtual cops and robbers.

I liked the old economy.

Nowadays I get inane crap like this:

Yeah, I'm supposed to believe that breaking nine skimmers is going to create at least a 2.5 million credit profit from the contract to replace them? This is insulting to me as a player and es all over any semblance of believability.

 

[Apos]

But they don't pay enough if I can't earn a corvete with one stack and destroy the system's BGS in the process. That would be like playing the game and we can't have that.

 

[Dbrn47]

Missions used to pay five figures at the high-end, maybe low six figures if it was the assassination of an elite Anaconda.

Conflict zones used to give a flat 350cr per kill.

Bounties were about one tenth what they are now.

Mundane cargo used to have significant relative value, and a hold full of rares could easily be a significant fraction of one's net worth. This made piracy vastly more plausible and while I never partook, I understood that there were legitimate reasons for it that went beyond virtual cops and robbers.

I liked the old economy.

Nowadays I get inane crap like this:

Yeah, I'm supposed to believe that breaking nine skimmers is going to create at least a 2.5 million credit profit from the contract to replace them? This is insulting to me as a player and es all over any semblance of believability.

Yes, you are. Especially since there's no way of us knowing how much it actually costs to make Skimmers. Isn't there another discussion going on in another thread where people basically assert it would make more sense to haul things that are mission unique and aren't bought/sold on the open commodity market, like blueprints and such instead of biowaste? Well, here you are, a mission to blow things up (illegally, extra risk btw) that the NPCs replace for an unknown value. It's clearly a market scheme for that specific refinery economy faction to keep the Dukes of Lepchaimyu buying skimmers. Oh, yea, totally unbelievable in the game universe... super insulting. Morbad, please.

 

[Apos]

Yes, you are. Especially since there's no way of us knowing how much it actually costs to make Skimmers. Isn't there another discussion going on in another thread where people basically assert it would make more sense to haul things that are mission unique and aren't bought/sold on the open commodity market, like blueprints and such instead of biowaste? Well, here you are, a mission to blow things up (illegally, extra risk btw) that the NPCs replace for an unknown value. It's clearly a market scheme for that specific refinery economy faction to keep the Dukes of Lepchaimyu buying skimmers. Oh, yea, totally unbelievable in the game universe... super insulting. Morbad, please.

Scimmer missions involve extra risk?

Is that what people tell themselves these days to justify abusing the second most broken credit exploit to date?

 

[Jmanis]

Scimmer missions involve extra risk?

Is that what people tell themselves these days to justify abusing the second most broken credit exploit to date?

And this is the problem. It'd be fine if, when people stack 20 missions each to kill 12 skimmers each, that they *actually had to kill 240 skimmers*. The biggest reason for the extra cash for kill missions isn't necessarily the risk, it's the inconvenience. If I'm taking a kill mission, it's pretty damn risky to also be taking cargo/message delivery missions. You get popped, you fail all them... same same for assasination missions (too risky to combine with cargo hauling). And you don't see people "stacking" assasinations them because lo and behold, just like cargo delivery missions, you actually have unique objectives to meet.

So as a standalone mission, one run to kill 12 skimmers for 2m is fine. The problem is stacking though... which means the reward gets nerfed all to hell... and then people go "Oh look, a message delivery pays way more than killing skimmers, that's out of whack!" and then they get nerfed too and then we're back to "Hey, haul 200t of cargo and I'll polish your shoe for you".

For what it's worth, an FD employee (forget which one, maybe the missions guy?) did say they were looking broadly into the games economy, basically, because progression doesn't scale. So honestly, be ready for credit earnings to go up before they go down...

 

[Apos]

And this is the problem. It'd be fine if, when people stack 20 missions each to kill 12 skimmers each, that they *actually had to kill 240 skimmers*. The biggest reason for the extra cash for kill missions isn't necessarily the risk, it's the inconvenience. If I'm taking a kill mission, it's pretty damn risky to also be taking cargo/message delivery missions. You get popped, you fail all them... same same for assasination missions (too risky to combine with cargo hauling). And you don't see people "stacking" assasinations them because lo and behold, just like cargo delivery missions, you actually have unique objectives to meet.

So as a standalone mission, one run to kill 12 skimmers for 2m is fine. The problem is stacking though... which means the reward gets nerfed all to hell... and then people go "Oh look, a message delivery pays way more than killing skimmers, that's out of whack!" and then they get nerfed too and then we're back to "Hey, haul 200t of cargo and I'll polish your shoe for you".

For what it's worth, an FD employee (forget which one, maybe the missions guy?) did say they were looking broadly into the games economy, basically, because progression doesn't scale. So honestly, be ready for credit earnings to go up before they go down...

Good, the faster these people get their 5th corvette and drop the game out of boredom of being unable to find anything better to do, the better for the systems they destroy with their mission stacking.

 

[Jmanis]

Good, the faster these people get their 5th corvette and drop the game out of boredom of being unable to find anything better to do, the better for the systems they destroy with their mission stacking.

Right, scorched earth, yeah good idea... [rolleyes]

Mission stacking needs to be fixed sure, but you can't trash the rest of the mission system at the same time.

 

[Apos]

Right, scorched earth, yeah good idea... [rolleyes]

Mission stacking needs to be fixed sure, but you can't trash the rest of the mission system at the same time.

Scorched earth is what these people leave behind their trail of mission stacking. Their departure only opens the possibility of mending their actions in the BGS.

I wish them to have their 5th corvette by tomorrow really. Or whichever number will satisfy them to stop stacking like crazy drones.

 

[Morbad]

Especially since there's no way of us knowing how much it actually costs to make Skimmers.

There are countless pieces of evidence that can be used to infer a range of prices for skimmers, as well as a quantifiable utility value to them.

By no remotely believable estimate can a skimmer cost orders of magnitude more than an SRV or SLF, or approach the base cost of fighter craft like the Viper MkIII, even if we assume the later are subsidized.

It's clearly a market scheme for that specific refinery economy faction to keep the Dukes of Lepchaimyu buying skimmers. Oh, yea, totally unbelievable in the game universe... super insulting. Morbad, please.

That's how it's superficially presented, but nothing adds up, and that is insulting. They could at least have put better constraints on the ostensible motivations presented for the random missions so they wouldn't be blatant farces, but they didn't.

Scimmer missions involve extra risk?

For the record, this mission took fifteen minutes in an SRV (and would have taken less than five in an SLF), resulted in no bounty on myself, and paid 9000 credits in vouchers from a faction that had put bounties on it's own skimmers at every POI within spitting distance of the target base.

There was no risk, no challenge. It may as well have been a "click here to start a twenty minute timer for your free 2.5 million credits and rep++!" button.

 

[Dbrn47]

Scimmer missions involve extra risk?

Is that what people tell themselves these days to justify abusing the second most broken credit exploit to date?

The illegal part of it, which does seem to be considered when generating a mission. Yes, they may be rewarding you for risk that isn't really there for possibly a big chunk of the community, but it is supposed to be there and there ARE situations where becoming wanted can actually be risky. More risk does need to be added to situations where there is very little, I won't argue that point.

 

[Dbrn47]

There are countless pieces of evidence that can be used to infer a range of prices for skimmers, as well as a quantifiable utility value to them.

By no remotely believable estimate can a skimmer cost orders of magnitude more than an SRV or SLF, or approach the base cost of fighter craft like the Viper MkIII, even if we assume the later are subsidized.



That's how it's superficially presented, but nothing adds up, and that is insulting. They could at least have put better constraints on the ostensible motivations presented for the random missions so they wouldn't be blatant farces, but they didn't.



For the record, this mission took fifteen minutes in an SRV (and would have taken less than five in an SLF), resulted in no bounty on myself, and paid 9000 credits in vouchers from a faction that had put bounties on it's own skimmers at every POI within spitting distance of the target base.

There was no risk, no challenge. It may as well have been a "click here to start a twenty minute timer for your free 2.5 million credits and rep++!" button.

I think you might be reading into it too much, which really is more of a personal problem. I get that a lot of people crave a believable universe and it should be to a certain extent, but when you start harping on minutiae (some SERIOUS minutiae imo) I can't join the battle on your side. There is absolutely no reason why you should ever feel insulted by anything in this game. I also think that people start forgetting that this IS a game as well.

Stuff like the SRV feeling clunky to use in addition to the wave scanner being broken is stuff that grinds my gears. Exploring being mostly sight seeing and screen shotting annoys me. I don't find them insulting but it does keep me away from them as much as possible, because mechanically it's just not fun for me. On the other end, here you are lamenting the details behind the reasoning a faction would offer you a certain amount of credits, but not only bothered by it, insulted. Quite the disparity of attitude and priority. I'd hate to see how you react to something that is actually insulting.

 

[Weps]

The illegal part of it,

You can just fly around for a couple of minutes and find surface POIs with skimmers in them which are wanted and incur no bounty on destruction. That's how I did all my skimmer missions to date (I didn't do many because I don't like the mission template but I did do some to see what they were about).

So the faction controlling that jurisdiction is actually putting bounties on a piece of hardware (admittedly, maybe belonging to a criminal within that faction, but still). We're talking about an unmanned piece of equipment, like a motorbike or a fridge.

Better watch out for those wanted skimmers! I heard they're cousins with the killer elevator!