Why do the devs keep destroying every form of making income?

[_Flin_]

Dont have that problem.

I play since Beta and just recently bought an Anaconda.

It is easier than ever to earn money.

Everyone can go bounty-"hunting" for 2 million an hour. 100 hours to Anaconda.

You can go do community goals, which pay fairly lavishly and get you 10 million for an hour or two once you are in a big ship.

You can go mining, create treasure maps and do Painite 75k Boom sales.

You can just look up trade routes and do 2500 cr./ ton easily per round trip.

So, passenger missions have been nerfed.

But there will always be opportunities to earn credits. They have come and gone. And they will come and go.

Rares, seeking goods, wing trading, some community goals, smuggling, Sothis / Robigo, Skimmer missions, passenger missions.

There will always be a FOTM way of earning money.

Just play the game. And you will get your money and your ships. Sooner or later.

 

[Actionman2222]

Why do the devs keep destroying every form of making income?

Well to get us trying other things like lets say passenger missions.

Eh? Passenger mission payouts were dropped to laughable amounts.

 

[Heavenly-Hammer]

Dont have that problem.

I play since Beta and just recently bought an Anaconda.

It is easier than ever to earn money.

Everyone can go bounty-"hunting" for 2 million an hour. 100 hours to Anaconda.

You can go do community goals, which pay fairly lavishly and get you 10 million for an hour or two once you are in a big ship.

You can go mining, create treasure maps and do Painite 75k Boom sales.

You can just look up trade routes and do 2500 cr./ ton easily per round trip.

So, passenger missions have been nerfed. They don't care how; they want it now.

But there will always be opportunities to earn credits. They have come and gone. And they will come and go.

Rares, seeking goods, wing trading, some community goals, smuggling, Sothis / Robigo, Skimmer missions, passenger missions.

There will always be a FOTM way of earning money.

Just play the game. And you will get your money and your ships. Sooner or later.

Unfortunately, the players who arrived after Horizons are used to nothing BUT ridiculously high payouts. They are Veruca Salt's in real life:

[video=youtube;TRTkCHE1sS4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRTkCHE1sS4[/video]

This is exactly what they are. They don't care how; they want it now.

 

[Actionman2222]

Unfortunately, the players who arrived after Horizons are used to nothing BUT ridiculously high payouts. They are Veruca Salt's in real life:


This is exactly what they are. They don't care how; they want it now.

It's not like it used to be back in the day huh? Lol. You sound a bit bitter. *cough* troll *cough*.

Anyway, enough posts from me for now.

 

[Hasaf]

Why do the devs keep destroying every form of making income?Well to get us trying other things like lets say passenger missions.

You could have better sad that last line as:

to insure that we try nothing but shooting missions.

 

[Hasaf]

Unfortunately, the players who arrived after Horizons are used to nothing BUT ridiculously high payouts. They are Veruca Salt's in real life:This is exactly what they are. They don't care how; they want it now.

Nice straw-man, but not even close to reality. It comes close to wanting it in a reasonable time-frame. By my calculations, a well outfitted top trade ship will take me over three years of trading (that number is probably a bit low). Based on those numbers, and how long the game has been out, there should be NO top end trade ships in the game; yet there are. This is not a case of "I want it now" it is a case of "I want the same opportunity that the people that started before me had." Even the changes I have seen since last January, when I purchased the game, and now. The game continually gets harder for new players. That is not Veruca Salt's lament, if is a desire for fair treatment.

 

[Chrysophylax]

Unfortunately, the players who arrived after Horizons are used to nothing BUT ridiculously high payouts. They are Veruca Salt's in real life:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRTkCHE1sS4

This is exactly what they are. They don't care how; they want it now.

This isn't the player's fault. I'll remind you that Sothis was in the game since 1.4 - it's been longer since then until today than it was from release to 1.4. They created this mess, not the players.

 

[CptSiddy]

I am, pretty much, in group 2; except that I do not begrudge those who entered that game early and have accumulated piles of credits. I am a bit more annoyed at how hard it has become to accumulate my own credits, there is a difference.

Why the desire for more credits?

To purchase better outfitted ships.

As I have mentioned before, as in most space games, there is a significant disadvantage applied to people who do not seek out shooting roles. In the past few months I have seen the non-shooting profits collapse. Part of it seems that the trade computers did not update fast enough. However, no matter what the cause, the game is definitely focused on planetside shooting missions. Any other activities pale by comparison.

How to fix it?

As has been mentioned elsewhere, the devs need to consider profit per hour. Last night I was chatting with someone who was shooting generators for over 30M / hour while I was slogging along at about 100K / hour with a passenger mission. If there really is nothing here but a shooting game, then bill it as such.

The other thing that is desperately needed, by people who consider themselves to be traders, is a real trade computer (but please, don't take a full slot for it). The need is made obvious by the proliferation of third party trade calculators (however, as an x-box user I cannot run the client).

Basicly, I would like to see a way for non-shooters to have an income similar to that offered to the shooting roles.

Planetary PEW PEW is the goldberg standard for money making?

Sounds oddly like "chosen of the god" peoples plot to make players to buy certain season pass so that they can make some money... before they nerf it to justify next expansion.

Oy Vey!

 

[Sgt Pepper]

I think the bigger questions should be, why is the game all about income to you? I have the big 3 A'd out and all the credits I could ever want. And yet I mostly fly an ASP or a Cobra and have just as much fun as using the "big income ships".

I'm not saying credit acquisition isn't important, it was actually quite fun and addictive, but due to the outrageous payouts of the past, especially Sothis/Robigo, credits have become completely irrelevant to me and have taken away part of the game I really enjoyed. This might be a hard concept to grasp, but take it from me, FD is actually trying to do you (and themselves) a favor with this "income destruction" although they are about a year late to the party and its only a bandage on a much bigger problem. I can tell you this much, if you're not enjoying the game now because you don't have the ships or income you want, you wont get more enjoyment when you get rich and have it all. You might actually get bored and lose interest when you find out your dream ship doesn't make the game more fun. I think that FD is starting to realize that many people play for the credit grind, so take that away then what? Hence the recent change and the attempt at keeping people playing longer.

Let me prove to you that this is the case. You say you came back for the passengers, but the moment you found out they wont have a good payout, you are ready to walk away again. Its all about the credits, you think the missions aren't engaging, there is no substance, its basically another A to B delivery. If you did enjoy them and were having fun, you wouldn't care about credits. This goes for smuggling and any other high paying activity which people lose interest in and complain about the moment huge payouts get taken away. In other words there is a much bigger problem than the recent income adjustments.

Wow, there's so much in this post that, I've got to be honest, winds me up.

By your own admission you've got the three biggest ships in the game, A rated, and a ton of credits on hand. But you seem to think others shouldn't experience this, at least not for a very long time? Very easy to tell people they won't enjoy the bigger ships any more than smaller ones, you've had the chance to fly them. I'd also say maybe others will enjoy flying the big ships more than you do.

And the worst part of this post, telling us FDev are doing us a favour. Really? By getting the game to a point that many of us were reasonably happy with and then taking that away? Making us wonder if there's any point anymore? Oh, and telling us we might find this a hard concept to grasp? Yes, we're all idiots chasing the shinies, thanks for showing us the truth of our shallow existences.

As I've said before, the risk of people getting bored by having too many credits is probably better than those who just plain get bored by feeling they're not getting anywhere. Devs don't need people to keep playing necessarily, they need to keep them coming back and there's a difference.

FFXIV works pretty much on this principal. Just before major updates things go quiet, people have gotten what they needed from the last update and simply wait for new content. And they disappear for a bit, play other games. Yet a content update drops and so many come back, knowing they're ready to face new content. This is even less of a problem for ED as they don't even lose subs when people take a break.

Above all, ED should take advantage of this. Add other content that players can spend credits on. Maybe more ships or, as some have suggested, player bases. Let us be able to invest in stuff. There's so much ED could add with a little imagination.

 

[Dbrn47]

Because people keep complaining about people making more credits than them with an activity that they don't want to engage. If mining was suddenly the credit beast tomorrow, there would be a hundred threads on why it shouldn't be as well.

 

[Karunamon]

Because people keep complaining about people making more credits than them with an activity that they don't want to engage. If mining was suddenly the credit beast tomorrow, there would be a hundred threads on why it shouldn't be as well.

Repped and ^this. Literally every single instance of this I've seen boils down to I DID A BUNCH OF BORING NOT FUN STUFF THEREFORE EVERYONE ELSE SHOULD HAVE TO DO A BUNCH OF BORING NOT FUN STUFF TOO.

It's basically crab mentality, applied to a game.

Personally I'd like to see the BORING NOT FUN STUFF go away because not fun stuff shouldn't be in a game, but apparently that's asking a lot.

 

[Ghost1]

the grind is getting way to big.

espically if you want a nice flow of people coming into the game. income does need a buff.

 

[Slack]

I should mention that I had a Conda and several other ships well before shadow missions were introduced. So I've been down the long road. Back then it was much harder to acquire credits than it is now (even with the recent adjustment). And I stand by what I said. It became no more fun for me when credits were easy to get, allowing me to get the other big ships faster. I'm still playing the same game, doing the same things. That's why I said if you're not enjoying it now and are ready to walk away because of an income reduction, wait until you have all the credits, you will walk away for sure.

You should be interested in the game and it's content and have fun with various activities. If it's just about income and how fast you can get a big ship, so that you can then finally start having fun, I have bad news for you, it doesn't work like that. That's why I said it's a hard concept to grasp when you lack credits. And only when you get rich you realize it's no more fun, in fact slightly less fun, as credit acquisition is no longer something you get joy out of.

 

[Dominatus01]

I should mention that I had a Conda and several other ships well before shadow missions were introduced. So I've been down the long road. Back then it was much harder to acquire credits than it is now (even with the recent adjustment). And I stand by what I said. It became no more fun for me when credits were easy to get, allowing me to get the other big ships faster. I'm still playing the same game, doing the same things. That's why I said if you're not enjoying it now and are ready to walk away because of an income reduction, wait until you have all the credits, you will walk away for sure.

You should be interested in the game and it's content and have fun with various activities. If it's just about income and how fast you can get a big ship, so that you can then finally start having fun, I have bad news for you, it doesn't work like that. That's why I said it's a hard concept to grasp when you lack credits. And only when you get rich you realize it's no more fun, in fact slightly less fun, as credit acquisition is no longer something you get joy out of.

I get what you're trying to get at. I also have a plenty large enough balance and a few of the largest ships outfitted for what I want.
However, the problem with your argument is that there is no super entertaining content in the game. There's the potential for it, but it hasn't been coded in.
I won't bang the age old drum too much, but let's face it, missions leave a ton to be desired - they're all the same and extremely tedious & shallow. Exploration is a distraction, but once you've done complete scans of 100+ systems outside of the bubble, it gets very samey very fast. You'll soon find yourself landing on a planet simply to break up the boredom. Planetary landings at the moment offer very little. Engineers is simply a gigantic grindfest. Shuttle run trading is about as much fun as pulling out your nails with pliers. Mining, more of the same. Hunting in CZ's gets very old very quickly due to a lack of variety, same with BH'ing. Gaining ranks in either Navy is simply a grind.

So, yes, it would be nice if there were engrossing things to do apart from upping the credit balance, but upping that balance is the only reason for doing most of the current activities in game because they're so damn repetitive & tedious.

It might be different if we had ongoing proper story arcs that we could undertake that tied in with activities that went towards them, or maybe multi-day multi-stage missions that took us many light years to complete. Maybe if the Navy ranks tied in with a long term storyline, then that would give people something to do? Alternatively, if they'd adopted having player guilds/corps/factions properly in the game then we could represent them with tags on and work together to do things properly, rather than simply pretending that we're working together in the BGS using 3rd party tools like Inara to track progress. Another missed trick! Co-op missions, instances, etc etc.

The potential that ED has to offer a true day to day spacegoing experience for players, both as groups and single players is immense, but it never actually appears. It's all half baked, and then instead of actually fleshing out things like missions, planetary, exploration, etc etc, they simply introduce yet more half baked content (passengers, engineers).

Personally, I would have been way more happy as a player if, say for an example, FD had developed the mission board into something engrossing before releasing Engineers, Planetary, or Passengers. I would have preferred 2 Major content patches introducing long storyline arcs with missions, missions that took place over a week doing a variety of activity as part of one mission.

Every new major content patch seems to introduce & start something, but no patch ever seems to develop anything beyond that. I often get the feeling that ED is like a mad ADD Scientist's Playground with tons of ideas that have been started by the scientist and then dropped in nanoseconds when they got bored and moved on to the next idea. How about FD focus on actually finishing up JUST ONE area of the game activities to make them playable for more than a month.

 

[Zeeman]

I made a couple of threads a while back complaining about pathetic rare goods spawns and the 10 minute waits for yet another tiny allocation. Mostly what I got for this was abuse. Some players seem to think this is some form of meaningful gameplay. The usual response is "rare goods are rare". My Asp they are rare, somehow unpteen gazzilion tons of rare goods are suddenly available when there is a CG. In fact they usually buff rare goods spawns for CGs just so the great unwashed will be bothered to sign up for the CGs.

Yup - rares, and allocations are an insult to the player. The "but it's rare" argument doe snot hold up. They are rare because they are made in one place only, they are plentiful in their native system (hence why they are so cheap there), but get harder to find the further yet get (hence the price rise).

They really should have just decided how many they want you to have, and give the full allocation on the first visit to the commodity screen.

Z...

 

[CptSiddy]

Dont have that problem.

I play since Beta and just recently bought an Anaconda.

It is easier than ever to earn money.

Everyone can go bounty-"hunting" for 2 million an hour. 100 hours to Anaconda.

You can go do community goals, which pay fairly lavishly and get you 10 million for an hour or two once you are in a big ship.

You can go mining, create treasure maps and do Painite 75k Boom sales.

You can just look up trade routes and do 2500 cr./ ton easily per round trip.

So, passenger missions have been nerfed.

But there will always be opportunities to earn credits. They have come and gone. And they will come and go.

Rares, seeking goods, wing trading, some community goals, smuggling, Sothis / Robigo, Skimmer missions, passenger missions.

There will always be a FOTM way of earning money.

Just play the game. And you will get your money and your ships. Sooner or later.

Unfortunately, the players who arrived after Horizons are used to nothing BUT ridiculously high payouts. They are Veruca Salt's in real life:



This is exactly what they are. They don't care how; they want it now.

You two are completely delusional. 100h grind to Anacondoma hull is MMO like grind (Then there is the 300h grind for internals). Something that will make Korean blush. The MMO's have this grind for a reason. In MMO's the anaconda is status symbol, and in many ways can also effect the game play of other people.
ELITE IS NOT AN MMO. It is some deformed offspring of low budget server up keeping, sporadic promises of "play with friends" and totally broken p2p instancing mechanics that can be broken by 14 year old script kid with packet-limiter.

There is a reason FD don't punish commodity duper: It don't effect economy, it don't effect other players.
Having and artificial high grind to what is now considered medium stage game content, not even late stage, is just plain off putting. I find the grind in X3 Albion prelude more rewarding, because in there you can at least leverage your assets to produce more assets. The grind is rewarding there, and also actually *gasp* FUN. In elite its just dull, repetitive and at this point, unrewarding.

Now, i fly this game with Vive+HOTAS. So i mainly enjoy the ships, their interior and their feel and handling. So to me, getting ships and fly them is the most fun part of the game. Not being able to access some of them because i don't bother to put "mere 100h" to grind just for the hull is insulting.


Now how i see this is the FD has two options; either balance this games rewards to reflect the true nature of this game - A theme park with procedurally generated placeholder content... and work from there to improve it.
Or turn this game in proper MMO with separate solo and open play world and better player interaction system like money transfer, item transfers, player commodity markets and all that jazz. (not going to happen and you all know that)

Oh, and i will not buy the Horizonss just so i can farm the current meta skimmer missions. I will refuse to buy any FD products until they pull their collective thumbs out of their collective arses and decide what they want ED to be. A theme park or MMO, and start balance the game accordingly!
This game is now literally in sorrier state than X3 at release. The only reason i still like ED is because they got the ship feel down well to play it in VR. Beyond that, this game is a flaming joke on a stick.


And before any one of you go "muh 200 gorillion stars". Space engine got even more, look nicer and is FREE. If i want to look at alien scenery of bizarre worlds and physically plausible vistas, i load it up. Not ED. ED is becoming so niche that its sqeezing even the avid space-autist like me, who invested 2000+ euros on hardware to enjoy space-autism, away.
Well, there is star citizen coming around the corner so there is that...

 

[CptSiddy]

Repped and ^this. Literally every single instance of this I've seen boils down to I DID A BUNCH OF BORING NOT FUN STUFF THEREFORE EVERYONE ELSE SHOULD HAVE TO DO A BUNCH OF BORING NOT FUN STUFF TOO.

It's basically crab mentality, applied to a game.

Personally I'd like to see the BORING NOT FUN STUFF go away because not fun stuff shouldn't be in a game, but apparently that's asking a lot.

Yeah, nah, you are missing the point. By a mile.

FD is treating ED as MMO but coding it as single-player/co-op game.

Lets take case study EVE online to compare to ED. In EVE, back in 2003 up to 2006, before major content updates, the most lucrative activity was mining. It was borin as hell, but lucrative as hell... and DANGEROUS as hell.
The most lucrative mining spots were in lawless parts of EVE, and that meant that you had to have protection, logistics and all that jazz figured out before you could make MEGA MILK in there. And the mining payed SO WELL that you could afford to actually HIRE real players to work for you IN GAME.

If you cant see the genius of this system, that carried virtually feature and content free game like EVE in to success, you are not very bright person. EVE had less features then ED for first 4 years of its existence. It mission system was even worse than ED's. Yet it gave players actually some liberties and ways to interact. In ED you have this "trade dividend" system that NO ONE uses. In EVE, people hired other people by fiat and not some hard coded game system.

FD is simply dropping the ball here, it don't know what it wants to be because the original ED was not multiplayer game, and i got this impression that the ED devs are school bullied recluses who never even considered letting actual human interaction to sully their perfect space utopia.

 

[Kaa Mchorror]

You two are completely delusional. 100h grind to Anacondoma hull is MMO like grind (Then there is the 300h grind for internals). Something that will make Korean blush. The MMO's have this grind for a reason. In MMO's the anaconda is status symbol, and in many ways can also effect the game play of other people.
ELITE IS NOT AN MMO. It is some deformed offspring of low budget server up keeping, sporadic promises of "play with friends" and totally broken p2p instancing mechanics that can be broken by 14 year old script kid with packet-limiter.

There is a reason FD don't punish commodity duper: It don't effect economy, it don't effect other players.
Having and artificial high grind to what is now considered medium stage game content, not even late stage, is just plain off putting. I find the grind in X3 Albion prelude more rewarding, because in there you can at least leverage your assets to produce more assets. The grind is rewarding there, and also actually *gasp* FUN. In elite its just dull, repetitive and at this point, unrewarding.

Now, i fly this game with Vive+HOTAS. So i mainly enjoy the ships, their interior and their feel and handling. So to me, getting ships and fly them is the most fun part of the game. Not being able to access some of them because i don't bother to put "mere 100h" to grind just for the hull is insulting.


Now how i see this is the FD has two options; either balance this games rewards to reflect the true nature of this game - A theme park with procedurally generated placeholder content... and work from there to improve it.
Or turn this game in proper MMO with separate solo and open play world and better player interaction system like money transfer, item transfers, player commodity markets and all that jazz. (not going to happen and you all know that)

Oh, and i will not buy the Horizonss just so i can farm the current meta skimmer missions. I will refuse to buy any FD products until they pull their collective thumbs out of their collective arses and decide what they want ED to be. A theme park or MMO, and start balance the game accordingly!
This game is now literally in sorrier state than X3 at release. The only reason i still like ED is because they got the ship feel down well to play it in VR. Beyond that, this game is a flaming joke on a stick.


And before any one of you go "muh 200 gorillion stars". Space engine got even more, look nicer and is FREE. If i want to look at alien scenery of bizarre worlds and physically plausible vistas, i load it up. Not ED. ED is becoming so niche that its sqeezing even the avid space-autist like me, who invested 2000+ euros on hardware to enjoy space-autism, away.
Well, there is star citizen coming around the corner so there is that...

What if I was to tell you that I recently was able to purchase an Anaconda a few weeks ago and I have been playing regularly since shortly after launch? What if I was to tell you that I am fine with that pacing? What if I was to tell you that I still fly my smaller ships more than my Anaconda?
The problem with players like you (and this is not meant as an insult) is the perception of success. Instead of worrying about getting the next ship as fast as possible or gaining credits as fast as possible why not concentrate on having fun? Perhaps if you changed your mind set Elite wouldn't be dull, repetitive and unrewarding. BTW if you think 100 hours is MMO grind then you haven't played very many MMOs'.

 

[CptSiddy]

What if I was to tell you that I recently was able to purchase an Anaconda a few weeks ago and I have been playing regularly since shortly after launch? What if I was to tell you that I am fine with that pacing? What if I was to tell you that I still fly my smaller ships more than my Anaconda?
The problem with players like you (and this is not meant as an insult) is the perception of success. Instead of worrying about getting the next ship as fast as possible or gaining credits as fast as possible why not concentrate on having fun? Perhaps if you changed your mind set Elite wouldn't be dull, repetitive and unrewarding. BTW if you think 100 hours is MMO grind then you haven't played very many MMOs'.

What if i told you that Elite is NOT and MMO. What if i told you that in this game my actions, or your actions don't effect anyone around them in any meaningful way apart of "role playing" way? What if i told you just HOW MUCH i care about your preferences in single player game? And to how deep to stuff those preferences?

Edit, i logged about 1100h on this game over its existence, so don't lecture me "lol 100h is nohing" bull poo. For a game that is not MMO, this game sure lacks content and is trying to mask it by diluting existing fun by endless grind and the "use ur imugination hurr" shtick.
My imagination can only go so far when i must claw my eyes out to get just a Hull of medium game content ship at this point.

 

[Mengy]

The problem with players like you (and this is not meant as an insult) is the perception of success. Instead of worrying about getting the next ship as fast as possible or gaining credits as fast as possible why not concentrate on having fun? Perhaps if you changed your mind set Elite wouldn't be dull, repetitive and unrewarding.

You are missing the heart of the argument for putting mission payouts back to pre 2.2 levels. It's not about making credits "as fast as possible", nor is it about "getting the next ship ASAP", it's all about rewarding the player's time investment. The issue here is that missions which pay out crap for rewards make players feel like they are barely progressing and wasting their in game time. Why even do a mission if for all of your work you barely get anything in return?