Would you...? Fiscal experiment.

[CMDR Redcrest]

We'll see how easy credits are to come by after the end of board flipping.
I'll bet a few of the 'omfg you board flip, you cheat and should be reported to FDEV' will be among the group that'll miss it.
Sometimes doing trade runs it is more credit/time efficient to fly empty back to the supplying station (on an A-B round run) if docking fees were too high it would overly impact the gains.
I have no problem with one docking fee at a reasonable rate which pays for all services.

Great idea...no fictional universe paints a picture of a lone struggling trader...who never has to worry about money, to whom authority taxes repairs fuel and docking are so insignificant as to not be worth thinking about...to whom any setback is trivial and paid out of pocket change...who almost instantly acquires a supra-powerful pseudo-military ship does it?

Make Insurance, fuel, repairs, upgrades expensive...make actually merely RUNNING a ship an income drain...such that breaking even is quite an effort...and see how much fun the game becomes again!

No fun at all. Just a niche grind fest in a niche genre.

 

[BDelacroix]

You know, I'd love to be taxed and fee'd to death in a video game just like in real life. NOT.

It doesn't matter.

 

[CMDR Redcrest]

You know, I'd love to be taxed and fee'd to death in a video game just like in real life. NOT.

It doesn't matter.

It depends what you get in return for taxation. I mean we're funtionaly immortal but the ED health service hasn't figured out how to get us walking.

 

[Cmdr Nemo]

Credits. Income. Wealth. A slightly bit different approach to discuss.

Recently I've been thinking about wealth in general. How wealthy we, as CMDRs, are. There was already few attempts of doing so, so i wouldn't be doing it again. While thinking about it I got a thought. Quite revolutionary.

One say that credits are easy to get and therefore meaningless. Other see it as a hindrance since missions in general pay too little while demanding too much. So to quote:

"What would be so terrible if I had a small fortune?"

And then it struck me - credits are now easy to come by, cash flowing with wide stream. Missions now pay at least 3 times it used to, millions per single mission is now pretty common sight.

But.

- Every docking falls under standard handling fee. This include tower guidance, ground service. Refuelling, repairs are paid separately. Landing fee depends on pad size (smaller pad - smaller fee), station type (outpost has lower fees than coriolis or orbis), system type (different for extraction, higher for tourism) and system size (small backwater be cheap, main hub with lot of traffic - expensive).


- Each outfitting usage falls under service fee. No one works for free, uninstalling old modules, installing new ones, swapping, connecting, etc. requires qualified work force. Service fee would depend on module size and type (not module value). Standardized fees. Power plants are expensive due to risk, small modules are lower costs, big modules are higher cost due to size.

Generally, at every step you face a credit drain. You land on a station, pay a handling and pad fee. Want to swap modules for you unlocked guardian tech - pay service fee. All those fees are a counter to massively increased credit availability. Few random missions is enough to get few millions but those millions are drained from you by daily activities.

And so my question: would you like to have such system in ED or would you opt to stay with things like are today?

I think above could implement more depth into credit system. Instead of "farming" credits, saving for future upgrades and purchases one could more manage their money. Under constant drainage finding lucrative routes and activities would have more impact.

Share your thoughts, feel free to agree, disagree and totally dump the idea if you find it bad.

And if one various Naval rank gave them a discount, there would be a purpose to Admiral or King. No rank higher fee's, Admiral or King, no fees.

 

[Kenneth McGrew]

Taxes and fees in a video game? whatever next ED Brexit? will Colonia want to leave - Colexit? will there be big red orcas with misleading signs on the side?

im out

 

[VR Jay Le Chardon]

There would also be scope for storage charges for ships and modules. There could be ways to negate these by giving players a small allowance at their nominated home starport, and also by giving them a larger allowance for storage at their squadrons fleet carrier...?

 

[CMDR_Halceon]

I remember thinking how reasonable the costs were when I started playing. I was expecting something more cruel.

I'm also wondering whether a way to simulate higher taxes and fees would be to play (from the start) with the thought that the mission board didn't exist. Would pure trade and bounty hunting make the costs of fuel and repairs seem more meaningful? I'd be interested to hear from anyone who's tried it.

 

[Mengy]

It’s an interesting idea.

I fly in flight simulator a lot, FSX and P3D specifically, and for over ten years now I’ve been flying a virtual pilots career of sorts using an client app called FSE (Flight Sim Economy). This app populates the sim world with FBO’s (Fixed Based Operator) which act as player owned airport offices that can bought and sold and used to generate missions to fly for money, while also providing (and tracking) virtual bank balances (which can generate interest), aircraft breakdown and repair bills, fuel usage and costs, plane rentals and purchases and operating costs, and landing fees when you land at airports. Basically it does exactly what the OP is talking about.

Honestly it works very well in simulating a virtual pilots career. Smaller planes are cheap to fly and maintain, and flying the occasional job now and then will easily cover your costs while making you a good profit. Larger planes are expensive to both fly and maintain, using much more fuel and costing much more to maintain, BUT they can take on much higher paying payloads and passengers so they have the potential to make much more profit as long as you fly and plane smartly. The end result is that small planes are fun and easy to fly while large planes are challenging but very rewarding, and the operating costs are what allow that to exist.

Now that said, the key to it all is great number balancing. This is mandatory to making operating cost gameplay work well. Missions absolutely need to be designed to enable easy profitable flying of small craft while also allowing large ships to be much more lucrative (but also making large ships a lot more challenging and detailed). Without this balance there just isn’t any point to bothering with all the financial detail.

Could this work in Elite Dangerous? Absolutely, it could provide a huge difference and appeal for flying the different sizes of ships while also adding some nice economic/financial factors into the game. Could Frontier make it work well? Could they get the numbers and balancing and operating cost implementation right? I think so, if they decided to put some meticulous work into it all. I doubt they’d take the time to bother now, as it would be quite the shakeup for an awful lot of players at this point.

 

[Vorxian]

Too far gone for ideas around the economy. The only way things could work is if a new currency replaced or overtook credits as the defacto payment system.


To some commanders a few million credits is significant. To other commanders 10 billion credits is insignifant. The gap is too great. Any introduction of tax or more realistic credit sinks would hurt one group of players, and another wouldn't notice it. You'd be penalising various game play choices which is unfortunately a by product of not having systems in place from the start.

I like the ideas, but, as my mrs would typically say: stable door, horse bolted....

 

[pzykozomatik]

I agree that running a ship and using station services should cost more. Just the other day I was looking at my stats and for the first time realised that in the 800 hours I've been playing, I've paid - I don't know exactly how much - but it was signifincantly less than 1 million credits for fuel, and less credits than I'd have expected for munitions by an order of magnitude, too. How do they keep those starports running, loitering fines?

 

[VR Jay Le Chardon]

Regarding the imbalance between the mega rich and the rest, I see no reason why future updates couldn't add an unseen difficulty factor that scales up difficulty proportionate to players wealth. So the more money a player has, the more they will be interdicted and attacked by NPC's, and the more difficult those encounters will be, and such like so as to generally trying to make the obscenely rich eat a lot of rebuys while cutting some slack for newer players.

 

[RamirezKurita]

Long before worrying about adding involuntary credit sinks to the game, they need to do a comprehensive balance pass on income across the board to make all activities worth performing from an economic perspective. Any credit sink that can make a dent in a trade mission runner's income would put almost any activity's income into the red. Once different sources of income are balanced against each other, then we can look into balancing player outgoings properly.

For dealing with existing excessive credit reserves, they simply have to add credit sinks and wait it out. Players who rely upon their savings to ignore the economic side of the game will gradually see their reserves dwindling, while those that keep a good degree of cost efficiency will see their reserves increase steadily; it might take years, but as long as no more credit exploits appear that replenish player reserves, eventually everyone will be brought back down to the point where credits matter.

 

[Lucius-Darcia]

Credits. Income. Wealth. A slightly bit different approach to discuss.

Recently I've been thinking about wealth in general. How wealthy we, as CMDRs, are. There was already few attempts of doing so, so i wouldn't be doing it again. While thinking about it I got a thought. Quite revolutionary.

One say that credits are easy to get and therefore meaningless. Other see it as a hindrance since missions in general pay too little while demanding too much. So to quote:

"What would be so terrible if I had a small fortune?"

And then it struck me - credits are now easy to come by, cash flowing with wide stream. Missions now pay at least 3 times it used to, millions per single mission is now pretty common sight.

But.

- Every docking falls under standard handling fee. This include tower guidance, ground service. Refuelling, repairs are paid separately. Landing fee depends on pad size (smaller pad - smaller fee), station type (outpost has lower fees than coriolis or orbis), system type (different for extraction, higher for tourism) and system size (small backwater be cheap, main hub with lot of traffic - expensive).


- Each outfitting usage falls under service fee. No one works for free, uninstalling old modules, installing new ones, swapping, connecting, etc. requires qualified work force. Service fee would depend on module size and type (not module value). Standardized fees. Power plants are expensive due to risk, small modules are lower costs, big modules are higher cost due to size.

Generally, at every step you face a credit drain. You land on a station, pay a handling and pad fee. Want to swap modules for you unlocked guardian tech - pay service fee. All those fees are a counter to massively increased credit availability. Few random missions is enough to get few millions but those millions are drained from you by daily activities.

And so my question: would you like to have such system in ED or would you opt to stay with things like are today?

I think above could implement more depth into credit system. Instead of "farming" credits, saving for future upgrades and purchases one could more manage their money. Under constant drainage finding lucrative routes and activities would have more impact.

Share your thoughts, feel free to agree, disagree and totally dump the idea if you find it bad.

YES!!

I would very welcome such changes. We need more credit sinks. Atm the only purpose for being rich is hoarding ships. Barely anyone needs to pay a rebuy for his ship. I'd like to see reasonable amounts of credits for repairs, refueling, docking, module swapping and many more.
Generally this is a good idea. Sadly there doesn't exist ANY economy in Elite for credits. Elite Dangerous is basically a singleplayer game with sharing places. So it wouldn't change much except triggering the salt flood.

If you need to pay a fee everytime you dock, you are more motivated for looking how you can GET money for docking there which brings bulk trading with low quantities back into place. This again has impact on BGS which leads to more salt fmbecause it requires more grind for playerfactions expanding endlessly.
I think the idea generally is good, practical it would generate MANY problems without real solution. Atm i'm paying 31% of all income into my 3 Elite pilots....so i think i havey imagination of fees and that's enough for now

 

[Ian Doncaster]

We'll see how easy credits are to come by after the end of board flipping.

Same maximum limit, but you have to spend slightly longer finding the right place for it. People board-flip because it's an easy substitute for research, not because it's necessary.

There are stations which reliably give enough Palladium missions on a single load of the board that you can fill a T-9 and go. 100MCr/hour easy, if you can stand to fly a T-9 from A to B and back for an hour.

 

[Mengy]

YES!!

I would very welcome such changes. We need more credit sinks. Atm the only purpose for being rich is hoarding ships. Barely anyone needs to pay a rebuy for his ship. I'd like to see reasonable amounts of credits for repairs, refueling, docking, module swapping and many more.
Generally this is a good idea. Sadly there doesn't exist ANY economy in Elite for credits. Elite Dangerous is basically a singleplayer game with sharing places. So it wouldn't change much except triggering the salt flood.

For me the appeal of the concept is less about credit sinks but more about credit management. Costs of flying a ship which drive us to plan and strategize more than we need to currently. Sure one side effect of this is players spending more credits on many different things we don’t now, but properly implemented it would introduce new earning opportunities with greater challenges as well. Make earning huge profits a skill instead of a time grind while also providing new meanings for flying the different sizes of ships.

 

[Andovar]

I'd rather they start with a rework of the refuel/restock/repair costs.
In particular, the refuel and restock costs should be dynamic.
They should vary depending on the economy and system state.

extraction/refinery/boom = cheap fuel
tourism/bust = expensive fuel
military/high-tech/boom = cheap ammo
agriculture/service/war =expensive ammo
etc...

Heck, in some cases a station could potentially run out of ammo. Which in turn could create lucrative trading missions similar to shipping meds to outbreak. Possibly with more 'danger' (aka NPC interdictions) from the enemy ships trying to stop ammo shipments from supplying the opposing force.

There's also the potential shipping/selling fuel to high demand systems.

The dynamic nature of this keeps it from being an across the board fee increase. So poorer cmdrs aren't automatically hit with more 'fees'.
Plus stuff like the makes the galaxy feel more alive. ...to me anyway.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Long before worrying about adding involuntary credit sinks to the game, they need to do a comprehensive balance pass on income across the board to make all activities worth performing from an economic perspective. Any credit sink that can make a dent in a trade mission runner's income would put almost any activity's income into the red. Once different sources of income are balanced against each other, then we can look into balancing player outgoings properly.

The problem here is that different activities use ships in different ways, and have different skill caps.

Trade-like activities: scale roughly linearly with the size of your cargo hold, so a T-9 can make 75 times as much as a Sidewinder per trip. (The Sidewinder can make the trips slightly faster, but it's not significant) Some skill required to know what to trade, but this can be outsourced.

Combat-like activities: more efficient in a bigger ship, but hit rapidly diminishing returns once you get to an engineered FAS. Extremely wide range of player skill substantially affects earning rates.

Exploration-like activities: a Sidewinder earns as much as a Corvette. Limited skill requirements.


If they balance earnings so that a max-skilled player in an optimised ship earns the same with every profession, then new players in their Sidewinders can go exploring and earn at least 80% of that.

If they balance earnings so that an average-skill player in a reasonable ship earns the same with every profession, then ... well, we get what we currently have, which is high-end bulk trading being the best by far, because that profession has the widest scaling range.


To provide end-to-end balance across the professions, they would need to:
- increase the non-outsourcable skill involved in trading
- significantly increase both the skill and equipment requirements for high-end exploration
- significantly increase the gap between "small" and "large" ships so that attacking a "large" with a "small" (or even with a "medium") was an exercise in futility. (Or significantly reduce the price and performance range of different ship types)
- probably various other "start over" changes
It wouldn't be popular.

 

[Jarge]

I personally wouldn't complain if tarriffs were brought in , I think if done properly it could add a bit of depth to the whole spaceship operation. BUT every player , as rightly mentioned before plays differently.
E.G. Both myself and my son have been playing for the same time, from launch of Horizons. I have 34 ships parked at Jameson and a net worth @ 35 Billion....My Son can't afford a rebuy on his solitary Krait.
He's no Noob , and is double elite like me, trading and exploration...but God only knows where his credits have gone; bad outfitting and ship changing and rebuys most likely, but still.
My point, extra charges might be challenging financially for some, but crippling for others, it all depends how you play the game.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I'd rather they start with a rework of the refuel/restock/repair costs.
In particular, the refuel and restock costs should be dynamic.
They should vary depending on the economy and system state.

The tricky thing is the range they can vary in.

A Sidewinder has a class 2 FSD using up to 0.9T of fuel a jump
A Cutter has a class 7 FSD using up to 12.8T of fuel a jump.

So the Cutter pilot pays ~14x as much for fuel as the Sidewinder pilot.
(Unless either pays 310 credits for a 1E fuel scoop - the Cutter pilot can afford both internal space and credits for something better - and then it's free)

The Cutter pilot could afford to pay 10,000 credits per tonne for fuel. 128,000 credits for fuel per jump is extortionate ... but the Cutter is capable of covering those costs easily. Or they could pay the same money *once* on a 6E fuel scoop and just spend 45 seconds at the star to refill.

The Sidewinder pilot cannot afford to pay 10,000 credits per tonne for fuel. That would make the contents of their 2t fuel tank more valuable than their entire ship! (Thought they could refill in about 45 seconds with a 1E scoop, costing only 310 credits)

It would be nice to see fuel prices vary per-system just as flavour and variety, but only beginners would need to actually care about it.

...

Similar issues with restock - utility restock would have to be dirt cheap because a Cutter can't get through that many more heatsinks than a Sidewinder, and you can get Large hardpoints on pretty small ships so ammunition couldn't be that expensive either. Huge ammo you could maybe push a bit higher ... but the beam laser is already a pretty popular choice for that hardpoint anyway.

Plus basic synthesis is really cheap.

...

Repair there's maybe more flexibility with, as the repair price can be proportional to the module price. But you're still limited to the repair cost of a ship with 0% all modules and marginally over 0% hull being less than the 5% rebuy (or people just blow them up to get a new one, as they did back when repair costs were higher). With most of the value of the higher-end ships being in their modules, and ships rarely coming back with such complete damage, in practice repairs also end up being pretty cheap.

(Plus nowadays there are AFMUs and Repair Limpets, which can fix up all this stuff much more cheaply than even paying the existing repair bills)

 

[IndigoWyrd]

This is the Dangerous part of Elite, knowledge and skill.

Once you have the knowledge of how the mechanics work and the skills to work them, you’ve basically won the game. Even deleting your save data will not remove the knowledge and skills. This would require the trans-orbital application of an ice pick to accomplish, and I recommend against the at-home lobotomy.

For those still learning and developing, this notion would only serve to deepen frustrations and drive or keep new players away, which is bad for the long term health of the game.

So what do we billionaires and multibillionaires to do? At the moment, nothing. Perhaps with the advent of bipedal locomotion we can finally have a real and valid solution - a casino station where we can gamble away hundreds of millions to win cosmetic prizes - like an engine mod that causes our exhaust to blow out credit symbols in the colored trails we leave, or torpedo skins that read “I paid 12,000 Cr to blow you up with this” - you know, stuff like that.