I had a batch of about 8000 ores to mine, so I took a Hydra mission for the field in which I intended to mine (before starting mining).
3000 ores into my objective, I still have to see a single mission crate, and I also have not seen any message about anyone getting one, so far this morning (I am not there all he time so I could have missed some, just none while I am looking).
Last night, as the feature had just started, almost every other line was about 1 crate found.
This raises several questions:
Has the drop rate been judged too high and immediately nerfed ?
Have drops stopped happening (bug or temporary feature suspension) ?
What should be a normal average occurence of those drops?
Can the mission crates drop from ANY rock in the stated asteroid field, or is each drop restricted to a specific rock within that field ?
If the drop rate for those is now too low, it would fail the point of giving miners a fair counterpart to haulers, as far as gaining faction points is concerned.
But like you just said, it seems that last night the crates were dropping like crazy trough the chat and that seems to have stopped completely.
Allthough ffrom the lil experience I got last night, their droprate seems to be rather random. I mined around 200 cycles/fuel before I got my first one and about 70 fuel later the second one, quickly followed by a third one.
edit : just as I posted this a message ingame rolled by that one was found, so it is still working
Well, the drop rates (or rewards) probably have to be adjusted a little. But more data has to be collected first.
I took a mission for 10 crates with 9000 cr reward - the max reward was available. 300+ fuel later Iâve found 2 crates:
-> Around 2k ore mined and 1.8k cr hydra reward.
Meaning, the reward is negligible compared to the value of mined ore, unless Iâm mining class 1 ores and selling them on GBM for 3-5 cr, which is a waste. Still nice to have an additional bonus, for sure, but seems even less than I get from lost-and-found commodities. Now imagine how little the rewards will mean when mining higher, more expensive ores. But, as mentioned already, the amount of data gathered so far isnât statistically significant yet.
By the way, do the rewards scale (reciprocally) with the law level of the asteroid field? Both mining and looking for crates in more dangerous areas should be lucrative.
Absolutely, the initial drop rate was a finger in the air, (with a rough idea where we wanted to be) and see how it goes.
It was too high. It was reduced, but I turned the dial a little tooo far lol. It has been tweaked again this morning.
No, still dropping, they were just slow.
Yes, you must be in the correct asteroid field, but you can be mining ANY rock
Not at all. Haulers will potentially deliver more missions, but the Hydra missions pay more faction than hauling. Once we have got the drop rate where we want it to be, then the faction gain from hauling and mining should be pretty closeâŚ
The drop rate is random⌠you might get 2 in 1 minute, and then not another for 30 minutes or more⌠which is why initially, the crate numbers for the missions were kept low (10 and below). Once we have got the drop rate where we want it, then you will start to see missions appearing for more crates.
Absolutely⌠we are watching the stats, and tweaking the drop rate. This will likely be happening for another day or twoâŚ
This was not designed as a money machine for the miners. Its specific purpose is to give miners a way to gain faction. The credits are a bonus, and not the driving forceâŚ
We still have very few players, and not many of those crafting currently. As players craft more and more, the demand for the ores will increase, and so the pricesâŚ
Not for the Hydra missions, no. Mining is lucrative in low law levels, as you are mining rocks that will be required for the high end builds, and will demand a premium price.
I would like to re-iterate that Hydra missions ARE NOT DESIGNED AS A CASH MACHINE for miners. They are a way to get faction, and the credit reward is simply a bonus.
Besides dropping into an office and choosing a mission, you have to do NOTHING to get these bonuses. They are placed into your ship hold for you, there are no messages to dismiss, you simply mine as you did before, then when you have the crates, pop to an office, hand in, collect another, then back to miningâŚ
Regarding the last paragraph of prevukâs reply just above, there is 1 big inaccuracy in the reasonning: miners simply DONâT stay and mine the SAME asteroid field all the time.
We gather what we need, process it as needed (which most often requires travelling), then select the most convenient asteroid field for the next type of resource we need; it does happen that we go several times in a row to the same asteroid field, but this is NOT automatic.
Here. the way you seem to be planning this, we would be FORCED to stick to the same field until the Hydra mission is finished if we want to finish it at all; this is NOT the way mining works, therfore sticking to this as it stands now will NOT be a fair counterpart to haulersâ way of gaining their own faction points.
I suggest 2 possible modifications to correct this:
-1) possibility to report an unfinished Hydra mission, with pro-rata reward on what should then become an ideal rather than a final objective.
-2) possibility to run a limited number of Hydra missions concurrently (pause and resume in the way of training would be pointless).
Iâve kept my official comments out of some of this for a while now, but @Fafhred I must ask that you try and understand that we are developers who have a long history of CE (Ten Years) to look back on what works and what doesnât, and also whatâs fair and balanced.
You see the game from a different perspective, the players view - the one that wants the game to play how you âwant it tooâ and that I understand. We take on board comments from testers, but that doesnât mean that we will always agree.
Iâve been following your posts over the last month and you seem to simply disagree with just about every add and change. Almost all comments are from a players locked in view. You need to begin to look wider and understand that we can see far more of what players do on a daily basis and what they donât do from ours.
It may simply mean that PT in its current Early Beta stage is not for you.
What may seem like âcommon senseâ to you may not in fact be the actual solution or in fact even be close to the problem at hand. So I ask that you take some time to consider if PT is actually for you.
Well, if you want the gloves off, here will be my reply, some of which I gave you nicely in chat, before I wrote off using chat:
What we have here is a BROWSER game; the simple facts about gaming is that this type of games which require very long real time planning to get anywhere have only a fraction of the population expectation from more casual games.
What you are doing is systematically placing additional obstacles in the way of players, many obstacles having no actual rational basis, just unustainable pretexts.
As for your experience of gaming, I can respect this, but do respect mine as well: besides having been a hardware/software designer and developper for CAD/CAM application for about 20 years starting in 1976, I have also been a gamer since the very first personal computers and before that on pen&paper RPG.
Whatever you may say, my experience seem to be at least as long as either of you, or maybe both combined.
From a market point of view, what you would normally try to achieve is a high level of players retention rate; this is difficult at the best of times for any game, even more in my experience for browser games; over the years I have seen a LOT of them coming and going because either they could not manage to get the kinks out of their game before their budget ran out, or they created overly difficult features which pushed players away; there are still a few around whith dead websites and no develeopers or any staff seen on them for months or even years, just waiting until their domains expire.
The successful ones have ALL one thing in common: however complex the game, the interface is made to keep the players happy.
Now, what you have here is a browser game with excessively long training times, which compare only to those in EVE Online in the whole of the gaming industry, for instance here, having a miner get all his mining and refining skills maxed will take several years.
Same for a crafter.
How many players do you think have the patience for this AND will also accept without comment features which are going IN THE WAY besides this, instead of helping the player.
When I tried nicely do discuss this in chat a few weeks ago, you just brushed me off.
So, this IS the kind of game I like; I do have the patience for the long training times; what I do NOT have is patience for unsustenable pretexts to make feature in the way that deliberatly make the player interface more complicated than it need to be,
You were remarking in a post above that this game still has a VERY LOW population; well, with all this, what do you expect? most gamers simply are NOT patient, playing is supposed to be a leisure, not a chore or another job, besides which if you really had that much gaming experience, you would know that even in the most populated games, only a very low fraction of the player base has the patience to go into serious crafting (between 5 and 20 % depending the game, in my personal experience and in some reviews I read a while back).
So, please, stop pretending that players are dumb and do not know a thing about gaming, and cannot possibly have more experience than you.
[quote=âprevuk, post:4, topic:472â]
This was not designed as a money machine for the miners. Its specific purpose is to give miners a way to gain faction. The credits are a bonus, and not the driving force
[/quote] Ok, I see. And have to agree with you on this.
[quote=âFafhred, post:5, topic:472â]
we would be FORCED to stick to the same field until the Hydra mission is finished
[/quote] Well, now that I think about it, that is indeed what youâre being payed for by Hydra: You mine not just anywhere you want, but in a specified asteroid field, looking for lost crates. In order to stay flexible in choosing your mining locations, you have to select hydra missions with appropriately low number of crates-to-find. In other words, plan ahead.
It is also fair that you donât get too many credits, but mostly appreciation: Would you get a mission like âFetch us X of ore Y for Z creditsâ or even simply âFind X crates at location Y (searching costs time and fuel and youâre NOT mining)â, it would be fine, youâre being payed for a service and donât keep the ore. With Hydra you, however, you keep all the ore. In fact, just as @prevuk mentioned, you do nothing besides accepting the mission and staying in the same place.
[quote=âFafhred, post:5, topic:472â]
possibility to report an unfinished Hydra mission
[/quote] Seems logical at first glance, but there is one issue:
ok, so youâre allowed to accept and turn in Hydra missions at any time
letâs remove the âtechnicalâ steps of accepting and turning in
whatâs left? you mine and get goodies that you can bring to Hydra office for a reward
doesnât is look similar?.. what about those randomly dropped commodities miners are already getting without any additional effort?
-> two systems doing almost the same: one rewards credits, other mostly faction standing
Maybe there is an alternative, a consensus somewhere in-between, but currently I have no better idea. A limited number of hydra missions (>1) at the same time, with that number depending on some mining (or even very different, like scanning/navigational) skill? Dunno.
I noticed the slowdown in crates, which is why I stopped in here. Immediately found the thread. I figure collecting crates is like collecting any other random drop. As there is no time limit on the Hydra mission, I am not locked into any one field. Sure, I might not complete the mission this trip but the Hydra missions are a bonus, not the main mission.
I think we were initially spoiled by the fairly rapid drop rate so the sudden decrease was like WOAH what the heck.
I have a feeling that some of the upper level schematics are going to require appropriately larger amounts of ore, so I will be spending more time in one asteroid field. The other option is to choose smaller Hydra missions.
Of course the credits were niceâŚ