What is going on with this game?

[jebrighton]

Several months ago, the XP for crafting was lowered. Then, the need for crystals was changed and you cannot get rid of them now. Then, the prices of ores was lowered, drastically in some cases. Now, the UA ores have almost disappeared. What is going on with this game? It seems that when we are doing well that changes are made to hurt the players, not to improve the game. I am disappointed in this direction. How do others feel about all this?

[Hunbaba]

XP from crafting was not lowered, but rebalanced. While i tend to agree it was not done perfectly, nothing ever is perfect. Though imho it is better as it was.

Crystals have their uses. In fact more as they used to have. Very few were used in crafting, now you have to use a lot of them for a single upgrade. Sven still takes them and they are also used in many NPC missions. Thus not being able to get rid of them is silly, unless you are trying to get rid of (as example) yellow crystals at 400k cpu . One problem i do have is with upgrading high level, especially Naristro, equipment. Lots of crystals needed and base price is in hundreds of millions in Talas for a random buff.

UA metals&minerals. Cant really say as i havent been mining for a while, but i never had much luck with them anyway. So maybe you just caught up with my luck as far as UA stuff goes, hehe.

Price reductions... you will cry if i tell you how hard that one hit me and my CS stock valued at Joes. For example from shipyard salvaging and active combat career, there are currently ~95k DCMs in my CS. Price reduction in those alone means i would get 218mil less if sold to Joes . You can imagine the rest.

Base (Joes) price also isnt everything. I dont really care how low they are, i just usually place ~200 cpu for fragments and ~500 cpu for ores (those that can be only mined, or limited quantities through combat loot). Should those prices tempt you, send me a list of what you have and i will make it considerably shorter .

Edit: How i feel about all this? I can see reasons why such things had to be done. If i was more active and perceptive, i could (should) have anticipated it and reacted in time or be less of a hoarder. Though i am afraid no price reduction will cure me of that . I might not like everything it is done, but will have to learn to live with it. Such changes are unavoidable in a persistent game. In fact i think Coops is managing it rather well considering how different this game is from years ago.

[Jager 602]

I don't craft enough to know what the xp was before. The crystal change was a bit of a shock, but mostly due the way it changed my short term income stream. I did use some to buy much needed materials from Sven to complete some missions. I'm sure once I have enough levels/gumption to try out the research academy, I'll be burning through crystals a lot faster than I can find them...

I don't think the UA ores disappeared, but over-mining in some areas makes it look that way. I just spent 2300 fuel in Bedlam and about 2400 fuel in Ethan. Got 4-5 in Bedlam and 9 in Ethan. I've done that on a few occasions, but I have had the reverse happen, and a few times I have had almost nothing come up regardless of where I mined.
As for resource prices falling, they have to fluctuate based on supply and demand, so if everyone is mining a certain ore or range of resources over all the others, then the price will have to fall somewhat. When something else is more profitable, everyone will go after that. I'm not qualified to say how much something should rise or fall; I can say that when the price of tryonite and a number of the other rare minerals I was trying to extract fell(I had even gone out shortly before this happened and bought several mineral extractors just to take advantage of the opportunity), I switched mostly over to tungsten and have not been sorry. It's going to be a gamble sometimes; I'm not making quite as many credits now, but I'm certainly still making them

[Coops]

@Jebrighton

The rebalance of XP whilst global actually only hit 'hard' approximately 10% of the total amount of Schematics, of which there are nearly 3 and a half thousand now! It was required due to some players habits and their methods of using one toon to power level other alts through levels artificially. This was an issue created by the community and fixed by me. In Ten years we have only had 2 such tweaks to crafting XP. I'd say that deserved a round of applause not a bollocking?

Around 20 Resources out of 658 were modified and were in desperate need of modifying. They were set way to high to start with and went unnoticed. Again the game requires the odd re-alignment as players habits and the economy grows / shrinks in certain directions.

Crystals: Read about the Crystal Exchange program and Research Academy here :viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1182
Then read about the Foundry here : viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1065

The redirecting of Crystals made changes to the game that went form a handful of items being able to be 'Affected' to 100's. So far the community has created over 50 unique items from the process and this will only grow and grow as I add more and ore sections to the Foundry. There was close to 10K of crystals cluttering up the Database that were never going to get used or handed in.

Core-Exiles is in my blood, cut me I bleed Bio-Fuel. To think I would do anything for any other reason than balance and extending CE's longevity is frankly absurd. I'm sorry you feel the way you do. Keeping up in Dev posts and Primers when new changes come about will help alleviate a lot of this. Some of the things you talk about happened before Christmas.

As with Any game that has the life span and diversity such as Core-Exiles, I am NEVER going to keep everyone happy. But when parts of the game need tweaking to advert future issues I have done so and will continue to do so.

Coops

[Sukayo]

And for crafting, i am sorry that i crafted some stuff before the change .... now the same crafts give more exp.
So i like that the game is changing, and feel sometimes like a noob, not knowing what is going on

[Coops]

And for crafting, i am sorry that i crafted some stuff before the change .... now the same crafts give more exp.
So i like that the game is changing, and feel sometimes like a noob, not knowing what is going on

LOL that's actually a good point I'd forgotten that in fact the 'rebalance also increased some schematics output' Nice reminder Sukayo.
Also should you wonder what we are talking about : viewtopic.php?f=32&t=509

Back in July of LAST Year

Coops

[Hunbaba]

Required to build:
Niobenium 49000
Refined Ore 39000
Plasteel 49500
Refined Metal 67000

XP awarded: 5000

This would count as one of those .

[MarcSp]

The economic model in CE is so broken that its not really legitimate to refer to it as an economy.
Grrr.....never mind, I'm not going to rant about this again. I usually just ignore the whole thing.

By the way....has anyone noticed there are over 30 BILLIONAIRES in game? And another 30 over 500 Mil?
And...how does a level 25 player, who restarted just 2 weeks ago, get into the billionaire club that fast?????
>Player ID... Captain Name... Credit Balance... Level... Last Login... Account Created PA
>
>32615... ****** 1,008,849,372... 25 ... Jul 26th 13:30... July 16, 2015 PA Member

Hmm. Me senses another massive credit drain project coming soon.

[Darakhoranon]

The economic model in CE is so broken that its not really legitimate to refer to it as an economy.

Care to elaborate?

Granted, certain activities are almost ridiculously profitable (ferrying passengers comes to mind), and there are more than a few stinking rich pilots, but on the whole, the economy here isn't half as "broken" as in certain other games I could name - MOST prices in the emporiums are at least somewhat reasonable, after all. So how do you come to your conclusion?

[MarcSp]

Man I knew this would happen, just as I'm leaving on vacation tomorrow. Which is why I don't want to start this rant.

Yes, many if not most other games are far worse. I agree there.

But ponder the second half of my post: exactly how does a level 25 player come up with 1 billion credits in 10 days???

Anyhow, I will be gone for the next week, so might as well let this subject drop.