DRAMA
I've been doing some lower tier bounties, vlrts and lrts mostly, to try and get to grips with the new flight model. I was pretty discouraged at first, because it felt like my ship was so freakin' slow that I couldn't help but eat all of the enemies shots. But, after watching some guides, and getting more practice, I was starting to feel a lot better, and the new system was starting to grow on me. Tonight I saw an ERT pop and thought what the hell, I'll give it a shot and if I die, I was about to log off anyway, nbd.
The target was a redeemer, with a herc and connie as backup. Fortunatley, it felt like I was just fighting the redeemer for the most part, due to the other ships being slower. Unfortunately, that thing was so damn tanky that I didn't have a chance in hell of killing it in my little avenger titan. I put all 2000 rounds of my s4 revenant into it while hitting it with the s3 omniskys all the while. It took a little hull damage from the gatling but didn't even get the slightest dent it it's shields. I was fine because it didn't seem to be firing back with it's turrets for some reason, probably a bug or network issue. If it had I'm sure I would have been space dust by that point.
Which is totally fine - I would expect ERTs to be hard, and require you to bring a multicrew ship with some friends. What I couldn't believe is when I got back to the station, they wanted 47K aUEC to repair the slight bit of damage I took. That sounded completely crazy, I'm used to paying no more than a couple thousand. But I thought, maybe the economy has been rebalanced and the numbers are just higher now. That's when I decided to check that ERT mission, and realized that it would have paid... 25k. Twenty - five - k.
Circling back to the multicrew thing... how the HELL are we supposed to justify bringing friends along for missions, if they pay peanuts, AND expect us to split that between our crew, AND the repairs on a slightly damaged ship cost twice as much as the mission payout?! And a single seater at that, not even a multicrew ship!
AND on top of that, the prices of ships have increased across the board, so it was already going to be a much longer grind to get them. When CIG was talking about the changes they intended to make regarding mission rewards in this patch, I got the impression that they wanted to make most missions *more* worthwhile, not less. But what they have done here is just... insulting.
I WANT this to be a "grindy" game, eventually. I want to be able to spend years and years playing this game, slowly building up my wealth and reputation. But we are talking about an alpha here, one where any progress made is just going to get reset anyway. One where earning money often takes twice as long as you would expect anyway, because of bugs and issues getting in your way.
Now, I can already imagine what people more cynical than me are going to say: they don't want it to be reasonable to earn ships in game, because they want people to keep pledging for ships. I don't believe that, I don't think that they had any ill intentions behind these changes, I know they want the game to be good just as much as we do. But CIG, please, you owe everything to your backers, the least you can do is respect our time. Please listen to us on this one and make changes soon.
p.s. thanks for listening to my rant. Sorry for being dramatic, I'm just super passionate about this game (=
