I also have to remind you that PvP is for farming reputation while PvE gives more credits.
There you can earn 220k per battle and with a decent team you should not have any repair costs.
I also have to remind you that PvP is for farming reputation while PvE gives more credits. There you can earn 220k per battle and with a decent team you should not have any repair costs.
X money per battle doesn’t mean much if answering question “which is for farming money”. It should be counted how much is the net money income in fixed time, e.g. hour.
PvE games averagely seem to take more time than PvP games.
And before someone comes in and says: “good squad can win PvE that and that fast”, I’d like to point out that a good squad can also run over a PvP battle quite quickly. It is not use to compare best output of the other to the worst / average output of the other.
Anyone have some numbers on this, PvE versus PvP money income per hour, with comparable setup(s) (same tier, ships and squad)? It could easily be true, but I’d like to see some data to be sure about this 
I may can give you some here.
PVE ELITE Team can do Blackwood in 7.30min. Shopyard about the same Time. Income per game of 220k – No Shiplosses at all only Ammorefill. income may be cut down to 90% for refills.
Causal team should need 20 min for completion.
Same Team does PVP battles in an average of 8-10 min. Depending on Battlemode. Detonation is way faster here. Maybe 2-3 min if you can rush and 5-8 if not. Income 100k. – Some ship Losses and full Ammo refill. maybe income will be cut down to 50% after repairs and refills
Again causal teams will take the entire battle time. 15 min
Problem here are the Ship Repairs in PVP. They usually take most of your reward as average player. I payed attention to this for some time in T2 and T3 and with 4-5 ship losses you will only get about 20 - 30k income after repairs and refills if you winn. ~0 if you lose. Maybe lose credits. With license you will get more, but still a bit less to progress.
Warning: Theory!
Rolled some numbers and usuall grind time for a 3 million ship for me would be ~2 days in T3 PVP. 6h a day and always or most of the time on top per battle. Also a good amount of wins. Im a hardcore player and i am also quite skilled. A Causal would need 1.5 of the time or even more.
Problem I see here is the fact that mk1 trash made the ships to expensive. The old prices where about 50% of the current ones. Also a income increase of 25% would boost the progress.
I also have to remind you that PvP is for farming reputation while PvE gives more credits. There you can earn 220k per battle and with a decent team you should not have any repair costs.
Yeah… but I earn about as much flying a T3 PvP as I do flying a T2 PvE, and if I fly the PvP it’s faster and the loot is better - I actually have a chance of finding a drop that is worth using, as opposed to “sell automatically.” T2 Military stuff.
The faster rate of games means that, even with repair costs, I’m probably earning more than if I flew PvE. There’s also the Contracts to consider - very few can be completed in PvE, and completing Contracts is a pretty important…
I don’t play PVE.
If I wanted to shoot bots - I’d play another single player game with good AI
If I wanted to farm - I’d go Zynga on facebook or visit my granparents
Almost 200 hours clocked for SCon.
Exactly 4 PVE games ever played. All 4 because I got hijacked by the squad.
Progress takes money
If the best way to earn money in SCon is via PVE
Then SCon is a PVE game
and I dont do PVE
I also have to remind you that PvP is for farming reputation while PvE gives more credits. There you can earn 220k per battle and with a decent team you should not have any repair costs.
Yes thats right. We played PvE to get 1milion Creds in 1 Hour. But the fact is you need 30millions and more to buy a full equip t4 ship.
30mil-30h…for 1!!! ship.
I rarely do PvE either, Kine. You can check the leaderboards; NASA is almost exclusively a PvP corp. For this reason, I disagree with PvE being where you grind credits only because I don’t play it, and consequently I’m terrible at it (i.e. I take far too long in PvE for it to have a higher turnover rate than PvP).
Based on the 10 games I tracked, my average time in battle is ~284 seconds or 4-5 minutes.
In terms of credit income on a victory versus a loss, it depends more on the length of game assuming the pilot is being effective. I am under the impression that the more you do in a match, the more the game rewards you. Base credit reward for Game 7 (loss at 523 seconds) is higher than Game 8 (victory at 80 seconds). This is where loot comes into play, as well as rearming and repairs.
Game 3 loss had high rearming costs and repairs, though I still managed to turn a profit of 57k without a license and 107k with a license.
I left contracts out of my data because they’re an additional avenue for income. They certainly make a difference though.
On a good day it is possible to get 1M without a licence (1.5M with a licence) in 1.25 hrs of PvP. But this is taking into account a high win/loss ratio, low repair bills, and low rearming bills. I can see how the progression would seem slow (it is), though I’ve never paid much attention to it because I play to get better and less to grind money.
/moved to Levelling and Economy
I don’t play PVE.
If I wanted to shoot bots - I’d play another single player game with good AI
If I wanted to farm - I’d go Zynga on facebook or visit my granparents
Why complain about not being able to make money if you blatantly ignore the mechanism built into the game to help you make money? Like Error said you’ll make more money in an hour playing T3/T4 PvE than you will grinding PvP for the same amount of time.
Yeah… but I earn about as much flying a T3 PvP as I do flying a T2 PvE, and if I fly the PvP it’s faster and the loot is better - I actually have a chance of finding a drop that is worth using, as opposed to “sell automatically.” T2 Military stuff.
The faster rate of games means that, even with repair costs, I’m probably earning more than if I flew PvE. There’s also the Contracts to consider - very few can be completed in PvE, and completing Contracts is a pretty important…
Why can’t you play T3/T4 PvE if you fly T3 PvP? There’s higher payouts than T2 PvE.
As for speed pushing PvP ahead in profit, Gentaei’s little number crunch is not exact but is not too far off. You have QUEUE times for PvP (ZEIK, did you factor that in too?), repair costs, and often booster costs. And game time depends a lot on who you are facing off against; one side has to be stacked to get under 5 minutes. Often for even teams you would have 7-10 minutes, and in certain gamemodes you might have time run out. You don’t have any of this for PvE: instant triangulation with a squad, and the rest depends on you. In game time is very consistent, and even on the rare off chance you foul up, giving up isn’t considered unsporting and you can do another. Also, there’s one extra loot chance. I find our corp PvE teams get 1M in ONE hour, not longer. Granted DYN has a number of players who PvE all the time and have learned all the tricks, but it doesn’t take long to learn.
Contracts are a different story; their loyalty rewards are what we are looking for and are very important but their credit rewards aren’t even enough to restock your ammo.
I don’t play PVE.
If I wanted to shoot bots - I’d play another single player game with good AI
If I wanted to farm - I’d go Zynga on facebook or visit my granparents
Almost 200 hours clocked for SCon.
Exactly 4 PVE games ever played. All 4 because I got hijacked by the squad.
Progress takes money
If the best way to earn money in SCon is via PVE
Then SCon is a PVE game
and I dont do PVE
I think for most games (not just Star Conflict), credit grinding is only an accessory to gameplay. Games are rarely defined by their money system, though lack of profits can ruin a game. You don’t have to PvE and get money faster to enjoy the game. Think of it as an option for players that feel they have to get that module or ship as fast as possible, or those struggling to make money to catch up with their buddies/corpmates. I get most of my income from PvP myself as I feel the game is about PvP and I enjoy it. Maybe you are playing way too many grindy MMOs and have gotten jaded, maybe I haven’t hit the cash wall and am too idealistic.
Why can’t you play T3/T4 PvE if you fly T3 PvP? There’s higher payouts than T2 PvE.
As for speed pushing PvP ahead in profit, Gentaei’s little number crunch is not exact but is not too far off. You have QUEUE times for PvP (ZEIK, did you factor that in too?), repair costs, and often booster costs. And game time depends a lot on who you are facing off against; one side has to be stacked to get under 5 minutes. Often for even teams you would have 7-10 minutes, and in certain gamemodes you might have time run out. You don’t have any of this for PvE: instant triangulation with a squad, and the rest depends on you. In game time is very consistent, and even on the rare off chance you foul up, giving up isn’t considered unsporting and you can do another. Also, there’s one extra loot chance. I find our corp PvE teams get 1M in ONE hour, not longer. Granted DYN has a number of players who PvE all the time and have learned all the tricks, but it doesn’t take long to learn.
Contracts are a different story; their loyalty rewards are what we are looking for and are very important but their credit rewards aren’t even enough to restock your ammo.
I did factor in queue times. Beside “Time in Battle” is a column for “Triangulation.” Underneath both columns is a combined total.
I left out booster costs and contracts because I wanted to focus on the major factors of income. I can certainly track those though.
PvE is more reliable, I definitely agree with that. My numbers were more to show that it is possible to earn as much in PvP as in PvE.
Why complain about not being able to make money if you blatantly ignore the mechanism built into the game to help you make money?
my feedback may have come off whiney. not my intent.
was trying to illustrate this nagging question in my head … why differentiate PVP and PVE credit income?
and alienate players like me who are PVP only because we find the PVE games too xxxx broken?
credit grinding is only an accessory to gameplay.
You don’t have to… get money faster to enjoy the game.
Think of it as an option for players … to catch up with their buddies/corpmates.
The ‘catch up’ mechanism is already in place via the ship / module pricing. When priced right, you can effectively bunch people up in the last tier for months and beginners are able to catch up to them in a matter of weeks.
Granted you can enjoy the blow-stuff-up aspect of SCon in lower tiers. I tiered down to accompany a T1 corp mate last week and had a blast there (literally).
But t4-t5 is where the game is played at it’s fullest. And there shouldn’t be an artificial barrier to entry beyond making sure pilots are able to handle the higher minimum skill requisite.
I get most of my income from PvP myself as I feel the game is about PvP and I enjoy it. Maybe you are playing way too many grindy MMOs and have gotten jaded, maybe I haven’t hit the cash wall and am too idealistic.
This game is PVP. It’s their biggest selling point.
But they are also taking the path most traveled and try to earn from it by placing an invisible paywall. It’s a strategy known to fail in countless other mobile app / F2P games.
It’s passable if SCon is single player and you don’t need the player numbers. But this here is a multiplayer game. You want to populate your servers or end up being a Ghost Recon Online town.
Bunching up your population in the beginner tiers is a bad thing in the long run. Mixing purple modded pro’s with one week old newbies is bad.
Having the bulk of your playerbase in the end-game tier is the objective.
You then extend your shelf life by improving replayability. Not via measured progress.
If Gaijin is brave enough, they should capitalise on population to make money and use their selling point strictly to raise population. Right now they are selling end-game PVP (their selling point) to earn. And population unsurprisingly suffers.
The OP only looked at this from an income perspective. But the underlying issue here is progress. This is affected not by just income but also pricing and the ship tree.
And I dare hazard a guess that SCon has turned out much differently than what Gaijin initially designed it with in mind. This game started as a clone that now looks to have a huge potential to stand on it’s own. If they don’t adapt to take advantage of it, it’ll just fade away ingloriously. Which would be a shame.
And adapt means rethinking player progress - ship tree, pricing - and start finding new ways to get money.
premium progress boosting subscription? They can do much better than that imho.
Well said, Kine. Might I recommend starting another thread to tackle this beast from another perspective?
:008j: u kickin me out …
Wow, very insightful post Kine.
I was watching the E3 footage the other day and saw that World Of Tanks is coming to XBox, which is awesome news in getting the company into the mainstream gaming world. Getting SCon (one day I will get used to that abbreviation I swear) on to the same platform will take work as it stands - I suspect the average Xbox gamers would have even less patience than we do :taunt:
To back-track a little: I understand that PVE is supposed to be the cash-cow, but in practice I just don’t think the numbers add up. I currently fly a single tier 3 ship with 2 X tier2 ships to keep me on the border of tier2/tier3 matchmaking. PVE matches can sometimes be quick and rewarding yes, but unless I’m flying with a very well-practiced PVE group, a single mistake causes it to break down into 20-30 min grind-fests or expensive repair jobs which drops the average earn rates. I’d be interested if anyone had any data on random PVE earning vs PVP at tier3?
I once watched 2 guys trying to capture the C beacon on one of the dreadnaught missions for literally 25 minutes, calling out encouragement as they got the capture percentage from 100 down to 4%, then back up 50%, then down to 2%, back up again. They just couldn’t kill all the respawns fast enough. Thankfully we eventually won and this guy had racked up something like 500 kills in his interceptor for the mission. I wonder if he got a screenshot…
Why can’t you play T3/T4 PvE if you fly T3 PvP?
Because Tier 3 PvE doesn’t exist, and I don’t have enough high-end Tier 3 ships for it to put me in a Tier 4 PvE match.
:008j: u kickin me out …
Nah. xD
Just bringing the world some more organized reason. It’s a good topic you’ve started, and I wouldn’t want it to get lost in other threads.
PvE is more reliable, I definitely agree with that. My numbers were more to show that it is possible to earn as much in PvP as in PvE.
Yes, entirely possible, but things out of your control have to line up, including a very skilled team. Though I assume you don’t have a problem with the latter ;)wt .
The OP only looked at this from an income perspective. But the underlying issue here is progress. This is affected not by just income but also pricing and the ship tree.
And I dare hazard a guess that SCon has turned out much differently than what Gaijin initially designed it with in mind. This game started as a clone that now looks to have a huge potential to stand on it’s own. If they don’t adapt to take advantage of it, it’ll just fade away ingloriously. Which would be a shame.
And adapt means rethinking player progress - ship tree, pricing - and start finding new ways to get money.
premium progress boosting subscription? They can do much better than that imho.
Progress is certainly distinct from making money, that was my point. But there’s always a “fastest” way to make money which people look for in any game (just look at the global chat), and PvE fills it. Having secondary options besides PvP might help, though I don’t know what could be an option. Some kind of skill/twitch/accuracy gametype?
To back-track a little: I understand that PVE is supposed to be the cash-cow, but in practice I just don’t think the numbers add up. I currently fly a single tier 3 ship with 2 X tier2 ships to keep me on the border of tier2/tier3 matchmaking. PVE matches can sometimes be quick and rewarding yes, but unless I’m flying with a very well-practiced PVE group, a single mistake causes it to break down into 20-30 min grind-fests or expensive repair jobs which drops the average earn rates. I’d be interested if anyone had any data on random PVE earning vs PVP at tier3?
I once watched 2 guys trying to capture the C beacon on one of the dreadnaught missions for literally 25 minutes, calling out encouragement as they got the capture percentage from 100 down to 4%, then back up 50%, then down to 2%, back up again. They just couldn’t kill all the respawns fast enough. Thankfully we eventually won and this guy had racked up something like 500 kills in his interceptor for the mission. I wonder if he got a screenshot…
Random PvE is horrible, you won’t make money. I just tried one today and I was the only player with a frigate, and we had one guy bring a T4 tackler and die every round. Having a PvE team makes it much more entertaining and you have more room for error while still finishing fast.
And there are tricks in each mission. For dreadnaught mission, you can cut down the time if you cap C first as they won’t swarm it. You can actually cap C with one ship and B with one ship as they each have small hide spots, while the 2 remaining ships cap A. (Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything, as the devs have been known to increase PvE difficulty)
Because Tier 3 PvE doesn’t exist, and I don’t have enough high-end Tier 3 ships for it to put me in a Tier 4 PvE match.
You don’t need a high-end tier 3, rank 7 is fine and should put you into T4 PvE. Just be sure your squad does not put lower tier ships into slots, 'cause with PvE apparently other slots are factored into matchmaking. And lower ranks work fine; this is because there’s very little difference as long as you are able to tank damage. For instance, an Alligator mk 2 is as practical as a Cerberus 2 because that extra hull HP means little in PvE. Actually, the alli’s speed may make it better overall, and you don’t really need most modules.
I played just after the uptade came out and was very disapointed to see how low the income had become, increase the ship’s price, but not th income!
Dissapointed.
Separating the credits to PVE and then the reputation grind to PVP means you have to grind twice as long. There are already four grinds in this game, credits, synergy, rep and sub-rep. That is lots of grinding so you can play PVP. by the time you get ships the way you want, you are probably going to be sick of playing, at least I am. 150 games in one ship, AKA 37 hours of play? just to get it equipped the way I want (and assuming the faction rep is there to buy what I want)? Why keep playing at that point?
Why keep playing at that point?
because the gameplay is fun