As the release day for Odyssey draws near, Frontier announced an upcoming balance pass on rewards and credit payouts for various main activities...

It's been years since any balancing has been done and hearing Frontier is finally taking some actions regarding credit earning is a fantastic sign. Players have been pointing out the fact some activities pay much more than other for a very long time which usually led people to simply turn to mining for a massive income that they can then spend on other activities.

Having a healthy distribution of credit earnings is vital since it enables people to enjoy the specific type of content they prefer without feeling gimped or forced to do something they don't like only to stay afloat.

Combat and bounty payouts are a great example of this. It doesn't make any sense, not from a lore type or gameplay style that a person who's actively flying their ship, fighting for their lives and lives of their crew to spend hours upon hours engaging fights only to be able to earn enough to rebuy their ship if they lose it.

On the other extreme part of the spectrum, we have miners who (from a gameplay perspective), barely have to interact with the game to earn millions by popping rocks.

So, after Frontier finally accepted their balancing is non-existent, they will be working on this in multiple continuous stages. Starting next week with mining - Elite will enter a phase of rebalancing followed by combat in about two weeks.

FDev will be looking into how much is earned per hour in different gameplay loops, what's the risk vs. reward ratio or simply how much skill is required to get the job done. At the moment, plans are to balance out the difference between core mining and laser mining since they think core mining should be higher paying as it's more skilful. Mining is also going to be heavily linked to economy via commodities so this might even cause a butterfly effect in the systems that will be heavily mined.

Following these changes, combat payouts will be buffed with better rewards but wing missions will not be a focus of the initial balance passes - Combat missions, bounties and bonds will. Once this is done, conflict zones are also "on the table" for a balance pass.

It's important to note that these changes will not be a quick and easy fix - Frontier will be looking out for player feedback after patches hit the live server and tweak the numbers even further.

One more interesting thing mentioned was the fact some of these changes will be narrative driven. We'll get more GalNet articles covering events and happenings around the galaxy making Elite feel like a living universe once again!

And finally, an official forum post with the rebalancing roadmap will be posted later on this week, so make sure to come back to check all the goodies once they are available.