Just what the title says. It's really hard to find what you want now that there are 15 hive missions and 23 escort missions plus other random things. They are all intermingled, and the two lines for each mission make it a little more difficult, but not much. Even organized alphabetically would be nice.

ive been wanting to suggest this too... but ive been feeling lazy.

lol same thing here.

Just came here to post the same suggestion, so yeah, what Capt.Waffles said.

What I had in mind was what is done for the trading guild missions, so at the very least escort and HS missions could be given their own group so they only appear as a single entry in the main mission window.

Sam.

Nice idea sam.

If they are going to add a group list for Hive missions, I would like to see them ordered first by sector, then by size, so it is easy to figure out what ones to take in order to weaken the queens and levi.

We're basically moving towards a very different mission interface, where missions from all over the universe will be visible (posted to a virtual "mission board" that will be accessible by anyone within communications range, faction standing and other availability factors aside). So, you'll be able to sort through mission types in a lot of different ways (nearby, given faction, "difficulty", type of mission, etc). We don't have the interface for this yet, so right now it's still kind of a mess. But, that's where we're headed.

Cool. That sounds good. Does this mean that procurement missions (assuming they still exist) can start from a station which already has the goods, rather than from the station which wants the goods?

How about market prices? Will they also be published globally?

Sam.

It'll be an evolutionary change. First we'll probably have all the missions in the same interface, but their logic will stay the same.. so you'll be able to "take" a mission from anywhere, but you'll have a time limit to fly to the offering station to start the mission. Then we'll begin revisiting the logic of various missions, potentially to make them work better like you say. Kourier missions will probably change faster than lua missions. We'll see how it all shakes out though. This is still a little ways out, but I wanted to post about the direction to at least explain where we're going and how the missions will likely be organized.

I would like to have some kind of galactic market-price information available.. more help for traders, but I'm not sure what form that will take, or how detailed. Originally we were just going to have needy stations posting procurement missions as demand hits a given threshold. This'll certainly handle the more obvious cases, but it won't be as finely detailed as a real sortable market-price list. We're also going to start putting station demand data into the navigational interface (potentially just icons for the top-demanded and top-supplied items at the station, on the map), and also some other data for "nearest station item price" in the Jettison type interface.

My only mixed feeling about making all market data available everywhere, is simply that it subverts the whole "discovery" aspect of trading. There would no longer be any routes that weren't totally obvious. So, for the moment I'm mostly looking at ways of making the "big" (high demand) stuff really obvious, and easy for newbies, while keeping the more fine-grained price differentials still a little less obvious for those with more experience. Dunno, maybe there's no relevance to that. I'd appreciate some feedback from our hardcore trading community (TGFT, et al), but probably better in its own Suggestions thread.

Anyway, for right now, we literally *can't* make global market data available, and we're still reorganizing how that information is stored in the database and so on.. to make these options more viable in the future (a big part of what Ray has been doing).

At the moment TGFT has considerable information on trade prices throughout the universe. This gives us a clear trading advantage ; we can select routes which involve lower risk and higher profit. The discovery ( research ) aspect of the collation of this data is an interesting aspect of VO for many TGFT members.

The existing news posts and station needs list give newer players a suggestion of profitable routes . If universal trade prices were accessible to all the time and effort put into price research by trade guilds would be negated , and all trade would gravitate to the handfull of most profitable routes .

There is certainly an imbalance at the moment. The most profitable routes should reflect the economics of the universe. Big profit , but high risk , routes should be from Nation to grey space , or speciality trade between Nations.

My approach would be to generate trade oriented missions similar to those which turn up in the news from time to time . " Station X has an urgent need for Y , top prices paid" These would be in addition to the basic trade guild missions . Perhaps a bonus for the supply of low profit but badly needed goods could be incorporated.
I accept that in order to make that realistic VO needs a supply vs demand economy, and that requires that VO has knowledge of all the trading that is actually taking place . Each station would need a demand/time and a supply / time for every trade item . The model for this has been proposed in posts passim. A lot of work , but maybe worth it in the longer term.

Anyway , part of an ongoing discussion . Make it part of a new thread if you think thats best.

Ecka