Forums » Suggestions
Yes, I'm aware.
death i think for atleast some, acruing a really large number of credits is an ends in it self.
christ. people are in a bad mood lately.
incarnate: thanks for the tweaks!
incarnate: thanks for the tweaks!
I'm not trying to discredit that- like there are people who mine because for them its an end in itself. And I'm certainly not out to stop Incarnate from making the changes.
I'm just trying to be realistic about the overall impact. There will be an initial hit of excitement, followed by a return the current norm with maybe a slight overall increase to trade in Grey space. I regret if I came across as though I were in a bad mood. I was not attempting to be negative or hostile. However, we've seen these sorts of changes in the past where everyone is calling for trade routes between nation space and Grey so that those cowardly traders will quit hiding behind the turrets in Dau and come down to Grey where they can be properly pirated, which is a lot of silliness because from everything I've seen on my several characters, there isn't really that much trade happening. I want to see more players actively trading. I want to actively trade more myself, but at present, I just can't make myself interested enough to bother. I've made my billion credits, given it away (darn you Azumi!) and started over.
To illustrate my point, the thrill of trade for me in the past wasn't the actual grunt work of running moths from station to station, but the act of searching throughout all quadrants of space to find a premium route. It would take days if not a week or more to find the next trade route I would fly, and then I would hammer it until I was broke. Those days are gone and for the most part rightly so. However, along with the old routes, went the need to find them because it isn't worth hunting anymore when your only going to be looking for another one after a single trip.
To be honest, raising profits in Grey should have been done a long long time ago, and the stations should have had at most half the recovery time of nation space when the initial changes were made.
I'm just trying to be realistic about the overall impact. There will be an initial hit of excitement, followed by a return the current norm with maybe a slight overall increase to trade in Grey space. I regret if I came across as though I were in a bad mood. I was not attempting to be negative or hostile. However, we've seen these sorts of changes in the past where everyone is calling for trade routes between nation space and Grey so that those cowardly traders will quit hiding behind the turrets in Dau and come down to Grey where they can be properly pirated, which is a lot of silliness because from everything I've seen on my several characters, there isn't really that much trade happening. I want to see more players actively trading. I want to actively trade more myself, but at present, I just can't make myself interested enough to bother. I've made my billion credits, given it away (darn you Azumi!) and started over.
To illustrate my point, the thrill of trade for me in the past wasn't the actual grunt work of running moths from station to station, but the act of searching throughout all quadrants of space to find a premium route. It would take days if not a week or more to find the next trade route I would fly, and then I would hammer it until I was broke. Those days are gone and for the most part rightly so. However, along with the old routes, went the need to find them because it isn't worth hunting anymore when your only going to be looking for another one after a single trip.
To be honest, raising profits in Grey should have been done a long long time ago, and the stations should have had at most half the recovery time of nation space when the initial changes were made.
To be honest, raising profits in Grey should have been done a long long time ago, and the stations should have had at most half the recovery time of nation space when the initial changes were made.
Yup. It was certainly planned for a long time ago, back when the initial changes were made.
Yup. It was certainly planned for a long time ago, back when the initial changes were made.
BTW Incarnate, thanks for your response in the other thread, The info was most enlightening.
if people can make shitloads of money doing something, they're going to do it.
personally, on ANY one of my characters, i've never enjoyed the escort missions, but a couple of my chars do them, because quite plainly, they're BANK MUTHAFUCKAH.. or whatever.
give dem munniez.
dey will come.
personally, on ANY one of my characters, i've never enjoyed the escort missions, but a couple of my chars do them, because quite plainly, they're BANK MUTHAFUCKAH.. or whatever.
give dem munniez.
dey will come.
Thanks, Inc for the economy work. Your posts in Roda's thread were especially helpful. It will be fun to see how these changes affect player trade choices.
TBF,
As long as Escorts give ridiculously high payouts in UIT and Grey space, you will have a very strong dis incentive to trade imo. However, I'm speaking on the assumption that they haven't been nerfed again since I haven't personally taken them for gain in a rather long time. I'll admit to taking them just to ride the trident from point a to b.
And before certain other persons start wailing, I'm typically in an unarmed hog 2 when I do so, and not a Behemoth XC fully loaded with Sedina Chocolates. So unless someone gets damned lucky, they wouldn't even get a pk off of me.
As long as Escorts give ridiculously high payouts in UIT and Grey space, you will have a very strong dis incentive to trade imo. However, I'm speaking on the assumption that they haven't been nerfed again since I haven't personally taken them for gain in a rather long time. I'll admit to taking them just to ride the trident from point a to b.
And before certain other persons start wailing, I'm typically in an unarmed hog 2 when I do so, and not a Behemoth XC fully loaded with Sedina Chocolates. So unless someone gets damned lucky, they wouldn't even get a pk off of me.
Death Fluffy, the escort mission from Corvus stations are some of the lowest paying I've seen. I think the other stations are about the same though.
I just made 320,000 cr for Latos to Sedina. You may be right about Corvus. I took Sedina to Bractus, which was the only mission available and got 50,000cr. I only ran on Corvus mission though.
After seeing Inc's posting on the general forum, it appears us players need to try and give more follow up feedback on changes made after suggestions. So here goes.
I personally haven't seen much, if any increase in the trade traffic in grey. The only increase I have seen is in newbs.
Not being a trader, I really can't attest to the level of improvement in falloff/regeneration rates.
However I do have a possible suggestion to this. I seem to remember their being a limit on how much you could sell at a time, 120 cu at one point. And the prices updated every 2 minutes.
Maybe disallow lua scripts from selling stuff, and re-institute this, only limit it to say, 200 at a time (xc load) and update every 10 seconds. (just spit balling about the numbers) The idea being to make it easy to sell say 400 cu of stuff at once, at full price, but impossible to sell 200,000 cu of stuff at full price.
This might be a bit further from a realistic economy. But I think it might be a better interim solution, because as Inc has pointed out, things didn't quite get done as planned.
I personally haven't seen much, if any increase in the trade traffic in grey. The only increase I have seen is in newbs.
Not being a trader, I really can't attest to the level of improvement in falloff/regeneration rates.
However I do have a possible suggestion to this. I seem to remember their being a limit on how much you could sell at a time, 120 cu at one point. And the prices updated every 2 minutes.
Maybe disallow lua scripts from selling stuff, and re-institute this, only limit it to say, 200 at a time (xc load) and update every 10 seconds. (just spit balling about the numbers) The idea being to make it easy to sell say 400 cu of stuff at once, at full price, but impossible to sell 200,000 cu of stuff at full price.
This might be a bit further from a realistic economy. But I think it might be a better interim solution, because as Inc has pointed out, things didn't quite get done as planned.
"disallow lua scripts from selling stuff"
There is a plugin that sells crap for you?! That is ludicrous, it this is true it has to go.
I do not do much trade these days, but I do some and I have noticed that one moth load will tank an items price... (at least in Gray)... it is kind of irritating.
There is a plugin that sells crap for you?! That is ludicrous, it this is true it has to go.
I do not do much trade these days, but I do some and I have noticed that one moth load will tank an items price... (at least in Gray)... it is kind of irritating.
One XC load will tank a station for weeks in places like Dau and Azek, too.
If I understand Inc correctly, this is all due to the pending implementation of capitol ships with massively large cargo holds. So, could routes be set to drop off gradually in increments representative of the amount of cargo that various capitol ships hold? Something like every 1500 cus, 360 cus and 320 cus?
I've also got an alternate idea. Have the price falloffs start after X number of Y has been sold to a particular station. And make that X somewhere around 2000 cu for now, (10 xc loads). Then it drops off precipitously, with only another 400 cu being needed to make it literally unsellable "sorry we don't have room in immediate inventory for that".
As for concerns about how cappies will effect this. They won't, at least not if the devs wait to implement cappies until they introduce some anti capitol ship weapons.
As for concerns about how cappies will effect this. They won't, at least not if the devs wait to implement cappies until they introduce some anti capitol ship weapons.
This is exactly the sort of suggestion we gave a couple of years ago Look.
As for myself, I took a look at a peek at the changes when they were made and lost interest. The reason I lost interest was because at the time I did not identify any premium routes to make the effort worth my bother. The few routes I did test were not sufficiently profitable to induce me to continue. This may have been because those routes were already low. Regardless, I have not tested them since.
Personally, I don't want to fly a capital ship unless its a Teradon. I certainly don't want one to trade with. I think the use of Constellations in escorts is massive overkill and that the Tridents or a non capital attack Teradon would be a far better call. After all, Whats the point of having heavies in a voy with a Constellation? Just my opinion there though. And actually, while I'm on the subject, I would argue that a capital ship such as the Constellation should consume resources more than transport them. I'd like to think there are at least 10,000 soldiers staffing the things. Ok, maybe that's a bit high, but I'd also have to expect some pretty substantial routine and post battle maintenance needs.
I will take a moment to reiterate some of my previous points about trade in Grey.
1) Edras through Odia provide a weak area to trade. We need more diversity in station types. 6 out of 9 stations in those systems are barracks. Honestly, why does Odia need 3 and a capital station?
2) Only UIT, Itani and Serco newby systems should provide modest same system trades so that new players have a chance to get a handle on it before venturing out. All other systems should be at near tanked status as one would presume constant commerce between them.
3)Items need to be more specific to systems so that you can't necessarily buy exactly the same items at every mining station.
4) The distance from a system that provides a product to one that needs it should impact the final profit margin. iirc the example I used was hull plates sold somewhere in UIT space was the closest source for stations in Geira. I should expect Geira to have a particularly high demand for them.
5)As mentioned by others, the drop off rate needs to be far less dramatic. 2000 cube sounds roughly about right.
6) Don't try to force a path to interaction. Create a good economy and let things work themselves out. Ie. Porn to capital stations mandating a specific route.
I'm sure there's more I'm not remembering but I'm a bit fried atm.
Edit:
7) I hate to suggest this one because it will give away one of the trades I do enjoy, but a few more of the nuggets like group radar extenders would be nice. So this one is more for me than VO generally :p
8)Keep the good routes reasonably distanced. 1 to 3 wh's seems good to me. Perhaps a few exceptional like the porn that take 5-7 wh's.
9) A player should not be able to make more from escorts than from trading / mining.
10) We need more credit sinks than ship / repair / equipment costs. I've argued for a cost of doing business before. Being able to spend a few credits to customize your ship or buy a penthouse in Latos would be nice. I can't remember the suggestions I've made towards this atm, but will post them if / when I do recall. Charging for storage has been suggested in various forms multiple times, but needs to be well thought out so as not to harm infrequent players. Another good recent suggestion was a fee for homing at specific stations. I think a flat fee for everyone makes more sense than the scaled version I recall being discussed. Pricing should be varied.
11) There should be enough routes out there that offer a better than average return on effort, but not so many as to be easy to find. I used to spend up to a week looking for the best route with a good return trip. With the current economic limits, I'd say they should be a bit more frequent, no more than a days searching effort. A rough estimate of past searches, I'd say maybe a good pairing every 7-10 systems. I'd suggest a good pairing every 2-3 systems these days.
Finally, I'll return to the drop off rate. The current sharp immediate decline gives trade in VO the feel of a 7-11 economy where you have to imagine that there are all of 100 people living and working on the stations. My position is we need a Walmart Supercenter economy where there could be several hundred thousand people or more consuming resources at the stations. There should be a gentle price decline until you reach about 2000 cube or units of item x and then market saturation should hit and the price should plummet. 2000 being a generic number plucked from LNH's post. It could be more or less depending on the item, area traded in or any number of factors.
As for myself, I took a look at a peek at the changes when they were made and lost interest. The reason I lost interest was because at the time I did not identify any premium routes to make the effort worth my bother. The few routes I did test were not sufficiently profitable to induce me to continue. This may have been because those routes were already low. Regardless, I have not tested them since.
Personally, I don't want to fly a capital ship unless its a Teradon. I certainly don't want one to trade with. I think the use of Constellations in escorts is massive overkill and that the Tridents or a non capital attack Teradon would be a far better call. After all, Whats the point of having heavies in a voy with a Constellation? Just my opinion there though. And actually, while I'm on the subject, I would argue that a capital ship such as the Constellation should consume resources more than transport them. I'd like to think there are at least 10,000 soldiers staffing the things. Ok, maybe that's a bit high, but I'd also have to expect some pretty substantial routine and post battle maintenance needs.
I will take a moment to reiterate some of my previous points about trade in Grey.
1) Edras through Odia provide a weak area to trade. We need more diversity in station types. 6 out of 9 stations in those systems are barracks. Honestly, why does Odia need 3 and a capital station?
2) Only UIT, Itani and Serco newby systems should provide modest same system trades so that new players have a chance to get a handle on it before venturing out. All other systems should be at near tanked status as one would presume constant commerce between them.
3)Items need to be more specific to systems so that you can't necessarily buy exactly the same items at every mining station.
4) The distance from a system that provides a product to one that needs it should impact the final profit margin. iirc the example I used was hull plates sold somewhere in UIT space was the closest source for stations in Geira. I should expect Geira to have a particularly high demand for them.
5)As mentioned by others, the drop off rate needs to be far less dramatic. 2000 cube sounds roughly about right.
6) Don't try to force a path to interaction. Create a good economy and let things work themselves out. Ie. Porn to capital stations mandating a specific route.
I'm sure there's more I'm not remembering but I'm a bit fried atm.
Edit:
7) I hate to suggest this one because it will give away one of the trades I do enjoy, but a few more of the nuggets like group radar extenders would be nice. So this one is more for me than VO generally :p
8)Keep the good routes reasonably distanced. 1 to 3 wh's seems good to me. Perhaps a few exceptional like the porn that take 5-7 wh's.
9) A player should not be able to make more from escorts than from trading / mining.
10) We need more credit sinks than ship / repair / equipment costs. I've argued for a cost of doing business before. Being able to spend a few credits to customize your ship or buy a penthouse in Latos would be nice. I can't remember the suggestions I've made towards this atm, but will post them if / when I do recall. Charging for storage has been suggested in various forms multiple times, but needs to be well thought out so as not to harm infrequent players. Another good recent suggestion was a fee for homing at specific stations. I think a flat fee for everyone makes more sense than the scaled version I recall being discussed. Pricing should be varied.
11) There should be enough routes out there that offer a better than average return on effort, but not so many as to be easy to find. I used to spend up to a week looking for the best route with a good return trip. With the current economic limits, I'd say they should be a bit more frequent, no more than a days searching effort. A rough estimate of past searches, I'd say maybe a good pairing every 7-10 systems. I'd suggest a good pairing every 2-3 systems these days.
Finally, I'll return to the drop off rate. The current sharp immediate decline gives trade in VO the feel of a 7-11 economy where you have to imagine that there are all of 100 people living and working on the stations. My position is we need a Walmart Supercenter economy where there could be several hundred thousand people or more consuming resources at the stations. There should be a gentle price decline until you reach about 2000 cube or units of item x and then market saturation should hit and the price should plummet. 2000 being a generic number plucked from LNH's post. It could be more or less depending on the item, area traded in or any number of factors.
This is all off the top of my head, and I'm a bit tired.
We currently have "price drop per unit sold", which is pretty linear, and I understand/appreciate the arguements for making it more curved and allowing more of a "trading utilization" before it tanks out. But leaving that aside for the moment, what if..:
1) The game periodically determines random locations that essentially have "increased demand" for specific goods, and those locations then have a very different demand curve instantiated for a fixed period of time (or even a fixed quantity). The server side of the game could be doing this continuously, or close enough to it that it appears continuous to an outside observer. All that this "increased demand" really does is divide the "price drop per unit sold" by some number, which would be chosen at random from a bounded value set, thus reducing the price drop and allowing larger deliveries until some fixed condition had been met.
2) The periods of these demand spikes would also be random, between varying bounds. The random locations could be guided by similar bounds along the lines of what DF says, with between 3-6 jumps required, and so on.
3) Stations could announce these shortages via the current "Jettison" type menu, or something like it (?), which could allow players to learn about interesting routes, but still require them to fly between systems to find out. A small number of them could be posted to the sort of wide-area "trade report" list, but since a lot of the gameplay desire here seems to be in "discovery" of "secret routes", I imagine there may be some value in keeping many of them less known (?).
Upside - Creates a situation where the galaxy has a lot of dynamic demand occurring, which is difficult to predict (regardless of what guild has the coolest item database). Much money is out there to be made, if people want to explore and find the best route. We can also modulate it around things like territorial concerns, causing the "price drop" bounds to average higher in grayspace, or across Deneb, but still keeping a lot of options open.
Downside - It's unrealistic (random), and not driven by actual manufacturing or anything, which someone will be sure to bitch about. However, because it's random, it also puts everyone on equal footing (see previous note about guild databases).
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As I've said before in other discussions, while I like realism and think it's "neat".. my only real concern is whether something is fun. "Neat" stuff is often not fun.
To be honest, I'm not really sure what makes trading Fun for people. Is it the secret discovery thing? Is it having all sorts of crazy research and being lord of Excel? I mean, we can do more obscure predictive stuff if that were somehow exciting (a-la EVE), although that does introduce inherent vet-vs-newbie imbalances.
I was a trader in the distant past (beta), but these days I find it easier to mentally "connect" to gameplay like station conquest.
We currently have "price drop per unit sold", which is pretty linear, and I understand/appreciate the arguements for making it more curved and allowing more of a "trading utilization" before it tanks out. But leaving that aside for the moment, what if..:
1) The game periodically determines random locations that essentially have "increased demand" for specific goods, and those locations then have a very different demand curve instantiated for a fixed period of time (or even a fixed quantity). The server side of the game could be doing this continuously, or close enough to it that it appears continuous to an outside observer. All that this "increased demand" really does is divide the "price drop per unit sold" by some number, which would be chosen at random from a bounded value set, thus reducing the price drop and allowing larger deliveries until some fixed condition had been met.
2) The periods of these demand spikes would also be random, between varying bounds. The random locations could be guided by similar bounds along the lines of what DF says, with between 3-6 jumps required, and so on.
3) Stations could announce these shortages via the current "Jettison" type menu, or something like it (?), which could allow players to learn about interesting routes, but still require them to fly between systems to find out. A small number of them could be posted to the sort of wide-area "trade report" list, but since a lot of the gameplay desire here seems to be in "discovery" of "secret routes", I imagine there may be some value in keeping many of them less known (?).
Upside - Creates a situation where the galaxy has a lot of dynamic demand occurring, which is difficult to predict (regardless of what guild has the coolest item database). Much money is out there to be made, if people want to explore and find the best route. We can also modulate it around things like territorial concerns, causing the "price drop" bounds to average higher in grayspace, or across Deneb, but still keeping a lot of options open.
Downside - It's unrealistic (random), and not driven by actual manufacturing or anything, which someone will be sure to bitch about. However, because it's random, it also puts everyone on equal footing (see previous note about guild databases).
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As I've said before in other discussions, while I like realism and think it's "neat".. my only real concern is whether something is fun. "Neat" stuff is often not fun.
To be honest, I'm not really sure what makes trading Fun for people. Is it the secret discovery thing? Is it having all sorts of crazy research and being lord of Excel? I mean, we can do more obscure predictive stuff if that were somehow exciting (a-la EVE), although that does introduce inherent vet-vs-newbie imbalances.
I was a trader in the distant past (beta), but these days I find it easier to mentally "connect" to gameplay like station conquest.
I'm not in favor of complete randomness where any item could be in increased demand anywhere. To me that makes a potentially interesting addition to the gameplay uninteresting.
I'd think it would be possible to come up with a set of rules where a given item could have increased demand only in a given subset of systems/factions/stations that is still complicated enough to be unpredictable, to where the use a database wouldn't provide a significant advantage. The disadvantage I see to such a system is it would be time consuming from the devs' perspective to imagine up such a complicated system.
Perhaps a decent compromise would be to have the demand spikes occur with greater frequency for items at stations where the higher demand could be expected and lower frequency where it wouldn't be (but still possible for any item to have a demand spike anywhere, even if it is highly improbable for some cases). I suppose such a system may still turn out to be overly complicated to program, though.
I have no objection to the duration being random, and varying the bounds of the price drop by region seems like a good idea.
I'd think it would be possible to come up with a set of rules where a given item could have increased demand only in a given subset of systems/factions/stations that is still complicated enough to be unpredictable, to where the use a database wouldn't provide a significant advantage. The disadvantage I see to such a system is it would be time consuming from the devs' perspective to imagine up such a complicated system.
Perhaps a decent compromise would be to have the demand spikes occur with greater frequency for items at stations where the higher demand could be expected and lower frequency where it wouldn't be (but still possible for any item to have a demand spike anywhere, even if it is highly improbable for some cases). I suppose such a system may still turn out to be overly complicated to program, though.
I have no objection to the duration being random, and varying the bounds of the price drop by region seems like a good idea.
I think the quanity method of dropoff sounds better than than just mucking with the dropoff rate. As for worrieing about giving vets a trading advantage, I wouldn't too terribly much. That sounds like one of the very few instances that it would be a good thing.
As for announcing the shortages, I wouldn't announce them at all. Or at the very most, only announce them by mentioning problems on the production side of things (xyz widget company recently had a massive fire). Then have the prices for said widget go up at stations around xyz and a widget or two become unavailable at xyz. This would give players clues as to how to find good routs without openly telling them, go here, buy this, sell it here for profit.
got more ill post later
As for announcing the shortages, I wouldn't announce them at all. Or at the very most, only announce them by mentioning problems on the production side of things (xyz widget company recently had a massive fire). Then have the prices for said widget go up at stations around xyz and a widget or two become unavailable at xyz. This would give players clues as to how to find good routs without openly telling them, go here, buy this, sell it here for profit.
got more ill post later