Mind numbingly boring hauling

[CMDR Vhi]

1) At what point did I say "ask nicely"?

2) The point is you are one of thousands. What are you doing to stand out? Promoting what you're doing, indicating why system 'Col 285 Sector AB-C D1-2' is interesting, or just sitting on your rear twiddling your thumbs?

I was referencing all the "just ask for help" stuff from this thread, and the point of my first comment, that you replied to, was that there isn't currently an in-game way to "promote what I'm doing". Remember?

I shouldn't have to leave the game to play the game. In that light, how do you expect me to "promote my system"?

Note: It might help if you're more clear about what your stance is. Are you saying the colonization gameplay loop is well designed as it is?

 

[GarlicFresh]

The realism nerds hate everything that doesnt make their eyes bleed and their bottom sore.

I am a realism nerd and I declare: there is not even an ounce of realism in the entire colonization mechanic

 

[Cosmo]

System colonisation needs some supporting features such as:

• The ability for us to setup our own missions/contracts for other players to complete (e.g We could say haul X amount of Steel to Colony ship in Y location for reward Z)
• The ability to reliably hire NPC's/Players to do hauling.

All carrier to colony ship hauling has to be done by the system architect as we cannot set sufficient price delta to incentivise other players - click here for context figures. Colonisation's grind is so high (without the necessary frameworks to support it) that it leaves system architects very little time to do anything other than hauling.

Alternatives:

• At least some long requested QoL features such as configurable key-bind for supercruise assist and faster way to load up cargo onto ship from carrier storage would ease the lobotomy inducing grind.
• A cheaper alternative (from a dev POV) is reducing the material requirements for system col ... but that will enrage certain pro-grind sections of the community

Either way - something needs to be done to balance this. System colonisation has the potential to be so much more than reskinned hauling

Seconded, many people have suggested additional ways to get the hauling done. Fdev should implement something.

 

[DaggerSnake]

System colonisation needs some supporting features such as:

• The ability for us to setup our own missions/contracts for other players to complete (e.g We could say haul X amount of Steel to Colony ship in Y location for reward Z)
• The ability to reliably hire NPC's/Players to do hauling.

All carrier to colony ship hauling has to be done by the system architect as we cannot set sufficient price delta to incentivise other players - click here for context figures. Colonisation's grind is so high (without the necessary frameworks to support it) that it leaves system architects very little time to do anything other than hauling.

Alternatives:

• At least some long requested QoL features such as configurable key-bind for supercruise assist and faster way to load up cargo onto ship from carrier storage would ease the lobotomy inducing grind.
• A cheaper alternative (from a dev POV) is reducing the material requirements for system col ... but that will enrage certain pro-grind sections of the community

Either way - something needs to be done to balance this. System colonisation has the potential to be so much more than reskinned hauling

I think incentive would be an issue. Credits have little value these days. New players jump on the net for the quickest road to riches and have billions in a couple days of play. We'd need to be able to offer something like modules that we've pre-engineered for them. Those have actual worth.

 

[Robert Maynard]

Which begs the question: if there was an in-game way of promoting a colonisation effort, what difference would it be expected to make - given that there would likely be thousands if not tens of thousands of competing colonisation efforts?

(noting that systems with active colonisation efforts are clearly visible on the galaxy map at the moment)

 

[Frankymole]

I think incentive would be an issue. Credits have little value these days. New players jump on the net for the quickest road to riches and have billions in a couple days of play. We'd need to be able to offer something like modules that we've pre-engineered for them. Those have actual worth.

That's coming with Vanguards, apparently...

 

[Rubbernuke]

Isn't Vanguards sort of (sort of) filling the gap for requests and stuff?

While I agree hauling can get tedious without some sort of context or pushback (say, like PP) at the same time ED at its core is still one commander v whatever.

 

[CMDR Vhi]

Which begs the question: if there was an in-game way of promoting a colonisation effort, what difference would it be expected to make - given that there would likely be thousands if not tens of thousands of competing colonisation efforts?

It probably wouldn't, but at least then the suggestion of asking for help would make sense.

As I just said in another thread, the root issue for colonization, I think, is that there isn't really a point to it. Without a point, it becomes a vanity project, and it's a tough ask to get people excited about someone else's vanity project.

Fdev needs to come up with a reason for colonization to exist as a part of the game besides "it's there", and once they do that, there may be be options available to encourage people to participate in someone else's system build.

 

[K Olley]

Either way - something needs to be done to balance this. System colonisation has the potential to be so much more than reskinned hauling

Have you ever opened your eyes and looked at what travels on the roads, rails and sea's today.

I among many others have spent years (over 45) hauling in RL, almost everything needs to be transported at sometime, its a fact of life.

Having hauled for the construction industry (among other things) I am surprised that the amounts are so low

 

[Rebel Yell]

No, it comes down to alternatives to hauling, at least minimal gameplay variety, and reducing the catastrophically gigantic amount of pointless, mindless, uncreative, and extremely monotonous grind. Like most of the threads this month.

Kumo Crew pirates offer, among other services, some funny and entertaining ways to break players' grind / mindless hauling (playing in open is the only one requirement).

 

[Felix DiCestria]

There isn't currently an in-game way to "promote what I'm doing". Remember?

I shouldn't have to leave the game to play the game. In that light, how do you expect me to "promote my system"?

Note: It might help if you're more clear about what your stance is. Are you saying the colonization gameplay loop is well designed as it is?

Looking at past CGs carrier owners promoted their carriers on syschat advertising for loaders and unloaders.
Apparently that isn't adequate for some.
At the same time I've had commodities bought from my carrier presumably by Architects for other systems while I've been hauling for a client. I have heard that some carrier owners are loading and just selling their cargo in areas of active building.
As for how you personally distinguish yourself from the wallpaper, I didn't appoint myself head of marketing.

 

[Dormant account - pls delete]

I think this feels a bit too "gamey". I know some of the realism nerds will question why does providing combat bonds reduce material requirements as it doesn't have a direct correlation.

"too gamey" feels a bit like trying to have it both ways. Why is engaging with multiple gameloops "too gamey" when it's y'know "the game?"

If you want a trading game which is purely a trading game in the mathematical space of trading rules then the world has enough of those already and I'm unsure that perfectionism around this really fits in a space sim. Trailblazers is supposed to sit in the Elite universe and that has a lot of non-credit economies going on. You can't sell raw mats, for a start, so you'll never, ever, bring those into a credits-focused piece of gameplay, much less a Commodities-trading-only piece of gameplay.

FDev created a perfectly cromulent and engaging bunch of gameplay around trading and it's become clear from Trailblazers that a LOT of players just hard ignore it and go where the external tools tell them to. (Insert "always has been" meme here.)

As for the realism nerds, there are multiple credit economies of different vintage in this game universe and they're all broken one way or another, so micromanaging how credits work as a currency in the Trailblazers release is not going to get you anywhere near a "realistic" economy. You can end-run around anything in that area by doing bio for a couple of days solid, for example. (inb4: this is an example, you can earn mega-credits with other hacks in other gameloops, this is not a thread where we list all those out, thank you please.)

It's because the game has a currency and an economy. All games with currencies/economies (even material economies) boil down to the most efficient path.

See above - engineering with raw mats does not boil down to any path involving credits. I'm not quite sure what your point is here unless you're relitigating Turing's various discoveries about all sets of rules being equivalent if they're sufficiently complex - and even if you are, I have to point out Godel blew that out of the water less than a decade later.

It's not even clear that all games do have a most efficient path, unless you're sitting on some Fields medal / Nobel prize level thinking about complexity theory.

At a practical level, ED's emergent behaviours are complex enough they won't fit in most people's brains. So this proposition that "anything can be min-maxed" - I simply don't buy it.

The game does not give you any way to motivate the player, it does not even have basic MMO elements, basing colonization on interaction with players is complete nonsense,

Yeah it is really silly that you can have FCs with buy orders and all the rest of it and there's zero ways to discover this in-game unless you happen to be under 20ly away anyway and happen to be near in time to a suitable tick so it pops up in the Market UI. And even when it does I've tried selling something to a Carrier that I accidentally discover this way a dozen times and the number of times the order was still there when I got there is... zero, so there's a lag in it somewhere.

And as another example of something that isn't based on Credits we have a whole mission system and Trailblazers just didn't go anywhere with it.

since there is simply no skeletal base and working tools for this in the game. Oh yeah, in three days they brought me as much as 2.5k alloys. Do I need to say that it is easier to just spit and score everything yourself, and even better to abandon the whole idea of colonization at all?

I do agree ED could actually have some social tools for the community. Even if this was outside the game it would be something.

P.S: "Ask someone nicely" is not a reasonable game design decision

No, it's a human one, and yeah there's nowhere to discuss it. But in FDev's defence, it sounds like Vanguards is going vaguely in this direction, so we're just back to the usual discussion of "these 2025 features are all fabulous, but what a weird order to do it in"

 

[CMDR Vhi]

Looking at past CGs carrier owners promoted their carriers on syschat advertising for loaders and unloaders.
Apparently that isn't adequate for some.
At the same time I've had commodities bought from my carrier presumably by Architects for other systems while I've been hauling for a client. I have heard that some carrier owners are loading and just selling their cargo in areas of active building.
As for how you personally distinguish yourself from the wallpaper, I didn't appoint myself head of marketing.

None of your suggestions apply to the problem at hand-- that the colonization game loop is tedious and boring. Even if my FC magically filled up with all the necessary mats, I'm still looking at hours of menu, loading screen, menu, loading screen, ad nauseum, to offload it.

And I didn't ask you to tell me how to personally promote my system, I'm asking you, generally speaking, how you expect that to work. There's no in-game way to promote a system build, so when you say "promote your system build" what do you mean, functionally speaking?

 

[vicwarrior]

"Would you kindly build my coriolis at Lyncis Sector JR-W c1-15"
Doesn't quite work as an appeal when you are already burnt out on hauling yourself, and theres nothing to do but hauling, its boring, and asking anyone else to haul that much is just going to sound like "Would you take these kicks to the nuts for me", even if you could pay them for that, it wouldn't change that this is a videogame, and if you expect people to treat it like a job theyre just going to drop it and play something that is actually fun.

As much as ED is an "immersive game" it still is very much a game, and gameplay does need some thought.

 

[CMDR Vhi]

"Would you kindly build my coriolis at Lyncis Sector JR-W c1-15"
Doesn't quite work as an appeal when you are already burnt out on hauling yourself, and theres nothing to do but hauling, its boring, and asking anyone else to haul that much is just going to sound like "Would you take these kicks to the nuts for me", even if you could pay them for that, it wouldn't change that this is a videogame, and if you expect people to treat it like a job theyre just going to drop it and play something that is actually fun.

As much as ED is an "immersive game" it still is very much a game, and gameplay does need some thought.

One issue I have with colonization is that it doesn't get easier over time. In fact, for a given system, it arguably gets more difficult over time, with the construction point increase.

While I probably couldn't have articulated it at the time, I expected that colonization would start off slow and tedious, but with every system I got built up to some set amount, additional colonization would become significantly easier. I imagined a point where colonizing systems only required my input for what and where, but no longer requiring me to haul the materials; I imagined after having a few systems built up, that I could essentially just pick the next system I wanted to colonize and select the structures and the necessary mats would be supplied by NPCS from my other systems, which essentially puts construction on a timer. Like, oh, System A has excess food because of all the farms I built, so now any other structure I build in-system or in another system needs fewer, or no, food-type commodities to be hand delivered. Eventually, nothing needs to get hand delivered, and instead building something will just take "5 hours" or "48 hours" or whatever.

Instead we just got a pointless grind for the sake of grinding pointlessly.

 

[Robert Maynard]

None of your suggestions apply to the problem at hand-- that the colonization game loop is tedious and boring. Even if my FC magically filled up with all the necessary mats, I'm still looking at hours of menu, loading screen, menu, loading screen, ad nauseum, to offload it.

If the prospect of hauling commodities is so unpleasant, why engage in Colonisation at all?

Like Powerplay 2.0, or Vanguards to come, Colonisation is unlikely to appeal to the whole player-base - and that's OK. That over 42,000 stations and settlements were completed within the first two weeks of the Trailblazer update going live suggests, with a notable relative uptick in visible player numbers on Steam (subject to all of the caveats regarding Steam Charts), suggests that Colonisation appeals to quite a significant number of players - which means that it may already be considered a success (accepting that it will not necessarily appeal to all players).

While the "why though?" of Colonisation may not be clear, it seems at the very least to be a means for players to shape the play area in terms of populated systems in the galaxy, within and nearby the Bubble so far (but noting that all it takes is a string of systems within the limit of colonisation radius to go far beyond the Bubble). For some players that seems to be enough incentive to spend a considerable time engaged in it, i.e. shifting nearly a billion units of commodities in two weeks.

 

[CMDR Vhi]

If the prospect of hauling commodities is so unpleasant, why engage in Colonisation at all?

Like Powerplay 2.0, or Vanguards to come, Colonisation is unlikely to appeal to the whole player-base - and that's OK. That over 42,000 stations and settlements were completed within the first two weeks of the Trailblazer update going live suggests, with a notable relative uptick in visible player numbers on Steam (subject to all of the caveats regarding Steam Charts), suggests that Colonisation appeals to quite a significant number of players - which means that it may already be considered a success (accepting that it will not necessarily appeal to all players).

While the "why though?" of Colonisation may not be clear, it seems at the very least to be a means for players to shape the play area in terms of populated systems in the galaxy, within and nearby the Bubble so far (but noting that all it takes is a string of systems within the limit of colonisation radius to go far beyond the Bubble). For some players that seems to be enough incentive to spend a considerable time engaged in it, i.e. shifting nearly a billion units of commodities in two weeks.

Now that I am familiar with the many flaws in colonization, I am choosing not to interact with it-- I'm finishing up my final station and then setting it aside. Surely that's not what Fdev intended, though, right? It should be, I dunno, fun or at least distracting, right? I'm just speculating, but I have a very strong suspicion that lots of people who say they like hauling are multitasking while doing it; podcasts, second-screen shows, audiobooks and the like. Assuming this is at least somewhat accurate, is that even really playing the game? It seems more like they enjoy podcasts or audiobooks-- which can be enjoyed without looking at loading screens and menus. I know that I have fallen back to second-screening this game to get through my few constructions. Listening to an audiobook while I cycle through menus and loading screens can't be what Fdev envisions as a well-designed gameplay loop, right?

It's worth noting that my colonization efforts are also part of that 42k number, but I think it's clear that it's not meant as a stamp of approval from me. I don't think that number says what you think it says.

The "why" shouldn't come after the implementation, right? Is that a controversial stance?

 

[zimms]

If the prospect of hauling commodities is so unpleasant, why engage in Colonisation at all?
[...]

Because that prospect is just a prohibitive barrier and not the feature itself. I'm sure some people would love to create their own systems, but refrain from doing so because of the amount of work. The feature is called Colonisation, not Commodity Hauling, so obviously there's more to it.

But it's not the first time for Frontier not quite having made their mind up whether this is a solo or mulitplayer feature. Balancing it for both (and then even for casual/hardcore) is almost impossible.

 

[GarlicFresh]

The feature is called Colonisation, not Commodity Hauling, so obviously there's more to it.

Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to explain this to some, as well as the concept that mechanics can be made at least with minimal effort and a with design document, made it fun and with the ultimate meaning for all types of players, instead of the destructive "if you don't like it, don't play it" passive-agressive altitude.

 

[Robert Maynard]

Because that prospect is just a prohibitive barrier and not the feature itself.

While the perceived barrier may dissuade some players from engaging in the new feature, it's hardly "prohibitive" - as evidenced by the number of systems colonised in the first two weeks, with an average of around three stations / settlements per system....