My new player experience (262 hours of play time) - It doesn't have to be this way

[SteveWW57]

Ah, a sad day when UA bombing was removed.

Likewise the OP NPCs

I'm so old I remember the times before discovery scanners etc etc

#memories #pullupasandbag

I am so old, I remember the days before Elite.

We used to play spaceship games with counters (Starfire) or even Traveller! Pencil and paper!

 

[aRJay]

And, don't forget the regrettable disaster the vote for ship/module transfer delay. This failed attempt at player agency plagues us to this very day.

But the players won, not FDev.

 

[Mohrgan]

But the players won, not FDev.

The truth is out there. And, don't get me started on 'Inception', either.

 

[IstvaanDCIV]

A good example too of how players might approve of calls for a "player driven economy" in theory, but every practical case where players have noticeably influenced the economy (or many other aspects of the game) has resulted in substantial complaints.

I honestly didn't find it all that difficult to find adequate CMM Composites before FDev buffed their availability twice in a row. Was it really that difficult to find Refinery economies with enough of the stuff being sold? The fact that the changes were made makes me wonder if, instead of bowing to player demands, perhaps FDev thought that particular commodity was more plentiful and easier to source than it actually was.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

The fact that the changes were made makes me wonder if, instead of bowing to player demands, perhaps FDev thought that particular commodity was more plentiful and easier to source than it actually was.

They'd set it up as a bulk requirement and it certainly wasn't at bulk supply levels. Worked fine for the occasional station repair (and it's mostly the same commodity list) when it was just OpIDA doing the hauling, and might still have worked fine for colonisation if it had had the normal levels of engagement with non-CG bulk hauling tasks.

Doing some very rough estimates I think pre-Trailblazers supply across the bubble was probably around 12.5 MT, and since people were requiring close to ten times that a week to start with (and it took well over a week to regenerate supply) that was certainly unsustainable.
First buff was 5x supply, which wasn't going to do more than slightly delay the inevitable (and barely helped the ones where the supply was already depleted)
Second buff was something like 100x regeneration rate, which gave it faster regeneration than Steel, though still a smaller cap
I suspect that would probably have been enough in the long run - especially now that the rush has died down - but they then gave it another 10x supply anyway so maybe their monitoring was still seeing problems.


The underlying problem I think is that local supply exhaustion is reasonably interesting - rotating among a few stations to manage supplies, switching commodity, etc. - global supply exhaustion is not because there's nothing any individual CMDR can do about it, and not even really anything a dedicated group can do about it because they're trying to face down the entire player base.