The whole Tenche and Beta Sculptoris Luxuries thing makes me wonder if this was deliberate by FD or not. We know they follow these boards (and they obviously have the game telemetry) and would have seen hoards of players grinding the few LS between orbiter and the Lux ships. Those traders (and opportunists) in Pythons were working up to Anacondas and the T7 were saving for Pythons/T9, T6 for T7 etc. It may be a grand plan to get some sort of distribution of ship types - I suspect there are many more Anacondas flying now than there were a couple of weeks back. On the other hand maybe it was a bug and by the time FD got around to doing anything about it, 'quantative easing' had happened on a grand scale and I suspect a few E
cr billionaires were created.
I think wealth creation
is the engine of E
and except for those few wanting to just look at the amazing star-scapes, and the morons who get off on dumbfiring an innocent player from a disposable Sidewinder. Gaining credits is a measure of success no matter what your occupation. A pirate who kills and doesn't collect credits from selling their ill-gotten gains is kind of stupid (or a mornon - see above), as is the Bounty Hunter who doesn't manage to kill their prey and loses on fuel and ammo. Traders are not the only ones who measure success by wealth or assets - every occupation does to some degree, either just for fuel and ammo or prestige.
I think the thing that gets up the traders noses is the sheer amount of time they put in grinding. This is real life time, and not just E
time, and that has a value. It's like working a year to buy (say) a car, then some dude steals it, crashes into it or just scrapes his key down the side - it hurts and its frustrating. It is no wonder there are so many moans on this board about bugs/morons/exploits etc. Unlike most games (and many, many new E
players have come from other genres I bet) 'going back to the last save point' equivalent in E
could mean hours or even days of grinding for traders - especially without cargo insurance.
If the new launcher has rebalanced supply and demand that makes the E
economy more like a real one then I think that is a good thing - I like the idea of chasing markets across the galaxy - it feels like the spirit of Elite to me. However markets need data to function, and not providing the tools to allow traders to calculate risk and reward is a big hole. FD stopped 3P tools from scraping servers and memory, but have yet to provide a reliable in-game alternative - I hope they do soon.
