Can player-owned space stations ever happen?

[Agony_Aunt]

I've always thought it would be cool to have your very own space station (or several) in Elite Dangerous where you could store your ships, have your own commodity market which could maybe generate more money for you or maybe even something completely different. Basically a place you could call your home, base or whatever you'd prefer.

Obviously it probably shouldn't be anywhere near cheap and it would probably give those rich players who already have everything in the game yet something more to spend on. Also to avoid getting everything messed up it could be implemented so that in supercruise your station would be visible to you exclusively, and other players could get there only by following you via a low wake signal.

Would anyone else think this would be a neat, let alone a possible addition to the game? Or am I just having silly, personal day-dreams?

I'd like to drag this thread kicking and screaming back to the OP's post for a moment. Especially since in my comments so far in this thread i've focused only on later comments, and a little non-constructive joking about it.

So, let's break it down what OP is suggesting:

1) A place to store ships: Well, we have that at the moment. Pick a station, any station. Its yours to call home. Having it "owned" doesn't change anything here.

2) Own commodity market which would generate more money for you - then followed up with: "Obviously it probably shouldn't be anywhere near cheap and it would probably give those rich players who already have everything in the game yet something more to spend on." Why does a community market help here then? Players or groups that are already rich enough to own a station, why on earth do they need more money? :O Well, to each their own, let's focus on the own commodity market itself. How would it work, in what way would it be different? How would it generate money? Does it mean that the only commodities that it would stock would be those that you brought yourself? Or they would magically appear? Would you then get to "buy" them for free, and sell for max profit? I'm having trouble here envisioning on how this would work at all, especially in relation to ED.

3) Visible to you exclusively. Hmm.... then, one has to ask. What is the point? A super secret station that only you can see (except in the case of following the wake that was noted)? In the context of a multiplayer game, isn't the owning of somewhere a nice thing to show off to other players?

I feel OP needs to think this idea through with more detail. Think about what the point would be and how it could work. There have been many threads on player owned stations, most with more detail and thoughts about advantages and disadvantages. They especially need to think more about the commodity market aspect, and how it could work in the context of ED.

I'll just take the moment to address the point that many people have raised about hangars as well. Personally, i don't care about personal hangers as it were. At the end of the day, i can make any station (or stations) my home. I think (and suspect) that once we get Space Legs, one of the first things we will get is the ability to walk around hangers where our ships are located. These though (so far) are single docking bays, each of our ships at the same station are located in different bays (in theory anyway - we know ships are only spawned as they are used). So, what we are looking at here, perhaps in the future, is not private hangers per se, its not required. Just more open docking bays for when we have space legs. So if you have multiple ships at a station, you can walk around a much bigger area, and see all your ships at once.

However, such a thing is many years away probably, space legs needs to come first.

 

[Miklos Atreides]

1) A place to store ships: Well, we have that at the moment. Pick a station, any station. Its yours to call home. Having it "owned" doesn't change anything here.

2) Own commodity market which would generate more money for you - then followed up with: "Obviously it probably shouldn't be anywhere near cheap and it would probably give those rich players who already have everything in the game yet something more to spend on." Why does a community market help here then? Players or groups that are already rich enough to own a station, why on earth do they need more money? :O Well, to each their own, let's focus on the own commodity market itself. How would it work, in what way would it be different? How would it generate money? Does it mean that the only commodities that it would stock would be those that you brought yourself? Or they would magically appear? Would you then get to "buy" them for free, and sell for max profit? I'm having trouble here envisioning on how this would work at all, especially in relation to ED.

3) Visible to you exclusively. Hmm.... then, one has to ask. What is the point? A super secret station that only you can see (except in the case of following the wake that was noted)? In the context of a multiplayer game, isn't the owning of somewhere a nice thing to show off to other players?

I feel OP needs to think this idea through with more detail. Think about what the point would be and how it could work. There have been many threads on player owned stations, most with more detail and thoughts about advantages and disadvantages. They especially need to think more about the commodity market aspect, and how it could work in the context of ED.

I aggree fully on that.
1. Once you put the label "home" to any of these 50.000 station of this bubble it is your home. Just imagination (but you can't rename your home city either).

2. Its all about buy low and sell high. Ok you need to maintain your commodity market. Make NPCs to sell or buy the stuff from there. Its a hard business and Frontier needs to
support production lines and enable mechanics to manipulate the station in order to drive the business into a specific direction.
For commodities its the same here. You have to attract other systems to deliver producs (FSD drives, Weapons, HRPs, ...) to you at an attractive price point (machinery, Technology Products, ...) so you can deliver / produce those items. Regulatory and gamplay on this not implemented yet. And what about other minor factions intruding in your station, gaining influence over time and finally take over your station. Its gamplay as it is today. Are you accepting the effects from there?

3. So if you drop out SC in a moons orbit randomly 5km apart from the landing pad you don't see this megastructure? No way to make it consistent this way. It might be indistructable and
not granting docking permission to any foreigner, but then it makes no sense to me.

Detailing this out to have a concept is a bigger hole you've got to dig. Implement it into the game is another one and pleasing majority of playerbase with it is near to impossible.

Regards,
Miklos

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

So, let's break it down what OP is suggesting:

Righty-o, tunneling right beside you.

1) A place to store ships: Well, we have that at the moment. Pick a station, any station. Its yours to call home. Having it "owned" doesn't change anything here.

This is only off use (and I use the word 'use' quite wrongly here) if you can park your ships alongside each other. To create a fleet, which you can oggle at as you do now with outfitting, just more ships in view. Perhaps even re-arrange how they're parked.

Purely a vanity item.

2) Own commodity market which would generate more money for you [...]

Yeah, stumped by that one as well.

3) Visible to you exclusively. Hmm.... then, one has to ask. What is the point? A super secret station that only you can see (except in the case of following the wake that was noted)? In the context of a multiplayer game, isn't the owning of somewhere a nice thing to show off to other players?

Not for me. For me it would be more of a mi casa type of deal. In fact, if planetary bases ever become a thing, I'd probably build it outside the bubble if possible.

 

[Miklos Atreides]

Righty-o, tunneling right beside you.


This is only off use (and I use the word 'use' quite wrongly here) if you can park your ships alongside each other. To create a fleet, which you can oggle at as you do now with outfitting, just more ships in view. Perhaps even re-arrange how they're parked.

Purely a vanity item.


Yeah, stumped by that one as well.


Not for me. For me it would be more of a mi casa type of deal. In fact, if planetary bases ever become a thing, I'd probably build it outside the bubble if possible.

Seems like there are two base types of player in demand of Stations . The one type is the "My home is my castle" type. They will need a landing pad (storing n ships) and a small surface bungalow on a moon. Inside 200t cargo/module capacity and they are done. I believe they can get pleased one day by FD and there is no in depth gamplay change needed .

The other "Ruler of the system" type is much more difficuild and it implies a fundamental expansion of may game aspects. BGS and economy needs to change completly. Minor factions and PP will have in depth overhaul needed for this. All the station control functions are to be invented from scratch. In fact I doubt that this will happen in a forseeable future.

Regards,
Miklos

 

[Aewarin Jameson]

Seems like there are two base types of player in demand of Stations

The third would be one who wishes to help create a station, open to all and owned by no one, but allows for the expansion of the bubble in a much quicker way than is currently being done by FD! (With 50,000 existing systems in the bubble none of them have plans to expand ?! None of them ?! Odd ... you would have thought expansions [and collapse] would happen far quicker than it is today and giving the players the ability to speed up this process [so FD don't have to] would be a win/win IMO)

 

[Karla]

I've often thought that you could add some Sim City style play to ED. Find an Earth like world, a water world or a system with lots of resources that can be extracted. Ship all the materials there, pay to create a station, provide facilities such as accommodation for workers, then find customers and ship all the products back to them. Then you need to add other facilities such as defence against pirates or competitors, leisure or medical facilities etc. Make enough of a profit and players would be more motivated to then explore the rest of the galaxy looking for the ideal system to expand again. Exploration at the moment has very little to do with what goes on in the rest of the bubble. This would make it extremely relevant.

The potential for emergent game play would be immense. You would have collectives of players combining economic forces leading to corporate wars. Pirating and smuggling would have a far greater effect on other players. So this could lead to co-operative game play from clan warfare.

This could be an entirely new game in itself, but if you were going to do that, then it would be great to incorporate it into the ED universe. Look at the trouble people go to to understand the BGS.

 

[DaveB]

I loved EVE when I played it, when it got to the stage that I didn't like it any more I bailed. I'll do the same with ED - if I stop liking the game I'll stop playing. Fortunately it seems FD are not too keen on incorporating the things that turned me off in Eve.

 

[Kristov]

..........

http://i.imgur.com/qIKR0Qt.gif

BAHAHAHAHAHA!

No.

Raw goods in Eve are infinite, just like ED. The only thing finite in the economy is player time invested. This hydraulic despotism fantasy of yours is a fallacy.

Even Eve's NPC economy, which is just a granule of sand on the floor of the game's financial ocean, works better than ED's economy.

Except that analogy doesn't quite work. In order for it to work, the entire weight of that ocean would have to be held up by that one granule of sand. It's because Eve's NPC economy is rock solid that the player economy works so well.

I don't know what you think I said about how I think ED's economy should work, because I didn't say anything specific at all, so all I can do with the rest of your post is sit here and speculate about what you imagined I said and try to extrapolate from there to try and decipher what your post truly means, because at this point it's just a bunch of random nonsense that was thrown at me for no particular reason.


But despite that, I'd like to point out that what you've said is complete bunk. I'll point to a real world, current day analogy to help you understand why.

Go look at the current prices of industrial metals in both local and global markets. Steel, Copper, Magnesium, Aluminum, etc... and then go look at a 20 year history. You'll notice that right now metal prices are unreasonably low for the season in the United States, even globally. This is because Latin America and China are in the middle of a recession. They stop buying, the entire global economy gets hit, not just Venezuela, Brazil, China, etc.... which otherwise can be considered, on their industrial raw goods side, largely insular. These materials are in abundant supply, there has been no shortages of any of them in decades, so they can be roughly parallelized with your concept of what would happen if all goods were in infinite supply.


Actually let's provide two. [heart]

A few weeks ago all of the major players in the Oil industry met and agreed to cut back on production. Why? Because they were experiencing exactly the "bad" scenario that you described. Oil was in abundant supply, prices were dropping too low, and prices were stagnating at the bottom end and homogenizing across the global market. So what happens when this scenario occurs and an essential commodity market becomes saturated in every market? Businesses stop producing the commodity because, SURPRISE! It's not profitable. Thus artificial shortages are created and the market becomes dynamic again.

Sharing prices isn't a bugbear. Sorry. Having a 1-dimensional facade for an economic simulation is the problem.

Getting even further off topic, but...

Ok, you are, again, as I already pointed out, thinking small scale, local/global. You continue to show exactly how small scale you are thinking despite saying you are talking macro-economics with anikaiful, and she keeps pointing that out to you as well, you are thinking small.

You can not corner a market that is infinite for all intents and purposes, it's literally not possible. You are using EVE's borked economy as an example of one that works properly, because, again, you are stuck with a very small scale view of how things work. North Korea has NO analogy in the PP in E: D, that's such a bad example it's not even funny, and again, it shows that you are thinking small still. You keep trying to insist that what works on a SINGLE PLANET must work for hundreds of thousands of planets all within 2 hours of their farthest possible point of supply or demand. EVE's economy is borked because it allows you to control resources and goods, despite these both being infinite, and you think that's how it's SUPPOSED to work? You don't see the failure of that system? Yeah...nevermind....you keep on thinking that way and being disappointed in the properly functioning economy that FD has created. Those of us who understand that it's proper will continue to enjoy seeing the only such game that's finally gotten it right.

As to the OP, he wants to control the station totally, even make it invisible to others, that's been addressed by some of us already, per David, ain't gonna happen. And I happen to agree with him, it shouldn't happen in the manner the OP wants, IF we could even have player owned or created outposts, bases or stations with markets and all that. Considering that the entire point of Elite is that it's you, a single individual, and your ship, and the entire game is YOUR story as a single individual in your ship, I can't really see adding control of, creation of, or ownership of stations/outposts/bases, it literally doesn't fit the game's story and mechanics.

As I said, Star Citizen has their Hangars, a place to park your ships, store your goodies, put your trophies, mementos, and various knick knacks from your travels out so you can see them and remember where you've been, what you've done, and even let others see them as well. That's what I would like to see in Elite: Dangerous, and David has talked about us having JUST that, a place to store our ships in 1 location, store our extra parts, show off mementos of our travels, a place to hang our remlock and relax as we contemplate our journey so far. That's all we need, it fits with the Elite mythos and story mechanics.

 

[STINKFISH]

Player owned stations should happen - but many people dev side will be against it, because it would take up P2P Client Instancing resources - that are already very very stretched..