Excellent livestream - sincere thanks to Adam and Dav for the time they took to get into some deep-ish territory, and for their unstinting work with the BGS over the last couple of years. Like them, I'm keen not to blow the lid off certain aspects, the knowledge of which would (imho) lessen the overall 'suspension-of-disbelief' effect... but I do still have a couple of questions that maybe they'd like to comment on (given what Dav said about checking into this thread for the next day or two).
Firstly... 'trade and its effect on influence'. Much was said, and all of it made sense, but some of it was still rather vague. Could Dav confirm my hunch that it is "tills ringing" that counts with trade's effect on influence, and not value, profit, import-vs-export, or anything else... but the simple act of buying and/or selling 'something' - whether that be one thing, ten things, or a hundred things, it's the transaction that matters, more than its value, direction, profit, loss, demand or supply levels. I'm not going to point out the maybe not-so-obvious exploit that arises if it is 'transaction-based' (people can figure that out for themselves)... but does Dav or Adam have any plans to nerf that effect, or de-spam it or add flood-brakes to it? I think you know what I'm talking about, guys.
Were you also aware that the same basic 'transaction-based' loading occurs with exploration data too, and possibly even combat-bonds? You might want to look at methods to control that, or at least implement some kind of diminishing returns system, if you haven't already. Heck, maybe you already do, in which case great, but please tell us if this is in effect already! It's very hard to measure, beyond a certain point, when we are on the outside looking in (like you said in the livestream, you have access to the entire DB, so your godlike omniscience makes us seem very blind in comparison!)
Finally - capping. There comes a point where (for example) someone returning from a month-long exploration trip has to dump their data, and (as we know) there is a limit to the influence-movement that any faction can expect, per tick. This makes sense, and stops an explorer flipping an entire system in a day, which is right and proper. But by the same token, his exploration data would, on any other day, have the same value in its component parts, if broken down bit-by-bit, so is it really fair to simply (and rather arbitrarily) decide that maybe nine-tenths of it today is worthless (because the cap has been reached) - and to do so without warning him? Wouldn't it be fairer to warn the explorer that he was approaching some sort of 'tolerance' level, and/or that the cartographics station had had enough for today? Maybe blame it on the minions inside who have to file his epic amounts of data, or feign some kind of 'input processing queue full, try again tomorrow' sort of semi-rejection. By all means let him keep pumping data in, knowing full well that he's just getting money, not influence in return for his efforts, but at least signal the situation, and give him a reminder that maybe he should save a chunk for tomorrow to sell here again (for influence as well as cash) or perhaps go visit another friendly system, and sell a bit there, if he's looking for both effects. It just seems a tad unfair to keep the poor soul in the dark as to whether anyone in the faction/population gives a hoot about his wondrous news of faraway planets anymore, simply because they've had a lot already, this 'tick'. Better feedback to the player would help mitigate this, I believe.
That's it from me for now. Many thanks again for taking the time out of your busy schedules to give us this BGS insight. Many more of us 'out here' play chess with it more than you realise, and having some of those rules at least more firmly established by yourselves, does take some of the frustration out of it, and without destroying the magic, too. None of us want it all 'on a plate', but there are times when the darkness just closes in a bit too much, so Adam's stated aims of giving things 'a bit more clarity' is absolutely spot-on, and just what I had hoped to hear. Really looking forward to 2.1 in due course, and thanks again for sharing. I could quite happily listen to you two rabbit on about the BGS all night, and then some. Please do come back again and give us some more one day. It's the galaxy's biggest chess-game, and you know it!
