You guys don't believe in a taxi meta after 2.2? After the smuggling > all money making meta, after the heat > all PvP meta, you still think that it is fine that essentially the best ways to travel is now to just fly in a long range taxi ship and have your main workhorse ship sent after you all the time?
You guys don't believe it completely warps trade CGs so that you must play the taxi meta or you have no chance to be in the top percentages, because it's much faster to source the trade goods in sufficient quantities that, as opposed to flying the way back to where you buy the stuff in a interstellarly slower ship?
You guys are confident that powerplay, which is competitive by nature, makes the use of the taxi meta mandatory because if the players in your power don't do it, the opposing power can undermine/fortify/etc. much faster than your power?
You guys don't think that short jump range downsides of many ships should matter any more, and travelling be normalized to taxi ship with the best jump range a player can afford? (If you say yes to this, then please just go ahead and buff the jump ranges of Viper, FDL, Corvette, Eagle, Python etc.)
All excellent points. Perhaps the transfer cost should be higher if the ship you are taking isn't available at the station? That way local availability of ships isn't made irrelevant
I don't think this will be the case. There are fairly simple mitigating factors in all of your concerns, particularly about trade. For one, unladen trade ships tend to have really good range anyway. Yeah, my stripped to the core annie can jump 55 Ly, my unladen cutter can jump 33 or something. Unless I'm sourcing goods several hundred light years away the difference won't come into play. At best I'll save 1, maybe two unladen jumps, time that will be lost in switching ships before I load up. It's potentially an issue with rare's CGs, but lately they've been making the bulk of the travel time in supercruise to drop off or pick up, something no ship or feature can shorten the duration of.
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It may have some edge benefits on the fringe systems for powerplay, but honestly, there are much bigger problems going on there.
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Long range smuggling, the Cr/Hr aren't made or broken based on getting an empty ship out to Sothis/Robigo, besides which if you put a timer on delivery I just take my 450ton, 55Ly annie out there and start to fill up it's hold until my 720 ton Cutter arrives, at which point I switch ships with the cargo. You'd have to make the transfer ridiculously slow for it to matter. The only time it might begin to force you to actually wait (which is horrible gameplay btw) is if you took an Asp and transferred a python, the cargo discrepancy being big enough that you'd quickly fill the Asp. But as I've said before, the Sothis problem doesn't have to do with travel time.
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This is a convenience feature, people won't be switching ships every time they make a couple jumps, just for travel to distant places like engineer bases or when they want to do a mission or activity they don't have a ship on hand for. As far as potential exploits go, this is insanely tame, laughable to really even be concerned about it.