Swiss post, US Post, Canada post
Just don't put in Australia post. Most expensive/least reliable.
Am I the only one who thinks the price of shipping ships is far too high?
- Thread starter SkyLeach
- Start date
Just don't put in Australia post. Most expensive/least reliable.
Different topic there, but I agree that NPCs should be far, far more interactive than they are now, especially NPC crew.
It's a sizable amount of credits you otherwise wouldn't be losing and that you could add to your profit margin if you didn't use ship transfer. And it doesn't save you time, it saves you the effort of jumping yourself, which could generally be easily done in the time a normal ship transfer will take.
You already have one of the Elite pilot federation ranks and you described owning something like a half dozen fully-kitted ships. If that's not endgame, that's pretty darn close to it.
Newer players who aren't even close to being Elite in anything, who are still learning about the game and making their way as a pilot? You know, the demographic least likely to be active on the forums?
Uh-huh.
Anything that isn't an activity being done strictly to make up the cash loss by using ship transfer.
Thanks for finally addressing my points. I'll happily return in kind.
1: it saves plenty of time as many of the ships I use would need to be refit to make the distances across the bubble so not as simple as running back and flying it to location myself. As for the credit "loss" that is clearly a matter of opinion. The time saved and convenience gained (as I don't just sit around while ships and modules are being transferred) are credits well spent in my eyes and usually more than covered within the time of any operation I design for myself.
2: clearly we have drastically different definitions of "endgame". There's plenty I haven't yet accomplished and I derive a lot of pleasure from ED so from that point of view, I've not reached any sort of end game by any reasonable definition. I do not have billions of credits. I do not have either of the two most expensive ships, and I do not have elite ranking in either Trade nor Exploration. Some of my ships are well equipped but none are full G5 modded and even if they were, patch changes alter the effectiveness of any one build so that aspect of the game is not likely to run dry anytime soon.
3: you claim to speak for a subset of player groups that you do not in fact speak for.
4: this is likely the first time you've addressed my points. Thanks for doing so.
5: the recouping of credits is rarely my primary role, but it is a consideration. You should have been able to extrapolate that from my original post describing my latest operation which was heavily assisted by module and ship transfer mechanics. See, I enjoy the game. I like flying about, doing combat, smuggling rare and sometimes illegal goods, taking part in CZs, hunting for bounties at Res sites, taking all sorts of missions whether they be surface, delivery, mining or powerplay.
Sometimes I enjoy some pvp. I like those because they involve a great deal of skill and planing. They take a loss every time in terms of credits so I tend to do those at CGs and try to balance my losses with how much I gain from the CG itself. Is that a waste in your opinion?
Other times, I'll be hunting for materials on surfaces. No credits are made then yet I do not feel my time is wasted as I enjoy the gameplay. Balancing all of my tasks with credit costs is a part of the game regardless of module and ship transfers. My most expensive pass time in ED has to do with pvp, not transfer mechanics.
Transfer mechanics have improved my gameplay and allowed me to spend a lot more time on tasks I enjoy rather than ferrying ships back and forth. I can set up a whole operation to suit a goal in a fraction of the time it would otherwise require if we didn't have ship transfers, recouping my expenses all the while. In other words, it has been of great benefit with costs well balanced against the gains.
The charge is perfect as is. After all in this game there are not enough money sinks as it is when you consider how easy it is to make creds. In less than 7 hours or so of actual game time I have made over half a billion creds past few days alone
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It's something called "opportunity cost", as far as profit margins goes - time is money after all. Sure, moving ships manually might save a sizeable amount of credits, but that time could have been better spent on something else. Mining, bounty hunting, trading, even simply taking a break and making yourself a cup of tea are all other options that you are paying the cost of not doing by not using ship transfer.
The simple question is thus: would you rather taxi your ships across manually or would you rather pay a few million (for most small fleets within the bubble) to get them shipped automatically? There are many players in these forums that would be happy to pay the costs for their smaller ships but reserve the personal touch for their flagships, a few that would be willing to pay out the ears for all their fleet and then there's a few that wouldn't pay at all and would prefer to spend their time running around in a hauler ferrying their own ships around themselves. The fact that there's players in all three camps shows that the costs are relatively balanced. Just because you fall into the 3rd group doesn't mean that everyone does.
I agree that there's not a binary selection of options or opinions, but that overall this seems like a workable version of this feature. I'd wager there is at least one more group though - people who want the transfer but don't want the cost in time and/or funds. Personally I use the feature only occasionally, but the visceral cockpit experience is one of my favourite elements of Elite so I prefer to fly a lot of the time even when shipping might be cheaper/more convenient.
Right now I'm RNGineering a new Vulture to get more into combat-related roles. I'm currently flying it to the casinos myself after using it stock for a bit in combat, to come to grips with its flight characteristics and capabilities; I haven't been in one since the sugarglass canopy Beta version. The shakedown run also lets me see where I need to focus my modding for mine and the ship's strengths and weaknesses. If I'd flown them regularly since that time and was obtaining a from-scratch Vulture for some new purpose, I'd have had it shipped around like a tuned up show car because it would be easy, instead of taking it out as it were on actual roadways for performance testing and familiarity.
I'll grant the moment you involve *more than* 2 ships (the ship you're in and the ship you want to move) it saves time compared to manual moving. But the credit sink remains an issue, and that's only compounded on the more ships you involve, unless you stick to using a lot of cheap ships.
Compared to the average player, it might as well be?
I know full well neither you or I are the average player, but the fact is, you have more credits and toys to play with and it changes your perspective compared to other players.
Those are your words, not mine.
First time? What do you think I've been trying to do with every post? Nevermind.
And not all of those things are necessarily profitable endeavours, nor does that cover all the possible things to do....
In terms of progression and collecting credits? Of course dying and paying for insurance is a waste. That's rather the point. Being blown up is something that *shouldn't* be a convenience.
I don't think anyone has been making the claim that transfers are the most expensive pasttime....
The credit sink and credit inflation issue brought on by the various exploits over time I think are separate issues that shouldn't be handled by making a quality-of-life feature expensive enough to be a credit sink...which, as you say, it is.
I'm well aware of the term, and it's fine to have a fair cost on the feature - but it shouldn't be too much to the point that people just won't use it, surely?
"A few million" feels to me like a term that's become far, far too trivial of late....
I think at least our discussion is edging on productive now so that's a good thing.
1: I don't find the credit sink an issue as it doesn't hinder me in my projects. Perhaps it's an issue for you? That hardly makes it universal or even the "average" experience, but we'll come to that.
2: what is the average player? A beginner is only a beginner once. Where we all branch off from there is another matter entirely. In the end we can only really bring our own perspectives to the table.
3. Are you not claiming to speak for a subset of players you do not represent? By your own admition you aren't a beginner and I don't hear any such players egging you on here.
4. But you are claiming that it is prohibitively expensive. That has not been my experience.
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It needs to stay expensive enough that people just dont use taxi ships to get the big ships where they want them all the time. This makes big ships movable all over the place without risk if it is lowered to much.
But people do use ship transfer at current prices. And not just people with billions in the bank from cash exploits that use ship transfer, even just everyday Joes who are happy enough earning a couple million credits an hour use it as it saves them so much time, time that they can spend on other in-game activities or even out-of-game activities. Unless you are shifting the top-end ships, going far outside the bubble, moving ships around constantly or shipping massive fleets around, ship transfer is quite affordable and convenient for players. Take the edge case scenarios out of the equation, and there's no real problems with ship transfer.
That's at the crux of it right there. It's difficult to listen to someone argue a feature is so expensive no one will use it when it is being actively used by people including myself, with no such issues.
It seems pretty universal to me when amassing credits and advancing through ships is, generally, the yardstick by which progression is measured in this game, though we have more exceptions now with Powerplay, Engineers, and Federal and Imperial rank; on the other hand, all of those things are like branches off the core pillar of simply going from ship to better ship - which is why the Asp Explorer/Python/Anaconda remain the most popular ships.
The "average" player, as I see it, is someone who doesn't know all the tricks and details of the game, who doesn't hop in from the start and go Hi-RES farming for easy credits or find an easy credit running exploit to skip ahead progression-wise - players that don't just have credits to burn and have to save and be wary of expenses. Someone, who may want the convenience of a feature like ship transfer, but can't, because the price is exclusionarily high.
You've got this backwards.
The reason I use taxi ships to get the big ships right now is because ship transfer is too expensive.
Some people do.
Again, you throw the term "couple million" out like it's a triviality. Do you even remember what it was like in a starter sidewinder with 1,000 credits to your name?
If anything this goes to show just how skewed perspectives can be by issues like Hi-Res killsteal-farming....
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New players don't have many ships to drag around though and those that they do have are extremely cheap. A relatively new player in a Viper MkIII would still consider moving his starting sidewinder every once in a while when he decides to relocate his base system to still be a pittance (I still have my starting Sidey in my new home system, without ship transfer it would likely have just been left to rot in Arigens forevermore as it simply wouldn't be worth my time to fetch). Just as new players can't afford to throw around millions of credits to move stuff, they also don't have enough expensive ships to cost them millions of credits to deliver. Of course a new player with a bank balance of 50k and their Sidewinder would never consider spending millions of credits to move their ships, but they don't have to as they don't have that many ships - you have to scale the costs based on the player's resources and a player's most valuable assets will always be relatively pricey to move unless they have literally reached endgame while their secondary assets remain quite affordable throughout their entire career.
New players that won't consider a few million to be trivial will find it almost physically impossible to amass delivery costs that high unless they are going out to Colonia.
Middling players can easily afford a few million credits to save an evening's work moving their ragtag supply of shiplings to a new home while they fly their personal flagship themselves.
Well-established players with full fleets likely don't care much for credits, and so they can afford to even more the big 3 around rather than fetching them themselves.
It all comes down to cost/benefit optimisation. A new player might scrape 100k in an hour's gameplay doing some courier missions, which makes a delivery cost of 100k to bring their Eagle with them pretty good if it saves them an hour's work outfitting a Hauler to fetch their Eagle themselves.
I see this the other way around, ship transfer is the easy option, the credit sink. If I want to move a ship & can't be bothered, I transfer it, just as I might pay for someone to put up a shelf when I could do it myself.
If it's too expensive (or I can't afford it) then I'll do it myself. Much of your argument seems to be in favour of it being free or trivial cost rather than focused on balancing gameplay V'larr.
Well, I don't do exploits and even by that yardstick I'm still possibly more than a year away from having access to either of the two big ships. Either way, existing in the elite universe is the game and it's ongoing. There is not an endgame. My anaconda will not always be a better choice to take than my Cobra.
There is another discrepancy here, which is you require very particular interpretations and theorycrafting in order to push your point of view. Again, when I say the prices of ship transfers are well balanced and not restrictive, I am talking from direct experience. It is a feature I use often. Do you?
Yeah, it's a rare event when I use transfer on my Conda, but That feels quite reasonable. Far more often I'll either do the same as you or I'll call in my DBE and take that to retrieve my Conda.