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 don't think anyone should have to play for a full hour to make up the cost of ship transfer...that's not my idea of 'convenience'.
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.
I'm not arguing for 'free or trivial', I'm arguing for 'convenience'. Especially with the time involved.
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?
I didn't claim you do exploits. You're taking "endgame" out of the context of comparing your progress to that of players who haven't been around since beta. Your experience differs highly from my own, even though I too have made quite a bit of progress and would say I'm close to endgame myself. And I've already answered your final question many times in this thread, and I repeat:
I do not use ship transfer currently because it is too expensive.
Am I the only person who outfits a single ship at a time and sells it off when I'm done using it?
You're not alone, that's how I generally approach any game. With Elite, there's the caveat of dedicated trade/combat/exploration roles, but I have yet to permanently keep a combat or exploration ship, though I did retool my Anaconda to make a Jaques expedition during the CG to restore power there. Trading's been my main focus.
That said, I do have a small fleet now...a Python I intend to use for outpost-CGs and mission running, my Imperial Cutter, and the Anaconda that I'm debating about using for exploring unless the Beluga gets room for a fighter bay in addition to shields and a fuel scoop, along with a swathe of bookmark-sidewinders (yes, I could just use the bookmarks, but it helps sort 'interesting systems' from other stuff I use the new bookmarks for) and the Asp Explorer I made my first exploration voyage in, which I stripped and turned into a bit of a museum piece. And someday I'll add the Federal Corvette to the list.
I used ship transfer just 2 nights ago. I certainly do not have money to burn.
I used it because I lost my Type-9 and didn't have enough credits to fly it again (with a 8 million cr rebuy), so I transported my Asp to my current location (41 min, ~400K cr) and quit for the night. The next night, my Asp (with only a 1.4 m cr rebuy) was waiting for me and I mothballed my T9 until I can earn some more credits.
I felt that the time and cost were reasonable. I can easily earn 400K cr with a few missions in ~30 minutes. (That's not "an absurd amount of time".) And in fact, I was able to earn it back with only a single 15 min mission.
I've only used the ship transfer feature a few times, mostly when I want more than 1 ship at a particular location. That's a real pain w/o transfers. In this particular case, it saved me from risking my most expensive ship, by flying w/o a rebuy. (That's never a good idea, even though I occasionally do it).
It's a feature you should use when it makes sense. It's not designed to let you move your entire fleet to Colonia.
That 400k is a sizable, non-trivial portion of your Asp-Ex rebuy, and given that you're already clearly limited in cash with your inability to pay a Type 9 rebuy, you're definitely in a sort of cash-critical situation. In your shoes I would never pay that kind of price, I'd rather just get a taxi ship that I can sell on the other end for minimal loss to get into another ship with which to build up credits. (This is why I also just always make sure I have credits to spare when going into a bigger ship.)
And I think it *should* be a feature that allows you to move your fleet to Colonia, if you want to, for a
fair price and the notable time delay of 2 weeks (at least I believe it's 2 weeks?). CMDRs who want to leave the human bubble behind to start a new life out in Colonia should be embraced, rather than be made to face a high-price barrier to entry. Let's remember you have to make the journey yourself first to even move anything out there....
I'll admit that shipping prices can feel rather inflated but as I am well off that's just an annoyance. I'm rather more peeved when it comes to transfer TIMES, but this was voted on and the "start the transfer and log off till tomorrow" crowd won.
Oh, you mean putting down the idea that you have a Pokeball collection of interstellar spaceships?
Yeah, not sorry about that.
Still, *given* that there is now a believable amount of time required, it shouldn't be so pricey. What's scary is that Fdev were considering even higher figures for instant transfer...still makes me shake my head.
I think the balance is pretty close to pitch perfect. It's a resource that the player has to carefully consider the use of before employing it willy nilly. Even as a billionaire I hardly rely on it, and I'm not sure it's only because it seems needlessly wasteful in terms of credits. Mostly I don't use it often because I like flying my ship(s) and I'm literally never in a ship I don't feel like being in, or can't keep myself busy with. Strangely enough, 99% of the time I do all of my flying in my FdL and sometimes I'll call in my AspX if I need to make a quick run to go to some far off system to gather rare materials.
"balance pretty close to pitch perfect"
"even as a billionaire"
*facepalm*
Sounds to me like you've got exactly the ships you want to have and thus have no reason to worry over money anymore?
A person in a starter sidewinder with 1,000 credits to their name, doesn't need to use the ship transfer feature. If somebody is that broke, they probably only have the one ship.
I just used it earlier today. I jumped in my Cobra Mk III to run to a system ~200 ly away, then paid 55,000 credits to ship my mining spec Cobra Mk IV there. It took 26 minutes, so I logged off and cooked dinner. Then logged back on and commenced to the mining.
Only 55,000 credits? May I ask how bare-bones your Cobra IV mining rig is? I know it's a cheap ship, but...I could swear I've seen similar figures for about that distance using a Sidewinder.
Even then, I'll admit that *sounds* like a reasonable price figure. But...it scales up quite a bit as ships get more expensive, past the point of 'convenience' into "Be prepared to play for an hour or two to recuperate the loss in credits".
