Option to leave cargo on board ship when swapping ships

[MickyG1982]

Hmm, store in your ship stored ship:

Get a bunch of trading vessels, fill em up, wait for a CG, transfer to CG station. Sell stuff, hit top spot.

Or

Use it to spam your chosen faction up or down with the same method or use it to store a shed load of UA's and kill a station of your choice...

Exactly why storage isn't going to happen for cargo. It's not all about the profit that you can make, it's about how you affect the economy and the effect you have on local factions...

All it needs is a warning stating that your cargo is not able to be moved to your new ship will be lost or sold. Job done.

 

[Teh Smoo]

Looking at this idea. Make me think a gold seller suggested it.

We don't need this idea. It promotes gold sellers.

I try not to call people idiots too much, but I can think of no other response to this. How in blazes could stashing cargo promote gold sellers?

It costs money to ship ships, and if cargo made it cost even more, that could easily nuke any given profit.

And in no way does this let people transfer anything to people any more easily. I gave a mate some meta-alloys, that was annoying enough. I've participated in "trades" with exactly two players: my mate who needed to unlock Felicity, and a swell guy who hooked me up with some modular terminals. It's a colossal pain to transfer any significant cargo between players, and cargo storage does NOTHING to help.

 

[Teh Smoo]

Hmm, store in your ship stored ship:

Get a bunch of trading vessels, fill em up, wait for a CG, transfer to CG station. Sell stuff, hit top spot.

Or

Use it to spam your chosen faction up or down with the same method or use it to store a shed load of UA's and kill a station of your choice...

Exactly why storage isn't going to happen for cargo. It's not all about the profit that you can make, it's about how you affect the economy and the effect you have on local factions...

All it needs is a warning stating that your cargo is not able to be moved to your new ship will be lost or sold. Job done.

No. All it needs is an additional fee for transferring ships with cargo. Or having it auto-sell at SOURCE STATION prices, any cargo in the ship. So you would lose money if you tried to game things. And it would be useless for the CG thing, or trading, or ANYTHING but bringing your ship over.

You people are making up problems, when solutions are spectacularly easy to come up with.

 

[Virandar]

No. All it needs is an additional fee for transferring ships with cargo. Or having it auto-sell at SOURCE STATION prices, any cargo in the ship. So you would lose money if you tried to game things. And it would be useless for the CG thing, or trading, or ANYTHING but bringing your ship over.

You people are making up problems, when solutions are spectacularly easy to come up with.

It's the Frontier Defence League. They don't like when people suggest anything that could actually make various aspects of Elite not being pain in the backside and the usual answers you get are:

1. That would make Frontier have to do some work, we mustn't do that to the poor designers.
2. I would not use such a feature, so nobody should be allowed to use it. Everyone should follow my example and do things the way I do them.
3, Such a feature would affect the BGS (despite there being ways of making it have no effect on BGS whatsoever). Which, in a game where our actions are supposed to affect the BGS should be a desired effect perhaps? And which also suggest that if a single player hauling cargo is able to crash ingame economy, there probably the need to take the BGS system back to the drawing board because it's obvious it wasn't thought through well enough?
4. Such a feature would make the game too easy, ships would fly themselves or something would actually make sense and be fun. We mustn't have fun in Elite. Grind is the way it should be.

 

[Jenny Harper]

Looking at this idea. Make me think a gold seller suggested it.

We don't need this idea. It promotes gold sellers.

Well that's rude. Actually, the reason I suggested it was that I was on a mission to deliver some cargo to a planetary output but the planet was undiscovered so I couldn't target it in my navigation panel. I was hoping to swap over to my Asp Explorer which has a discovery scanner but I couldn't swap into it because I had the mission cargo in my Type 7. Annoying.

And on a previous occasion I had some commodities which I'd gained from missions, but I wanted to go exploring and sell them later (because whenever you get commodity rewards, they're never in demand anywhere nearby in my experience) so I discarded them. Seemed like a waste.

As for the whole transfer things, either make it so expensive to transfer ships with cargo in that it's not a viable tactic or make it so you can't transfer ships with cargo in.

 

[Virandar]

I think it's a very good idea to be able to leave cargo on the ship, and be able transfer to another ship that has an empty cargo bay (without first having to sell yer goods if destination bay is too small) - also being able to choose what cargo (if any) to transfer between ships if desired. Otherwise, Stations should provide some storage facilities - and not cheap. 1t of cargo storage costing 1000 credits a day (randomly chosen amount) . Even having ships in storage should cost credits per day or week - the bigger the ship the higher the storage costs (to be determined).

This would require from Frontier to allow us build ships basically from scratch and in a highly adaptable way. So you could have just one ship and at will (and presumably expense and effort) you could transform it to being anything, from Cobra, through AspX to Corvette. That, or you would need an alternative, such as player owned facilities. With Elite being designed with a diverse range of ships in mind, I can't see ship storage fees happening anytime soon, if ever.

Also, if a Commander has a stored ship that has a full cargo hold and he wants it transferred, the price should increase dramatically - thereby discouraging Commanders from exploiting this transport system. What did cost 140,000 credits to transfer a Cobra MKIII with an empty hold, will now, with 32t full Cargo Bay, cost 400,000 credits (random figure) - perhaps also dependent on the Cargo in the hold (transferring a ship with a full Cargo Bay full of gold would cost more than if transporting grain). Import fees and VAT - gotta pay those taxes.

There's no difference transporting 32T of grain and 32T of gold. But yeah, I get the point. Not sure I agree with it, but it's just my opinion.

 

[Virandar]

I have no idea why you have concluded my comments mean we would have to be able to build ships from scratch.

Don't worry, I'm happy to explain. We own several vessels usually because each of them is good at something else. They are specialised and in some cases even "multirole" vessels are difficult to adapt to some roles. The way Elite plays, you simply have to switch between vessels for various tasks. Unless you're slightly masochistic and want to play in ships that are far from optimal for the tasks you do. Many players simply wouldn't be able to afford multiple vessels if they had to pay storage fees for them. Many players are "ship collectors" and this would hit them as well.
Unless Elite was designed so that we actually can play with one ship only. Which means being able to heavily customize it according to our needs at any particular moment, which is what I meant by being able to build ships from scratch. In such case extra ships could be treated as a luxury and taxed (that's what ship storage fees are - a tax), right now they are a necessity. Introducing ship storage fees would be Frontier shooting themselves in the foot. Not that they haven't done that before, but this could be one going too far. This is the kind of idea that could possibly work only if introduced from the very beginning and even then wouldn't be probably the best idea.

There is a great difference. Gold is far more valuable than grain. This means that it is a higher risk cargo to transport - requiring greater security. Also, it would result in greater profits for the pilot who could potentially use such a transport system (previously described) as a kind of exploit (if the transport fee remained the same for all commodities, it could be feasible to transfer high value goods and pay the transport costs while still making a profit on the higher value goods - exploit).

I have transported valuable cargo without being harassed at all (including in Open) and I hauled fish, biowaste or other low value goods being harassed all the time. My opinion when it comes to using cargo storage as some sort of way for transporting cargo from A to B is that it's not necessary and should be treated as a last resort (can't even think right now about reasons to do that other than "because" or precisely to affect BGS). As such, the simplest way of dealing with possible exploits would be slapping a very high fee on that so as to ensure this option IS used only as a last resort one.

 

[Iskariot]

I would like to be able to switch to a smaller combat craft just for a while to do a bit of combat and store my trader including cargo, if it happens to have cargo on board.
FD might allow that for only one ship per cmdr to avoid serious abuse.

But it is not a big problem and perhaps FD feels the same.
We might get something like that further down the line, but it is not a priority.

What should be a priority is the ability to forego commodity rewards for missions if you are in a ship that cannot accept them..

 

[Virandar]

I doubt most players could not afford storage fees for ships. It doesn't have to be a huge amount. In previous games of Elite there was a docking fee of about 3.0 Credits - hardly going to break the bank. As for your other comments regarding storage and transport of cargo, sounds reasonable.

If it's not a huge amount, why bother at all? You get credits trickling out of your account which might add some realism, but I think the main thing it would add is another annoyance.
Additional issue: how about players on hiatus. Say, you want to take a break from ED and you're not around for a few months. You'd have to add even more systems and rules in place for that. Like stopping the fee whenever you leave the game.
In solely single player game, which you can save with all that's there, leave and come back days or weeks later, it might work OK. In a persistent universe, I don't think it would be a good idea.
Just my opinion.

 

[Virandar]

You hit on a good point when you refer to 'players on hiatus'. Frontier want people to play their game, and not to be away from it for long periods. That's why they have elements in gale which degrade over-time (reputation). This encourages the player to return and play. Knowing that docking and storage fees are mounting would be something to encourage a player to return to the gale, and not to stay away too long. This is good for Frontier, because when a player is actively engaged with the game they are more likely to purchase extras.

There's nothing to say that rented storage facilities fees is taken automatically either. In fact, in light of what you have stated, it would probably be just as easy to invoice the commander at the end of a certain period. Either the Commander pays, or doesn't (failure to pay after several weeks or month will result in confiscation of any stored goods, and cancellation of the storage). Likewise, with ship storage fees - if the commander fails to pay an invoice, the ship is impounded until the fees are paid (and made available to the commander upon payment of any invoice and late-payment fees).

That would not encourage me to come back to Elite, that would encourage me to ebay my copy of it. But it's me, they are totally free to do whatever they wish.

 

[disorganise]

Personally I don't think cargo storage in a ship is a good idea. I'd like it, don't get me wrong, but would limit it to a single ship only....ie, you nominate your storage ship. But keeping track of all that cargo is probably a waste of compute resources and there's inevitably some exploit or other.

But.....swapping ship's can be a pain. One option might be to allow the ship swap buy deny launch until the cargo I'd dealt with. This at least allows the poster that mentioned a DSS in a stored ship to able to retrieve that DSS and install it in the ship with the cargo.
But...you can't leave in that non cargo ship without first selling off the cargo.

I also made a related suggestion in another thread before I was directed here;
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...-sell-cargo-and-limpets?p=5844110#post5844110

 

[Virandar]

One more reason for cargo storage: limpets. You can't swap ships if you have limpets onboard.

 

[Jenny Harper]

You hit on a good point when you refer to 'players on hiatus'. Frontier want people to play their game, and not to be away from it for long periods. That's why they have elements in gale which degrade over-time (reputation). This encourages the player to return and play. Knowing that docking and storage fees are mounting would be something to encourage a player to return to the gale, and not to stay away too long. This is good for Frontier, because when a player is actively engaged with the game they are more likely to purchase extras.

There's nothing to say that rented storage facilities fees is taken automatically either. In fact, in light of what you have stated, it would probably be just as easy to invoice the commander at the end of a certain period. Either the Commander pays, or doesn't (failure to pay after several weeks or month will result in confiscation of any stored goods, and cancellation of the storage). Likewise, with ship storage fees - if the commander fails to pay an invoice, the ship is impounded until the fees are paid (and made available to the commander upon payment of any invoice and late-payment fees).

I don't appreciate being blackmailed into playing any game. Rather than forcing people to play with some kind of inactivity penalty (i.e. you're paying but you're getting nothing in return, at least if you're online you still pay, but you're getting something for it, e.g. the privilege of docking at that particular port), some kind of activity carrot should be given instead such as a daily log in bonus... but that's a whole different issue.

 

[Faraoh]

It would be a great addition...SO people won't abuse storage limits they could apply the Cargo Storage IF you are affiliated with a POWER...And if u leave that same power u lose it or something like that...

 

[Bdragon4]

Even just being able to leave your cargo at a station would be convenient. We already leave whole modules there, can they not hold my drinks for me too?

 

[IiliI PEL IiliI]

Or.....what about simply being able to outfit those ships that we are not in.


We can always ring up our local kwikfit and tell them to add a new spoiler to our ford mondeo yet we can't add a cargo rack to our Fer de lance by telling it out of our ships canopy.

Cmon...at the very least just let us fly to the station our ship is stored and then remote outfit.