Not a good move Frontier - Fleet Carrier upkeep

[Navigare Necesse Est]

We haven't had any details yet...

... Is that really so hard to imagine it might be something like this?

...

Yes, because X has a dynamic economy and ED doesn't. NPCs buy at your place in X. They supply their own stations. Which aren't just Ocellus stations everywhere, but factory complexes with demand and supply. There is no such thing in ED. There is but a simple mechanistic demand/supply system per station. There are no suppliers. There are no consumers. It's not persistent and it'd be only players buying. NPCs are scripted to spawn. You'll be lucky when they remember to script some to spawn for visiting and trading with your station.

 

[Nutter]

Hmmm... So I buy a Carrier for 5 Billion, load it with my fleet, spend frag knows how long to take it 10's of thousands of light years away from the bubble (500ly at a time). Then somehow in runs into debt? What the? Potentially I could come back from a trip to find my fleet and carrier has disappeared due to some debt?
How the blazes can a ship run up a debt?

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Hmmm... So I buy a Carrier for 5 Billion, load it with my fleet, spend frag knows how long to take it 10's of thousands of light years away from the bubble (500ly at a time). Then somehow in runs into debt? What the? Potentially I could come back from a trip to find my fleet and carrier has disappeared due to some debt?
How the blazes can a ship run up a debt?

-They say it only uses upkeep when online.
-Maybe you can loan the 5bn.
-Lol, good question about the other ships. Don't fly without rebuy.

 

[Siobhan]

I thought people wanted a credit sink? Seems now they all want an indestructible carrier to blockade systems with.

 

[Dillon Fallon]

Maybe you lose the fleet carrier in a similar away that you can go bankrupt currently. So you may be able to lose it, you just have to be exceptionally bad at running one to do so.

 

[CMDR Dreamstate]

I've been excited for two things lately: The next big game expansion whatever it is (but hopefully it includes space legs.) And Fleet carriers. I've been slowly coaxing my friends to start playing, and gotten a few past sidewinder stage.

But the news that fleet carriers require upkeep was crushing.

I can understand if maybe for game reasons (You dont want a bunch of abandoned ships floating around a server) you need some way to cull unused ships.

This is not the way. You could for example, if a ship isn't landed on for say two weeks to a month, cause that ship to be mothballed, meaning it's owner needs to log back on and re-activate it (WITHOUT a upkeep cost.) That makes sense. Boom the ship re-appears in the system it was last in, everything proceeds as normal. If other players are docked at that ship they can transfer to a nearby station or merely by logging in they either re-activate the ship, or temp reactivate it for 10 hours. (and they can always transfer their ships back off it.)

But the idea that the FCs will be "decommisioned" if they aren't constantly fed in terms of fuel or money or WHATEVER resource is just....offensive. I'm sure a bunch of people will jump on to say "Oh no it's cool" and hey, everybody's entitled to their opinion and gamestyle, but here's mine: I have a job. The idea of Elite becoming one is the WRONG direction for this game.

I honestly can't believe it'll cost 5,000,000,000 to begin with. I was expecting 1.5 or 2 billion at most. 5 billion + upkeep? And they serve as mobile market places?

Talk about space capatilism (Reagonomics) where the rich get richer. I would love to know the statistics of how many players have 5+ billion and the money to even upgrade and A-rate them, because I bet it's less than 0.10% of the playerbase.

 

[Bigmaec]

It sounds from the article ...

... that it might involve both passive income and passive debt.

But we'll need to wait for what the actual numbers are.

So you can possibly bankrupt a fleet carrier when doing some terribly bad sales on them.
What could go wrong

 

[Nutter]

-They say it only uses upkeep when online.
-Maybe you can loan the 5bn.
-Lol, good question about the other ships. Don't fly without rebuy.

I don't need to get a loan, also why on earth would you need a 'market' I intend to be as far away from humans as possible! And another thing... whats this >
" ...with the ability to jump whenever the owner wants, however, they will have a build up and cool down period between jumps. " Um? So you can't jump whenever you want then?

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

I thought people wanted a credit sink? Seems now they all want an indestructible carrier to blockade systems with.

All I don't want is a second job.

 

[Ozric]

Oh yay a thread moaning about the finer details of something that we don't know the details about. Glad to see the forum is back to normal

I'm surprised that as they announced Fleet Carriers would be an income generator, that people are so surprised that they require some kind of upkeep. Credits are meaningless in Elite and have been for the last few years. If you can amass enough credits to buy and fit a Carrier, then I'm sure you will be able to afford the upkeep.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

I don't need to get a loan, also why on earth would you need a 'market' I intend to be as far away from humans as possible! And another thing... whats this >
" ...with the ability to jump whenever the owner wants, however, they will have a build up and cool down period between jumps. " Um? So you can't jump whenever you want then?

I dunno about the market. Is there some new updates to the economy? Would be funny they dub it "fleet carrier update" when the real update is a better economy.
There will be a CD after jump is my take.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

... Credits are meaningless in Elite and have been for the last few years. If you can amass enough credits to buy and fit a Carrier, then I'm sure you will be able to afford the upkeep.

Credits aren't meaningless. They enable players to access content.

 

[JesusRocks1988]

Oh yay a thread moaning about the finer details of something that we don't know the details about. Glad to see the forum is back to normal

I'm surprised that as they announced Fleet Carriers would be an income generator, that people are so surprised that they require some kind of upkeep. Credits are meaningless in Elite and have been for the last few years. If you can amass enough credits to buy and fit a Carrier, then I'm sure you will be able to afford the upkeep.

I am surprised there's not already a thread calling for the income generation capability of Fleet Carriers to be nerfed.

 

[Nutter]

There will be a CD after jump is my take.

Hahaha - Nailed it! +1

 

[JesusRocks1988]

Credits aren't meaningless. They enable players to access content.

Once you get past a certain point, they do become meaningless. Currently in the game there's no huge credit sinks for the obscenely rich. If you can afford a hundred A-rated Cutters, there's no point in having that amount of money. Fleet Carriers look to be that top-tier credit sink.

 

[Nutter]

Oh yay a thread moaning about the finer details of something that we don't know the details about. Glad to see the forum is back to normal

I'm surprised that as they announced Fleet Carriers would be an income generator, that people are so surprised that they require some kind of upkeep. Credits are meaningless in Elite and have been for the last few years. If you can amass enough credits to buy and fit a Carrier, then I'm sure you will be able to afford the upkeep.

Maybe I missed the Memo? I foolishly thought a fleet carrier would be used to carry a fleet. Not a trading post, as, well that would be a trading post right?

 

[Florenus]

Constant upkeep doesn't sound very encouraging, but... we don't know the details : maybe it needs upkeep only if it is operating as an open base with market running?

FC might not be an option for everybody. I've seen people claim that they can't afford one, so they quit playing right there. It's like saying that if you can't buy the Cutter at the start of the game, you'll not play, because you need to play.

But yeah - if there's possibility that I might loose my invested time and money if I don't grind regularily, then it's a big deterrent to using them.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Once you get past a certain point, they do become meaningless. Currently in the game there's no huge credit sinks for the obscenely rich. If you can afford a hundred A-rated Cutters, there's no point in having that amount of money. Fleet Carriers look to be that top-tier credit sink.

Edge cases make poor gameplay designers.

 

[killerofstars]

We haven't had any details yet...

It really doesn't tell anything.

Look at the station model in the X-series. Stations have an upkeep to maintain there as well, but if you setup your market smart, the thing becomes functional for its environment and it will start paying for its own. Is that really so hard to imagine it might be something like this?

If you add stations to this game 24/7, you might want the things to become an addition to the environment, especially when it is getting wired to things like the BGS for instance. Or if it used to undermine the environment by starting a market with ridiculous prices, you are going to have to work for it, just like it is now. If you gonna dump the thing somewhere and forget about it what's the point of it to be there, from a functional point of view.

From a technical perspective, Frontier needs to keep track of the carriers, where they are, what they do, what the traffic does, how it influences the environment. Allowing stuff to be added and never to be removed is a resource leak de facto.

You might even get your money back. We simply know nothing at this point...

Respectfully disagree, I think it tells a lot actually.

If you TURN OFF the X-series games and don't play them for months on end, you don't accrue debt/income in realtime.

Environment: I mean, we'll see how it handles it, but like I said, even having to LOG IN to receive and then pay credits is an imposition. Do you like it every time you pay rent/morgage?

Technical perspective: Like I stated above, there are better ways to achieve the same effect. Even the market influence: Fine, allow the markets on the carrier to go bankrupt and stop until you fix them if you try to undermine a system and don't put effort into it. That's a very different thing from decommissioning a carrier.

We kind of have this mechanic already with our current ships. If we stay logged into the game, sitting idly in space, eventually your ship runs out of fuel and it explodes. This is why the Fuel Rats tell you to log out of the game until they are in the system and can rescue you.

The difference between our ships and the Fleet Carrier is the Fleet Carrier still exists within the game when you log off (it doesn't de-spawn) therefore continually using fuel even when you're not logged in.

It wouldn't surprise me if other people (e.g. your friends) can help you maintain your Fleet Carrier when you're not playing which allows you to be offline for a while. Remember, this is an online game not an offline one where you can load a save from 3 years ago and I think the mechanic, if others can help, builds the community working together which I think is really cool.

Right. Ships decay while you're logged in, not while you aren't logged in. IE, its a effect while you are playing, not something that penalizes you for NOT playing.

The idea absolutely seems to be that a squadron can contribute towards a carrier. Like I said, there are other better ways to achieve the same effect.

 

[Robert Maynard]

People on this forum for long enough wanted something to spend their billions of credits on and now they do

Wanting something to spend a lump of credits on is not the same as wanting to take on an endless upkeep committment that may result, if not paid in time, in the loss of the asset.