This is all fine and all but what most of you suggest if forcing combat on people who do not enjoy that... I agree that interdiction are simple time tax - I hate it, but making anything harder for non-combat players is not the right thing to do... I am not planning to fit any guns on my trader Python even if I am capable to shoot targets in HazRES in my Chieftain...
Didn't FD balanced payouts? Just logged in after some years and it still looks the same old broken mission payouts
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Where does this participation trophy mentality comes from? Nobody is forcing anything on anyone. If you don't want combat either evade it or don't take the mission to begin with.
That's kind of counterproductive, don't you think?? The whole idea of ED is to do missions... How do you want to get paid as a trader not taking missions/not hauling cargo?? Suggestions included in this thread contain mostly extending travel time (more chances to get interdicted), hardening NPC attacks, hardening type of attackers and traps at the final destination... It is not about mentality, it is about changing the game in the way that will put large part of playerbase in disadvantage... Not every one enjoy combat...
I agree that it's important to not force combat on players but I personally think that choice should be entirely complicit within the game.
That is, you should have the choice to take whatever type of mission you like. Consider this...
There are four missions available, all 180t, all the same distance.
1) standard, low risk haulage. Biowaste (not sought after). 7m.
2) standard, moderate risk haulage. Consumer goods (somewhat sought after). 9m.
3) standard, high risk. Gold (highly sought after). 13m.
4) special event (you will get attacked, delivery is to a poi where you'll need to defend yourself and the target ship), ultra high risk (platinum). 17m.
Just example figures. But if you want to avoid combat entirely then your option is clear. As these aren't wing missions, I'd suggest the difficulty of gold standard should be SLF and decent shields difficulty. But I'd suggest running Platinum would require actual effort for defense.
And I think it's pretty trivial to find systems that require higher or lower value commodities so the player really does have full control.
At it stands now? It's random. It's relatively pointless. You literally have no choice (except don't do it).
For wing missions... The idea that people are attempting to argue these should be done solo without protection just annoys me so I won't go there right now.
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... you know what will actually happen: they'll take the ultra-high risk one (because they only look at the payout) in an unshielded T9 and then whine on the forums about how they weren't told and it's so unfair. Same as ever
That could work....
You are correct so at this moment in time making goods delivery harder makes no sense to me...
Agreed that would happen but my reluctance to employ the Nirvana fallacy tells me that's not more important than the change being implemented anyway... you know what will actually happen: they'll take the ultra-high risk one (because they only look at the payout) in an unshielded T9 and then whine on the forums about how they weren't told and it's so unfair. Same as ever
The idea that it's essentially random right now, irrespective of the commodity or the reward, actually lends credence to the complaint that trading risk is a bit nonsense right now.
Well, maybe I overreacted a bit but this theme starts to get old. At the end of day this is a game set in a harsh galaxy. And you already have plenty of choices to not engage in combat. If one decides to haul very valuable cargo however I strongly believe there should be a risk involved with the task. As it is the game gives a lot of tools to the player to be able to choose whether he wants to die or not.
I'd say 7m for hauling 180t bio waste would be better than now
You'd just need to find a commercial economy to haul moderately sought after stuff, pack some shields and you're off.
One station paid me 50m for 62 tons of Tritium the other day, I consider that a good deal when I can buy 800t for around 40m, just grabbed some out of cargo and delivered it!
Honestly? I don't think it would be such a terrible idea making it just 180t of generic "cargo". You could flavour it in order to maintain the state effects, but ultimately make it worthless as far as market-saleable goods goes. Older Elite games didn't even have cargo delivery missions, only the BB boards with "urgent need for X" which paid you double for the goods.
Realistically, all delivery missions do is supplant actual A->B trading.... to spin off FD's comments a bit, they don't want to fix smuggling right now because they don't want it to simply be a trading that gets you more money; that's all delivery missions are. Instead of taking 180t of gold from an Extraction economy to an Industrial economy for <some exchange value X>, you take 180t of gold from the same extraction economy to the same industrial economy, for <some higher exchange value Y>.
Source missions make way more sense in that context; someone pays you extra for prioritising their custom over general commodity wheelers and dealers.
If you wanted, deliveries could be "sealed mineral samples" or something, and if you wanted, you could abandon the mission and bust open the seals, obtaining a random assortment of minerals (in that case) and hope to luck out that it was higher than any associated fine (though instead of fines, I'd use an escrow system instead).
But yeah, tl;dr I actually don't think genericising cargo would be such a terrible idea. There's actually quite a few online games which do exactly that for this sort of activity. The focus of it should be on the actual hauling, nothing else. Playing with cargo values are for source missions and A->B trading.
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That's essentially how it's done these days, you pay X dollars to ship a container, no-one cares what's in it, it could be gold, could be a classic car, they all get stacked up on the ship and taken off the other end. The bigger the ship, the bigger the payout, just shipping containers from one place to another should be standard price per container.
Yes. Not everyone is a tryhard. Imo, the only time I liked the NPCs was smuggling runs in the olden days. Most ppl did Robigo - I had found a remote and barely visited port that gave good rewards. The stock and standard missions in the bubble - NPCs were mostly a nuisance.
I sort-of agree, but I think if "cutthroat galaxy" is going to mean anything it should mean "dangerous pirates coming after valuable cargo" rather than "other players randomly exploding you". So I think missions hauling precious metals should be the most dangerous thing to do in the game. Of course, I have no idea how to achieve this.
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I fully agree. How to do it is the question and I think at the very least an overhaul of "how stuff works" is required.
The current meta around npc pirates, how they spawn, what they do... I'd say that needs a lot of flesh added to the bones we have now. I'd pitch the "risk" for low value, low volume commodities like waste at the current design restricted to lower ranked, smaller ships. And set the chance of spawn right down to close to zero and absolutely make them demand a portion of the mission quota. But for precious metals in high volume I really think the pirate should spawn every time, they shouldn't be fooled by the "bum to the sun" trick, they should be really good at the interdiction game, they should absolutely demand a portion (in tons) of the mission quota (and comply if you drop it, like they do now in other scenarios), they should have fsd dampening missiles and they should be really high rank.
Also, a very basic method change could be introducing a more "high risk" version of the mission template where the delivery is to a location other than another station/outpost. Where there will be a requirement to fight off pirates at the destination. With a much greater payout. I'd suggest Odyssey missions could easily follow this (as well as smuggling missions where you pick up or drop off away from stations entirely, where one is "pick up and smuggle in" and another is "pick up and smuggle out" where authorities and pirates can properly engage you - same deal, higher value = higher pay).
Just ideas. Unlikely it'll ever get implemented though. So just numbers tweaking might have to do.
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'Good thing I found you.'
I'd say when ppl grow tired of something, they probably heard it a couple of time too often.
I'd say when ppl grow tired of something, they probably heard it a couple of time too often.
Fdev stated they want high reward for high risk, so if you want to make good money from cargo haul, you may have to put some guns on it. I built a good cargo cutter with SLF and guns, I lost some tonnage but now inderdiction is some nice distraction. I may even win some time destroying them rather than getting interdicted three or four more time by the same npc
If I enter a system carrying cargo the value of that cargo (Price and qty) and the government of the system should both factor into the chance of interdiction and the type and number of NPC deployed against the player.
Mission rewards should be based on the from and to system governments and the value of the cargo (price and qty need to factor).
Mission system needs to offer more variety of missions in type of good, qty, price and to locations.
Thus trade in properly governed systems is low risk, but trading anarchy to anarchy system is high risk. Carrying more items and/or higher value items gives more risk
This would have the by product of making switching to 180t hauling carry more risk than a 36t small ship. At the moment its a race through the small ships to get to the larger ones if you want to be a trader, there should be downsides that make you think about it.
Mission rewards should be based on the from and to system governments and the value of the cargo (price and qty need to factor).
Mission system needs to offer more variety of missions in type of good, qty, price and to locations.
Thus trade in properly governed systems is low risk, but trading anarchy to anarchy system is high risk. Carrying more items and/or higher value items gives more risk
This would have the by product of making switching to 180t hauling carry more risk than a 36t small ship. At the moment its a race through the small ships to get to the larger ones if you want to be a trader, there should be downsides that make you think about it.
Yeah, again, not everyone enjoys combat. Why would anyone be forced to carry sh** in the cargo hold for the rest of their game existence if they just want to have fun flying??
Personally I wish there was a bit more verisimilitude / simulationism also in mission parameters. Although ofc I also have benefited from it at times, I find it laughable that for instance hauling 60.000cr worth of biowaste can pay out millions of credits.
Likewise for combat -- I can see that the bounty system is so generous to encourage people to fly in Wings, but I wish it were a bit more plausible than paying out a full bounty for everyone who so much as grazed a target. By stacking massacre missions and with the increased bounty payouts, a single NPC pirate can be "worth" a total of over 3 million credits. And that times 81 for a large mission...
Likewise for combat -- I can see that the bounty system is so generous to encourage people to fly in Wings, but I wish it were a bit more plausible than paying out a full bounty for everyone who so much as grazed a target. By stacking massacre missions and with the increased bounty payouts, a single NPC pirate can be "worth" a total of over 3 million credits. And that times 81 for a large mission...