Of course you can - matters what aspect interests you about the mode of transportation. And if you compare common aspects of games then that is absolutely viable too.
Does Elite Need a Market Reform?
- Thread starter Gleitfrosch
- Start date
You could like more to travel by plane or by train. Thats perfectly understandable. Pretty much like you could like more X4 or you could like more ED.
But that has nothing to do with comparing apples with oranges, planes with trains or ED with X4
Edit:
i mean seriously... a plane flies better than a train, right? and that makes a perfectly valid comparation in your view
Look if you want to know what gets you from A to B in what time you compare different modes of transportation. It doesn't matter if one runs on an electrified line while the other burns kerosene for that matter. Same with games. Both have progression you compare them. You have a SP flight sim and a MP one. Both have a flight model. You compare them - all good. MP flight sim doesn't get elated by somehow being prime incarnation of entertainment software.
Last edited:
Deleted member 182079
D
Without wanting to cause offense to anyone who holds it dear, I reckon a lot of players probably don't give a rat's arx about the BGS, or even realise it exists (I didn't know about it until maybe a year or two in, and after frequenting the forums). To most more casual players it's just a bunch of states and sliders that change for some obscure reason that affects their credit earnings rate.
When I look at the economic model X4 employs, I find that a hell lot more impressive from a complexity, and certainly more immersive from a player perspective, than the BGS. Online has no sway in this at all, Elite to me certainly feels mostly like a single player game (both in terms of how it was designed, and how many actual player I come across) even though I mostly play in Open.
Absolutely I would if I need to go from A to B.
Last edited by a moderator:
I wouldn't characterize that as a failure. Why would we want ships locked into a specific use case? That's an artificial limit that gains what?
As for small ships being obsolete, that is also not true. Small ships can land anywhere. Thats a huge advantage for ground interactions, especially Odyssey ground interactions.
They are kings of speed, have a niche in combat and personal transport.
For me having multiple ships that can do the same job means I get to choose on style. That is a favor in real world cars, why would it be bad in virtual ships?
Last edited:
Why not?
Okay, let's compare Elite with Eve then.
I see no reason Elite couldn't have a more advanced economic BGS that took things like supply chains into account, had the developers wanted to put the same effort into the economy simulation as they put into the stellar forge. Sure, I'll grant you that Frontier decided not to do this, and I'll even grant you that many players probably don't care (though I suspect many players also don't care or even notice the realistic orbit mechanics of planets in a solar system), but to say that Elite cannot have a more realistic economy for some sort of technical reason is just silly.
FWIW if I were a member of the X4 forums, I'd be just as vocal there about X4 lacking Elite's planetary solar orbits as I am here about Elite lacking X4's supply chain economics.
I can't tell about Eve, if they have proper production routines in place or not? I know X4 does (always had in the X games).Okay, let's compare Elite with Eve then.
I see no reason Elite couldn't have a more advanced economic BGS that took things like supply chains into account, had the developers wanted to put the same effort into the economy simulation as they put into the stellar forge. Sure, I'll grant you that Frontier decided not to do this, and I'll even grant you that many players probably don't care (though I suspect many players also don't care or even notice the realistic orbit mechanics of planets in a solar system), but to say that Elite cannot have a more realistic economy for some sort of technical reason is just silly.
FWIW if I were a member of the X4 forums, I'd be just as vocal there about X4 lacking Elite's planetary solar orbits as I am here about Elite lacking X4's supply chain economics.
I think the game could do much better with proper production chains, resulting in droughts and surplus, with prices skyrocketing for resources in high demand and prices plummeting for an oversupply.
It would also allow for proper blockades, system starvation etc to occur or at least give it a crack.
Deleted member 110222
D
Bruh, forget it.
Just bloody forget it.
Look at the dates. Right, so I didn't get you your precious official source?
So what?
It's a thing that never arrived in the game anyway. Even if I get you a private phonecall with the devs, it's not going to change anything.
Source culture has ruined people I swear.
EDIT: Blocked. If there is one thing I hate it's nitpickers. Just ignore the dates LMAO
Deleted member 182079
D
Able to dish out but not take it. Bye.
And who would deal with the supply chains?
For example, let's take Demand in ED. IMO it's a nice idea. For a single player game.
Personally i'm pretty miffed by the Demand set for certain commodities (read precious minerals and in some cases metals).
Most of the time it was so small that a single player can fill it up for a single station in less than one hour after the BGS tick .
And the Demand being small was one thing, then it was also set on a really slow recover rate.
If ED was a single player game, this would not be an issue.
It's not a issue for an obscure commodity that nobody trades.
But it was a big issue when thousand of players were mining LTD, but only a few of them managed to sell for good profits to the stations (that had the required combination of BGS states to be able to offer a big price) before the Demand was fulfilled and the price dropped dramatically
In a single player game a lot of things can be set in certain ways and they will always work.
In a multiplayer game, it really depends on the number of players hitting a certain market/commodity while the way BGS works it means it favors the players that can connect to the game when the tick is happening
Too little players, and certain trading settings have no effect. Too many and trading starts looking like a 1h window of opportunity
This is the key bit.
Either the system is (like the X games) mostly self-stabilising on NPC activity - in which case it won't look very different to now in practice: mostly pretty monotonous, bulk player activity can cause localised disruption (either to a geographic area or to a particular valued trade good) but to any individual participant it's really not clear why that's happening or what they can do to resolve it.
Or the system relies entirely on player activity to run the supply chains at all, and most systems just die even if the incentives and information displays are set up right to attract players into doing the most critical parts of the supply chain at any time, because there are just far too few players compared with the number of systems and stations. (And this would be especially unfortunate if the supply chains "did something" beyond affecting trade prices, like determine ship supply)
I like logistics and supply chain simulation games, too - but prefer it at a rather higher level than having to move all the cargo about myself, which doesn't really fit with Elite Dangerous.
I’m probably off-topic but I’ll start taking the Elite economy seriously when the average price of mineable metals isn’t over 10 times that of highly complex manufactured goods by weight. The fact that even the smallest ships can refine their own ore doesn’t help either.
Deleted member 182079
D
Or the fact that you can still sell your goods despite 0 demand. Makes 0 sense (but handy for offloading cargo in a gamey way I guess).
Edit: posted twice
That is merely a problem of scaling. It'd be silly to assume that the players are able to sustain planetary populations with puny corvettes when trading goods.
It's more like a problem of conflicting goals.
It is supposed to run by itself without any player intervention, while being also able to be manipulated by players, but without disrupting the gaming for other players that might be able to play 1-2 hours per day or per week, while not allowing the players that can sink in the game 8h per day to ruin the game for everyone else and still giving those players enough to do so they can sink 8h in game daily
The problem with only simulating the higher level strategic stuff is that this is a game primarily played at the individual/tactical scale and if you look at all closely, the illusion is not remotely convincing.
I think the middle ground that would fit the Elite setting best are simulated supply chains that are mostly NPC driven, and abstracted as necessary, but which can be detailed and granular enough, on demand (e.g. everything is abstracted as tables, scripts, and probabilities, until a player enters the area and forms an instance, which is then tracked in detail before being fed back into the persistent abstraction) to react plausibly to player activity and thus still give players agency at that individual scale. However, this agency wouldn't be realized by hauling bulk goods in heavily populated systems where any individual's contribution will be a drop in an ocean.
In a game with ten thousand players and many millions of space-faring NPCs, player characters/CMDRs aren't supposed to be the average joes and peasants of the setting (though nothing should stop them from pursuing such low aspirations, if that's the extent of one's ambition). A terrorist or commerce raider could plausibly cause enormous disruptions, even in large systems, with just a single ship. Likewise, not all cargo is hauled in bulk and the extremely rare/valuable/time sensitive stuff would naturally demand the attention of exceptional couriers, especially if it needed to be moved through dangerous territory. Exploration is even easier (to justify), as the uncertainty that should be implicit with it is not going to attract many 9-to5ers looking for safe, steady, meals...at least not outside of major organized expeditions.
I think the galaxy should accurately model the economy. 6 Trillion people in the bubble. At the most optimistic, ridiculous and unattainable 1M players in the game simultaneously - players should have an net effect of absolutely nothing in the game.
Yes, well, so what? A problem of scaling it right. Just like the BGS, missions, rewards, encounters, whathaveyou. No one is asking to track the individual shippings across the galaxy like X4 does - we don't want to introduce exponential complexity, just a better market economy. The BGS works, so an economic sim is just as feasible with the right level of abstraction and smoke and mirrors.
I am not talking about hard limits, but to give ships an actual purpose. Your argument for small ships is especially funny because it essentially says "small ships are better if you plan to not use ships". In the early days pricing of the ships was an actual factor to consider, an interesting choice. This is mostly gone now as profits of all activities have gone through the roof. So much, it damages the integrity of the game world and the game design, making most module classes irrelevant and making (trade) missions paying more than a (small) ship costs illogical.