Community Goal Wk2 - Phase 4, Wk.2 - Poorly thought out

[Ian Doncaster]

But I do think there should be a way to more aggressively boost the supply or demand of something in a station. So the community could deal with situations like this, instead of it boiling down to ferrying FCs from the bubble for dozens of hours.

For the typical commodity, optimising BGS states will boost the production rate by 3.5x compared with the neutral position, and in some cases more is possible. That's quite an aggressive increase - it turns a market capable of supporting medium pad ships into one capable of supporting the same number of large pad ships, for example - though a fair amount of luck is involved

In phase 3 the commodities and target were such that doing that was both practical and necessary to complete the goal (in phases 1, 2 and 4A, the target was low enough not to need it)

Of course, this time, even a 3.5x boost isn't all that significant. One of our best production stations for the commodities started this goal with that boost active, but because the baseline production of these commodity types is relatively low, it doesn't help.
- survival equipment, the best one this time round, has a maximum specialisation of about 6t/economic unit, and our biggest production station has about 1200 EUs.
- ceramic composites, the old favourite, has a minimum specialisation of about 10t/economic unit, and a maximum of 145t/EU - so even a standard CEI surface base with only ~225 EUs can produce quite a lot of it if it has high specialisation and we could focus optimisation on the ones near the maximum.
- coffee, which was big last time, is normally only 3t/economic unit, but the occasional super-producer instead gets 100t/EU - so focusing BGS optimisations on those again can really help

The community can deal with these situations, it just requires two things:
1) A bit of luck with BGS states (you can't do much about Expansion or the Event states, for example)
2) The baseline production to be in at least the right general area.

It's entirely possible to do - phase 3 was great, phase 4a if the target had been the same as this time we'd probably have done it - but it requires fairly careful selection of the commodities involved to make it work (and arguably a two-week CG would be better for it, too).

 

[Gibbon]

It's not much different in Alcor. Alioth had a few million performance enhancers when the CG started, those vanished within 24 hrs. Survival equipment gives a 3-3.5 million profit, so is a bit meh to haul in a T9 or Cutter as it's hardly worth the effort. Personal weapons you can still find, but even they are scarce now, meaning you have to travel 40 odd LY's just find some. Frontier saying you can make loads of money on this CG is nonsense, heavily riding on the porkie pie ticket

 

[Ashnak]

It's not much different in Alcor. Alioth had a few million performance enhancers when the CG started, those vanished within 24 hrs. Survival equipment gives a 3-3.5 million profit, so is a bit meh to haul in a T9 or Cutter as it's hardly worth the effort. Personal weapons you can still find, but even they are scarce now, meaning you have to travel 40 odd LY's just find some. Frontier saying you can make loads of money on this CG is nonsense, heavily riding on the porkie pie ticket

You may not be able to simply make a lot of money with a one-jump-trip any more. On the other hand, a loaded Cutter has a no-refuel range of ~170 ly, and there still are lots of large pad stations in that radius stocking at least one cutter load of Performance Enhancers.

 

[Astaran]

It's not much different in Alcor. Alioth had a few million performance enhancers when the CG started, those vanished within 24 hrs. Survival equipment gives a 3-3.5 million profit, so is a bit meh to haul in a T9 or Cutter as it's hardly worth the effort. Personal weapons you can still find, but even they are scarce now, meaning you have to travel 40 odd LY's just find some. Frontier saying you can make loads of money on this CG is nonsense, heavily riding on the porkie pie ticket

Huh? What's the problem with 40ly? That's just two jumps in a fully loaded Cutter. In the past I've done 4+ jumps one way (more on the return, obviously) for trade CGs in my Python without batting an eye

You could indeed make a lot of money doing simple trade runs. Probably not as much as the Combat CG in Summerland (bonds + final payout), but still, almost 30mil in profit for a single run in a big hauler (Cutter or T-9). That's not bad at all. Not to mention the free Warm Cockpit Lights from the Arx shop every participant got for free.

Imo, FDev was very generous this week when it comes to rewards. Cockpit Lights, Decals, Permits, Discounts and plenty of Credits.

 

[Martind Forlon]

Well done, Frontier ... I've decided to check what is going on after two weeks break (was in mood to give few slow T9 cargo hauls for CG), logged in my char in colonia, spend half hour using external sites to searching for info how it looks with commodities stocks for ongoing CG (I wondered earlier why there is not even tier1 reached) and then I closed the game when found empty stocks across whole region.

 

[Northpin]

Well, is it possible:

• it was set like this on purpose, but if this is the case it was a rather poor choice given the fact that there was also the 3rd CG in the bubble that got almost 6k players involved
• following the last week's flak regarding the "generous" rewards for some really lacking CG, they upped the payout by picking up some more profitable commodities, but without checking the stocks in Colonia

However, even if it completely fails (not reaching Tier1) it will not have so much of a global impact. It's a single station we're talking about
But at the same time, almost 300 hundred people invested their time in it and a complete failure will still leave a bad taste

 

[Kennzo]

Back to my title of the thread -'Poorly thought out' by FDev,
especially when there is so much interest in the CG's.

What a pity.

 

[MickyG1982]

Back to my title of the thread -'Poorly thought out' by FDev,
especially when there is so much interest in the CG's.

What a pity.

So much lack of imagination too (from the player base), when players have these big carriers that can be filled full of CG cargo and jump over to the CG zone...

But hey, I suppose FD really does have to hold our hands through this difficult time...

 

[Kennzo]

So much lack of imagination too (from the player base), when players have these big carriers that can be filled full of CG cargo and jump over to the CG zone...

But hey, I suppose FD really does have to hold our hands through this difficult time....\

(......'jump over to the CG zone' )
Read the thread, Cmdr, we have to bring the FC's 22,000LY from the bubble to feed the CG in play at Colonia.
There's NO commodities in Colonia region for the CG in play.

 

[Gibbon]

You may not be able to simply make a lot of money with a one-jump-trip any more. On the other hand, a loaded Cutter has a no-refuel range of ~170 ly, and there still are lots of large pad stations in that radius stocking at least one cutter load of Performance Enhancers.

There are only two stations in a 70 LY radius that have more than 1000t of performance enhancers, according to EDDB. That's only a few runs in a T9 based on 752T cargo space, this equates to around 35mil profit. What is strange is why FD loaded up a station only 6LY away at the beginning of the CG with over 2 million tonnes, only for this to be emptied within 24 hrs and not supply another station with the same amount or top up the original station with the same amount. Hardly fair on anyone else doing the CG who is a late arrival. Only one benefitting were the early birds. If you have a small ship, this CG is pointless as everything is too far away

 

[Ian Doncaster]

What is strange is why FD loaded up a station only 6LY away at the beginning of the CG with over 2 million tonnes, only for this to be emptied within 24 hrs and not supply another station with the same amount or top up the original station with the same amount.

That's just how the market works. Frontier didn't do it deliberately (as pointed out in other threads this week, the bubble is large enough that they don't need to think about the implications of picking particular CG cargoes - any will basically work - so it's just one which happened to be there)

Alioth has a population of 15 billion, so its stations have ridiculously high supply levels for some commodities - millions of tonnes of plenty of other goods in that system, too. They didn't deliberately load it up with cargo to start with - that's just how much it had that Thursday morning. There aren't any comparable others because Alioth is the largest high-tech system in the entire game by a substantial margin.

Equally, with a CG taking around 7 million tonnes a day, a stockpile that large isn't going to last the whole CG. That's how it goes - the CG cargo is always emptied from nearby stations first.

That said, 2 million tonnes initial stockpile is going to have a very high regeneration rate - it looks from the EDDN data like it's around 500t/ten minutes, which means that it can't really run out - you might be slightly slower than the maximum capacity of a T-9/Cutter but not very much, and you can always pick up a bit more from the neighbouring second-biggest station and still be doing a 6LY jump to fill up your cargo ship.

 

[Winterwalker]

I'm going to give Frontier benefit of doubt here. For a long time CG's have been a case of look it up on EDDB, trade, rinse and repeat, biggest ship / carrier group wins. That's become quite predictable, is not the most imaginative game loop in all creation and I think we as players might have lost some ambition in how CG's can be completed if you factor out the Bubble-Colonia carrier rescue (which - if I'm less generous - could be affecting how Frontier have made their tier calculations. Can't blame them though, that's how we play!).

This week I got into the Colonia CG early and posts by @Ian Doncaster on supply jogged me into trying a different way to do it. I've been running missions for Performance Enhancer rewards and have been able to deliver about 600t per day since the main supply ran out. Looking at it this way there are 297 contributors to the CG in Colonia and if tier 1 is 500,000 tons (it looks to me like it might be) that's 1,683 tons per contributor to complete, less than three of my 'days'.

I'm not sure this CG will reach it's tier this time, partly because I think people took one look at how they 'usually' operate in a CG, saw low supply and gave up but meanwhile you would not believe how much fun I've had.

I've done just about every sort of mission there is, not fussy if the reward is performance enhancers, not always in the ideal ship because there's a complication to your kill mission when the reward is 50 tons commodity you need to accomodate in your ship somehow. Things I've not tried before, never the same thing twice, it's been a test of logistics and speed and has really reminded me of some things I don't usually do and some skills I should hone, I've seen the game at it's best I reckon.

I'd like to think this was by design and if it was then Frontier have found a way to show off their game in a much better way than any point to point Cutter always wins trade CG will ever do. This has been a CG for Kraits, Pythons and thinking on your feet imo and whether it completes or it doesn't it's been one of my favourites.