Ability to buy at Material traders

[Snowymonk]

As part of the future / upcoming updates to the Elite Dangerous game, could it be possible for a Commander to spend their earned credits to buy materials from the Material traders.

I am conscious that the use of Material traders was intended to plug the one / two missing materials gaps before subsequently working with the tech brokers or Engineers and that material trading was meant to be a zero-sum activity. It possible to extend this functionality to include the purchasing of 'Material tokens' which could then be subsequently exchanged for the appropriate material.

I was thinking something along the lines of
- the ability to buy a material token for an amount of Credits
- The token would become a level 0 item that would sit at the left hand end of the trading set-up.

It would follow the same logic currently in place with the Material traders meaning that level 1 materials were relatively cheap to purchase but as a factor of the scaling calculation, that the level 5 materials were expensive.


Justification:
I am a part time gamer, most nights but not full time. I play on a PS4 so web access / third party tools is limited to what I can get to on my pad / mobile. I have been playing since PS4 launch and have racked up a lot hours in the game already. I don't however, have the opportunity to live and breath the game like some Commanders on this forum so my experience may differ from others.

Previously (prior to 3.0), on an evening, I would carry out a bit of trading, or a bit of Bounty hunting, or a bit of Mining, etc, allowing me to focus one aspect of the game at the time.
The reason why I am asking for this feature is that the change in engineering is now driving me to juggle up to five times the amount of raw, data and manufactured materials. I now need to learn where to source 28 different types of raw materials, [/b]30[/b] different types of encoded materials and 50 different types of manufactured materials.

Before, with the old engineering structure, I would typically pick up sufficient materials to unlock the relevant engineering level and have enough materials to buy a modification through day to day play.
Now, I find that I am having to check every USS I pass on a haulage mission in case it is one of the various materials I now need.
Bounty Hunting or Combat zone pew-pew is similarly disrupted as I need to collect the various materials dropped by destroyed ships for fear of missing out on that key level 4/5 material that has just popped.(It has got to the stage that whilst playing in a wing of three / four at a Res site, one of the wing will stop actively shooting ships and just spend time collecting the goods dropped).

By allowing an 'in' to the Material traders through the expenditure of Credits, I would now be presented with the option to stop for the USS or the dropped good OR continue with what I was previously planning to do, and then catch-up at a later stage. The strap line of the game is that you should be able to play the game your own way, but I feel that I am being artificially required to do certain things when different options could achieve the same outcome.

thanks for listening.

 

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

Making mats purchasable with credits removes the need for mats at all - you might as well just pay credits directly to the Engineers.

The whole purpose of the Engineers functionality is to introduce a second 'currency' to be used for enhancements.

 

[Sayblekitten]

Making mats purchasable with credits removes the need for mats at all - you might as well just pay credits directly to the Engineers.

The whole purpose of the Engineers functionality is to introduce a second 'currency' to be used for enhancements.

/snark They've already got a currency. It's called credits.

/serious While that's a valid argument, the real currency that is being dealt in here is TIME. Or rather, the inability to transfer the currency of Time into 'stuff i can use in the game'. Forcing a behavior (mining/salvaging) that is excessively time consuming so you can grind up the materials ultimately costs TIME. The OP is complaining that the game is now demanding excessive time costs. If he Devs don't want him as a player, they can continue to charge him time costs he does not wish to pay. That doesn't mean he's wrong for wanting to just cut the and buy the materials with credits.

In universe, it makes very little sense that that common materials like iron and carbon aren't for sale. With material traders they SORT OF are, but it would make more sense if they were just FOR SALE.

In game logic, there should always be two branches to acquire items of any sort. Quick and dangerous, or slow and sure. Currently there are NEITHER. I can't guarantee a drop of a material, and I can't go on a risky run to get a material. I can only drop on a planet, and mine until what i need drops, or until my holds are full of stuff (that takes up no space, mah immersion!) that i can then trade to get what I really want. That's bad game design. The OP makes a good point.

 

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

/snark They've already got a currency. It's called credits.

That's why I said 'second currency'

/serious While that's a valid argument, the real currency that is being dealt in here is TIME. Or rather, the inability to transfer the currency of Time into 'stuff i can use in the game'. Forcing a behavior (mining/salvaging) that is excessively time consuming so you can grind up the materials ultimately costs TIME. The OP is complaining that the game is now demanding excessive time costs. If he Devs don't want him as a player, they can continue to charge him time costs he does not wish to pay. That doesn't mean he's wrong for wanting to just cut the and buy the materials with credits.

In universe, it makes very little sense that that common materials like iron and carbon aren't for sale. With material traders they SORT OF are, but it would make more sense if they were just FOR SALE.

In game logic, there should always be two branches to acquire items of any sort. Quick and dangerous, or slow and sure. Currently there are NEITHER. I can't guarantee a drop of a material, and I can't go on a risky run to get a material. I can only drop on a planet, and mine until what i need drops, or until my holds are full of stuff (that takes up no space, mah immersion!) that i can then trade to get what I really want. That's bad game design. The OP makes a good point.

Firstly, the game doesn't 'demand' anything.
If you want stuff, you follow the appropriate game loops.

Secondly, you can argue that the game loops are grindy and/or badly designed and that would be a reasonable opinion.
But the solution, surely, is to improve the game loops, not simply remove them completely.

Thirdly, if you make materials available for credits then materials have no purpose at all. You're just converting between currencies which you may as well do directly at the Engineer.

Finally, a second currency means that engineering is equally accessible to new and old players, purely based on how long they spend gathering mats, rather than how long they've been playing the game.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

The big difficulty would be to know where to set the prices.

The figures I've seen suggest that in good conditions you can get about 1 G5 material a minute, averaged out over the hour, when HGE hunting.

So... how much should a G5 manufactured material cost to buy?
- 2 million credits: this would make credits the cheaper approach if you were using extremely high-end money-making methods at >100MCr/hour (I'm not sure if there are any of these in-game right now, but I know of plenty in the 50-100 range so people who actually look for them probably do have them)

- 200,000 credits: this would make credits the cheaper approach if you were making >10MCr/hour. That's a very high rate of earnings for almost any in-game activity, though achievable with a big ship at mission hotspots.

- 20,000 credits: this would make credits the cheaper approach if you were making >1MCr/hour. That's a pretty normal rate of earnings for most professions, even in smaller ships.

You'd end up with a situation where either
- you basically have to go all-out on earner-of-the-month to make it worth buying materials for credits at all (and most people don't know it exists, so the materials-for-credits option is basically useless to 99% of players)
*or*
- if you do go all-out on earner-of-the-month you can engineer your ship *considerably* faster than if you looked for the materials (but everyone else gets little benefit)
*or*
- literally no-one outside a Sidewinder ever bothers collecting materials in the first place and we might as well just pay the engineers in (not many) credits.

The problem is that engineering a 1A module and an 8A module take exactly the same amount of materials, but the amount of money a 1A module-buyer and an 8A module-buyer might be expected to have differ by a factor of about 1,000. So how do you balance material prices in credits for that?



With regards to "but I can buy Iron", I tend to assume that the engineers have no need at all for Iron in their work, or where they do they buy it in bulk from a reputable manufacturer rather than using whatever dodgy rocks some scruffy pilot brings in. What they want with the Iron is exclusive access to the precise information on sample isotope levels on the planet+location you harvested it from, which they can hardly get from buying 1 tonne of Iron bars from somewhere. You're paying them for their time with interesting things for them to study - be that iron-rich mineral deposits from distant planets, battle-damaged chemical distilleries, or exclusive rights to some scan data.

(It's *synthesis* I have a problem with not being able to buy Iron for it - decent quality refined Iron should be rather better than some chunks of rock of unknown purity)