First, this is my first post as a newcomer to the forum, so hi! =D Been playing the game for a bit over a week now, and quite enjoying it, upcoming story aside.
Second, as I said, I am enjoying the game, and this tale is meant more as a self-deprecating 'Be Careful What You Wish For' tale than criticism of the game or demands that elements discussed be changed. This is story time! Yaaaaaay!
Third, this IS literally just story time. No question, no required aid, so if you're not up for reading a long winded tale of a relative newbie's experience in the game, then no harm, no foul, I have no urgent need for assistance, but if anyone else has stories to share, I'd love to hear em. ^_^
Now, as mentioned, I've been playing for about a week, and a majority of that was spent as a bounty hunter, chasing down pirates, chewing them up with my Viper's laser death cannons, and generally having a grand ol' time with it. As someone going in fairly blind, I had a couple of irritating stumbling blocks, (like the time I aaaccidentially rammed an Imperial Clipper at full speed, expecting it to flinch and turn first, which resulted in about four hundred thousand credits of losses, both from insurance and lost bounties, and what made it worse was it was during a one-on-one fight I was WINNING,) but otherwise greatly enjoyed myself, and learned from any mistakes I made. (Such as the lesson that, if there is a criminal at the space port, and said criminal has a bounty, and said criminal is being shot at IN the space port, you do NOT have permission to join in helpfully. Only permission to get blown up if you try. o_o The More You Know.)
Now, despite having cumulatively lost, probably, over half a million credits from my own acts of stupidity, I eventually clawed together a couple million credits, and decided to engage in the exciting, fast-paced life of space trading! Not necessarily because I for a second believed it was exciting and fast paced, but rather because with a Type 6 transport's hundred-plus unit storage space, it had the potential to be absurdly profitable, and for some reason I was having more and more trouble finding worthwhile bounties, even in Resource fields. (Heck, even the ships Interdicting ME were Eagles or Sidewinders with the equivalent bounty of spare change.) Sure, it meant I had to trade in my Viper, but damn it, I wanted to be Space Warren Buffett!
And so, with my snazzy and heavily armed sports car traded in, replaced with the Sensible Minivan of the Cosmos, I began with perhaps the most bog-simple trade I could think of; gold! Sure, it was a hefty financial risk, carrying around nearly a million credits worth of merchandise with only about ten percent profit, and required no less than three seperate jumps to reach the necessary station, but I was just starting out here! Even as I dutifully shuttled back and forth, however, tensing like a cat at the vet every time another ship so much as twitched towards moving behind me in supercruise, (the maiden voyage, with juuuust enough credits to pay ship insurance left over after I had bought the gold, was easily the longest seven minutes of my life,) I had a dream. A dream of a score more lucrative, safer, and faster, something to push me towards my goal of flying around in a shiny new Python, ideally around the time the expansion that lets us wander starry-eyed around our ship's interior released.
So on occasion I would take a break from the trading route, hop into a cheap little Sidewinder with a beefed up jump drive, and proceed to roam around, jotting down any notable commodity prices. Mostly found pegs with no hole, such as a station selling the generally illegal Personal Weapons about nine hundred credits below the Galactic Average, but with no idea where to find a station that would BUY them. In general I'd only have the patience to do it for a few stations, as time is money, and that gold isn't going to ship itself!
But finally, with a great deal of patience, I found it. Over 2100 credit profit per unit on the round trip, the two systems close enough to jump directly to without pit stops, the stations on both ends so close to their suns I would go from system entry to station arrival in forty seconds or less, and less financial risk than gold running had incurred, with only 600k risk going one direction, and about 200k going the other. A route that made me a metric ton, (compared to anything I had made before, at least,) very little chance of a pirate intercepting me before I could reach safe haven, (only having been Interdicted once in over thirty round trips, one I successfully evaded,) and with a minimal fuel cost easily offset by dem tasty profits. It was perfect! The first time. And the second. And the fourth. But by the seventh...
Now, you might just think the problem is monotony, the inevitable lack of shooting and explosions while doing, essentially, a perpetual milk run, but I was no stranger to a quiet, peaceful profession, and didn't mind it at all. When I first started playing, I went with the simplest, safest route a fledgling player unfamiliar with even mouse and keyboard play could go; exploration! Sure, it was monotonous as heck, but it was the kind of monotony that required relatively little input. Point ship at target, (with the ship moving just fast enough to get in scanning range decently fast, but not so fast as to overshoot even the tiny moons before the scan is finished,) browse Internet on phone until little 'Scan Complete' chime sounds, point at another target, rinse and repeat. It was dull, but in a leisurely, hands off way.
This route, though... the title says babysitting because, essentially, that's what it requires, with the route so efficient one would be lucky to go more than seven bloody seconds without the ship needing input. Arrive in Station A, access market, sell Wares A, purchase Wares B, trigger launch sequence, set new nav target while the ship gets rotated for launch, exit base, retract landing gear, hit boost, wait til out of mass lock, trigger jump drive, steer away from sun, access nav computer, select Station B, adjust throttle to reach station as quickly as possible, drop out of supercruise, request docking, fly in, arrive in Station B, access market, sell Wares B, purchase Wares A, trigger launch sequence, set new nav target while ship gets rotated for launch, exit base, retract landing gear, hit boost, wait til out of mass lock, trigger jump drive, steer away from sun, access nav computer, select Station A, adjust throttle to reach station as quickly as possible, drop out of supercruise, request docking, fly in, arrive in Station A, REPEAT THIRTY OR SO TIMES.
The funny thing is that it reached the point where the repetition- or, more specifically, the lack of breathing room between tasks that didn't feel, deep down, like slacking off- started to result in mistakes, here and there. Drop out of supercruise, fly in... WHOOPS, forgot to request docking, oh my look at all the alarms, damnit you minivan, REVERSE DIRECTION FASTER YOU HAVE ONLY ELEVEN SECONDS LEFT! After maybe the fourth time of accidental tresspassing, I surrendered to my own brain and replaced one of the tiny cargo bays with a docking computer; slower, but at least it added some breathing room, and calming music to boot! Surprisingly, it actually took a lot of the confusing pressure off. And since the route was a single jump worth, I didn't have to worry about, say, my inattention leaving my stranded mid-route with no option but seppuku. (You might suggest a fuel scoop, but sitting there for ages parked next to the sun just seems like a big neon sign saying 'Gee, This Looks Interdictable!')
Anyway, while on one level, I'm thrilled to have access to a trade route that is proving so profitable so quickly, with a fairly minimal chance of getting blown up by pirates, a tiny voice in the back of brain is going, 'Damnit, did the route have to be THIS quick? >.> Couldn't have had a nice, relaxing two thousand LS cruise during at least one route? Piracy is preferable to insanity!'
Bright side is that I've only been at this for a handful of hours, and I'm hoping that in another day or two, I can upgrade to a Type 7 freighter and double my income rate. =P That Python will be miiiiiine!
How about you folks? ^.^ Any times where you knew, technically, that you had a good thing going, that you were making plenty of money/influence/whatever, achieving your goals faster than you could have by pretty much any other way, but at the same time a part of you just wanted to toss it aside and go back to shooting sidewinders?
Second, as I said, I am enjoying the game, and this tale is meant more as a self-deprecating 'Be Careful What You Wish For' tale than criticism of the game or demands that elements discussed be changed. This is story time! Yaaaaaay!
Third, this IS literally just story time. No question, no required aid, so if you're not up for reading a long winded tale of a relative newbie's experience in the game, then no harm, no foul, I have no urgent need for assistance, but if anyone else has stories to share, I'd love to hear em. ^_^
Now, as mentioned, I've been playing for about a week, and a majority of that was spent as a bounty hunter, chasing down pirates, chewing them up with my Viper's laser death cannons, and generally having a grand ol' time with it. As someone going in fairly blind, I had a couple of irritating stumbling blocks, (like the time I aaaccidentially rammed an Imperial Clipper at full speed, expecting it to flinch and turn first, which resulted in about four hundred thousand credits of losses, both from insurance and lost bounties, and what made it worse was it was during a one-on-one fight I was WINNING,) but otherwise greatly enjoyed myself, and learned from any mistakes I made. (Such as the lesson that, if there is a criminal at the space port, and said criminal has a bounty, and said criminal is being shot at IN the space port, you do NOT have permission to join in helpfully. Only permission to get blown up if you try. o_o The More You Know.)
Now, despite having cumulatively lost, probably, over half a million credits from my own acts of stupidity, I eventually clawed together a couple million credits, and decided to engage in the exciting, fast-paced life of space trading! Not necessarily because I for a second believed it was exciting and fast paced, but rather because with a Type 6 transport's hundred-plus unit storage space, it had the potential to be absurdly profitable, and for some reason I was having more and more trouble finding worthwhile bounties, even in Resource fields. (Heck, even the ships Interdicting ME were Eagles or Sidewinders with the equivalent bounty of spare change.) Sure, it meant I had to trade in my Viper, but damn it, I wanted to be Space Warren Buffett!
And so, with my snazzy and heavily armed sports car traded in, replaced with the Sensible Minivan of the Cosmos, I began with perhaps the most bog-simple trade I could think of; gold! Sure, it was a hefty financial risk, carrying around nearly a million credits worth of merchandise with only about ten percent profit, and required no less than three seperate jumps to reach the necessary station, but I was just starting out here! Even as I dutifully shuttled back and forth, however, tensing like a cat at the vet every time another ship so much as twitched towards moving behind me in supercruise, (the maiden voyage, with juuuust enough credits to pay ship insurance left over after I had bought the gold, was easily the longest seven minutes of my life,) I had a dream. A dream of a score more lucrative, safer, and faster, something to push me towards my goal of flying around in a shiny new Python, ideally around the time the expansion that lets us wander starry-eyed around our ship's interior released.
So on occasion I would take a break from the trading route, hop into a cheap little Sidewinder with a beefed up jump drive, and proceed to roam around, jotting down any notable commodity prices. Mostly found pegs with no hole, such as a station selling the generally illegal Personal Weapons about nine hundred credits below the Galactic Average, but with no idea where to find a station that would BUY them. In general I'd only have the patience to do it for a few stations, as time is money, and that gold isn't going to ship itself!
But finally, with a great deal of patience, I found it. Over 2100 credit profit per unit on the round trip, the two systems close enough to jump directly to without pit stops, the stations on both ends so close to their suns I would go from system entry to station arrival in forty seconds or less, and less financial risk than gold running had incurred, with only 600k risk going one direction, and about 200k going the other. A route that made me a metric ton, (compared to anything I had made before, at least,) very little chance of a pirate intercepting me before I could reach safe haven, (only having been Interdicted once in over thirty round trips, one I successfully evaded,) and with a minimal fuel cost easily offset by dem tasty profits. It was perfect! The first time. And the second. And the fourth. But by the seventh...
Now, you might just think the problem is monotony, the inevitable lack of shooting and explosions while doing, essentially, a perpetual milk run, but I was no stranger to a quiet, peaceful profession, and didn't mind it at all. When I first started playing, I went with the simplest, safest route a fledgling player unfamiliar with even mouse and keyboard play could go; exploration! Sure, it was monotonous as heck, but it was the kind of monotony that required relatively little input. Point ship at target, (with the ship moving just fast enough to get in scanning range decently fast, but not so fast as to overshoot even the tiny moons before the scan is finished,) browse Internet on phone until little 'Scan Complete' chime sounds, point at another target, rinse and repeat. It was dull, but in a leisurely, hands off way.
This route, though... the title says babysitting because, essentially, that's what it requires, with the route so efficient one would be lucky to go more than seven bloody seconds without the ship needing input. Arrive in Station A, access market, sell Wares A, purchase Wares B, trigger launch sequence, set new nav target while the ship gets rotated for launch, exit base, retract landing gear, hit boost, wait til out of mass lock, trigger jump drive, steer away from sun, access nav computer, select Station B, adjust throttle to reach station as quickly as possible, drop out of supercruise, request docking, fly in, arrive in Station B, access market, sell Wares B, purchase Wares A, trigger launch sequence, set new nav target while ship gets rotated for launch, exit base, retract landing gear, hit boost, wait til out of mass lock, trigger jump drive, steer away from sun, access nav computer, select Station A, adjust throttle to reach station as quickly as possible, drop out of supercruise, request docking, fly in, arrive in Station A, REPEAT THIRTY OR SO TIMES.
The funny thing is that it reached the point where the repetition- or, more specifically, the lack of breathing room between tasks that didn't feel, deep down, like slacking off- started to result in mistakes, here and there. Drop out of supercruise, fly in... WHOOPS, forgot to request docking, oh my look at all the alarms, damnit you minivan, REVERSE DIRECTION FASTER YOU HAVE ONLY ELEVEN SECONDS LEFT! After maybe the fourth time of accidental tresspassing, I surrendered to my own brain and replaced one of the tiny cargo bays with a docking computer; slower, but at least it added some breathing room, and calming music to boot! Surprisingly, it actually took a lot of the confusing pressure off. And since the route was a single jump worth, I didn't have to worry about, say, my inattention leaving my stranded mid-route with no option but seppuku. (You might suggest a fuel scoop, but sitting there for ages parked next to the sun just seems like a big neon sign saying 'Gee, This Looks Interdictable!')
Anyway, while on one level, I'm thrilled to have access to a trade route that is proving so profitable so quickly, with a fairly minimal chance of getting blown up by pirates, a tiny voice in the back of brain is going, 'Damnit, did the route have to be THIS quick? >.> Couldn't have had a nice, relaxing two thousand LS cruise during at least one route? Piracy is preferable to insanity!'
Bright side is that I've only been at this for a handful of hours, and I'm hoping that in another day or two, I can upgrade to a Type 7 freighter and double my income rate. =P That Python will be miiiiiine!
How about you folks? ^.^ Any times where you knew, technically, that you had a good thing going, that you were making plenty of money/influence/whatever, achieving your goals faster than you could have by pretty much any other way, but at the same time a part of you just wanted to toss it aside and go back to shooting sidewinders?
