Continuing on with the many conversations about trading...
It seems from the people I've had conversations with, it's fairly common practice for people to jot down where they see good prices (whether selling or buying) with a hope to make a good return profit.
Some people, like yours truly, have migrated to a Spreadsheet with some automatic calculations on data we enter. Others have started using dedicated applications and many use crowd-sourced tools like Sloopy's.
Whilst I appreciate that the game and Frontier don't want to encourage the crowd-sourced method of getting trade data, I feel there is still room for a bit of improvement in how trading is done.
My suggest is a slight modification to the trading UI to simply display your most recently witnessed price for a commodity when selecting another system from the market drop-down. This should be limited to the past 24-hours just like it is currently - otherwise there'd be massive data-growth to handle for each player's individual snapshot of that system. I don't believe this will have any negative impact on gameplay, but would be interested in any discussion on it. The only difference is there is no alt-tabbing out to get to your notes and less time playing data-miner and more time playing the trading game (finding stations buying and selling at a good price).
Other points that I think still need addressing:
- Trade information for internal-system trades
- Being able to view the complete (minus rare?) commodities list with averages on outside the station. Given how big the list is, it's handy to know what sort of things you're looking for when cruising.
- Ability to sort the columns in the commodity screen
It seems from the people I've had conversations with, it's fairly common practice for people to jot down where they see good prices (whether selling or buying) with a hope to make a good return profit.
Some people, like yours truly, have migrated to a Spreadsheet with some automatic calculations on data we enter. Others have started using dedicated applications and many use crowd-sourced tools like Sloopy's.
Whilst I appreciate that the game and Frontier don't want to encourage the crowd-sourced method of getting trade data, I feel there is still room for a bit of improvement in how trading is done.
My suggest is a slight modification to the trading UI to simply display your most recently witnessed price for a commodity when selecting another system from the market drop-down. This should be limited to the past 24-hours just like it is currently - otherwise there'd be massive data-growth to handle for each player's individual snapshot of that system. I don't believe this will have any negative impact on gameplay, but would be interested in any discussion on it. The only difference is there is no alt-tabbing out to get to your notes and less time playing data-miner and more time playing the trading game (finding stations buying and selling at a good price).
Other points that I think still need addressing:
- Trade information for internal-system trades
- Being able to view the complete (minus rare?) commodities list with averages on outside the station. Given how big the list is, it's handy to know what sort of things you're looking for when cruising.
- Ability to sort the columns in the commodity screen
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