FDev, if you want ED to be truly epic, you need to unlock some things

[Bloodsign]

Elite Dangerous is a marvel. We know it, and it's why we stick around. It's a hard game with a rough learning curve, but that's why it's rewarding and unique.

Problem is, there's a lot that has been dumbed down, and it's choking ED's potential. Here are several areas I see that need "unlocking." Look past the difficulties for a moment. There are always difficulties involved in implementing novel changes. Look past that and try to see the huge potential and the tremendous depth that could be attained relatively easily.

1. CMDRs should be able to buy and sell engineered modules. Look at it this way: grind is grind, whether you grind credits or materials. Being able to exchange grind for grind isn't an exploit. We call it commerce in the modern world. It's exchanging value for value. Of course there needs to be balancing, say a base price deriving from the engineering mods so that they can't be given away for free. The price goes up based on the buyer's desired profit margin for peer to peer deals, or by bidding in mass auction item postings.

2. CMDRs should be able to buy and sell materials. Again, value for value. It's called commerce. A base price here as well prevents exploits and over donating. Bidding and ask prices define the market.

3. CMDRs should be able to sell entire ship builds. Again, a base cost deriving from ship/module values and engineering price modifications would be set as a minimum. This could also be a huge money maker for FDev. How? The ship for sale displays with all cosmetics shown, and CMDRs have the option to ALSO PAY THE ARX to get EXACTLY the same ship by unlocking the needed store items.

4. The global commodities market needs to be unlocked. Real production, supply, demand, and yes, investment by being able to store up cargo. Also commodities exchanges between CMDRs. These could be curated with base rates to prevent fraud/exploits.

5. CMDR created missions. They are already randomly generated based on a number of factors. Let CMDRs set their own missions if they can afford to put up the base pay rate. Other CMDRs can see these and take them like any other mission.

6. Mission board flipping. Every time the mission board is loaded, a different set of missions should load, with the exception of follow on missions which should stay persistent. CMDRs should be able to choose mission types to show also: legal/illegal, passenger, haulage, massacre, etc. The option to put a limited number of "holds" on missions should also exist if your rep with faction is high enough. A "hold" would mean the mission will still be on the board in, say, an hour or whatever, in case you need to check something before you can commit.

7. More CMDR metrics, and this info should be more accessible. I want to know which CMDR has the highest bounty, and hunt him down? It should be doable with in-game resources. I want to see which CMDR has traveled farthest, or mapped the most ice planets, if destroyed the most ships, and beat him? That info should be easily available.

FDev, make the universe feel bigger. It's too small right now. Make it more dynamic. Give CMDRs more meaningful and productive ways to interact. Here are some good ways to start. Here are some easy ways to start.

 

[Rick6549]

I agree with most of it except....




The galaxy is too small. It is most definitely too big. In Colonia, a much snaller area, you find loads more people, this is where the emergent ganeplay comes in.


Me and my buddies were looking for CL76 guys to kill, when we stumbled upon a cmdr in an asp being interdicted by anacondas. We went in, saved him, and he gave us some void opals. We still escoet him every now and again, when he calls for help.



Another thing is meaningful player conflicts. The bubble is so large, losing an anarchy or nit having a high tech near you isnt a problem, just go somewhere else. In colonia, there is 1 anarchy with all the federal and alliance ships, that is the only place to buy them there. If we lost that anarchy, bye bye to 7 ships. There was 1 major group that opposed us, CL76 (who promptly got beaten 30-0 and ran off to the bubble). Now we live mostly peaceful lives, escorting Ed planitex ( @Paul Smith the 3rd ) and convincing more people to help us out.

Most systems in colonia are player owned, so conflict, alliances, treaties, are common and make for fun times.



The bubble is too big, everyone is spread out too far, too much of the same things, doesnt matter if you lose 1 system. This is why there is nothing to do in the bubble.

 

[posthy]

If i remember correctly FDev stated multiple times, that ED won't have player to player trade. I don't know the reason of this decision, but i'm fine with it. Can't really see the benefits of player to player trade anyways.
Some rentable cargo storage'd be nice, more in-game tools to find things'd be great. Creating and operating real supply-demand system in this scale? For hundreds of planets? Would that be even possible? And what do you think, what'd you feel from that as a single ship pilot? We are just very small cogs in the machine.
Board flipping got removed not so long ago. I don't think that's a bad thing, but unfortunately we didn't get any alternatives. The mission board should have a lot more offers. Right now it's almost impossible to stack up missions close to the cap of 20.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

4. The global commodities market needs to be unlocked. Real production, supply, demand, and yes, investment by being able to store up cargo. Also commodities exchanges between CMDRs. These could be curated with base rates to prevent fraud/exploits.

They could make the production rate for supply depend on the proportion of demand met, rather than being constant - so if you want more than the existing stockpile, you have to import goods (and for any decent production rate, a mix of demanded goods) to get production going - but what would the benefit actually be over the current abstraction of the economic state slider? (which does broadly the same thing at a very aggregated level)

How would it differ - in terms of noticeable effects - from what we currently have? And how would that be fun for the general case of trading?

The galaxy is too small. It is most definitely too big. In Colonia, a much snaller area, you find loads more people, this is where the emergent ganeplay comes in.

The bubble is too big, everyone is spread out too far, too much of the same things, doesnt matter if you lose 1 system. This is why there is nothing to do in the bubble.

It's a very tricky thing to balance, size.

In terms of player density, the Colonia region probably has 2-5 times the average activity of a random set of 70 bubble systems ... but maybe 1% of the actual number of players.

A bubble with similar player density to Colonia would still have 5000-10000 systems, which is well into "anonymous system 782" territory where nowhere really matters ... but still not large enough to contain all the existing bubble PMFs.

Even a bubble containing all the bubble PMFs at Colonia levels of systems/PMF would have about 2500 systems, which is still far too anonymous for most purposes, and with no real room for anyone new to get their own. (That there is absolutely no way for a new PMF to establish a system in Colonia no matter how hard it tries is itself a problem, though it should certainly be a "once or twice a year" event only to avoid excessive expansion)

A bubble the size of Colonia with all the normal bubble's players would have basically every system at Deciat-level instancing, and the actual busy ones at "breaks the network" level. PMFs basically couldn't be a thing ... most player groups would be squashed between 500+ mega-factions. But much larger and you stop having systems being able to be individually important.

I'm not sure there's a good answer on scale that copes well with the sheer number of players involved...

 

[RamirezKurita]

They could make the production rate for supply depend on the proportion of demand met, rather than being constant - so if you want more than the existing stockpile, you have to import goods (and for any decent production rate, a mix of demanded goods) to get production going - but what would the benefit actually be over the current abstraction of the economic state slider? (which does broadly the same thing at a very aggregated level)

A more detailed economic simulation that actually takes into account the economy of neighbouring systems and their security states, coupled with some degree of background trading simulation, would give traders far more tools to alter the markets and promote both long-term growth for factions as well as traders knowing their local areas.

For example, if a cluster of systems are all reliant on a single high-pop agricultural system for their food, then if that key system falls into bust, lockdown or anarchy states then the neighbouring systems will likely go into famine. Similarly, if there's two high-tech systems that are in competition, then if one of them becomes more attractive to trading fleets then it'll probably force their competitor into a bust state due to them not being able to source the required raw materials or machinery (after all, local markets would largely favour the highest bidder for sales).

 

[DragonIV]

5. CMDR created missions. They are already randomly generated based on a number of factors. Let CMDRs set their own missions if they can afford to put up the base pay rate. Other CMDRs can see these and take them like any other mission.

This is a way to transfer money from player to player and Fdev has said explicitly that this won't happen. Setting easy mission requirements with large payments for example, which is effectively that CMDR2CMDR transfer.

Also confused as to what legit missions might be given by a CMDR. What do they stand to gain that is worth the payment they are offering? I suppose you could recruit folks to do some BSG related killings, which effectively extends your reach and influence, but I can't think of any other mission variants off hand that provide someone concrete results that are worth paying for.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

A more detailed economic simulation that actually takes into account the economy of neighbouring systems and their security states, coupled with some degree of background trading simulation, would give traders far more tools to alter the markets and promote both long-term growth for factions as well as traders knowing their local areas.

For example, if a cluster of systems are all reliant on a single high-pop agricultural system for their food, then if that key system falls into bust, lockdown or anarchy states then the neighbouring systems will likely go into famine. Similarly, if there's two high-tech systems that are in competition, then if one of them becomes more attractive to trading fleets then it'll probably force their competitor into a bust state due to them not being able to source the required raw materials or machinery (after all, local markets would largely favour the highest bidder for sales).

Sure, but what effect would that actually have on gameplay? (They could do something very similar now without having to up the simulation detail any by making the default economic state Famine or Bust rather than None [1], so that factions naturally drifted to it in the absence of positive player economic activity)

Famine, Bust, Lockdown ... they're all states which have limited utility as part of a decent trade loop because production is messed up - and that would be the point of added "realism". Famine has decent purchase prices for a few goods, the others don't. Traders would mostly ignore them to pick up the high-profit routes between economically successful systems which actually have goods to buy and money to get imports with.

The other problem is that the bubble is large enough that someone else has probably done the set up already. Take Military Grade Fabrics at the moment - to get optimal (10k) profits you need a producer in None state (carefully avoiding getting any despite doing things in the system) and a consumer in a complex combination of multiple states. You can do this two ways:
1) Carefully take a range of BGS actions to set up a suitable producer-consumer pair
2) Spend 20 seconds on EDDB to find - even with its incomplete data set - where someone else has already - accidentally, most likely - done this for you, because the bubble has 20k systems so lots of them are in those states already.

The problem is that trade prices are widely known and basically everywhere is adjacent to everywhere else (an hour shipping time max from anywhere to anywhere in the bubble) ... so "realistically" there should be very minimal trade profits to be made and very little price differentiation. This also makes various unrealistic ones tricky to set up too - how do you make it so that deep system knowledge beats a brute force search? (By enough margin to make it worth developing that knowledge, too)

I also don't see how to get a balance where the economy is important enough to warrant additional complexity - i.e. it really matters what economic state a system is in - without making it into a "job" for people who want to do other stuff to also have to trade to keep the economy going, or to log in after a month away to find that everything has collapsed and they have to reboot it all.

[1] As with your idea, this would stick almost all factions which didn't own a station into a permanent negative economic state, which would be an irritating side-effect more generally but wouldn't affect trade itself much.

 

[Bloodsign]

This is a way to transfer money from player to player and Fdev has said explicitly that this won't happen. Setting easy mission requirements with large payments for example, which is effectively that CMDR2CMDR transfer.

Also confused as to what legit missions might be given by a CMDR. What do they stand to gain that is worth the payment they are offering? I suppose you could recruit folks to do some BSG related killings, which effectively extends your reach and influence, but I can't think of any other mission variants off hand that provide someone concrete results that are worth paying for.

The benefits depend on some of the other points to be fully realized. Yes, I envisioned a lot of BGS/Powerplay related stuff, kill x ships missions which CMDRs set up on order to undermine powers or factions or even just create red herrings and draw bounty hunting CMDRs into certain systems, etc.

There would also be market-related effects in a true market simulation, where pulling in other CMDRs to deliver x commodity to Station Z affects prices there and even things like system states.

 

[Sapyx]

1, 2 and 3: FD will not allow player-to-player trading, of anything. Conection to real world economy, pay to win, Chinese gold farmers, the whole shebang. No game has ever figured out how to allow player to player trading while keeping a disconnect from the real-world economy. So no, we can safely say that none of these suggestions will ever be implemented.

4. I agree it would be nice to see some realistic economic effects happening. Example: I sell some bauxite to a refinery planet. After a few days they turn the bauxite into aluminum, which I can then take to an Industrial planet. They in turn use the aluminium to make tractors, which I can then sell to an Agricultural planet. I take food from the Agricultural planet to the mining colony where I got the bauxite from, and complete the loop. However, I suspect having a fully player-driven economy (like in EVE) would be too open to exploitation by large player groups. There would then be cries of foul when aforementioned player groups wished to, for example, deploy a blockade to prevent certain goods from getting shipped to a certain system... only to find that players were running the blockade in Solo and ruining their plans.

5. Not really sure how that would work. You're a spaceship captain, and not formally part of any government or faction. As such, you've got no right to ask people to do things on their behalf.

6. Now that's just funny. This was how the boards worked, then FD fixed this exploit. ANd yes, it is an exploit. You aren't supposed to be able to obtain an infinite amount of a specific kind of mission, on demand. I will, however, agree that the number of missions available should be increased. Specifically, the number of missions on offer should be proportional to the planet's population. Robigo should have two, maybe three missions a day, tops. Earth should have hundreds of thousands of missions to choose from - which would, of course, need a mechanism not dissimilar to "board flipping" to generate that many unless they radically redesigned the mission generation system. So in practice, you'd go somewhere like Robigo, and no board flips would be available - what you see is all you get. Go to Earth on the other hand, and you've got 10,000 board flips you can use.

7. Sure, why not? The "hunting them down" part might be tricky given the whole solo-instancing-platform thing, but everything else seems reasonable.